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Follow Up on the
News
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An
Unplanned Debacle
“He
told me that I was not being reappointed because there had
been numerous complaints,” Minew recalled. “I
then called my chairman (Chas “Skip” Weidner)
and told him it was a pleasure to serve with him on the board.
He said ‘What do you mean?’ and I told him I had
not been reappointed because of ‘numerous complaints.’
He said ‘That’s pretty odd. They never asked me.
They never talked to me about any complaints’.”
“This had never happened before,” said Weidner.
“Whenever they (the town board) talked about appointing
somebody or not renewing somebody, the supervisor always talked
to me, as chairman. This time there was no word at all, nor
a hint of what the complaints were. I’m sure that any
body of people who do the work of a planning board are going
to have complaints at times because we follow the law and
if somebody is unhappy about what’s in the regulations,
they might complain.
“I don’t know who complained,” continued
Weidner. “Nobody gave us reasons. We asked. There were
no reasons. We have a lot of respect for Paula. She probably
did more for the board than any other member and she followed
the rules of the zoning laws. We all think it was unfair and
when you get six varied individuals to agree on the same thing
that’s pretty rare. When you meet with somebody two
nights a month, you become friends, almost family. You respect
each other’s views. You may disagree with them but you
debate them civilly at a meeting and that’s that way
we always worked. I’ve had any number of surveyors come
before us and say they would rather come before us than any
other planning board in the area because we were fair. That’s
a high compliment to a board, really.”
Planning board member Robert Oakes, who introduced their protest
during the awkward and dramatic confrontation at the town
board meeting, had also received word of the decision on the
29th and mulled it over during the day.
“I called Skip Weidner the next morning and he informed
me that he had already written his resignation,” Oakes
recalled. “I certainly wasn’t going to stay on
the board without Paula or Skip - I mean that’s our
chairman and vice-chairman- so I asked Skip to hang on to
his resignation till I got back to him. I was going to call
everybody else to see if they felt the same way. I thought
if we all collectively went to the town board, we might be
able to get Paula reinstated.”
According to councilwoman Helen Chase, Oakes’ strategy
was flawed by the implied threat of resignations .
“When Bob said ‘This isn’t a threat but
you might be losing some other planning board members,’
yes, it WAS a threat.” Chase reflected, “I’m
sorry he choose those words because things could have been
very different.”
Councilman Bruce LaMonda concurs.
“You probably heard me say (at the meeting) that if
the planning board hadn’t threatened to quit, there
was probably still room for discussion,” said LaMonda,
who, like Leifeld, said he hadn’t seen the crisis coming
until the topic arose during the December 28th “closing
of the books” meeting. “But you can’t run
government by succumbing to threats, no matter what party
you’re in.”
LaMonda bristled over a newspaper report that Minew’s
disengagement sprang from his displeasure with a subdivision
adjustment before the planning board in which his surveying
business was representing Sherrett Chase, brother of councilwoman
Helen Chase.
“I’m getting very tired of being attacked personally
this way,” LaMonda said. “This had nothing to
do with me or my business. In all of the years I’ve
been in politics, I’ve always kept my business away
from my politics and Sherrett Chase is not a client of mine.”
Other town board members were less than enlightening about
the nature of the complaints cited as cause not to renew Minew’s
7-year term. Councilman Henry Rank refused to discuss the
matter at all. When pressed, Councilwoman Linda Burkhardt
offered a vague “Well, there were complaints that she
wasn’t using a professional manner, how’s that?”
Councilwoman Chase said she had heard that Minew had been
“rude” and “arrogant” to some who
had come before the board. The planning board members were
careful to point out that the political complexion of applicants
was never a factor in their process.
“We treated everybody equally that came to the planning
board,” said Minew. “That was our goal.”
“Politics is not a consideration this board,”
said Weidner at the meeting.
“I couldn’t tell you what anybody’s political
affiliation was on that board and I was on it just about two
years,” said Tim Rose. “It was a very good board
in that we were very conscious about following procedure,
which keeps the town from getting into trouble and Paula was
a great asset in that.”
“Nobody on this (town) board, that I know of, has ever
asked anybody what their political affiliation was,”
said LaMonda during a hushed and candid exchange at the January
2nd meeting. “But when you appoint a member to a board
then the member goes out and works against you in an election
and says a lot of very unkind things - that is politics. The
board is political from that standpoint but not from their
decisions - and they never have been - which is a great credit
to them. I can tell you that I’ve been around a long
time and when you had Republican town boards, they didn’t
appoint Democrats. That’s old school politics. The present
board doesn’t look at registrations. We appoint whoever
we think can do the job. That’s all changed and I’m
sure if Republicans were in the majority on the town board,
they probably wouldn’t be looking at registrations either.
But you’re not naive people. When this board appoints
somebody and they start ‘badmouthing’ the board,
what do you expect?”
This reference to Minew’s campaign against Burkhardt
and Rank for a town board seat a few years ago came after
an admission from Leifeld that politics, rather than complaints,
was at the root of the issue. Later he would elaborate that
he could name people who complained “a little bit here
and there individually” which “didn’t mean
a whole lot” except something that came up when the
issue hit the fan at the ‘book closing’ meeting
on December 28th. It was, he seemed to be saying, a convenient
excuse.
“If the town board had come to Skip Weidner and said
‘Look, we want to replace Paula. She’s been on
the board for 9 years and it’s time for a change,’
you can’t argue with that,” said Oakes. “But
being that they tried to get rid of her on a lie, we called
them on it and the truth came out that it was all political.
It had nothing to do with a complaint. Berndt said he wouldn’t
pull punches and that it was because she ran against them.
I can’t quote word-for-word but that’s basically
what he said to us.”
“The first indication of some other agenda was when
Berndt said that, for his decision, it was political,”
councilwoman Chase later observed, noting that she was startled
that Leifeld had confided that at a public meeting. “That
was not discussed at the Dec. 28th meeting. If it had been
brought up, my reaction might have been different. I remarked
at the time that if Berndt felt that way, it was his personal
feeling and had not been discussed in relation to the board
decision. But Paula was fairly pointed in some of the things
she was saying, although I wasn’t totally tuned in to
that campaign. It’s interesting to me now, looking back
at that, that she would have done some of those things. If
she thought she could say those things and have the people
she was saying them about have a short political memory, she
should have been more careful because the town board appoints
the planning board.
“It was obvious from what the rest of the planning board
members did in her support that they do appreciate her, that
they depended on her,” Chase added. “Maybe they
depended on her so much that some other members didn’t
blossom; that they depended on her so much that having her
not reappointed was going to be such a tremendous loss- indeed,
any one member who’s been on the board for such a long
time, will be a great loss.”
“It’s a thorny situation,” said Burkhardt.
“It’s unfortunate that it has come to what it
has but it’s not necessarily a bad thing for the town.
Sometimes a shake-up is exactly what’s needed. We have
several good people who have stepped forward and volunteered
to work on the planning board and we’re planning on
having the county planner, Dennis Doyle, come to the next
few meetings to guide the new members through the procedures.
There are educational means we will ask the new members to
participate in to learn more about the process and we also
spoke about hiring a professional planner to work with them
on a temporary basis.”
“We’ll have to do some training,” said Chase,
who named Robert Tischler, Drew Boggus, David Jones and Jim
Konjas as new planning board members selected at a special
meeting on January 9th, with three other undisclosed names
still under consideration. “This is kind of a new thing.
We haven’t had seven new members all at once.”
Former board members, of course, are a bit less rosy about
the view.
“I’m very angry,” said Minew. “They
didn’t even have the decency to thank any of us for
the time we spent doing this. No appreciation whatsoever.”
“It’s not that I’m no longer on the planning
board that’s such a huge disappointment,” said
Oakes. “I’m disappointed in the leadership of
our town. They threw away over 40 years of combined service
and knowledge over their own interests. They didn’t
put the town’s best interests first. We had all gone
to several planning seminars and there was a lot of knowledge
and experience between us thrown by the wayside. It was very
stupid on their part.”
There was no public application process for the new planners.
According to LaMonda, a similar situation where the town board
had to replace a planning board occured in the 1990s.
Making
Peace At Onteora
First, on Saturday March 3, the board will host a district-wide
community meeting at the high school to get input on what
each community school should look like. There will be a presentation,
question, answer and comment period with a formal introduction
of the district’s new Superintendent.
The other two steps include a survey to be mailed to district
residents and the compilation of more cost figures on each
of the bond proposals.
Costs for the three bonds range from $30-$62 million, not
including transportation, athletic fields and environmental
considerations. Two of the three plans would include closing
an additional elementary school or creating a centralized
campus at the Boiceville site.
Some school board members recently took a tour of the Taconic
Hills Central school district, a consolidated centralized
campus that took eleven referendums to pass. It was noted
that not until the Taconic school community was made a part
of the decision making process and major changes made that
a bond passed.
Victoria McLaren the assistant superintendent for business
gave an overview of the upcoming budget process and highlighted
budget concerns. She outlined the current tax certiorari,
or amount of legal challenges, over the value of property
assessments. The total amount of challenges facing the district
at present is $15,670,826.84, with most coming from a New
York City dispute that has alleged that the town of Olive
over-assessed the city’s reservoir. If New York City
were to win their litigation against Olive, Onteora taxpayers
could owe $14,293.667.60, a cost that the city believes it
is owed based on their own assessments.
McClaren said Onteora does not have enough in reserves to
cover such an amount.
“We only have $3.8 million in reserve, so we could potentially
end up having to pay $11.8 million more, McLaren explained.
“I don’t know what the chances of that are, but
we are likely having to end up paying more than we have in
the reserve right now.”
According to New York State law, the school district can only
keep the money in reserve for four years. McLaren added that
the costs of special education will be another financial concern
for the coming budget process.
“Last year, after we adopted our budget, we then restored
a number of positions,” McLaren said, noting how some
transportation costs have gone up dramatically in this area.
Trustee Maxanne Resnick asked if there was a better process
for special education referrals in regards to the budget,
noting that she did not want to see a repeat of last year.
Assistant superintendent Deb Fox said the pupil personnel
staff have already set possible projections for next year.
McLaren also asked the board to consider costs that may reflect
the budget process, such as retirement, contracts that will
be ending June 2008, rising cost of health care, and a new
State mandate that requires a certified director of Physical
Education.
School board president Marino D’Orazio asked the administration
to try and keep the budget at a four percent increase or lower.
“I don’t want to talk percentages because that
makes me crazy. I really want to see keeping track of the
quarterly reports we have gotten and the unencumbered amounts
of money and the fact that the last three years we have come
in at an overage that keeps increasing every year,”
replied Trustee Rita Vanacore. “I am not interested
in percentages. That is telling my district that we really
didn’t do anything better this year than last year.”
Cleaning
Up Elections
Wisneski, a Glenford native and resident of Lomontville
who’s planning to move to her husband’s Olivebridge
home in the coming months, was speaking from her Albany
office in preparation for a CMCE fundraiser set to take
place at Woodstock/Saugerties’ New World Home Cooking
this Sunday, January 21. Entertainment for the 1 to 4
pm informational gathering and celebration, put together
by local artist Bruce Ackerman, will include Mik Horowitz
and Gilles Malkine, Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, the Princes
of Serendip, Sarah Kramer-Harrison and Robin The Hammer…
all local favorites. In addition, Congressman Maurice
Hinchey and other political figures of note from the region
are expected to be on hand, along with a host of donated
goods and services to be silently auctioned off.
The CMCE movement in New York State seeks to set up public
campaign funding for all statewide elections similar to
other public systems set up in recent years in Arizona
and Maine, by public initiative efforts, and in neighboring
Connecticut, by legislative action. In those states, prospective
candidates would qualify themselves for public funding
by raising a certain amount of private monies in small
donations – Maine puts the limit at $5 a pop. Once
qualified, CMCE candidates would be given a certain amount
to spend, determined by analysis regarding how much most
legislative or statewide races take to win, with additional
amounts available should a privately funded candidate
seek a money advantage, or a third party try “swiftboating”
a publicly-supported candidate (a reference to the private
group that went after John Kerry’s Vietnam record
during the 2004 Presidential race).
Wisneski said that the total amount needed to cover New
York’s statewide races would be unlikely to go above
$20 million in one year… an amount she said would
cost taxpayers an average $1 per person. Such spending,
though, would be offset by savings in the amount of public
monies given back to corporate contributors via tax breaks,
as well as the changes that would occur in the pool of
candidates willing to come forward for public service
without the current fundraising demands modern elections
involve.
Wisneski also noted that Spitzer’s recent campaign
was run, and won, with over $40 million total.
Citizens Action, for whom Wisneski has been working since
December 2005, when she came east from campaigning for
similar measures in Hawaii, has been pushing for full
Clean Money, Clean Elections reform in New York for the
past nine years. She said that during one spell, following
ex-Governor George Pataki’s 2002 defeat of Democratic
candidate Carl McCall, funding losses forced a major downsizing
in the push. During the interim, which lasted a couple
of years, CMCE boardmember Irene Miller — a Palenville
resident who had earlier been instrumental in a push to
instill clean money principals into New York City’s
Byzantine elections system – started New York Citizens
for Clean Elections to “keep the ball afloat”
with the help of a lot of local volunteers.
“With Spitzer having committed to full public funding
in his State of the State speech, something he said he
would do, and that led to our endorsement of him last
year, we now need to focus on the state assembly and senate
to ensure a bill goes through in the coming years,”
Wisneski said. “That takes a lot of grass roots
organizing, which means more staffing on our part…
which all takes money.”
In addition to the coming weekend’s Woodstock/Saugerties
fundraiser, she added, her campaign drew 45 people to
a “highly successful” fundraiser at a private
home in New Paltz over the recent Martin Luther King Day
holiday weekend.
“Citizens Action always believed that the best bet
for getting election reform moving in New York would be
to elect a governor who was supportive of it to give the
movement real legs,” Wisneski added. “When
Eliot Spitzer first said he was supportive of clean elections
while running for attorney general in 1998, we knew we
had an opportunity… Now we’re working to keep
the issue at the top of the state’s agenda.
In his January 3 State of the State speech, Spitzer said,
early on, “To neutralize the army of special interests,
we must disarm it. In the coming weeks, we will submit
a reform package to replace the weakest campaign finance
laws in the nation with the strongest. Our package will
lower contribution limits dramatically, close the loopholes
that allow special interests to circumvent these limits,
and sharply reduce contributions from lobbyists and companies
that do business with the state. But reform will not be
complete if we simply address the supply of contributions.
We must also address the demand. Full public financing
must be the ultimate goal of our reform effort. By cutting
off the demand for private money, we will cut off the
special interest influence that comes with it.”
The Governor went on to also address gerrymandered legislative
districts, judicial reform, the consolidation of local
government, the elimination of “lump-sum members’
item” legislative grants, known as “pork barrel,”
full pre-K coverage for all children in the state, and
a new push to peg the state’s economic development
on knowledge-based business over rust-belt industry and
tourism.
“We have a tremendous amount of hope. That State
of the State speech was amazing,” Wisneski said.
“We know he means what he says.”
The big obstacle now, the campaign coordinator added,
was to help push the wanted legislation through the state
legislature. She said that although past bills passed
regarding clean elections by the state assembly were only
“partial,” she feels that Spitzer’s
lead – as well as the fact of Connecticut’s
recent move – should spur the writing, and passage,
of a better law. As for the state Senate, which has blocked
such moves in recent years, Wisneski noted that a comment
by Majority leader Joe Bruno after the Stet of the State
speech indicated possible support now, albeit with an
odd restriction that legislative races not be included
in the provisions. Furthermore, she noted that Bruno’s
recent legal troubles, and his party’s shrinking
majority, could work well for “real reform.”
“Incumbents don’t like this,” she said.
“It works to level the political playing field,
which is not to their advantage.”
She added that Citizens Action’s big push for now,
to be explained at this Sunday’s event, is to push
for a good elections reform bill’s passage in the
State Assembly and then put “all energy” into
convincing a similar move on the state Senate’s
part.
Did she feel the Assembly would be cooperative?
“It seems like a natural fit. They’ve been
saying they want to do reform for a long time now,”
Wisneski said, noting that local Assemblyman Kevin Cahill
of Kingston could prove an instrumental element of any
push to convince Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to get
a bill passed with some real muscle in it. Why? “Because
he comes from a district where the grass roots for this
entire movement have been strongest.”
As for the non-informational side of this weekend’s
fundraiser, Wisneski said there would definitely be a
major celebratory air to the proceedings because of Spitzer’s
rcent inauguration. But also a thankful air for all the
work Miller has done over the years, along with such other
stalwarts as Ackerman and former Woodstock councilwoman
Toby Heilbrunn.
“I’m looking forward to hearing recent Senate
candidate Susan Zimet talk about the current system and
how it can hurt a candidate facing a strong incumbent,”
Wisneski said. “But I’m also thinking we should
at least be giving Irene some flowers for having kept
the momentum going all these years.”
“It’ll be interesting to see what happens
over the next two to three years.. Can we get this through,”
Wisneski continued. “In Connecticut, it took sending
a governor to jail. We’re hoping bringing in a new
one will do the trick in New York.”
So where does the new sense of hope balance with reality?
“Spitzer’s not only talking the talk, but
he’s also started walking the walk,” Wisneski
said. “We’re not naïve. That’s
why we have this grass roots movement, these fundraisers.”
The Clean Money, Clean Elections Campaign fundraiser takes
place this Sunday, January 21, from 1 to 4 pm at New World
Home Cooking on Route 212 near the Saugerties/Woodstock
border. For more information call Jessica at 845-901-0264
A
Jar Of Olives
A
Question Of Resolutions
I was
bombarded by technological information that bounced
off my senior citizen brain, a mature brain that
rejected the latest gadget knowing that the season’s
expensive toy is tomorrow’s garage sale item.
I have rejoiced at the latest device to play music
too many times. Our family had a “Hi-Fi”
in the sixties, and now we have moved to High Def
in the new century. I owned cars that had CB, eight
tracks, cassette and CD players. My radio promises
to be obsolete by the time I trade cars again. Cars
now advertise satellite radio, GPS, and Bluetooth
technology.
Although I don’t know what Bluetooth technology
is, advertisers have convinced us that we not only
want it, but we need it! Since I am a lover of words,
I know that the term comes from a famous Christian
Dane named Harald Bluetooth Gormson. He united and
led the various tribes in Denmark from 958 to 986
and succeeded in ousting most of the Germanic tribes.
The new cable-free technology that came out of Denmark
was named in his honor. It certainly is a catchy
phrase.
The amazing thing, to me, about technology is the
fact that we are going small and large at the same
time. The nano, which the dictionary defines as
“infinitesimal” is so small that my
far-sighted eyes cannot read the menu without wearing
my reading glasses. My fingers are larger than the
keypads on things like Palm Pilots, cell phones,
Blackberries and such. At the time in my life when
I am choosing large button phones and large print
books, technology is shrinking phones and screens.
At the same time, televisions are getting larger.
I have seen homes with screens larger than the cinema
at the Hudson Valley malls.
I wonder what’s next. Phones, computers, games
and television all seem to be vying for the same
audience. Buy “me” next. The device
of the future will just be a “thing”
that comes in every color of the rainbow and it
will be the combo of all communication devices.
How will it run? The power of the sun, satellite
or some brand-new energy force will run the mini
“thing.” Let’s hope it isn’t
cellular! You can be sure that the “thing”
will be here before Olive or Shandaken’s cell
service is up and running.
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