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Follow Up on the News

Onteora IS Olive

The Large parcel issue would come up for a vote in August should the county Office of Real Property Services issue a determination later this month, as it has in the last two years, that such an entity exists within the Onteora District. The “trigger mechanism” for the large parcel bill, set by statute, is based on “a rule of fives”: the property has to be worth more than $5 million; has to account for 5% of the town’s assessed value; must be five per cent of the school district’s value; and also has to create more than a 5% difference in value of the town’s equalization rate and the apportionment rate.
In June, Patterson went on the record to say that he would side with the three new board members to not pass “Large Parcel” a second year should it arrive, claiming it was not the board’s responsibility to be determining tax assessment matters. His comments led to later colorful comments by Woodstock town supervisor Jeremy Wilber about Patterson that were referenced by several speakers at the Reorg mweeting Wednesday, along with Wilber comments in a recent Woodstock Times about Olive resident Charlie Blumstein, who has filed a civil suit over the legislation that names the school district, as well as state and county legislatures and municipalities of Shandaken and Woodstock.
Departing board president Marino D’Orazio pleaded with Blumstein, who was tape recording parts of the meeting, to drop his lawsuit, given that the district does not have insurance to cover such legal maneuvers, meaning it will cost taxpayers money, and because he said such a suit, if filed by a bonafide attorney, “would likely lead to that lawyer being sanctioned.” Earlier, D’Orazio, along with fellow board veterans Herb Rosenfeld and Lev Flournoy voted against Patterson and Vanacore’s appointments, saying the two lacked the experience, knowledge and objectivity for such positions. They later said they would nevertheless support the new board leadership full-heartedly.
During Public Be Heard, Simon Ennis noted how the Large Parcel issue was creating a “Civil War” between local towns. Robert Tischler spoke about not only the flaws uncovered in the legislative bill, but also its contradictions of provisions in the 1905 laws that created the Ashokan reservoir in the first place. John Tisch congratulated the new board as being the recipients of “two years getting justice”, and defended Blumstein’s suit as an “act of frustration” in keeping with the entire town of Olive’s similar feelings. Judy and Andrew Boggess talked of “special interest groups” behind the legislation and a need for the whole community to further research and explore how it came about.
Councilwoman Linda Burkhardt talked about the town’s hardships having to live with a reservoir in its midst, and how “where the money comes from,” meaning the school district’s taxes, being “no one’s business but Olive’s.”
Henny Wise spoke about the Large Parcel’s divisiveness… as well as erroneous editing of an Olive Press story in the Woodstock Times, a situation later explained to her in terms of rushed deadlines, poor communications, and other excuses.
“This is all politics, not education,” she said, echoing the quiet consensus at the meeting that it’s time for the school district to move beyond Large Parcel.
In other business, committee appointments, made at the discretion of the board president, were postponed until the board’s August 16 meeting. Similarly, a request to add The Olive Press to the list of official newspapers for the district was tabled until expenses could be looked into.
An interim meeting was set for 7 p.n. on Tuesday, August 2, for the setting of vacancies and hiring of new teachers. According to superintendent Justine Winters, such a meeting was necessitated by the 30-day lead time most teachers union employees need to give notice if leaving one job for another.
The August 2 meeting will be held at the Junior/.Senior High School cafeteria.

Them & Us... Again

But because I used to be one of “them”, I try not to take all this talk too seriously. I have lived in Olive for over three decades. I have paid enough taxes here to retire to the Caribbean. I have voted in favor of the school budget every one of those years, even though I don’t have children. Even now I imagine that locals think of me as one of “them.” But more than anything, I want this town to produce young men and women that we can admire, who will go on to move to other places where they will probably be thought of as “them.” I want to know that they are proud of where they came from, that they think of it as a place where they were celebrated and adored.
I have mentored young writers from the high school because I think that I have something real and concrete to offer them. Invariably, it is I who learn from them. They come from Woodstock or they come from Pine Hill or they come from Olive— but they come full of ideas, and attitude, and an eagerness that makes me so hopeful. Sometimes they are pierced and tattooed, sometimes they wear clothing that looks like it has just gone through a shredder. Sometimes they are naive and sometimes they are jaded. But they are ours, every one of them, and if we start weeding out who we would choose to have as our neighbors, then we have nothing to teach, nothing to share. Because this intolerance of people who might have more money than we do, who might not have ever met the great farmer Al Fox, who don’t understand that our entire fire department is volunteer is too easily passed on to tender minds. They know, they pick up on the unsaid, and then we have done the worst disservice, by not helping them dream.
When people ask me what I love about living here, my list is almost endless— the mountains, the streams, The Boiceville Inn, Rosie and The Olive Free Library, the friends I’ve made that I would never, ever have gotten to meet if I stayed in New York City. Although there were more people in the apartment complex I grew up in than there are in all of Olive, I would walk past them every day and not know who they were, who their families were, what they did for a living. I would never be a witness at their weddings or a reader at their funerals. I would not even meet their eyes, because even in our proximity, we were all “them”. In Olive, you know all these things and more. We are a community, and we will only stay that way if we are a little more inclusive.
At the Bennet School Graduation last month, white kids and black kids and Mexican kids and Indian kids and Chinese kids mingled with each other without a thought. Rich kids and poor kids high-fived each other without a care. They were all getting ready to go into the “big” school, and their joy was mixed with their anxiety, and the whole of it was contagious. As I sat there, I started to cry from happiness. When had this happened, I wondered? When had our town become such a beautiful rainbow of people?
Ah, I thought, it’s “them.” Welcome, I say.

Large Parcel Logic

"We can confirm that we are auditing the Ulster County law enforcement center capital project," said Jennifer Freeman, a spokeswoman for comptroller Alan Hevesi's office. "The audit started in late June. As you may recall, last August we made a determination not to audit at that time. However, we have been monitoring the situation, and determined an audit was appropriate at this time."
The project, originally scheduled for completion in April 2004 at a cost of about $70 million, not including interest payments, is supposed to be turned over to the county for final preparations and movement of inmates on or about September 21 at a cost of about $90 million. Critics have expressed doubt that latest target date will be met. Principal and interest amounts on long-term bonds will drive the total cost to taxpayers up to around $140 million by the time the project is paid for somewhere after the year 2030.
Legal entanglements among the prime contractors, construction manager Bovis Lend Lease, and the county are swirling around the project. The county has hired special counsel as well as expanding the contract of Hill International, which did the project labor agreement and is now helping the county parcel out responsibility for the cost overruns and delays.
Freeman said the comptroller's work would be "an in-depth process that typically takes a number of months or longer." She said the on-site auditors working on the sixth floor of the county office building are reviewing records and conducting interviews. They will make a preliminary written report of their findings to the comptroller. At some point, the county will be given 30 days to respond to points raised by the comptroller's auditors.
By policy, the comptroller's office does not discuss ongoing audits in any detail. "We certainly encourage if people want to provide us with information," Freeman added. "We always welcome information from the public if we're doing an audit."
"We welcome them with open arms," county legislature chairman Richard Gerentine said. "They are not doing an investigation. They are just doing an assessment, quote unquote assessment, according to one of their people who met with us."
Gerentine said he was not certain why Hevesi's office arrived at this time. "Basically, we had meetings in the past and they said they would review it in a year," he said, "and they are back now doing their review. I welcome them to see if they can do anything to help Ulster County taxpayers, if they find anything."
Two representatives of the comptroller's office met with a bevy of county officials last Thursday. Attending were Gerentine, county attorney Frank Murray, the county special counsel on the jail project Mark Sweeney, county building and grounds superintendent Harvey Sleight, county jail construction supervisor Brian Cunningham, county treasurer Lew Kirschner and deputy treasurer Mike Hein. Also present was county legislator Peter Kraft, a Democrat who has been critical of the project and is a member of the special jail oversight committee.
"Right now, they are calling it a risk assessment," said Kraft. He said that at the June 23 meeting the comptroller's officials "just laid out why they were there, what they were going to do." Said Kraft, "They were just asking questions, getting a feel for how the whole process went. We do know they are going to be here eight hours a day for the next three weeks, stationed in the sixth floor of the county office building, going through all the files."
Kraft said critics of the project plan to hold meetings with the auditing team as soon as possible "and lay out our case why they should be here."
The comptroller's people toured the construction site for the jail on Monday and were "very impressed," said Gerentine. "They said they think Ulster County is doing a lot of positive things" with the project.


 

Bringing It Together...

“Most of my family is invested in Onteora,” Vanacore says as one of her sons notes that there are Vanacores who’ve graduated from the school system in each of the last five generations. Rita adds she’s got family in almost every grade right now.
“It’s been great living in a place where we know so many people,” she adds. “I get information brought to me from all levels. It’s a good thing.”
The new OCS VP, who took the position, even though new to the board, when the three veterans on it said they didn’t want the role, came to the area from Stamford, CT at the age of 15, when her father took a job with Rotron and moved into one of the first new houses built off Maverick Road in Woodstock. She remembers the shock of shifting from a huge suburban school to Onteora High vividly… along with the disappointment she felt when her father, with old-school Italian beliefs, refused to let her go on to college.
Vanacore said that given her choice, she would have studied to be a doctor.
Instead, she married her husband, Dominick, just out of school and studied to become a hairdresser, eventually rising in the cosmetology field to become a teacher herself. She started her own business, Dreamweavers, still running strong in Uptown Kingston after several moves. She bought and renovated one of the cornerstone buildings of Wall Street. Raised her three kids. Grew involved in a wide range of organizational matters, both volunteer and business-oriented.
She even became an EMT, pulling on that original wish to enter the field of medicine.
Sure, there’s a whole book Rita Vanacore could write about the changes she’s witnessed in women’s hair styles over the years… a truly insightful and fun story on its own merits. Just as she has much to say about real family values, via her experience of extended family living, so rare these days.
But what’s got her focus is the school district, and the community impetus that got her to her new position.
“I’d been wanting to run for years,” she says of that process, thwarted for years by the busy-ness of her family and business lives.
What changed Vanacore’s circumstances had everything to do with the tax debacle caused by the school district’s implementation of the state’s controversial new Large Parcel legislation, which saw her meeting with other townspeople throughout Olive to research what had happened. Eventually, that group became Olive Matters. And Olive Matters’ meetings, and influence, started growing by leaps and bounds.
“I realized I both had the time AND the passion to run for the board,” she says of the decision she made last winter to seek a seat.
It’s an issue she’s still passionate about, ready to talk at length of at a moment’s notice. But she also realizes her focus will have to change, now that the OCS Board has the majority to keep the legislation from being enacted again.
“The thing I learned,” she says of her successful candidacy for the school board, “Is that the more noise you make, the more you get noticed.”
So what is she planning to focus on as not only a new school board member, but one of that board’s top officials?
“Policy,” is the first word out of her mouth. Vanacore speaks about looking back over current policies and finding ways of better enforcing them. Such as dress codes. Conduct codes for school athletes.
“We’re training students to be accepted in society and the business world,” she says, bolstering her point.
She also wants to continue working to better the district’s communications. She feels that if the district wants a long-term goal of building a new middle school, it has lots of work to do, and steps to do that work within. Like hearing from hired consultants, first, about how best to use existing facilities.
And then there’s the current board’s dynamics… which she’ll only say she “hopes” will not be personal, but focus instead on what is best for students and the Onteora community.
“I’m learninga ton.. going to conferences, meeting with all our principals,” Rita says of her hard work filling her new shoes.
She added that she’s gotten great help along the way from friends, family and community members, as well as old board members from her uncle Joe to former OCS VP Joe Doan. Now she’s wanting to reach out to other VPs, such as fellow Ovilian Kathy Hochman.
“I’m completely passionate about it all,” she says, grand kids running in and out of the kitchen as her own kids listen in. “I love puttinmg the pieces together, pulling on all my organizational skills.”
So is this it for political ambitions? “You don’t know how many times I’ve been asked about the county legislature,” she replies. “But our current reps are just fine.”