POUGHKEEPSIE – A presentation by an ecologist with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies paid off this week.  The Dutchess County Legislature, in a rare move, reversed an earlier decision to deny funding for tick-borne disease research, and for clinics for tuberculosis and other communicable diseases.

Dr. Richard Ostfeld delivered an annual report on what they have been doing with money received in prior years.

Surveillance programs help researchers understand why some years pose a high risk of tick-borne disease, while other years do not, or why the risk can be much higher only in certain parts of the county.   The money also funds pilot projects, permitting what Ostfeld admitted are at times “risky research programs”. 

The research, funded with county money, can pay big dividends, says Ostfeld.

“Our discovery that small patches of forest, here in Dutchess County, in our back yard, are much riskier than our larger more extensive forest areas, allowed us to generate a successful proposal to the National Institute of Health, that funded our research for four years at a rate of $1.2 million.”

All of that money from the NIH was spent locally. 

Ostfeld said other research has disclosed the presence of other rare but potentially debilitating or even deadly diseases.  That has leveraged more federal money.

That was enough to convince Republican David Kelly that the $95,000 needs to be put back.

“In no way, shape or form should these programs have been removed, when we do have nine-year consistency in funding a program that has directly impacted nearly every resident of this county, and the county is on the map for this illness that we have across the united nation.  I hope that everybody will support this resolution and return the funding.”

Almost all did.  Only one voted ‘no’ – Beacon Republican John Forman.

This week’s vote undoes a 15-3 vote, in March, with seven abstentions.  That was an attempt, by the Democrat majority, to rectify what they termed a budget ‘mistake’. 

A defeated measure can be resurrected only by a legislator who had opposed it.  Kelly had voted ‘no’ last month.