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Follow Up on the
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In a colorfully blunt talk punctuated by images of his project
“hijacked by environmentalists,” stalked by the
City’s “hired assassins,” and opposed by
“environmental Jihadists,” the controversial developer
also lashed out publicly for the first time at the state’s
ongoing review process and by inference, at decisions made
by presiding judge Richard A. Wissler to permit wide public
input into the ongoing review of the project.
“The SEQRA process is broken and needs to be fixed,”
said Gitter, who asserted that his project’s public
review “has be hijacked by professional environmentalists
who make their living by obfuscation, delay, distortion, perversion
of process, and just plain dirty tricks.” That process
stinks,” he said.
Gitter, long regarded as a regional champion of SEQRA, appears
to have reconsidered that position in light of his project’s
increasingly protracted timeline.
Each year since 2001, he has publicly expressed hopes of breaking
ground the following year, though recent statements on the
subject more consistently include the phrase “in my
lifetime.”
Gitter, who’d been invited to speak on the progress
of his plan to build a nearly 1,300 room resort on 1,960 acres
surrounding the state-run Belleayre Mountain Ski Center, now
in its fifth year of review, was charactistically confrontational.
At his last address to the Chamber in 2002, Gitter drew heavy
flak for referring to those who opposed his project as “not
as far along their spiritual paths” as those who support
it. Although steering clear of that subject this time, he
did take aim -in addition to the SEQRA laws - at New York
City’s Department of Environmental Protection, and at
the eleven member groups of the Catskill Preservation Coalition
opposing the project as “interveners” in the SEQRA
process.
Singled out for attack from amongst the environmental community
were CPC lead counsel Marc Gerstman, a former state DEC lead
counsel, NRDC attorney Eric Goldstein, and Catskill Center
for Conservation & Development Director Tom Alworth, whose
presence Gitter noted in the audience.
According to Gitter, these “environmental holy warriors
are smart, organized, and relentless.”
He took particular umbrage that Riverkeeper’s Bobby
Kennedy Jr. once sent a letter to the Kingston Freeman urging
full adjudication of the issues raised at last summer’s
SEQRA Issues Conference. And he seemed similarly irked that
Alworth and Goldstein once met with the editorial board of
the Albany Times Union, a common practice for those seeking
to influence public opinion and one he frequently engages
in.
“That’s not environmental protection,” said
Gitter of the process, “it’s environmental persecution.”
None of the three alleged holy warriors singled out seemed
terribly concerned by Gitter’s comments.
“First of all,” said Alworth, “when someone
calls you a jihadist and makes apologies to any Taliban who
might be present, I mean, frankly, how seriously can one take
that person? To the substance, I think the way Dean portrayed
both the participants and the process was pure hyperbole and
absolutely incorrect. I think it was unfortunate he said many
of the things he said. It was a pretty unbelievable rant.”
Regarding the City’s role in the project’s review,
Gitter, who has long sought to portray the proposed resort
as a test case of the viability of the 1997 MOA with the watershed
towns, repeated his frequent assertions that its regulators
have sought not only to obstruct his project, but to suppress
all economic development in the watershed and reduce the population
in the Catskills. He also accused the NRDC and other “fundamentalist
organizations” of pressuring the city into that position,
saying “they are virtually guaranteeing that the MOA
would, in time, be dead as a smelt.”
Responding to Gitter’s “hired assassin”
comment, Craig Seymour of RKG Associates, the city’s
prime consultant on the project, said that “We were
hired to provide technical advice on the adequacy & correctness
of the applicant’s information, not to kill anything.
While we agreed with some of the analysis provided, we also
found their consultants sometimes didn’t provide the
depth of analysis that was needed. If anything, that’s
what’s slowed the process down.”
Gitter’s comments on his project’s obstacles may
reflect concern with the changing political environment in
which its review is proceeding. Governor Pataki, who in the
past has interceded for the developer, may or may not be willing
to risk further political capital on the project. Ulster County’s
legislature, long supportive of Gitter under Ward Todd and
Richard Gerentine’s leadership, has recently taken a
more circumspect view, and continued GOP leadership there
appears less than entirely probable. Finally, future control
of Shandaken’s town board under supervisor Bob Cross,
Jr. and his pro-Gitter majority seems hard to predict. Leadership
changes at any of those governmental levels could precipitate
an end to, or a significant downscaling of the project.
“We are not going away,” Gitter concluded. “This
project will not succumb. This project will be approved and
we will build it.”
Decisions from Judge Wissler as to which issues will go forward
into the next, adjudicatory hearings phase of the project’s
review are expected in the coming months.
According to District Superintendent Justine Winters, the
decision to set and release such a schedule before this year’s
closing is part-and-parcel with recent decisions to do everything
possible to increase communication regarding all district
matters, the better to avoid a repeat of last year’s
vote against the board’s proposed budget.
Onteora is currently operating under a restrictive contingency
budget based on 2003-2004 figures.
“We started meeting this week with all our faculty members
at the various schools,” Winters said on Monday, December
12. “We want to involve everyone in this process as
best we can.”
She noted how a number of recent meetings addressing issues
raised by the public at meetings, including Special Education,
the INDIE Program, and sports, have not been attended by those
who originally raised such issues. Winters added that she’s
hoping better scheduling, and communication of such scheduling,
may overcome such instances in the future.
According to the just-released Budget Presentation Calendar,
Transportation and Cafeteria departments will give a presentation
on their budget needs at a January 11 meeting at the Bennett
School. Technology and Capital Projects, including long-term
debt, will be the subject of a January 25 meeting at the Phoenicia
School.
On February 1, Athletics and Extra-Curricular school activities,
as well as budget requests from the district’s Building
and Grounds Department, will be the focus of the district’s
regular meeting at the Middle-Senior High School. Instruction
will then be the focus of a February 15 meeting at the Woodstock
School, with Pupil Personnel Services and BOCES presented
at a March 8 meeting at the Middle-Senior High School.
The Superintendent’s Budget recommendations for the
2004-2005 school year will be presented at the district’s
regular meeting, again at the Middle Senior High School, on
March 15, along with an Open Public Discussion of those recommendations.
Further discussion of the Superintendent’s recommendations
will be the focus of a meeting scheduled, again for the Middle-Senior
High School, on April 19… when the Board of Education
is also scheduled to adopt its own budget proposal for the
coming year.
Further discussion of the budget will come up, according to
the new calendar, on Wednesday, April 27, as well as on May
3, both meetings set for the Middle-Senior High School.
The district-wide budget vote and election of new trustees
is set to take place in all three of the Onteora District’s
elementary schools from 2 to 9 p.m. on Tuesday, May 17, with
a special meeting to accept votes cast set for 9:30 p.m. at
the Middle-Senior High School.
Unless noted, all meetings take place on Tuesdays and start
at 7 p.m.
The next meeting of the district’s new Communications
Committee, initiated to help avoid a budget defeat next Spring,
has been scheduled for Tuesday, January 4, 2005, at 7:00 p.m.
in the MS/HS Cafeteria.
At the same time, Tom Rosato announced on December 8 that
he was resigning from the Onteora school board in order to
care for his ailing parents. The board asks any member of
the public interested in taking his place for the rest of
the school year to submit a letter of intent and, possibly,
a resume by January 10.
The candidate chosen will serve until the end of June and
may run to fill out the remaining two years of Rosato’s
term at the school board election in May. Three other seats
will be up for election in May — those held by board
president Marino D’Orazio, Neil Eisenberg, and Kathy
Hochman.
“It’s going to be very interesting,” D’Orazio
commented. “When four seats are up on a seven-member
board, there’s a chance the whole makeup of the board
could change.”
This year’s defeat of long-time board member Meg Carey
and the rejection of two budget proposals were attributed
to widespread dissatisfaction with the board’s decisions
to close the West Hurley Elementary School and to invoke the
large parcel legislation, which raised the taxes of Olive
residents by fifty percent or more.
Rosato served for four years on the school board and was reelected
this May. He served a partial term several years ago, resigning
in protest over the controversial Indian mascot issue. Employed
as supervisor of buildings and grounds at Ulster County BOCES,
he made use of his professional experience to form and chair
a Facilities Committee that oversees the maintenance of Onteora’s
infrastructure, as well as any construction projects the district
undertakes. He has also been a part of the recently created
committee on the future of the district.
D’Orazio acknowledged that Rosato’s resignation
comes at a difficult time. “We have a lot of very big
issues that are going to be happening again this year, like
the large parcel bill. I hope we don’t get into a situation
where everyone is worried about one issue. There are so many
other things we need to worry about. The Future of the District
Committee is going to be making recommendations to the board
about long-term goals, such as how many elementary schools
we should have. There’s a feeling we should have a separate
and distinct middle school with three grades.”
Rosato said the committee is also considering the district’s
technology needs. “The facilities need a lot of work.
We’re behind the times with technology. We’re
looking at what the community needs and can afford. In the
last four and a half years, I’ve accomplished quite
a bit, and I’m leaving at a time when I would’ve
liked to accomplish more.”
Despite the challenges, D’Orazio expressed optimism
about the future, praising Justine Winters, who took over
as superintendent of schools this summer. “We have a
really good superintendent with a new team, a new assistant
superintendent and a new business administrator, Victoria
Garone, from Webatuck, Justine’s old district. She’s
very good so far and extremely qualified. Everyone seems happy
and excited with the new superintendent. She’s very
positive but not afraid to tell it like it is. The board doesn’t
run the district on a day-to-day basis. That’s the superintendent’s
job.”
Any applicant for the seat on the board must be a qualified
voter of the Onteora school district and a full-time, continuous
resident of the district for the past year. The deadline for
application is January 10, 2005. Send a letter of intent and,
if possible, a resume to: Jeanne Shultis, District Clerk,
Onteora Central School District, PO Box 300, Boiceville NY
12412 or jshultis@onteora.k12.ny.us
The
County Hit’s In
Legislators
were able to whittle down a 24 percent tax increase in the
tentative budget to about 11 percent by maintaining cuts
to contract agencies and imposing a tax on hotel and motel
rooms (although an increased tax on mortgages was not enacted).
To the chagrin of minority Democrats, though, management
salaries and the so-called ‘flex’ plan for county
managers, which provides enhanced benefits not available
to rank and file workers, including a year-end payout that
could amount to $2,500, if left alone. Democrats claimed
that elimination of the payout alone could have saved $300,000.
And for the town of Olive, the combined budget hikes and
recent instating of “large parcel” legislation
by the legislature will mean an average 91 percent tax hike
for the coming year.
“We didn’t cut any jobs in this budget,”
said county legislative chairman Richard Gerentine, in casting
his positive vote at the tail end of the marathon meeting.
He praised the work of the county administrator’s
office during the two-month budget deliberations, noting
that originally county administrator Art Smith had faced
spending requests that would have raised property taxes
by 40 percent, a figure Smith had reduced before legislators
began working earnestly on the spending plan in late October.
“The process was very tough, very trying but I think
we made great progress going from 40 percent down to 24
percent and now less than 12 percent,” added Gerentine.
He said the legislature had tried to maintain as many services
as possible and had removed the home heating energy tax,
which amounted to about half a million dollars, a figure
roughly equivalent to one cent per dollar of the county
property tax.
Democrats saw it differently. “I am definitely not
supporting this, because we have not done a good job of
going back and looking at the fundamentals of this budget,”
said legislator Peter Kraft. “I think it’s important
we get a grip on the fact that our budget problems are long-term.
Rather than address the problem, we are using short-term
fixes.”
Two Democrats, Jeanette Provenzano of Kingston and Joan
Feldmann of Saugerties, joined with all 17 Republicans to
create the final 19-14 margin in favor of the plan.
The meeting featured about 90 minutes of public comment,
with several speakers protesting the $7,500 in taxpayer
money going to the Federated Sportsmen program to enhance
pheasant hunting by raising and releasing birds to be shot
by hunters. That money ultimately remained in the budget.
Other speakers criticized legislators for raising taxes
or urged full funding for cooperative extension programs.
No speaker praised the legislature.
Earlier in the process, Democratic legislators had offered
an array of spending cuts, including a generously publicized
across-the-board cut of 3.5 percent in each department,
starting with freezing management salaries at 2004 levels
and to be achieved by not filling vacancies. The minority
members said that would have reduced the tax-levy increase
nearly to zero. Department managers filed spending plans
based on a 3.5 percent cut without sacrificing management
raises in the cuts.
Still, Democrats charge that budget fat remains in numerous
patronage positions as well as buried in budget lines with
labels such as “miscellaneous contractual expenses.”
They particularly targeted the flex plan, which pays not
only medical expenses for managers, but can also reimburse
such costs as divorce proceedings, traffic tickets and expenses
related to filing personal bankruptcy claims, plus year-end
bonuses ranging up to $2,500. But Republicans refused to
consider any changes to the flex plan.
Mike Stock of Woodstock, the Republican majority leader,
said that the legislators should not consider changes in
the flex plan during budget deliberations. He said he pledged
to look at the flex plan at the beginning of the year, not
at budget time. “The point is we came in with a package
that we think could pass the budget,” he said.
Stock said that Republicans opted to impose a hotel-motel
tax instead of the mortgage-tax hike that Gerentine had
initially endorsed, because Stock said, it was easier to
calculate the financial outcome of a tax on lodging, and
because he believed that the long boom in refinancing mortgages
would end with rising interest rates. He said it was easier
and more lucrative to tax lodging than tax mortgages. He
said officials estimated that a hotel-motel room tax would
garner about $2.4 million in 2005.
That figure may face scrutiny. Though the legislature authorized
a two percent tax to begin in January on each hotel room,
it wants to switch to a flat $5-per-room tax beginning in
July. There is some question as to whether state legislative
action would be required for the switch.
Stock received support from Democrat Joan Feldmann, a real-estate
broker who said she could not have supported a tax on mortgages
because she feared it would financially harm first-time
homebuyers. She said she voted to support the budget because
the tentative budget would be adopted if the vote went against
the proposal put forth on December 13. “However, there’s
no way I can give this county a 24 percent tax increase,
so I vote yes,” said Feldmann.
Provenzano said that Democratic efforts at budget reductions
could have accounted for all the savings necessary to enact
a budget without additional taxes. But if taxes were going
to be enacted, “A hotel-motel tax is the way to go
because that is going to be our future.”
Other Democrats were far more skeptical. “We’re
still miles and miles apart,” said legislator Hector
Rodriguez. “The reality is there still is a lot more
that could have been cut.”
Ways and means committee chairwoman Sue Cummings said that
Democrats should be willing to unite behind a budget that
was a compromise, saying she herself had agreed to cuts
in programs at contract agencies such as the Ulster County
Development Corporation and Cornell Cooperative Extension.
She said that “it’s not a Republican budget,
it’s not a Democrat’s budget, it’s a vote
for all of us.” Added Cummings, “Part of the
problem from the beginning was [Democratic legislators]
wanted to attack and go after the [county] management.”
But political comments in the heat of the moment are often
forgiven. At the end of the lengthy meeting Donaldson, the
Democratic minority leader, stood up to publicly compliment
Cummings on the skill with which she had chaired recent
contentious meetings of the ways and means committee, a
statement applauded by other Democratic legislators.
Opponents of the spending plan charged that the 2005 adopted
budget was arrived at without addressing many structural
budget concerns, a point tacitly conceded by the Republican
majority leadership, who promised to start work on the 2006
budget as early as January. While only one seat separates
the majority from the minority and all 33 seats of the county
legislature are up for grabs next November, predictions
from both sides of the aisle are that the 2006 fiscal year
looks even more problematic than 2005’s.
Finally
Time For 28A
At least that’s the word from New York City’s
Department of Environmental Protection, which says that
they’re hoping to begin construction on the estimated
$6 million project by October 2005, with an accelerated
construction schedule including weekends and 12-hour workdays.
A tentative finish date has been set for January 2007.
The road will remain open to traffic throughout the construction
period.
According to Charlie Schaller, Chairman of Ulster County’s
Traffic Safety Board, the project’s moving “fairly
quickly,” with its time frame considerably shortened
from the 10 years or so such a project would typically take.
“Considering the normal procedure for a project this
size, the city’s way ahead” says Schaller.
The plan, developed in response to local pressure following
the post 9-11 closure of Monument Road across the reservoir,
calls for a complete rebuild of four-tenths of a mile of
Rt 28A east of Rt 213, eliminating several of the road’s
most historically dangerous curves, and reconstructing the
junction of the two roads as a T-intersection with left-hand
turn lanes and significantly increased lines of sight.
East of the new roadbed, which would basically move 28A
closer to the southern corner of the Ashokan Dam, plans
call for an additional 2.1 miles of road reconstruction,
extending to the intersection of 28 A and the road from
the Dividing Weir Bridge. That intersection is also slated
to be rebuilt as a T-intersection, replacing its current
merged configuration.
Improvements along the existing 28A route, which includes
the section through DEP’s main facilities, include
pavement & shoulder widening, guiderails, tree-line
cutbacks, drainage, signage, and so on. Also included are
plans for the relocation of utility poles, new street and
warning lights at several crosswalks, and the installation
of a series of removable bollards or posts, replacing the
existing barriers on Monument Road. When completed, posted
speed limits will rise to 40 mph, except in the immediate
vicinity of DEP’s building complex.
Design work on the project is 70 percent or more complete,
according to City DEP spokesman Ian Michaels, with the balance
of the design work contingent on the outcome of several
potentially complicating factors related to federal permitting
for the project. Those include a wetlands part of the permitting
process, with the City trying to qualify sites in question
under national wetlands permit designation.
Another variable in the process is the recent discovery
of several bald eagle nests, about 700 feet from a section
of the existing road. Under federal law, protection from
disturbance for such sites extends to a distance of 750
feet and moving the road 50 feet might end up being the
easiest solution. Discussions are pending.
Olive town officials appear OK with the plan, but privately
suggest their inclusion is a formality. The city, emphasizing
aspects of its plans including an accelerated bid-award
process and construction schedule, says the funding for
planned renovations is available and everything they’re
doing is fast-tracked.
“From a traffic safety standpoint” said Schaller,
DEP’s “been very cooperative addressing all
the things we’ve brought up,” and the city,
state DOT, county & town are “all on the same
page.”
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