After The Storm...
After years of people telling everyone else to “let the process reach its end,” the process of review that’s been holding up Dean Gitter’s Belleayre Resort proposal – for good and bad – passed through a major gate last week when Governor Eliot Spitzer came to the county to announce a deal. The resort made up of two hotels, a golf course, and a couple hundred private homes, some of them slopeside, will no longer touch on the Ashokan reservoir’s watershed. It’s not really going to be smaller, but it will be more concise.
With a majority of the major environmental groups that had been fighting the project in recent years now signed on to the new plans, it seems Gitter’s all but good to go on his long-touted project. We wish him well.
Sure, many of our readers and strongest proponents over the years are saddened by this display of power politics. And yes, the fighting will continue as the most local of the environmental groups that had been fighting Gitter over all these years still refuse to sign on to the present deal.
But they will again have their day in the process, which DOES continue, conceptual approvals or not, when the resort developers come back to the state, and eventually the towns of Shandaken and Middletown, with a whole new knee-high stack of environmental impact statement mitigation proposals in the coming months. Yes, the resort issue will again dominate local news as it re-enters the Scoping Process by which its new parameters, and inherent strengths and weaknesses, get examined. There will be new public hearings that will likely draw crowds again. There will surely be many more letters to the local papers for and against everything coming into view.
But that’s for the future. For now, we should give honor where it’s due… To Mr. Gitter and his crew for having agreed to embrace alternatives they once said they’d never take seriously. That was big of them. Similarly, to all the environmental organizations, including the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, and New York City for having signed on to the new compromise realizing that, despite any misgivings they might still hold, what was now before them signified a clearer future than what had been earlier proposed. And also to those who will continue fighting, watchdogging the process from here on as so many more of us thank the heavens to be able to shift our attentions to other issues for the first time in years.
Those “other issues” are many, and need our attention… from the saving of smaller businesses in our local communities, in trouble of failure due to the difficulties faced by all of us making a go of things in these mountains, to the need for our oft-warring communities to start working hard to get together.
We need to look at our Route 28 corridor, including ways of making the roadway itself safer. We need to reconsider other means of transportation into and out of the region, as seems to be currently getting some long-needed discussion, and possible funding, via the county’s new transportation planning process. We need to figure out what to do with our massive, increasingly unwieldy school district so it is again a regional pride that consolidates and meets our eduicational needs above expectation. We need to bring the Coalition of Watershed Towns, the Catskill Watershed Corporation, the Catskill Center and other regional entities back to a common ground. We need to work together so one town doesn’t get hurt by others in the race to lower taxes, as happened to Olive as a result of the misguided Large Parcel legislation.
With Gitter’s Resort not dominating so much of our regional discussion, at least for the time being, we have a chance to look at new issues tied to our day-to-day lives. New priorities.
Like the effects of climate change that appear to counter the state’s new promise of development at Belleayre. Or the shifts in the City’s attitude towards its reservoirs’ liabilities... which makes in-town travel ever harder.
We need to look at all of our present situations as much as our hoped-for futures. We need to get back to what is, and not just what should be. Or not have been.

PS