Letters 4/10/2008

Dear Editor,
For the last TEN months, we have been asking the Onteora Board of Education (BOE) to revisit their 5-8 Middle School (MS) decision which they made last June 2007.
This decision was made after months of asking the public to weigh in on configurations for the district as a whole: K-12. Untold sums were spent on Architect/Consultants who created the various configurations and ultimately recommended a 6-8 Middle School with three community-based elementary schools.
At no time was there ever any public discussion about focusing exclusively on a small number of grades and taking action only on them.
The 5-8 MS decision was made without any notice and at a late night meeting at 11:00pm. It was a 4 to 3 vote; and the incumbents running on May 20 ALL voted for a 5-8 MS.
The 5-8 MS decision MEANS THE CLOSURE of an elementary school in this district. This is evident in the Architect’s plans; although they will not answer us when we ask them “WHICH SCHOOL?”. On May 6, at the Onteora BOE meeting the members will discuss WHERE to PUT the 5-8 MS. This is a meeting to attend!! 7:00pm at the MS/HS cafeteria.
I believe that most parents and taxpayers in this District DO NOT want another community elementary school to CLOSE. Small community-based schools are key indicators of a town’s vitality. Schools draw families to towns.
When a school closes, the community loses a socio-economic stability. Real Estate and property values decline. A school closure affects EVERY member of the community. If this BOE closes another school, it will SURELY CONTRIBUTE TO THE DECLINE in student population.
We need to CHANGE the direction that our school district is heading in.
Please GET OUT and Vote on MAY 20 ! Put it on your calendar. Your voice is important. ALL of our voices together CAN make a difference.
Ann McGillicuddy,
Phoenicia, NY

Dear Editor,
Contrary to popular belief and to the half truths we read in the newspapers.....THE REVAL IN THE TOWN OF OLIVE DID NOT REMOVE THE THREAT OF LARGE PARCEL.
The litigation between the Towns of Olive and Hurley is on going. The law is still very much in place and subject to vote by your Onteora School board. It is very important to remember that when you cast your votes on May 20th.
My mother is Rita Vanacore and she is up for re-election along with Cindy O'Connor and Mary Jane Bernholz. They are the ones responsible for our reprieve from the imbalanced tax appropriations that we would incur if the Large Parcel were enacted.
But let me go further....this sitting school board has taken our school district farther in three years than any other board in the last twenty years. I know because I have alway lived in this school district and have watched it deteriorate my whole adult life.
I watch these women week after week deliberate, research, and deliberate some more before coming to conclusions that they feel are for the good of each and every student.
They have spent hour after hour taking apart your school budget each year, line by line, and scrutinizing every item in order to keep your tax increaases minimal.....they have questioned every piece of every decision that has come down from the board....sometimes they disagree but I have witnessed hours and hours of phone conversations between these three as well as with other board members. working to come to compromises that will work for our district.
I am watching and listening, now, as emotionally charged factions are trying to discredit their work... I have heard "the Olive three"... .I have heard they only care about what's good for Olive... I have heard them called ill informed, prone to making irrational decisions, and other equally negative and untrue statements.
I can only speak for my own mother when I say that she has spent a multitude of hours, adding up to weeks thru these least three years of her own time...time taken away from her family and her business to try to build our school district back up to where it once was - at the top!
I am speaking to all voters in our district in saying that it would be a great disservice to our children to put a stop to the foundation building that they have so diligently worked on for the past three years.These three women are very valuable commodities to our school district and board....DON'T LET THEM BE STOPPED NOW!!!!!
And to the people of Olive.....please rally, one more time, for the good of Olive... because believe it or not, instituting the Large Parcel Legislation at this time would cost you up to a 30% increase in your taxes. OLIVE, BEWARE OF LIES AND HALF-TRUTHS....OUR PROPERTIES ARE STILL AT RISK!!!!
Tony Vanacore
Shokan, NY

Dear Editor,
I'd like to offer my thanks to the Olive members of the school board. They have been willing to stand up for Olive.They need our support. Now they have come under increasing attack by those who don't believe they can address the legitimate needs of all those in the district. They put in lot of time, thought and work dealing with all the aspects and problems facing the district. If you see an Olive board member, give 'em a hug or good handshake and words of encouragement. And, when the time comes let's all come out in droves as we have before and vote for them.
Len Holmes
Samsonville, NY

Dear Editor,
Let me get this straight. Deborah Meyer Dewan of the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development is happy because the additional ski development for the east side of Belleayre is being withdrawn. She apparently feels that these new ski trails would be a problem to the "environmentally sensitive region" and would run the risk of damaging the watershed and the "forever wild" lands adjacent to it.
Is the lady delusional? What does she think Gitter's "city" on the west side of the mountain is going to do? Does she really believe a few ski trails are more damaging than a huge development? Apparently the State has the money (from the public) to put trails into a private development, but has no money for trails that the public can use. This whole situation really makes me sick.
Joyce McLaughlin
Northport, NY

Dear Editor,
Does the grand jury's finding teach us anything?
As evidence that timing is everything, comes the conflation of the end of another month of March and the Ulster County, NY, jail fiasco's distasteful grand jury conclusion announced March 27. We don't know how March, itself, will conclude; the investigation got off like a media lion, went out like a whimpering lamb...albeit a lamb intended for slaughter.
Question: Since when is a boss excused for his employees' wrongdoings?
Answer: When a grand jury convenes to examine the Ulster County Law Enforcement Center disaster's evidence.
No malice? No bribery? No graft? No criminal intent...no criminal mindset? Since when do grand juries read minds? C'mon, it was a brilliant cover-up.
To the faceless grand jury I say your ignorance of practical politics, bureaucratic shenanigans, is transparent. Your inability to conjur an old boys' network; your seeming refusal to accept its mantra: "GO ALONG to GET along" and its implications for employees' subsequent behaviors.
Your failure neither to condemn nor exonerate higher ups inexcusable. Shades of Enron, Tyco, Bear-Stearns in a teapot.
How could Harvey Sleight "manipulate" without his superiors knowing? If not a sin of commission, then surely omission. You truly believed that Sleight made a unilateral decision to employ and "...at one million dollars more than another organization, better qualified," without his bosses knowing?
Nor do I see nor hear mention of the late Danny Alfonso, legislature Chair at the steamrollered, ugly beginning. Chairman during which the legislature approved multiple million-dollar appropriations, bonded by voice-vote, despite the legislature NEVER having APPROVED building A JAIL in the first place!
Must have been Harvey Sleight's doing.
Nor a peep about an earlier legislative resolution [an upshot of the county office building repair fiasco] that, in the event of a future major capital project, the chair must appoint an oversight committee to obviate such a recurrence. Where was the oversight?
Oh,OK: another Sleight "Watergate."
DA Carwright "disappointed" with the outcome. I would hope so. I shouldn't have believed the fiction that "a District Attorney can get any grand jury to indict anyone if s/he is sufficiently resolute." Probably TV-spawned. He more than hints at his dissatisfaction.
But he seems hopeful of "new evidence." Say what? When Harvey Sleight turns? Could be.
It's a case of dual limbos. In reggae lingo, instead of the bar lowered to increase the difficulty of slipping, indeed backwards, beneath, here the bar was high enough to let anyone dance through.
Having left three named higher-ups dangling in the breeze, suffering a forever-indeterminate moral conundrum, you grand jurors have condemned them to a Dante-like purgatory, forever wandering the streets hoping against hope, but never knowing for sure, "...what should I infer from that passerby's wink?"
"Twenty million dollars over budget?" How 'bout FIFTY? The original, early-total appropriation was fifty million. Check the resolutions. Likely the final bill will dramatically exceed, interest on borrowed money included, one-hundred million.
Nor could have "attorneys and consultants," alone, gobbled up all that $50 million excess.
Question: What's worse than no leadership?
Answer: Incompetent leadership unaware of its incompetence.
It's been tested and proved time and again: those least adept at any undertaking most exaggerate, outspokenly, their own competence.
What's to learn from all this that you may take to the voting booth November 4?
Political parties put up candidates they believe are most likely to win. Irrespective of their qualifications needed to run the business of government. Then the leaders coerce their sheep to vote the party line.
Case in point: during the 2006 contest for Ulster County sheriff, I [a small "i" INDEPENDENT] WALKED, unannounced, INTO Democrat headquarters to VOLUNTEER TO PHONE-BANK for Paul Van Blarcum." The coordinator was peeved when I refused to make calls in behalf of Spitzer. "Why?" he almost insisted. "I just don't get the right feeling for him."
I hope Harvey Sleight has the fortitude and finances to fight his indictment in court, not to accept a plea, no matter what deal is proffered. Who knows under duress what else he'll remember? Given time before trial, maybe a 21st century, Ulster County version of "Deep Throat" will surface.
How to prevent this from happening again? November 4 vote your pocketbook, your heritage, your love of the USA, your future. Your PERSON, NOT your party.
Allan Wikman
Kingston, NY

Dear Editor,
The United States was created by the 13 individual states that existed in 1789. They established a federal government with limited powers and very few duties. Each state was to remain independent in most areas.
The people could control federal spending because they elected the members of the U.S. House of Representatives where all money bills must originate. The state legislatures could control federal interference because they elected the members of the U.S. Senate. In 1913, 36 states passed the 17th Amendment to allow voters to directly elect their U.S. Senators.
Since then, the federal government has usurped many powers of the states. We are rapidly becoming a police state. The President is now allowing warrantless seizes and searches, torture, and many other unconstitutional activities. He also is suspending habeas corpus, our right to face criminal accusations in a court of law.
The feds also plan to merge the United States with Mexico and Canada into a sovereignty-destroying regional government with open borders called the North American Union (NAU) by 2010. Go to www.thenewamerican.com for NAU details. Americans need to demand that the feds obey our Constitution now, or we soon will be governed by officials we did not elect, just like the European Union is today.
Richard and Gloria Hampton
Sylmar, CA

Dear Editor,
I will be forever grateful to the Catskill Watershed Corporation for footing the bill for my new septic system when I retired and moved here several years ago. (This replaced a 50 gallon punctured drum buried in the ground outside my bathroom.) I love them and did not get the impression they were an arm of the NYC DEP. I think we are very lucky to have them rooting for us in this neck of the woods.
Babette Kiesel
Chichester, NY

Dear Editor,
Why is it fewer people hunt and fish in our neck of the woods these days?
A recent article postulates that these pastimes are becoming passe, fading into the past as there is a lack of new recruits. True enough, but in this age of increasing environmental awareness, I'm disappointed that the article made no mention of the sad reason why I no longer fish. The sport was once an all-consuming passion for me to the extent sleep was impossible the night before opening day.
Even as a child, fishing was to me a lot more than landing a trout or a bass. It was a deep aesthetic wonder that captured me on many levels: the anticipation of a strike, the rainbow colors of the fish, the fine eating with home-grown tomatoes and corn liberated from the Zena cornfield, the chill April mornings echoing with robins and spring peepers, the warm June evenings, pools dimpled with rising trout sharing the insect bounty with swooping bats and swallows, the crystal water sliding over clean rock. This can go on to fill a joyful book.
One might still manage to catch some fish, but we have to face the fact that many of our streams are simply not what they used to be. There's a reason for the green slime on the bottom of the Sawkill and the mud and silt that has replaced much of the rocky streambed and that game fish are contaminated with mercury. Streams, and ultimately the ocean, are a repository for all the contaminants raining down from the air or leached out from what is dumped on or in the land. They receive the sediment washed in from land disturbed by human development.
Because of what I know, my aesthetic wonder has taken a severe beating.
As an ecologist and maybe just because of the way I am, I find it difficult to put on a happy face and go fishing.
Peter Koch
Woodstock, NY

Dear Editor,
There were a couple of things that Jon Berg and I did that when we remembered he used to get a big laugh out of: one night, many years ago, we stole a piece of Black Walnut in Kingston. We pulled up to a railroad siding where they stockpiled logs. We found a piece small enough to fit into my station wagon and took off. I later carved it into a torso.
Again, another night many years ago, we parked by the wall along the lower basin of the Ashokan Reservoir. We took our clothes off, dove in and swam around.
It was cold and it still refreshes me.
Robert Jacobson
Mt. Tremper, NY

Dear Editor,
Just wanted to let you know that I have decided to leave the Emerson/Crossroads family and take a new position with Laura Davidson Public Relations in New York City (www.ldpr.com). I start next week. My last day here will be tomorrow, Friday (April 4).
It has been a great, and always-interesting, three years. I greatly appreciate the opportunity Dean Gitter and the Emerson/Crossroads partners have afforded me. Truly, had it not been for the work I’ve done and the incredible amount that I have learned, I would not have been able to even approach this agency for a position. Seems fitting that after three years of saying that the Belleayre Resort will be a place where people’s careers can flourish, I become a prime example. I end my time here as I began it, firmly believing that the Belleayre Resort is exactly what this area needs in order to see the type of economic stability and growth it so desperately needs. I will continue to stay involved and do whatever I can to make that become a reality.
No replacement has been named so, for now, if you need anything, please contact the following:
Emerson Resort & Spa
Ron VanWarmer
General Manager
(845) 688-2828
rvanwarmer@emersonresort.com

Crossroads Ventures
Gary Gailes
(845) 688-7740
selaig@aol.com
Thank you.
Paul Rakov
New York, NY

Dear Editor,
Thank You to the Olive Fire Department!
We would like to express our gratitude to the volunteer Fire Department in the Town Of Olive and elsewhere. On Friday night, the basement floor of our house started to fill with smoke and set off the smoke detectors. Not knowing exactly where the smoke was coming from, we quickly called 911. Within minutes the Fire Department arrived and reassured my husband, myself and our small son that they were here to help. The men were wonderful, they took the time to talk to our very scared son and tell him everything was going to be fine. It takes incredibly special people to get out of bed, race to a neighbor’s house and then dare to enter a home filling with smoke. Thankfully it was only a furnace malfunction and we were back in our house within the hour and safe, but this situation could have been much worse. We have a great Fire department in this town; please remember to support them in any way possible. Thank you once again!
Henry, Wendy & Logan Williams
Olive, NY