NORWICH – Town of Oxford Supervisor Lawrence Wilcox is expected to be elected chairman of the Chenango County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
He would assume the county government’s top post from North Norwich’s Richard B. Decker, who is retiring after 17 years.
The position could be filled by any number of supervisors who could be nominated during Jan. 3rd’s organizational meeting, however Wilcox was nominated to lead the majority party during a Republican caucus in late November.
Wilcox, 63, has most recently served as chairman of the Chenango County Finance Committee, and has been a member of various other standing committees during his 13-year career in office. When asked back in May whether he would consider a bid for board chairman, the longtime dairy farmer said he had not yet made a decision. He said this morning that he would accept the position if elected.
Wilcox’s primary challenger has ended his campaign. George Seneck, supervisor of the Town of Guilford, was also nominated at the Republican Party caucus, but the motion failed for lack of a second.
Seneck, who begins a second, two-year term as town supervisor next month, participated in nearly every government committee meeting in 2011, and in the spring, began garnering support from fellow supervisors and members of the business community to take over after Decker. Since the general election in November, however, his political support began to waver, and later in the fall, the Guilford supervisor described his campaign as “an uphill struggle.”
He has officially stopped campaigning.
“At this time I do not have enough votes. I’m not going to do it this year,” he said two weeks ago following the board’s final meeting of 2011.
Wilcox, who is embarking upon an eighth term in office, is known to be fiscally conservative, particularly for questioning the true cost of the numerous government grants that are dangled before department directors to support various programs.
“We always look at all of these grants to see what the cost of free is,” he said recently.
While he said he never intended to milk another cow after high school, Wilcox has lived and worked on his family’s late 1880s era farm for most of his life. He earned a degree in economics from Colorado State University and was a missile launcher in the U.S. Air Force for five years.
He said the main difference between managing a 30 to 40-cow farm and a business like IBM is where and how the decisions are made.
“You sit down around the kitchen table with your wife and your family, not a board of directors. Whatever you need to do, it doesn’t go very far beyond you,” he said, adding that he was especially proud of his son’s plan to follow in his footsteps after he retires.
Wilcox referred to a 45 percent decrease in the gross return for milk among many other economic challenges that farmers have had to face over the years.
“That’s where I’ve come from,” he said. “There were a lot of us that figured out how to do that, and survived.”