Michael Forster Rothbart, D-Seventh Ward, is running unopposed for the city of Oneonta Common Council seat this November after being appointed last year.
Forster Rothbart, 53, is a lifelong Democrat but said he is running as an independent. A professional photographer, he attended Swarthmore College and studied urban planning at the University of Wisconsin. He was appointed to the seat in November 2024 after Bryce Wooden’s departure and started serving on the council in January.
Carolyn Marks announced she was dropping out of the Seventh Ward race Oct. 8. She was running on the Democratic Party line, challenging Forster Rothbart to fill the unexpired term, according to Daily Star archives.
Throughout the past year, Forster Rothbart said he has felt that he has done a lot of good in the community and would like to continue that public service.
“It feels really important for me for people to be invested in their community, involved in their community,” he said.
Having been involved in city government for a long time, Foster Rothbart said he served on the Planning Commission in Madison, WI for about five years as well as on the city’s Pedestrian, Bicycle and Motor Vehicle Commission. He has had jobs as an English teacher, journalist, photographer and an open space planner.
He said he is the only person on the council with a background in urban planning, which he said he believed was important when discussing infrastructure and neighborhood design.
He added that he wants to be an advocate for the neighborhood, especially with a lot of turnover in Seventh Ward leadership over the past few years. He said it is beneficial to have somebody focusing on that individual community within the city of Oneonta, bringing forward specific concerns those in the neighborhood may have.
Making Oneonta a welcoming place for the people and looking out for the city’s future are also major priorities of his, Forster Rothbart said.
Forster Rothbart said he has held neighborhood meetings, six so far this year, where he tells people what the council is working on and listens to people’s concerns within the ward.
In regard to affordable housing, a major concern of many in the city, Forster Rothbart said homelessness and affordable housing can be considered two separate issues, though they are intertwined.
“We need to not look at those people as a problem but as people we can integrate into our community,” he said.
The council passed dwelling unit legislation earlier this year, he said, allowing anybody to convert their barn or garage, or build a secondary dwelling unit on the property, potentially providing avenues for an increase of affordable housing in the city.
He added that he feels strongly about welcoming immigrants to Oneonta. It also should be a destination, not just a place where people stop for gas on their way to Cooperstown, he said. The city needs to attract businesses downtown and people to shop at those businesses, he added.
Oneonta is known as the City of the Hills, but it could be developed further, Forster Rothbart said. He said he has been working on developing some of the local trails, and said over time it could be a place for people to come mountain bike, hike and ski.
While it has the “beginnings of the infrastructure,” Forster Rothbart said, there is still work to be done.
Recently, he said he was visiting family in Michigan and went for a bike ride in a state forest where he and his brother used to ride as children. The county and state have since invested money to make state-of-the-art mountain biking trails, attracting bikers from multiple hours away to ride.
With the hills around the city, Forster Rothbart said, Oneonta has potential for similar projects. He said he is working on an Oneonta Creek trail with a goal to eventually establish a trail from Wilber Park to Wilber Lake. It would be a “good, practical level project that we can accomplish in a couple years,” he said, but that is just a first step.
Between the two local colleges, Hartwick College and SUNY Oneonta, Forster Rothbart said the city additionally has an impressive art scene.
“We kind of take that for granted,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of cities with 40,000 population where you can go out and hear live music any time you want.”
Making up every city, he said, are the people who live there and the infrastructure behind it. It is a network of roads and a social network of individuals that build a community. When there are “disjunctures in that network,” there are problems, Forster Rothbart added.
“You have to figure out how to bridge that break,” he said.