FORMER CHAIR RETIRING
Clark Doesn’t
File Petitions
For Reelection
Brockway, Ogden Vie In District 3
By JIM KEVLIN • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com
COOPERSTOWN – A dominant actor appears to be leaving the political stage: By today’s 5 p.m. deadline, county Rep. Kathy Clark, R-Otego, the former two-term board chairman, had not filed petitions to run again for her District 3 seat.
Absent an independent filing, it appears that either Republican Rick Brockway, the outdoors columnist and farrier from Laurens, or Democrat Caitlin Ogden, a grants administrator at the Baseball Hall of Fame, will be representing the Otego-Laurens district after the Nov. 5 election.
Elected in 2011, Clark was elevated to the chair in 2014, and had some initial successes, including the sale of the county’s Otsego Manor nursing home to Focus. But the sale went sour, and a long-running struggle over the director the county’s IDA, Otsego Now, sapped her support.
Last year, she broke with the county Republican Party when her husband, retired trooper Bob Fernandez, failed to win the GOP endorsement for sheriff, and she collaborated with a longtime pal, former Oneonta Mayor Kim Muller, to win him Democrat backing.
This January, she lost her chairmanship to David Bliss, R-Cooperstown/Town of Middlefield, last January, and the Republican County Committee endorsed Brockway in her stead for the District 3 seat.