DAN QUAGLIANA
Managing Editor
During the Fredonia Board of Trustees meeting on April 14, the mayor of the village, Michael Ferguson, took issue with an article written and published by the Dunkirk Observer on April 14.
Before I dive into Ferguson’s comments, let me unpack my own issues with the Observer’s article.
The article contained no original reporting. It took two completely unrelated articles that were published in The Leader, one of which was published almost two months prior on Feb. 18, and summarized them.
In doing so, the Observer left out many crucial pieces of reporting, some of which Mr. Ferguson criticized The Leader, not the Observer, for not including.
And therein lies the first problem with Mayor Ferguson’s argument — he accepted the Observer’s summary as a complete and unbiased account of what SUNY Fredonia students as a whole are saying about his administration.
If the Observer wished to write an article about how SUNY Fredonia students feel about the water issues and the debate around the future of FredFest, then why didn’t they contact some students to find out their thoughts? Summarizing previously published articles and not asking for any follow-ups is unethical journalism.
Additionally, the Observer’s summary was published almost two months after my original article. If the Observer had reported on my article in a timely manner, perhaps the mayor would have seen it as a commentary on current events and not as baseless complaining after the fact — which is honestly how I would have seen it, too, if I saw that published with months in between its publication and the incident it’s discussing.
But had Ferguson actually read my original, unabridged article as published in the Feb. 18 issue of The Leader, he would have seen a disclaimer above the article that says, “The opinions voiced by writers and artists in the Opinion section of The Leader reflect those individuals’ opinions, not those of The Leader as a whole.”
In other words, that article, which is titled “Boil water notices continue due to government inefficiency,” reflects only my view and opinion on the situation. “SUNY students” have not said (at least not publicly) that they are “wary” of the village’s water, as the Observer’s April 14 headline claims.
In his response to the Observer’s summary of the articles, Mayor Ferguson said, as quoted in the Observer, “It’s easy to write a poison pen article weeks before your senior graduation and leaving our community in your wake … The individuals have never addressed us with any positive suggestions on how to remedy this situation.”
While it is true that I am a month away from finishing my senior year at SUNY Fredonia, this is hardly the first time someone has expressed disappointment about the village’s handling of our water situation. I challenge any village resident to find someone who doesn’t complain about our water situation during a boil water order.
At the bottom of my opinion article, I actually did suggest a remedy to this situation: “We live next to a lake, for God’s sake. Stop arguing with each other, sit down and figure out how to fix this.” This is something that was restated in the Observer summary, as well.
My suggestion is this: the village board and the Save Our Reservoir group should sit down together and negotiate until a mutually agreeable situation is reached regarding the water reservoir. The current situation is untenable.
The mayor also stated, “One student,” which would be me, “said, if he knew about our turbulence in these meetings and on this water issue, he would have never come here. You don’t come to college for water, which we know you need. You go to college for an education. I’m pretty sure you got a good one while you were here.”
Yes, it is true that I did not choose to attend SUNY Fredonia based on the quality of water in the village in which the college is located. I did not study the water quality of every college I considered four years ago.
Perhaps contrary to the tone in my article, I have greatly enjoyed my time at SUNY Fredonia. I found a home here for the first time in my life. This is the first place where I felt like I could be myself, and I made multiple friends here that I consider to be the best I’ve ever had.
But that being said, Ferguson did admit that he knows college students need water, just like everyone else in the village. According to article 1, section 19 of the New York State Constitution, in New York, clean, safe water is a right, not a privilege — but there are multiple times a year when the village of Fredonia fails to provide safe drinking water. As I said in my original opinion article, if this were a one-off incident, no one would care.
Additionally, the mayor misquoted me. My original quote was, “If someone had told me that this was a problem I would have to be facing just by living within the village boundaries, there’s a very real chance I might not have gone to college here.”
I said there was “a very real chance” that I wouldn’t attend college here. Not a certain chance — because it wouldn’t be a certainty.
In most calendar years, this happens multiple times — and I’ve never had to deal with a boil water order in a place that’s not Fredonia. Never before in my life have I had to boil my water before I could drink it — and every single person I’ve talked to has said the same thing. But here in Fredonia, it’s the norm, not an exception.
During the June 7, 2023, boil water order, a faculty member here at the university who lives in the village said to me, “Where are my tax dollars going?”
When he announced his campaign for mayor in 2023, Mr. Ferguson said, “Five boil water alerts since 2009 are far too many to be dealing with this again.”
Since Ferguson took office in January 2024, there have been no less than three boil water orders in the span of less than one year. These orders were put out on Feb. 8, 2024, April 17, 2024 and Feb. 3, 2025. Any number of boil water orders is worrisome, but three within less than a year is especially concerning.
It’s also worth noting that there was one additional boil order between Ferguson’s campaign announcement and his taking office.
And I recognize that these are not his fault; the village has been having issues with its water treatment for well over a decade — but my original article was about how he’s not doing enough to fix the issue. Indeed, it’s getting worse.
There comes a point when one must realize that the mayor is not delivering on his campaign promises.
Continuing at the April 11 meeting, Ferguson said, as quoted in the Observer, “I will say that the water issue is not a reason nor license to invite drug dealers and ne’er-do-wells in our community. The few ruin it for the many. It’s not all college students… 95% of (students at the school) are standup [sic] citizens who have done great things in this community, and we hope that they will consider the village as a permanent location somewhere in their future.”
This statement greatly confused me — not once in my opinion article did I mention the ongoing FredFest debate. In fact, I completely agree with the mayor that something drastic needs to be done. Stabbings and drive-by shootings should not become the norm in Fredonia.
But I don’t understand where Mayor Ferguson got the idea that I was conflating the two issues. As I said, I never mentioned FredFest in my article.
This is further proof to me that he did not take the time or the effort to read the original articles that The Leader published on Feb. 18 and March 4. He seems to be relying only on the incomplete summarization done by the Observer, and he also seems to be under the impression that the Observer was talking about one, singular article, when this was clearly not the case.
If Ferguson has issues with what I said in my Feb. 18 article, that’s his prerogative. But if he’s going to be criticizing my criticisms of him, he should at least read and discuss them in their original form, not in a poorly summarized version.
As such, in the Observer’s April 22 article, which detailed the mayor’s response to The Leader article, the headline is incorrect. The headline is “Ferguson claps back on Leader articles.” A more accurate headline would be “Ferguson claps back on Observer summary of Leader articles.”
After I wrote the majority of the above, on April 24, the Observer published an editorial titled “Is this the time to worry about Non Fred Fest?”
In that editorial, the Observer claimed that “SUNY Fredonia students don’t need to occupy any of Ferguson’s thoughts,” and that, “Complaints by SUNY Fredonia students at this particular moment in time should be as noticeable in Fredonia’s Village Hall as the breeze a gnat’s wings generate in a hurricane,” as, “Who cares what some SUNY Fredonia students say? Do they pay taxes in the village? Do they own properties?”
The dues that students pay in residence hall fees are greater than the rent that residents of village apartments pay, and part of that fee goes to paying property taxes for the village. I pay to live in this community. I pay rising costs to live here every year. I chose to live here and to get my education here, and this is the welcome I get from the community. Students of the university matter just as much to the community as non-students do.
I feel that this statement is quite ironic, as well — the day after the Observer published this editorial, they published an article titled “Wind Ensemble to offer varied works,” referring to the SUNY Fredonia Wind Ensemble.
I don’t understand why this article was written. Why is the Observer wasting people’s time by making them read about SUNY Fredonia students? If, according to the Observer, they don’t pay taxes or own properties, then who cares about what services and entertainment they’re offering village community members?
The irony doesn’t end there. The Observer’s regional editor, John D’Agostino, is not only a former SUNY Fredonia student but also a former editor of The Leader.
The Observer claims to be the voice of the community. That does not give their editorial board the right to choose who gets to be a member of that community by spreading insulting narratives.