The Olive Press - Follow Up on the News

Follow Up on the News

The Shadow Of Terror...

The meeting was New York’s long-delayed response to an Article 78 suit filed last October in regard to the re-opening of Monument Road along the southwest edge of the Ashokan Reservoir which had been closed to vehicular traffic in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and, except for a period of several months which permitted local traffic, has remained closed despite the efforts and arguments of local citizens. But when town officials settled in, they found that reopening the road was not on the table. Instead, they were treated to a presentation of the City’s plans to straighten and widen the Route 28A access road that is being used as a detour.
“They didn’t tell us much we didn’t already known,” commented Olive Supervisor Brendt Leifeld, noting that the estimated $14 to $17 million project was slated to start in 2008 and finish in 2010. He said that a remote-controlled spike barrier would be installed at each end of Monument Road to permit the signaled passage of emergency vehicles.
The meeting was punctuated by heated exchanges when someone on the Olive side tried to raise the Monument Road issue, arguing that the 1905 Water Supply Law obligated the City to repair and maintain for local residents any roads built during the construction of the reservoir. This is hardly the first time the law has been cited in relation to reservoir roads and there’s a tale of a time a former Olive supervisor led a convoy of farm produce carriers across the reservoir after local farmers had been routinely denied the right of way. More recently, as Bob Steuding observed in his Last of the Homemade Dams; “Local officials also complain about the poor maintenance of roads and bridges, and the haphazard plowing of the snow in the winter. The Traver Hollow bridge, found in the 1970s to be unsafe, was summarily and indefinitely closed by the City to the great surprise and inconvenience of the inhabitants of West Shokan. This state of affairs remained unremedied, the City alternating between threats of bankruptcy and promises of action, until local State Assemblyman, Maurice Hinchey, took the matter in hand. This situation was reminiscent of a similar transportation problem which occurred in 1913, after the Shokan bridge had been toppled by high water and not replaced by the City.”
There have been other lingering bridge repairs since Steuding’s study and more scheduled for overhaul in the near future that have area residents already concerned- particularly with Monument Road sealed. Several residents, who attended the closed meeting at the request of attorney Dell Seligman, who is handling Olive’s plaintive end of the Article 78 suit, suggested that, as the 28A alternate was converted to a one-way while being worked on, that the upper Monument Road be opened to traffic going the other way. This, the City said, was unacceptable for security reasons.
Distrustful residents have expressed their own thoughts about the true motives for the road closure, venturing that the so-called “Lemon Squeeze” section of the road which passes over the dam had been deemed too narrow for two-way traffic by the State and the City had seized upon a “national security” excuse to avoid the major reconstruction which a widening that section would require. They deem laughable the idea that a car bomb would breech the 252 foot deep structure fortified by concrete, masonry, crushed stone and earth. Along with the 7 million cubic yards of earth and the million cubic yards of masonry which went into the dam, Steuding visualizes that there is also “enough concrete to bury the stockade area of nearby Kingston to a depth of 2,000 feet.” One resident noted that a Ryder truck filled with explosive left a crater in Oklahoma City only 8 feet deep.
The designated villain to those wishing to reopen the road, DEP Police Chief Ed Welch, said at a 2003 Olive town board meeting that he had made the decision to close it to avoid a car bomb on the basis of a secret confession by the proclaimed “mastermind” of the 9-11 attacks that he had been privileged to read in 2003. The confessor, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, called KSM in intelligence circles, was allegedly captured in Pakistan in March of 2003 by that nation’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) which has associated closely with our own CIA for decades. Although there are serious problems with accounts of that capture, KSM did vanish until March of this year when a 58-page document containing his confession emerged at the tumultuous trial of accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.
The release of this carefully constructed document, titled “Substitution for the Testimony of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” was huge news to those following developments in the War on Terror because all testimony or, indeed, contact with KSM or his close associates was not permitted outside of a small circle of terrorism specialists. A court had barred Moussaoui’s lawyers from questioning KSM, whom the had wanted to call as a defense witness and, likewise in other cases, the barring of testimony from KSM and other key figures has resulted in the release of terrorist suspects- even after conviction.
Where KSM is not vague, there are difficulties. Among many other claims in the sometimes contradictory KSM document, there is passing mention of secondary consideration targets which includes “poisoning of reservoirs” but this and an unclassified “Combatant Status Review”from KSM’s surprise tribunal hearing in March have received little credence from researchers and journalists persuaded that KSM has long been an ISI asset. His “confessions” contain such detailed improbabilities as his targeting of the Plaza Bank of Washington State which hadn’t even been founded until 2006, four years after his alleged arrest. Met with widespread scepticism on three continents, including a CNN Online poll that tallied 74% of respondents who doubted his confession, even his claim to have murdered Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was rejected by the Pearl family.
French journalist Bernard-Henri Levy’s investigation into that outrage, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, which was a European bestseller in 2003, concluded that Pearl had gotten “over-involved in intelligence games,” a conclusion identical to that of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, who may have been in a position to know. Musharraf was having protracted meetings with CIA Director George Tenet in Islamabad in May of 2001 while Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who has intimate ISI connections dating back to the 1980s, was touring India.
One of Pearl’s primary sources, terrorism expert and CIA veteran, Robert Baer, has said that Pearl was investigating KSM’s links to the ISI and its director Lieutenant General Mahmoud Ahmed, who (we learned from intelligence leaks to an India newspaper) instructed Omar Saeed Sheikh, later convicted of Pearl’s murder, to wire $100,000 to accused 9-11 team ringleader Mohammed Atta prior to the attacks. Mahmoud, who resigned and silently slipped away after the Indian article was published, was meeting with Senators Bob Graham and Porter Goss of Florida in Washington D.C. at the very moment of the attacks. Oddly, perhaps, Graham was later to serve on the 9-11 Commission and Goss was to become, however briefly, CIA Director.
There’s much more, of course; all of which opens new questions into what was really going on during that traumatic day but, it is the strange re-emergence of KSM (by redacted paper proxy) which casts a fresh light on the closing of Monument Road for national security reasons. How seriously can we take the KSM confession which prompted Police Chief Welch’s decision is a question on the lips of some of those who have raised their voices to re-open the road. Since we now know that KSM was handled like a suspected witch undergoing “Trial By Water” treatment in Salem, they reason, and that some of the techniques used to elicit his admissions may be subject to copyright violation fines from the architects of the Inquisition, we might reweigh the verity of his 31 dirty deeds. Who is KSM, really? Some of his claims are strange enough to be acceptable only to jurors with abdominal pouches and the Article 78 suit which hopes to re-open the road will not be reviewed by a military tribunal. But some of those who support the petition are concerned that the magic word “security” will deny the suit a proper legal evaluation.
“I told them they (the DEP) were treating us like second class citizens and we’re not,” said former Olive Supervisor Vincent Barringer, who was present as one of Seligman’s observers. “I also pointed out that there’s only one cop on the NYC water supply police from Olive, although some have moved here since they were hired, they haven’t hired anyone from here since at least 1992. When they first built the reservoir, most of the employees came out of Olive, Hurley, Shandaken and Kingston.”
Barringer also noted that any terrorist who did their homework on the New York water supply system wouldn’t put the Ashokan Reservoir any where near the top of their list.
“No other agency suggests that a car bomb could blow this up,” said David Rosenbaum, another observer, who added that explosive experts had been contacted to testify as to the impracticality of that idea. “If they really believe that, why hasn’t anyone seen their evacuation plan? They just feel that they can do anything they want to anybody.”
Some in Olive have viewed the current situation with the “same old story” perspective applied to the City’s corporate counsel in 1905, John J. Delany, whom the Daily Freeman described as deporting himself “like a royal duke” and who openly declared that “rural communities must be sacrificed for the needs of the great city.”
“I asked them why, with the amount of police they have here, they can’t set someone on either end of the road but they said ‘that’s not a possibility.’ If their main concern was protecting the dam, don’t you think they’d have someone around it all the time?” asked John Tisch, another observer at the meeting. “ We were strung along for quite a while before the Article 78 was actually put on file. It’s a legal filing you have to respond to because when anyone sends them anything, they just ignore it. But, if this goes to court, the so-called studies and engineers’ reports they won’t show us will come to light - or, at least, I hope.”
“I’m sure that if we didn’t have a lawsuit against them then we wouldn’t have had the meeting,” said Leifeld. “But they had it to insist what they were doing was right. We don’t agree. What they’re doing isn’t going to prevent anybody who really wants to do something from doing it but I can understand the part of it that, if they don’t do anything and something happens, then they’re really going to be criticized. This way, they can say they did something...Even if it doesn’t mean anything.”

Two More For Olive!

There were no long lines for the 2007-2008 budget vote at Bennett elementary school, as occurred in years past since the Large Parcel Legislation was enacted in 2004. But this was mostly due to an added ballot machine brought in to deal with the volume of Olive voters.
Despite attempts to the contrary, the district’s proposed budget managed to pass at a comfortable margin. A separate proposition to buy new school busses, however, went down, narrowly, based on a solid Olive “no” to the proposal.
New Superintendent Leslie Ford was pleased voters came out to support the budget of $46,775.318 or a 4.77 percent budget increase, which passed by 1222-1010 votes.
“I am so pleased that the students have received the support of the voters and I am very thankful for everyone who turned out to vote today,” Ford said after the tallies were released following the closing of the polls Tuesday night.
Olive was the single district to defeat the budget by 514-437. In Shandaken, the budget passed 220 to 174; in Woodstock by 307 to 165 votes, and in Hurley by 258 to 157 votes.
Proposition two, asking voters to purchase four buses to replace four that have high mileage and frequent maintenance needs, was defeated by 1108-1086 votes. In Olive, voters went against it 558 to 381; in Shandaken, the no vote was 199 to 183; in Woodstock, the proposition passed 189 to 171; in Hurley it passed 233 to 180.
Michelle Friedel won the most votes of 1470, Richard Wolff came in second with 1313 and D’Orazio came in last with 976 totaled votes cast.
Broken down town by town…
In Olive, Friedel won 925 votes, Wolff received 888 and D’Orazio got 94 votes.
In Shandaken, Friedel got 131, Wolff won 107 and D’Orazio won 299 votes.
In Woodstock, Friedel won 158 votes, Wolff received 111 and D’Orazio won 366.
In Hurley, Friedel got 256 votes, Wolff won 207 and D’Orazio received 217.
Friedel gave a whoop when she saw the total votes and thanked the community for “all their support.” D’Orazio had been leading as the early results of Shandaken, Hurley and Woodstock came in but then faced easy defeat, similar to the race that put MaryJane Bernholz, Cindy O’Connor and Rita Vanacore on the board two years ago. Last spring, a last-minute Olive write-in candidate, George Haug, came very close to winning a seat on the board, and easily swept his own town.
Also after results were announced on the 15th, Wolff smiled relived and said, “Thank-you Olive.”
D’Orazio said he has enjoyed his tenure as a board member. Responding to his loss he said, “This is democracy in action, the voters have spoken.”
After the board approved the votes cast, D’Orazio welcomed the new members.
“Congratulations to Richard and Michelle, welcome on board,” he said to the two officers who step up to the plate July 3, when the board will also choose a new president from its membership, only one of whom has been in office for over two years. “You guys are going to be invited immediately to participate in a number of things coming up.” This year Woodstock had its lowest turnout ever with less than 500 votes cast, while Olive brought out the most voters, averaging well over a 1000. The school district in total has approximately 11,250 registered voters.

One Last Time For Mass

These Masses are scheduled for Memorial Day weekend: Saturday, May 26 at 5:00 p.m. in Allaben, and Sunday, May 27 at 9:00 a.m. in Boiceville. All parishioners and the entire community have been welcomed to help celebrate a remembrance of the mission churches.
“While this is a difficult time for everyone, the mission churches will always have a special place in our hearts,” said Father Tran. “We pray that people will come together to heal the hurt and to move our faith community forward in the coming years.”

Neighbors Share Gardens

Contributors to the garden project are not farmers but backyard gardeners who grow more food than they can consume. All local gardeners are welcome to join the program and are encouraged to grow organically, without using pesticides. A $10 annual fee supports advertising and labeling. Rather than put a basket of excess vegetables by the side of the road, gardeners will bring their produce to the Black Bear to sell on consignment and will return weekly to pick up the proceeds. Any unsold vegetables will be donated to a soup kitchen or returned to the grower. “The gardeners will make a few bucks, and people in the community will be able to eat locally,” said Boyer.
Current plans call for seven percent of the profits to go to Phoenicia Elementary School, where there are hopes of reviving a gardening project abandoned several years ago. Boyer was enthusiastic about the prospect of a Phoenicia School garden, where students could be taught to grow food and bring it to market. “They’ll learn about the economics of it,” said Boyer, who feels that growing and eating locally are an important option. One enhancement to the school garden might be construction of a hoop house (a plastic greenhouse) so growing can take place during the school year.
The Neighbors Garden Market is patterned after a highly successful initiative in Connecticut, in which Martin was involved. Pierrette Kim of Good Deeds has been organizing the local effort and has gotten interest from some restaurants that may purchase excess produce for their kitchens. “The idea is to bring the community together,” explained Kim. “People can get fresh local produce and eat organic rather than having to buy things grown with chemicals.”
In addition to local vegetables and fruits, the Black Bear will be carrying an array of organic produce, enabling the Boyers to buy larger quantities of the items needed for the café kitchen. “We’ll also sell our prepared foods, like soups and salads,” said Boyer, “and we’ll offer groceries—cereals, flours, coffee, teas, organic milk, soy milk, and other items. We’ll have local specialty foods from farms in Ulster and Delaware Counties: jams, jellies, vinegars, mustards, artisan breads, organic meat, eggs, and dairy. And we may start baking more, like our apple cider doughnuts. We’ll be staying open until 8:00 for dinner.”
Kim is arranging for Cornell Cooperative Extension to offer weekend workshops on organic growing, and the café plans to sponsor a pumpkin festival in the fall. They expect to have more live music as well, now that renovation has taken down some of the partitions and opened up the space, and they will continue selling gifts, toys, pottery, and local crafts, as well as Boyer’s lyrical paintings. “We’re trying to see what the community wants, what people need,” said Boyer. “We’re not trying to get rich, just survive.”

A Jar Of Olives

Puppy Love

Training the puppy and meeting a demanding play schedule for Our Town has kept us busy. The play’s performances, which were sold out most nights, are only the tips of the iceberg. There is so much work and cooperation that goes into producing a play that the audience never sees. Linda Burkhardt was a tireless dynamo of a director who was ably assisted by Colleen Scanlon. Travis Gooderham, an eighth grader in Onteora Middle School, spent weeks doing sound effects. Costumes, props, scenery and lights, courtesy of Leslie Sawhill-Aja, had to be integrated into the script. Mary Hesley was our stage manager and ticket coordinator. The library trustees took tickets and sold refreshments. Michael Curtis stepped in as an able understudy when Del Umbers had to miss a performance. Del had a good reason though; Del’s mom was receiving her PhD on the final performance night.
I am grateful for the opportunity to work with seasoned actors and actresses and fellow novice stage rats. Last column I highlighted the men, women and children who came from Olive. This week I want to stress the success that occurs when people of many towns join together in a common goal. Kyle Yurechko, who played George Gibbs and his mom Jan, who did hair and make-up, came from Lanesville. Carol Urban, Ted French, and Dylan Patterson from Shandaken shared their acting talent in this production that benefited the Olive Free Library. Vivian Hill and her daughter Crystal Hoban came to us from Kerhonkson. Peter Kraft came from West Hurley and Rich Parete from Stone Ridge. Alan Shevlo made Mt. Tremper proud playing a convincing Doc Gibbs.
In the long rehearsals and waits in the wings, our energy became synergized. Strangers, veterans and novices, young and old became one unit. We were not Republicans or Democrats; we were not for or against Large Parcel; we did not whine and snivel over our assessments; we did not point fingers at towns that have 100% assessment and those that do not; we never mentioned the cell towers or lack of them, and we did not talk school board politics. We were all townspeople of a place called Grover’s Corners, a place that valued the simpler pleasures of life. It was rather nice to cooperate rather than compete. Our goal was to produce an entertaining play and raise some funds for the Library. In the act of doing so, we made new friends and I, personally, learned respect for the hard work that goes into a dramatic performance.
It’s a good thing that the play is over because it’s striper season on the Hudson. Billy, Bob, and Greg are Olive’s seasoned fisherman. Each man has his special lures, special techniques and special fishing spot to trawl. Listening to the marine radios is an experience. Homeland Security can take lessons from the coded messages. “Hey, Sparky, where are you?” “Sue Ship, what are they hitting on?” “Try a red tiger on your downrigger!” It’s a language all its own designed to keep “the others” from knowing where the stripers are hitting. I personally got a hit that had to be “the mother of all Stripers.” It took line and fought, and after ten minutes snapped the line and kept the lure. It’s the one that got away. It will not join the smaller ones that Bruce and Henry Rank caught that will be beer-battered and deep-fried. Yummy!
This weekend is the yard sale kick-off to the summer season. Route 28 will be reduced to a smaller version of the Long Island Expressway, a misnomer at best, as yard-salers hunt for that treasure or bargain. The Tongore Garden Club will have its annual plant sale in front of Dolly Denman’s house. My mom had a bumper sticker that said, “ I brake for garage sales.” It’s a good idea to be especially wary as tourists and locals mingle on Route 28. The tourists consider our main road a super highway while we, who live here, turn off and on as we shop and visit neighbors. Be careful out there!