The Olive Press

New York City opened up the floodgates on its reopened flood channel through the Ashokan Field Campus in Brown’s Station recently. Check it out over the coming weeks...

Reval Impacts Lessen
Town Raises City Assessment To Help Out As Home Values Jump The Highest

3/30/06By Paul Smart
Despite rumors of rampant value hikes and rampaging discontent among Olive taxpayers, the people in charge of carrying out the town’s first revaluation of its tax rolls in decades said they were happy with local responses since impact statements went out in early March, and informal grievance hearings have been held on a regular basis in town offices ever since.

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The Coalition Starts To Split
Hardenburgh Leads Break-Up Of Regional Entity Over Its Large Parcel Decision

3/30/06 By Paul Smart
Long predicted, the first cracks in the once-solidly unified Coalition of Watershed Towns, which brought together 50 Catskills Region towns, villages and county governments to fight proposed New York City watershed regulations in the 1990s, actually split the regional entity in recent weeks with the defection of the Ulster County town of Hardenburgh for being not only over-tithed in membership dues, but underrepresented by Coalition actions of the past year.

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Another Rural Sun Sets
Shadows Start To Fall On The Survival Chances Of Olive’s Remaining Farm...

3/30/06 By Gary Alexander
The bird flu scare couldn’t have come at a better time for advocates of the USDA’s mandatory property and animal surveillance program or at a worse one for the nation’s small farmers and homesteaders who are organizing to oppose it. Described by the Small Farmer’s Journal in their Winter edition as “the most destructive and misguided farm regulation in the entire history of farming,” the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) is seen by small farmers as a drive for complete control of the animal food industry by large corporate farming organizations. Other critics of the legislation, like civil libertarians, see the encroaching shadow of Big Brother in the implications of its regulations.

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Onteora’s strong-willed but humanistically open Superintendent of Schools Justine Winters, who came on board a year and a half ago at a time when the district was closing a school and facing upheaval because of its board’s implimentation of Large Parcel tax re-assessment, announced in late February that she will be retiring her position due to illness as of June 2. Winters has strarted undergoing chemotherapy treatments for the return of colon cancer in recent months. She was hired with a three-year contract in July, 2004. The school board has said that it is working with Ulster BOCES to find both an interim superintendent by summer and to start a longer, six-month-or-so search for a full-time replacement for Winters, who everyone has pegged as a hands-on healing force for the district. She replaced Dr. Hal Rowe, who started in 1994.

A Jar Of Olives...

I Just Saw A Robin...

3/30/06 By Carol LaMonda
I just saw a robin! That harbinger of spring lifted my spirits as it sat in my grayish-brownish soggy lawn searching for half-frozen worms among leftover leaves and fallen twigs. “Enough of winter,” I say.

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