ALBANY - With eight months on the job, small town Supervisor Thomas Dias finds himself faced not with a crisis in government, but no government all.

The problem? Three veteran Ancram town board members abruptly resigned over three days leading up to last Thursday's monthly meeting. That leaves the rural, 200-year-old Columbia County town with a government unable to even pay its July bills.

“I said, ‘Wow!' I was really surprised,” Dias said when he received the first resignation. He immediately sought guidance from an expert at the New York State Association of Towns, a lobbying and government resource organization.

“He said this is what is called an ‘indeterminate possibility,”' Dias said, “that something like this will probably never happen, so there is no way to plan for it.”

Dias is trying to get Democratic Gov. David Paterson to appoint at least one town councilman so the five-member board has a quorum and can conduct business until replacements are chosen by voters in the fall. The town is solidly Republican. Dias won election last fall on an independent line after losing a GOP primary. Ancram is a Hudson Valley town of 1,500 people once known for its lead mines. It is part of a county where gentrification is causing friction between local families living there for generations and Manhattanites buying weekend and vacation homes. Dias is a retired IBM Corp. executive who moved to the town in 1989 and figures he's considered a new resident.

“Some people say it's about the new people coming,” he said. “They see how nice the town looks and they want to lock the door and not let anyone else in. I say the Ancram people kept this place nice for 300 years. I think they know what they were doing.”

Dias, however, has shaken things up.

“I'm a person who likes contention,” Dias said from the town 90 miles north of New York City. “I think that to get good information you need a little contention ... and, I'm told, ‘That's not the way we've always done it.”'

Tension was evident in two of the letters of resignation.

James Bryant wrote that he hopes “the board will be objective in meeting the needs of both the old and new residents, as this town belongs to everyone that calls Ancram their home.” He resigned Monday after 20 years of public service.

“There are still several tasks to which I would have liked to contribute,” wrote Gerald Roberts in his resignation letter after nearly 11 years on the town board. “The momentum process and protocol that have evolved almost assuredly do not seem to embrace those challenges.”

Neither Bryant nor Roberts returned calls to their homes. The third board member, Robert Podris, said he resigned for health reasons. Town law dictates vacancies are filled by the town board, but that's impossible without a quorum. State law then kicks in and empowers the governor to fill one or all vacancies until an election.

“We're going as quickly as we can and the town is not facing emergency services being cut or anything like that,” said Morgan Hook, a spokesman for Paterson. The governor was speaking at the Democratic National Convention.

in Denver.

“Golly, this is just a small town it the Hudson Valley,” Dias said, impatient at the pace.