Town Supervisor is an elective legislative position in New York towns. Supervisors sit on the town board, where they preside over town board meetings and vote on all matters with no more legal weight than that of any other board member (no tie-breaking or veto powers).
Towns may adopt local laws that allow them to provide for an executive branch, an action authorized by the New York State Legislature. As such, some supervisors have additional authority or executive powers, whereas some towns have town managers or chief executive officers who serve as the executive branch, leaving the supervisor to his or her traditional role in the legislative branch.
In most towns the supervisor is considered a full-time position, although many supervisors also have other jobs concurrently, while the service on the town board is considered part-time work.
Famous quotes containing the words town and/or supervisor:
“A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We work harder than ever, and I cannot see the advantages in cooperative living.”
—Lydia Arnold, U.S. commune supervisor (of the North American Phalanx, Red Bank, New Jersey, 1843- 1855)