(News Briefs February 16, 2006)
Stream Activism
Supervisors and mayors from Ulster County communities affected by flooding along the Esopus Creek have organized themselves as the Esopus Creek Coalition of Supervisors (ECCOS) in an attempt to open discussions with New York City and the federal government to implement flood control projects to prevent the deluges that now seem to reach crisis proportions every time there is an inch or two of rain. The cause appears to be overflow from the city’s Ashokan Reservoir, which discharges into the lower Esopus Creek. Class action lawsuits have already been launched against New York City in Delaware and Sullivan counties as a result of flooding conditions there.
The group was organized by Hurley’s Michael Shultis and held its first meeting at his office at the Hurley town hall on Monday, January 30. The fact that all of the officials involved – supervisors Vincent Martello of Marbletown, Berndt Leifield of Olive, Robert Cross of Shandaken, Nick Woerner of Ulster, Greg Helsmoortel of Saugerties, and mayor Bob Yerick of the village of Saugerties - were present on such short notice gives some indication of how they view the situation’s gravity. Mayor James Sottile of the City of Kingston was unable to attend but told Shultis he wants to be included and plans to participate in future meetings, according to the Hurley supervisor.
“I don’t think a lawsuit is the way to go,” said Shultis. “I think we should sit down at the table with them and create a dialogue.”
New York City is currently releasing 540 million gallons of water daily to its Ashokan Reservoir system from the Schoharie Reservoir via the Shandaken portal in order to draw down the water level there and make repairs to the Gilboa Dam that has been deemed unstable.
Heavy rains and snow melt have made it difficult for the city to lower the Schoharie’s level, however, despite the maximum possible discharges through the Shandaken tunnel that takes the water into the Esopus near Phoenicia. It then runs downstream and collects in the Ashokan, which has been atypically full in recent months. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) would normally be drawing down the Ashokan’s western basin at this time of year in anticipation of snow run-off during the next month or two, but that is currently impossible because of the immediate need to stabilize the Gilboa Dam, according to DEP spokesperson Ian Michaels.
The ECCOS supervisors want the city to retrofit the Ashokan to permit drawdowns that will prevent flooding. The group also wants the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers brought in to clean debris from the Esopus that has collected from years of inundations that now regularly cause the stream to back up and spill over its banks.
The DEP is in discussions with SUNY New Paltz to flood a waste channel that runs through the university’s Ashokan Field Campus as a temporary flood control measure. Use of the channel that was built as part of the reservoir system in the early 1900s would involve flooding part of the field campus, but the Esopus must be below flood stage, and heavy rains this year and the Schoharie releases linked to the Gilboa project have kept the Esopus at the top of its banks.
Meanwhile, the state Assembly recently held a public hearing at Schenectady Community College to examine public concerns over dam safety in New York state.
Testimony was provided by representatives of state and local government, environmental organizations, public safety agencies and other interest groups. Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, D-Kingston, specifically asked Ulster County Legislator Michael Berardi, D-Ulster, to testify on behalf of Ulster County residents.
Assemblyman Thomas DiNapoli, chairman of the Environmental Conservation Committee, and Assemblywoman RoAnn Destito, who chairs the Governmental Operations Committee, scheduled the forum to focus on 383 dams (of 5,564 statewide) that are considered “high hazard” dams, whose potential failure could inflict significant loss of life and widespread property damage.
There are five New York City owned reservoirs and dams in New York City’s Catskill/Delaware watershed region. At least one dam, the Gilboa on the Schoharie Reservoir, is now undergoing emergency repairs, and two others, the Neversink and the Merriman, are under scrutiny after it was revealed that inspection reports had been routinely photocopied from week to week.

Infrastructural...
The toddler on her knee, she said while sitting in the Olive Library, could imitate the bridge which crosses the Esopus on Route 28A. How does a child imitate a bridge? By going “boom-boom, boom-boom, boom...” to give her small world impression of the sound of tires hitting the ruts across the structure.
Ms. H, who doesn’t want to be further identified, had arrived at the library with a copy of a letter from Senator Bonacic to NYC DEP Deputy Commissioner Michael Principe, dated February 6, 2006, requesting an update on the condition of the bridges on 28A and Reservoir Road. She held the letter as a slim sign of progress in her campaign to properly assess the safety of the bridges; a campaign which had included gathering about 500 signatures on a petition, last year, which she forwarded to Bonacic and other local representatives.
At the Olive town board meeting in February, a resolution supporting Bonacic’s four Senate bills and four like bills echoed in the Assembly under the sponsorship of Middletown Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther, passed by a 4-0 vote (with councilman Henry Rank absent). Ms. H searched out the wording of the bills on the Senate’s website and, noting that they each seemed responsive to last month’s flap about the falsification of dam inspection reports, wondered why bridge inspections were not included among the items of concern.
One bill addresses the lowering of reservoir levels in anticipation of overflows while a second bill sets the terms for an annual DEC review of the condition of dams in the counties of Delaware, Greene, Orange, Schoharie, Sullivan, and Ulster. The third bill would require a DEC review of DEP maintenance procedures in those same counties and the fourth mandates the provision of the DEP’s dam safety reports to the CEO of the DEC.
Olive’s resolution notes that the inspection reports have been withheld from public review without cause and that “Public officials must be given the information the New York State and New York City Governments possess about the safety of the dams in our region in order to determine if public safety needs are being met.” The resolution terms efforts by public officials or agencies to deny acces to such information “reprehensible.”
Ms. H, who lives downstream from the Ashokan Reservoir in Olivebridge, says that she has purchased lifejackets since learning of the faked inspection reports, including one for the dog, but would like to stress that the legislation should recognize that the structural integrity of the local bridges is also a life-threatening issue.

Flood Release...
The New York City Department of Environmental Protection announced this week that it has reached with State University officials and will start working to reopen a long-dormant runoff channel from its Ashokan Reservoir through the Ashokan Field Campus of SUNY New Paltz, located in the Brown’s Station area of Olive, to help divert up to 600 million gallons of water a day being pumped through the open Shandaken Portal during mandated repairs on the Gilboa Dam in Schoharie County. The idea is to help ease flooding conditions along the Esopus Creek below the Ashokan that resulted in much damage in Ulster, Kingston and Saugerties last April. The channel, last used in 1992, will be operated when the lower Esopus is below flood stage, creating a void in the Ashokan to capture the release from the Schoharie Reservoir and the spring thaw runoff.
Water from the waste channel will flow into the Beaver Kill and the Old Esopus Creek on its way to the Esopus Creek, but it is expected that part of the campus will be flooded.
“Water levels in the Ashokan will remain above normal through the spring, even with the waste channel in use,” DEP commissioner Emily Lloyd said in a press release. “But we need to do all we can so that people on the lower Esopus don’t suffer because of work going on at the Gilboa Dam.”
SUNY New Paltz environmental classes usually held at the Olive campus have been moved to a Christian camp located in Ulster Park for the semester and NYC has agreed to pay SUNY for moving expenses and lost revenues, and including possible property damage to the campus, which has been slated for closure and possible sale in recent months.
Ian Michaels, spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection, said some work is needed before the waste channel can reactivated.
“The problem that we have now is that it’s a stream bed where there have been trees, there has been growth. Those things have to be removed,” he said, adding that repairs on the Gilboa Dam started in December are now scheduled for completion by July, with “non-critical stabilization work” continuing through November.

Introducing Elk?
Supporters of a plan to reintroduce elk to the Catskills, and eventually other parts of the state, say now is the time to do it and have stepped up lobbying efforts in Albany this year. Chronic wasting disease, which has decimated deer in the Midwest, appears not to be taking hold in New York, they note. And reintroducing these animals to New York, they add, would expand the state’s biological diversity and eventually provide a new venue for big game hunters. The state, they say, could bring these animals back — if it is willing to spend the time and money.
Opponents, including farmers and anti-hunting groups, though, say not so fast. The former fear elk would devour crops. Animal rights groups say elk pose a road hazard that makes colliding with deer look like hitting a pothole by comparison. And more people are worrying that the central Catskills is becoming too gentrified for such hunting purposes.
Furthermore, state officials aren’t convinced the danger from chronic wasting disease has passed.
Either way, there is at least one bill that would allow elk to be reintroduced, offered by Assemblywoman Francine DelMonte, D-Niagara Falls, and Sen. Dale Volker, R-Depew. Previously, Assemblyman Dan Hooker, R-Catskill, offered similar legislation.
Elk were wiped out in New York by the mid-19th century, when they were hunted for their meat, hide and teeth.
The bill might not become law this session, but proponents say they are working to shepherd such a bill through the process during the next few years.
“We’re gearing back up to talk about a restoration of elk in the state,” said Wally John, a retired counsel for the Assembly, based in West Shokan, who is leading the charge to bring back elk and is working with a national group, the Montana-based Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and, with researchers from Cornell University, which has studied the feasibility of bringing these animals back to selected areas. He said he envisions bringing in 100 of the animals and setting them loose in the high peaks of the Catskills, which biologists say has the best combination of isolated mountain terrain, grass and forest cover for the elusive animals.
Other potential habitat could be found in the Southern Tier near Pennsylvania, and in the western Adirondacks.
“Hitting a 150-pound deer does considerable damage. Can you imagine hitting an 800-pound object? It’s much worse,” said New Paltz-based Peter Muller, vice president of the Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting.
There are already several elk farms in the Catskills as well as private hunting preserves where people can pay up to $8,000 to hunt the animals.

Cartoon Hell
As leaders of the world’s 57 Muslim nations gathered for a summit meeting in Mecca in December, issues like religious extremism dominated the official agenda. But much of the talk in the hallways was of a wholly different issue: Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad. The summit’s closing communiqué took note of the issue when it expressed “concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemned the recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Muhammad in the media of certain countries” as well as over “using the freedom of expression as a pretext to defame religions.”
The meeting in Mecca, a Saudi city from which non-Muslims are barred, drew minimal international press coverage even though such leaders as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran were in attendance. But on the road from quiet outrage in a small Muslim community in northern Europe to a set of international brush fires, the summit meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference — and the role its member governments played in the outrage — has turned out to be something of a turning point.
After that meeting, anger at the Danish caricatures, especially at an official government level, became more public. In some countries, like Syria and Iran, that meant heavy press coverage in official news media and virtual government approval of demonstrations that ended with Danish embassies in flames.
In recent days, some governments in Muslim countries have tried to calm the rage, worried by the increasing level of violence and deaths in some cases, even though the protests allowed governments to outflank a growing challenge from Islamic opposition movements by defending Islam.

Bad Cash Flow
On February 16, the Ulster County Legislature will hold a special meeting where they will seek to identify specific reasons why the county’s projected cash flow has significantly diminished. The meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. at the Ulster County Office Building on Fair Street.
Ulster County could see a $1.31 million deficit in its year-end cash balance without a reduction in spending or an increase in revenue this year, the county’s Deputy Treasurer Michael Hein has said, noting that the county’s $6.88 million cash balance at the beginning of January could shrink by $8.19 million, leaving a deficit, if no budget changes are made. He added that the deficit could increase daily if the new county Law Enforcement Center is not opened by April, the target date set by budget planners that was tossed in recent weeks, with six months mnore now being predicted befor the white elephant is completed.
Hein said measures taken last year to reduce the deficit, such as a hiring freeze and committee review of unplanned purchases of more than $500 or more, are already in place and will not affect current budget forecasts. He added that the deficit will far exceed state recommendations that the county have a fund balance of between $12 million and $20 million as part of its $293.11 million budget. The fund balance is now projected to decline for the third consecutive year.

Medisaster?
Confusion over the new federal Medicare Part D program that took effect in January, and requires most people to sign up by May 15, have left people confused throughout the county, according to Ulster County Office for the Aging director Kathryn Puglisi, who has dubbed the new federal program “the dreaded Medicare Part D” plan.
Blanche Duffy, the office’s Health Insurance Information Counseling Assistance Program coordinator, said some people are saying the “D” stands for “disaster,” adding that many seniors haqve come in for help with its complexities in tears.
At local pharmacies, including Phoenicia and Nekos, meanwhile, business owners have worked hard to keep their customers covered while the federal plan’s details get worked out.
The biggest problem, everyone is saying, is the number of plans that consumers must choose from - 47 in Ulster County alone - and the fact that not all plans provide prescription coverage for all medications.

Spy Vs. Spy
The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity. The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is the federal government’s latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens’ privacy.
“We don’t realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we’re leaving traces everywhere,” says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven’t thought about. It’s one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with.”
The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old “Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment” portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.
DHS officials are circumspect when talking about ADVISE. “I’ve heard of it,” says Peter Sand, director of privacy technology. “I don’t know the actual status right now. But if it’s a system that’s been discussed, then it’s something we’re involved in at some level.”
Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data-mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed that the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness, a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the TIA program a year later.
Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush’s eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.
The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly — who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.
The two heads of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were the only judges in the country briefed by the administration on Bush’s program. The president’s secret order, issued sometime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, allows the National Security Agency to monitor telephone calls and e-mails between people in the United States and contacts overseas.
James A. Baker, the counsel for intelligence policy in the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, discovered in 2004 that the government’s failure to share information about its spying program had rendered useless a federal screening system that the judges had insisted upon to shield the court from tainted information. He alerted Kollar-Kotelly, who complained to Justice, prompting a temporary suspension of the NSA spying program, the sources said.
Yet another problem in a 2005 warrant application prompted Kollar-Kotelly to issue a stern order to government lawyers to create a better firewall or face more difficulty obtaining warrants.
The two judges’ discomfort with the NSA spying program was previously known. But this new account reveals the depth of their doubts about its legality and their behind-the-scenes efforts to protect the court from what they considered potentially tainted evidence. The new accounts also show the degree to which Baker, a top intelligence expert at Justice, shared their reservations and aided the judges.
Both judges expressed concern to senior officials that the president’s program, if ever made public and challenged in court, ran a significant risk of being declared unconstitutional, according to sources familiar with their actions. Yet the judges believed they did not have the authority to rule on the president’s power to order the eavesdropping, government sources said, and focused instead on protecting the integrity of the FISA process.

Voting Info
As New York rushes to comply with the Help America Vote Act under a threatened US Justice Department lawsuit, many voters continue to raise concerns. On Sunday, Feb 26, four civic organizations will cosponsor an educational, non-partisan public meeting to hear from voters about proposed changes to NY’s election system and replacement of mechanical lever voting machines.
The free meeting will be held at 2 PM in the Common Council Chamber of historic Kingston City Hall, 420 Broadway, between W. O’Reilly and Foxhall Ave. An expert panel including Rachel Leon, Executive Director of Common Cause New York, and Aimee Allaud of New York State League of Women Voters, will be present to discuss issues and answer voter’s questions.
The nonpartisan educational meeting is cosponsored by Ulster County Democratic Women (UCDW), NY Citizens for Clean Elections (NYCCE), the American Association of University Women Kingston Branch (AAUW), and the Mid-Hudson Region of the NY League of Women Voters (LWV).

It Girls?!?
Local journalist and young adult author Dakota Lane’s work-in-progress, The Secret Life of It Girls, due out next spring from Simon and Schuster, deals not with starlets but with ordinary adolescents whose attractiveness, style, and social savvy have landed them in popular cliques. Lane has begun interviewing teens and finds them eager to talk about the details of their lives—”what nastiness and gossip goes on, the power element, what does it take to make a popular girl, how does she maintain her social status, and at what cost?” She describes her book as “Studs Terkel meets MTV”, a compilation of real-life interviews with only names and details changed to protect anonymity, along with photos of teens that capture both the vibrancy and poignancy of life as an It girl.
Lane is seeking girls—and some boys as well—between the ages of thirteen and eighteen to be interviewed and/or participate in a photo shoot at Onteora High School on February 17 and 18, with later sessions planned for March.
Teens—both girls and boys—between the ages of 13 and 18 are invited to submit applications to be interviewed and/or to participate in a photo shoot at Onteora High School on February 17 and 18, for the purpose of taking pictures of kids in typical school settings. Only 25 teens will be chosen for this shoot, but later sessions are planned for March. Onteora school district students may pick up applications and releases at the Onteora High School office. Others may apply by emailing Dakota Lane at itgirlcasting@hotmail.com. Applications must be filled out and releases signed by a parent and returned to the high school with a snapshot by email, with name and phone number.
For interviews, Lane said, “I’m looking for anyone who has a good story and wants to talk about the experience of being a teen.”

Yeah… The Jail!
The new Ulster County Law Enforcement Center will likely cost another $1 million or more and the facility isn’t likely to open for another five months, according to a new report that also states that the jail is “98.1 percent” complete. The “$1 million plus” was requested in a Jan. 26 letter from project manager Bovis Lend Lease. The letter added that “about $500,000 to $600,000” is “needed immediately” to satisfy construction contractor expenses.
The jail, which was scheduled to open in April 2004 at a cost of $71.84 million, had its budget amended last year to $84.39 million.
Other questions about expenses included concerns that the cost for about 250 feet of water line to the jail had still not been estimated and an agreement with Kingston city officials for service had not been reached because of installation problems.
Early estimates noted that a full renovation of the current jail would have cost $11,956,990.

Sex Calms…
Forget pretending you are talking to one person or concentrating on a single point in the audience — having sex is good way to calm nerves before giving a speech or presentation. But Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley in Scotland, said it has to be full sexual intercourse to get the best results. He studied nearly 50 men and women who recorded their sexual activities for two weeks and analyzed its impact on their blood pressure levels when under acute stress, such as when giving a speech. Brody discovered that the volunteers who had sexual intercourse were the least stressed and had blood pressure levels that returned to normal more quickly than people who engaged in other types of sex. But people who had abstained from sex had the highest blood pressure response to stress.
He believes that the release of the so-called “pair bonding” hormone oxytocin might explain the calming effect.

Town Actions
Noting that the Town of Olive “will have to live with any mismanagement” of the dam at the Ashokan Reservoir, Olive Supervisor Bert Leifeld introduced a resolution at February’s town board meeting
to “join with other affected towns bordering the Esopus Creek and gain support from Ulster County, the State of New York and the United States Federal Government to hold the New York City DEP responsible for their actions” in the regulation of water flow related to the Ashokan
supply system.
The resolution cites the DEP’s increase of water flow to approximately 590 million gallons a day at the facility, (a factor which, incidentally, would figure strongly in Assemblyman Cahill’s alternative “income-expense method” of valuating reservoir or watershed property as proposed in his A3992 bill before the Assembly), as well as the “severe damage to agricultural, commercial and residential properties” along the Esopus Creek. It resolves that NYC’s DEP “should be held accountable for any damage to the Town’s private and public property as a
result of the flooding of April 2005 and any future mismanagement of the Ashokan Reservoir water levels.”
The “Esopus Creek Resolution” was passed, along with four others, by a 4-0 vote. Other resolutions concerned tax changes for senior citizens and veterans following this year’s reval results, support for bills introduced in the Senate and Assembly concerning the condition and inspection of area dams and a “Homestead Resolution” which seeks to establish the Town of Olive as a Certified Assessing Unit with the New York State Office of Real Property Services.
Although neither Patrick Seely of the town’s Albany law firm, Hacker & Murphy, who recommended the application for CAU status, nor Dorothy Martin of Ulster County’s ORPS office could be reached for elucidation of the advantage in relation to the complex Article 19 provisions of Homestead and Non-Homestead taxation regulations, councilman Bruce LaMonda explained that it involves the town’s ability to distinguish between the tax classifications of primary home-owners and local businesses and second-homers. He added that acquiring the CAU designation did not mean that the town intended to exercise it.
LaMonda also dismissed the rumors that the DEP’s recent closing of Monument Road to pedestrian traffic was related to the recent uproar about fabricated dam inspection reports. He said that the DEP was installing remote surveillance cameras and other sensors in the area and closed the road temporarily as the work progressed for insurance and security reasons.