The bear fountain on Main Street Geneseo (R). SUNY Geneseo’s campus (L). File photos.
GENESEO – Village of Geneseo Mayor Richard Hatheway and SUNY Geneseo President Denise Battles will open the floor to community questions on ‘town-gown’ relations between the Village and the College.
Hatheway and Battles signed a renewed Village/College Compact on Thursday and will be joined by their executive teams at the Livingston County Museum on Center Street on June 2 from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. for the community chat, the first of its kind in history.
“We continue to treasure the mutual cooperation between the college and village, and updating this compact is a strong validation of the value we place in the relationship,” said Battles and Hatheway in a joint statement. “We look forward to the public attending both the compact signing and our first-ever community chat.”
Hatheway, Battles, and their teams will answer questions during the interactive discussion. The public is invited to attend.
The signing ceremony was at the Big Tree Inn on Main Street Geneseo.
The compact was first signed by Hatheway and then-college President Christopher Dahl in 2012. The original compact was the result of recommendations from a task force convened to examine areas of mutual concern with the intention of strengthening the existing strong relations between the college and community and renewing a commitment to a high quality of life for all who live, work and study in the village. President Battles is approaching completion of her first year as president, and she and Mayor Hatheway agreed that the time was right to revisit the compact.
The college collaborated with village leadership to identify a small working group that reviewed the original 2012 document and drafted updates to the compact, which were periodically shared with village and college leadership for feedback. The collaboration ultimately led to a consensus version of the document which was signed Thursday.