<p>Stacey Nachtaler had been on the Croton-on-Hudson Board of Trustees for exactly three months when she did something unusual: she read the proposal.</p> <p>Not the summary. Not the memo from the village manager. The actual 17-page proposal from the Center for Governmental Research, the Rochester-based nonprofit that was being asked to study the future of Croton's village justice court for $36,500.</p> <p>"The first sentence on page one," Nachtaler told her colleagues at the February 11 work session, "is a request for a proposal to study the feasibility of dissolving the village justice court and shifting it to Cortland."</p> <p>She paused to let that sink in.</p> <p>"Then when you continue on, it says they're gonna provide an impartial, impartial analysis."</p> <p>Nachtaler, who brought 20 years of professional consulting experience to the board, didn't think those two things were compatible. A study whose opening sentence presumes dissolution as the question — not "should we change anything" but "how do we dissolve this" — cannot credibly claim to be a neutral evaluation.</p> <p>"When I look at the actual study, and I've — I have twenty years experience doing studies — I think there are opportunities here to make it more impartial," she said. "It's not impartial right now."</p> <h2>The Background</h2> <p>The village justice court has been a recurring subject in Croton politics for years. Village Manager Bryan Healy proposed the CGR study in a February 5, 2026 memo to the board, framing it as a responsible look at whether consolidating Croton's court with the Town of Cortlandt would produce efficiencies.</p> <p>The idea wasn't new. A similar conversation surfaced in 2022. But the timing in 2026 carried special urgency: under New York State law, a village can only abolish its justice court upon the expiration of the sitting justice's four-year term. If the board didn't act before the current term ended, the next opportunity wouldn't come until 2030.</p> <p>CGR — the Center for Governmental Research, founded in 1915 by George Eastman — has a long history of studying municipal consolidation across New York. The proposed scope would include analysis of court operations, staffing, caseloads, costs, and the logistics of transferring judicial functions to Cortlandt.</p> <p>The cost: $36,500. The question: whether the study was genuinely open-ended, or whether the answer was already written into the ask.</p> <h2>"A Fact-Finding Mission"</h2> <p>Trustee Maria Slippen was the first to voice skepticism, long before Nachtaler dissected the RFP.</p> <p>"All of this conversation has been around whether or not we're gonna get rid of the court and what's the timing for dissolving the court and moving the court," Slippen said early in the discussion. "I wanna make sure that we're entering into this understanding that this is about the efficiency and effectiveness of the court."</p> <p>Her sharpest line came a few minutes later: "We're going on a fact-finding mission. We don't know where it's gonna take us. We're going on a fact-finding mission that we think is probably gonna take us to a place where we're gonna end up consolidating."</p> <p>Slippen also drew a connection to the village's most recent service consolidation — the abolition of the village assessor position, implemented in 2025 on the recommendation of a Laberge Group report. That move saved approximately $32,000 per year by shifting property tax assessment to the Town of Cortlandt's roll.</p> <p>"We abolished the position of village assessor on the recommendation of the Laberge report," Slippen said. "We still don't know how that worked. So now Croton residents do not have access to an assessor here."</p> <p>Her argument: the village was moving too fast on consolidation without evaluating whether the last consolidation had actually delivered on its promises.</p> <h2>The Port Chester Lesson</h2> <p>If the trustees wanted a preview of how court consolidation might play out, they didn't have to look far.</p> <p>The Village of Port Chester dissolved its justice court in 2021, transferring all judicial functions to the Town of Rye. The move required state legislation — Governor Cuomo signed a bill authorizing the Town of Rye to add two additional justices to absorb Port Chester's caseload.</p> <p>The financial results were mixed. Port Chester saved $734,000 in expenses, representing about 1.6 percent of its total budget. But it also lost 35 percent of its court revenue — a drop from $1.4 million to approximately $910,000. The Town of Rye, by multiple accounts, was "shell shocked" by the transition and absorbed roughly $1 million in additional costs.</p> <p>Deputy Mayor Len Simon referenced Port Chester during the discussion, as did Slippen, who pushed back on the comparison. "Comparing Port Chester merging with Rye and Croton merging with Cortland is pretty different," she said. "I think I would like to try to find — well, they told me they spoke with Ossining as well. But Ossining Town and Village also share services in a way that Croton and Cortland don't necessarily do."</p> <p>The Ossining example was equally cautionary. The Village of Ossining abolished its justice court in September 2011 and consolidated with the Town of Ossining. The police benevolent association opposed the move due to prisoner transport concerns. A former mayor later described the financial impact as "a wash" and said residents "felt betrayed."</p> <h2>The Nachtaler Effect</h2> <p>What made Nachtaler's intervention decisive was not just her critique of the RFP language. It was the specificity of her analysis.</p> <p>She argued that the study's proposed use of financial data from 2020 through 2025 would be skewed by the pandemic. Court-generated revenue — particularly parking fines, which had dropped to $152,000 during COVID — had rebounded to approximately $3 million by 2025. Using pandemic-era numbers as a baseline would make the court look less financially viable than it actually was.</p> <p>She also noted that the proposed CGR team, while experienced in municipal governance, had a track record that leaned toward consolidation recommendations — undermining the claim of impartiality.</p> <p>"I think there are opportunities here to make it more impartial," she said, carefully declining to call the proposal biased outright but making clear she believed it was.</p> <p>Nachtaler — who won her seat on the Voice of Croton ticket in December 2025, the opposition party that nearly unseated Mayor Pugh — was still new enough to the board that she deferred on other agenda items throughout the evening. But on this, her professional background gave her both the standing and the tools to challenge what the village manager had presented as a straightforward procurement.</p> <h2>The Collapse</h2> <p>The February 11 discussion didn't produce a vote. Instead, the trustees directed Healy to revise the CGR scope: broaden the study beyond dissolution, add public participation requirements, seek input from the police department and district attorney, and exclude pandemic-era financial data.</p> <p>But when the revised proposal came back to the board on March 11, Mayor Pugh tabled it. He told the board he lacked consensus among the five trustees to move forward and would not place another resolution for such a study on the agenda "now or in the future."</p> <p>The timing was notable. Voice of Croton had endorsed incumbent Village Justice Sam Watkins for the November 2026 election on March 10 — the day before Pugh's decision to shelve the study.</p> <p>The $36,500 study was dead. The village court, for now, is staying.</p> <h2>What It Means</h2> <p>Croton's justice court handles traffic violations, parking tickets, small claims, landlord-tenant disputes, and local code enforcement — the unglamorous work that keeps a village's legal machinery functioning. It generates meaningful revenue. It provides local access to justice for residents who would otherwise have to travel to Cortlandt.</p> <p>Whether consolidation would have saved money, improved service, or done neither is now a question that won't be answered until at least 2030 — the next time state law allows the board to revisit it.</p> <p>What the February 11 discussion did answer is that Croton's newest trustee — three months on the job, still learning the rhythms of village government — was willing to read what was in front of her and say what she saw.</p> <p>"It's not impartial right now," Nachtaler said.</p> <p>Nobody at the table could prove her wrong.</p>