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Publication Date: March 16th, 2025
Image remixed creatively from the Economist, ft. the Hudson Bluehawks logo. Go Hawks!
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The City of Hudson, New York, is a storied, punchy 2sqm of roughly 5,900 souls. Right now, there is much excitement about the Bluehawks basketball team, recently marching toward the Final Four of the New York State championships. The city’s most persistent headache, meanwhile, is its Byzantine municipal government.
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In case you didn’t know, the Bluehawks are Hudson’s high school basketball team, currently on a once-in-a-decade success run. Read more here: https://www.timesunion.com/hssports/article/nysphsaa-boys-basketball-hudson-peru-22073930.php
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To the untrained eye, high school athletics and municipal charters have little in common. But to our curious and mostly immigrant editors who use this publication as a looking glass to understand American culture and small towns, there is always a lesson. The Bluehawks have just handed Hudson’s charter reform movement, and taxpaying voters, its most compelling intellectual framework yet: the undeniable logic of the small roster.
It is a simple matter of arithmetic and demographics. Hudson High has not produced a state-championship football team in generations. It rarely fields dominant swim or baseball squads. The reason is structural: football is a game of mass. To win, you need a roster of forty able-bodied, committed athletes and a remarkably deep bench. A small city simply lacks the raw human capital to pull it off.
Basketball, however, is a different beast. You only need five starters on the floor. If you concentrate your top talent into a small, agile squad, a town of under 6,000 can absolutely dismantle much larger districts. The Bluehawks are proving it in real-time.
Yet, when it comes to running the city, Hudson insists on playing “football”. We currently field a bloated municipal team of 11 Common Council members and five County Board Supervisors, flanked by a dizzying array of appointed boards and commissioners.
And the bloat isn't just legislative. Executive scope creep has steadily taken hold. A generation ago, the Mayor’s office was essentially a one-person, part-time job. Today, it functions as a sprawling apparatus featuring the equivalent of two full-time roles, plus the relatively recent addition of a “Housing Justice Director”. For a two-square-mile city, this isn't a robust democracy; it’s administrative bloat that dilutes talent, drains budgets, and guarantees mediocrity.
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Editor’s Note: The following serves as an open memo and guiding framework for Common Council President Margaret Morris and all Common Council members currently tasked with navigating the City of Hudson’s charter reform process. And yes, some of our editors and correspondents journeyed to Troy this weekend to watch the game court side. We can confirm that former Mayor Johnson and current Mayor Ferris were in attendance.
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To understand just how absurd this structure is, you have to run the demographic numbers.
Hudson has roughly 5,900 residents.
But Hudson is famous for its second-homeowners and weekenders. If we conservatively estimate that 25% to 30% of those adults are not full-time residents, and thus lack the time, legality, or inclination to hold municipal office, our eligible, full-time adult bench shrinks to roughly 3,300 people. Add to that the complexity and opacity of just “getting involved” and understanding it all, one of the reasons why we created Hudson Common Sense.
We went deep undercover, past the metal detectors, and onto the bleachers for this piece… Yes, it was on the way to Wholefoods. And yes, we were impressed by large contingent of Bluehawk supporters in the stands.
Between the 11 Council seats, 5 Supervisor seats, the Mayor, and the Treasurer, Hudson demands 18 local legislative politicians. That means there is roughly one legislative seat for every 200 eligible adults in the city…and that’s before you even try to staff the Planning Board, the Zoning Board, and the various executive offices.
Compare that to the national landscape. In major American cities, the ratio is often one council member per 50,000 to 100,000 residents. Even in typical American small towns, the ratio hovers closer to one representative per 1,500 to 3,000 citizens. Hudson’s ratio of 1-to-200 is statistically absurd. It requires almost everyone in town to suit up just to keep the lights on.
Hudson’s ratio means that an astonishing one-third to one-quarter of all political offices are filled through completely uncontested races. This staggering lack of electoral competition allows entrenched figures to hold power without ever truly facing the voters or being held accountable. Take Claire Cousin, for example, who has managed to remain in office for nearly a decade without ever having to win a single contested political race. Or zombie candidates like Rick Scalera, who may have once worked hard and won competitive elections, but now walk off into the sunset with a $15k a year honorarium at a City of Hudson Board of Supervisor. When candidates are essentially handed their seats by default, the community loses its voice, and public service becomes a foregone conclusion rather than a democratic choice.
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We can’t help but point out that the Hudson Bluehawks’ Blue is a close match to our “Navy Trust” blue that are used for Guest Op-Eds. **Read the full story on our Color Coded Content here.**
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This oversized roster isn’t just an abstract political problem; it is a very real drain on the municipal treasury. Every year, the taxpayers of Hudson foot the bill for an enormous political apparatus. Let’s look at the math of the stipends:
| Position | # Officials | Salary Estimate & Benefits | Total Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common Council President | 1 | $10,000 + benefits | $10,000 |
| Common Council Member | 10 | $5000 | $50 000 |
| CC Board of Supervisors | 5 | $17 000 + benefits* | $75,000 |
| Mayor | 1 | $80 000 + benefits | $80 000 |
| Mayoral Aide | 1 | $50 000 + benefits | $50 000 |
| “Housing Justice Director” | 1? | $80 000 + benefits | $80 000 |
| Total | $345 000 |
*FYI: City of Hudson Board of Supervisors (BoS) honorariums are paid from County taxes, not City taxes. Residents pay both.
The table above reflects political salaries only (individuals like the Police Chief, Head of Public Works, Youth Center Director, are not mentioned here: they are appointed full-time professionals). In addition to the Common Council Members, Board of Supervisors, and the three people in the Mayor’s Office, there are also 5 departments in Hudson: Youth, Clerk, Treasury, Department of Public Works (DPW), and the Hudson Police Department (HPD). Each employs a Department Head and a working team. There are also 7 Commissioners, appointed by the Mayor. Further adding to the complexity is the fact that Hudson has multiple not-for-profits who have de facto full-time politicians at their helm, such as Caitie Hilverman and Peter Frank at the Friends of Hudson Youth.
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Read more about Hudson’s ongoing Charter Reform Debate:
https://gossipsofrivertown.blogspot.com/2025/02/more-debate-over-charter-change.html
https://gossipsofrivertown.blogspot.com/2024/12/charter-change-update.html
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That is $135,000 a year purely in base honorariums for an 18-person legislative roster. And that doesn't even touch the executive bloat: a Mayor’s salary, a Mayoral Aide currently costing taxpayers roughly $50,000 a year, and the addition of roles like the “Housing Justice Director”. According to estimates published by the Hudson Charter Change movement, funding the 11-member Common Council and the expanding Office of the Mayor currently costs the city approximately $400,000 annually. Additionally, we don’t know the true cost of the benefits these officials receive on top of their salaries.
Imagine if, instead of spreading that cash across a sprawling, uncompetitive roster of 18 part-time legislators, we consolidated those funds. We could afford to pay a five-person council a more substantial, respectable wage - attracting top-tier talent who might otherwise not be able to afford the time to serve - while actually saving the taxpayers money.
A basketball-team sized City Hall would incur only half of the current costs, but with exponentially less political drama. Imagine paying only one, excellent, Columbia County Board Supervisor $30K more (for more time, and more commitment), and still saving $45K? The conclusion is simple: if Hudson wants to win, field five (5) Common Council Members and one (1) Columbia County Supervisor.
There is another, more insidious cost to a massive roster: the sheer friction of getting things done. In organizational design and network theory, this is governed by the "math of nodes," driven by the concept of combinatorial explosion.
Visualizing the combinatorial explosion of communication channels: As a group grows from 3 to 14 people, the number of potential interactions skyrockets from 3 to 91, illustrating the hidden cost of adding headcount.
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The math is brutal: the number of individual relationships required to maintain a group grows exponentially, not linearly. If you have a tight, five-person council, there are exactly 10 unique interpersonal relationships to manage. Communication is fast and direct. But expand that room to 18 legislative politicians plus an expanding executive branch, and suddenly there are hundreds of distinct relationships to navigate, placate, and negotiate. Every new seat added to the city charter isn't just an extra voice; it is an exponential multiplier of friction, guaranteeing that more time is spent managing internal politics than actually governing.
For Hudson to win, we should lower the number of appointment positions so that residents can focus on their lives & families, and not have to fight political fights for survival.
When you demand a massive roster from a tiny talent pool, the result is a collapse in competitiveness. In local government, this translates to sleepy, uncontested races where incumbents win by default.
Take the 5th Ward’s Claire Cousins. She has spent the better part of a decade in the halls of local power, yet she has arguably never had to survive a highly competitive, high-stakes electoral dogfight. This isn't a personal failing; it is a structural inevitability. When seats are handed out like participation trophies because there simply aren't enough willing candidates to fill the ballot, the public loses its most vital mechanism for accountability: the very real threat of an incumbent losing their job.
The lesson from the hardwood is clear. If you have limited depth, you don't play a sport that requires a battalion. You shrink the team and raise the stakes.
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