Follow Up on the News

Charlie Does It!

Blumstein’s twenty-five page filing claims the law was illegally advanced in
the state assembly and senate with misleading and erroneous guidelines prior to its passage.
“The question is ‘Do we live under rule of law?’” Blumstein said Tuesday.
“There are twenty three causes of action (in the suit). Most of them have to do with prior notice, equal protection under the law, lack of due diligence, and so on. Basically, it appears to us that there was a concerted effort to deny us all of those constitutional rights.”
Blumstein is seeking a full refund of taxes under the law plus interest and a damage award of $25,000 per tax payer in the town. His suit names as defendants Governor Pataki, the New York State Senate and Assembly, the New York State and Ulster County Office of Real Property Services, the Ulster County legislature and assembly and the towns of Woodstock and Shandaken.
The total amount for damages adds up to roughly $114 million total.
“We have to prove that our constitutional rights were violated,” Blumstein said. “We have witnesses and documentation and lots of it.”
“The alleged fraudulent and unlawful actions of the defendants has resulted in substantial and potentially catastrophic economic, social, cultural, and psychological damages to our citizens in the town of Olive,” said Blumstein, known as much for his community oven and garden as his activism on the part of the town, in the suit.
The suit also asks that the large parcel law be repealed.
The law, adopted in 2003, allows school districts and counties to tax “large parcels” - in Olive’s case, the New York City-owned Ashokan Reservoir property - separately from the towns where they are located, and to apply a special equalization rate which supporters of the law have said is intended to ensure all towns in the school district or county are being taxed equitably.
“It’s the antithesis of democracy, the way they did this, and that’s the real damage in this case,” Blumstein told the press in his first interviews about the suit after filing it just before the independence day weekend..
“All I can say is some have described litigation as a machine where one goes in like a pig, and comes out like a sausage, and that is my comment on Mr. Blumstein,” Woodstock supervisor Jeremy Wilber told the press after being served the suit.
Onteora District Business Administrator Victoria Garone said the lawsuit has been referred to district counsel for review. “We have no further comment than that, at this point,” Garone told the press when asked about it. “Once counsel has reviewed it, the board may have comments, but I can’t speak for them.”
The Large Parcel legislation has resulted in 60 percent school tax hikes, and higher, plus 90 percent and greater county tax hikes for Olive residents over the past year.
The town came out en masse this past May to elect three candidates to the Onteora School Board who had pledged to repeal the controversial law. With fourth board trustee Dave Patterson of West Hurley having said that he, too, will not vote for its renewal, the law is likely to not be reinstated on a school district basis in the coming year.
Voting on Large Parcel legislation, and whether or not to enact it, only arises if and when the county Office of Real Property Services declares a district has such a parcel, usually in late July. Should it do so this year, county lawmakers will have until the November Legislature election to cast their vote, whose outcome has been pegged to stay the same, given its membership has not changed in the past year.
Deputy County Attorney Mark Frering told local reporters last week that although he hasn’t drafted any response to Blumstein’s suit yet, he will likely move to have it dismissed because “It’s within [the county legislature’s] prerogative to pass resolutions, and not be in fear of passing a resolution that somebody happens to disagree with.”
Legislature Chairman Richard Gerentine said he felt the county went through an “appropriate process” in enacting the law last year.
A Nov. 8 conference on the lawsuit has been set before U.S. Magistrate David R. Homer in Albany.
We’ll be giving you more on this as things progress until then.

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The Reval’s Underway...

“We started on the ground in April,” Beccio said of the reval work, whose data collection, including the creation of sales records for all town properties, is being handled by a team of four. “We’re getting the data needed to create a basis for valuation.”
Beccio spoke at length about the basics of valuation, including the setting of models, or comparables, by which property characteristics can be judged on an objective, “quantitative” basis.
More importantly, he said that he’s run into no major objections to site visits to date, ensuring that everyone gets plenty of advance notice of the reval, and his process, via mass mailings over the last month.
“There’s always a certain number of people who feel put upon, who feel the whole idea is inherently intrusive” Beccio said, “But generally, we’ve had no more grumbling than anywhere else.”
As for the quality of the data being uncovered, Beccio was circumspect, choosing to speak about the process by which his team is seeking information, and the methods he will eventually use to determine what characteristics mean most in local valuations. He said anything else would be “premature.”
Under the town’s contract of “approximately $200,000” with his firm, Beccio said, all data must be submitted for the creation of tax valuations before January 1, 206. Actual tax bills will then go out by the beginning of February, giving people time to prepare any grievances by the time a series of hearings are set up for such matters in May.
Cole Layer and Trumble was hired last summer after Olive approached eight assessment reval companies, of which only three responded, in response to outside pressures to update their assessments as a means of getting out of “Large Parcel” legislation which the state Office of Real Property Services has said was designed by the state legislature to even out tax benefits from large tax parcels shared between overlapping tax jurisdictions. In the case of Olive, the legislation was used by the county and Onteora School District to make up for tax benefits from the New York City-owned Ashokan Reservoir.
Both taxing jurisdictions gave the town an extra year, starting in the summer of 2003, to render moot the need for such legislation by starting a tax reval. The town of Olive, however, waited until last summer to start such a process because they said such efforts would be counterproductive and “useless” according to longstanding supervisor Berndt Leifeld, based on ongoing litigation with New York City over the reservoir’s value.
The town thought it had solved much of the need for the Large Parcel legislation when they managed to raise the city’s valuation from $119 million to $340 million, an amount the state Office of Real Property services accepted, even though Olive claimed the reservoir was worth at least another $60 million. That effort was managed with the help of the town’s Albany-based lawyers, Hacker and Murphy, who also helped with the town’s lobbying efforts to change the original legislation they were facing from the school district and county.
The so –called “trigger mechanism” for the large parcel bill, set by statute, is based on “a rule of fives” according to Hacker & Murphy’s Patrick Seely: 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.
Despite Leifeld’s pleas that the changed city valuation would raise local taxes anyway, both the school district and county enacted the legislation last year, resulting in hefty tax hikes throughout Olive that eventually forced the town’s citizenry to organize, with the “us versus them” help of Leifeld and the town board, to vote in a new school board which has stated its intentions to no longer vote in the legislation should it come up for a revote, announced by ORPS, later this summer.
Original calls to Beccio and Olive assessor Mike Sommers were answered by Leifeld, who characterized the reval work as “moving right along” and said of anyone questioning such action by noting that the town had no plans to “be sending up balloons” announcing their every step.
Beccio said that according to the International Association of Assessing Officers, as well as the same New York State Assessors Association that originally initiated the Large Parcel Legislation, a move is on to make annual revals mandatory in New York, just as they are in many of our neighboring New England states.
“It makes it much easier for people to understand their assessments,” said Beccio, who added a loud “really” when told that the neighboring town of Shandaken hadn’t had a reval in at least 30 years.
“As one might expect, the State Office of Real Property Services is advocating annual reassessments,’” said NYSAA President J. Todd Wiley in a recent address posted on the association website. NYSAA became known locally for its role in helping to push through the Large Parcel legislation that has done so much to shape local school and municipal politics in recent years.
“It is not realistic to expect that the school property tax can be eliminated. It should be decreased significantly. I believe that people would prefer increased sales taxes and income taxes in return for a large reduction in their school property taxes,” Wiley added. “This association does not have the power to alter school tax funding.”
Spokesperson Joe Hesch of ORPS in Albany said that his agency has long pushed for annual revals as a means of forcing local assessors, who are required to assure all valuation in their towns is current each year, to keep abreast of an increasingly volatile real estate market. The emphasis on annual re-assessments has include a growing number of state incentives, including a $5 per property grant to municipalities who reval annually, as well as a new $7 per property grant for those who share assessment duties between towns, or hand over such matters to county assessment offices. But he added that any move to mandatory revals would require a state legislative change to New York’s Teal Property Tax Law, for which there is currently no move, as far as he can see.
“Ideally, everyone would be at 100 percent assessments so homeowners would know where things stand more easily,” Hesch said.
Before it started its recent reval, Olive was at an equalization rate of under 1 percent while Shandaken is currently at 28 percent of real value. Hurley is currently at 90 percent and Woodstock at 93 percent of real value, due to recent revals on each town’s part.

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Jail Project Audited!

"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.

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Japanese Precision

Over dessert, creamy slices of sweet mango, Rose explained that she grew up in Tokyo with her Japanese mother, an antiques dealer, and her American father, who came from Long Island. At age 14, Rose went to boarding school in California, a former farm set on 2700 acres of land, where the staff and students had constructed most of the buildings. “We chopped our own wood for the wood-burning stoves, our only source of heat. We had to heat water for showers. Any time we wanted to, we could ask for permission to go camping—no tent, we’d just go out with sleeping bags, a frying pan, matches, and food. I was a city girl, but I loved it. I was there for four years.”
Next she studied economics and international relations at the University of California at Davis, followed by a job as road manager for musical groups. Her later career a health professional began to manifest on the road. “I’ve always taken care of people. I love to feed, nurture, and heal. I carried around a pouch with a phone, notebook, pen, and a whole bunch of remedies—homeopathic and herbal—that I’d hand out to people when they weren’t feeling well. Sometimes I’d take people to an acupuncturist.”
She knew she couldn’t travel forever and kept hoping to make a lateral step into TV or film, but it wasn’t happening. After ten years of this life, when a job ended, she suddenly decided to study acupuncture. “My parents and half of my friends thought I had lost my mind, but the other half understood. I asked my acupuncturist to write me a recommendation for school, and he said, ‘Of course! It’s about time.’”
Rose selected the four-year program at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine in New York City, partly because it has a strong herbal component. In addition to the Chinese system of medicine taught there, she learned the Japanese approach from a mentor and teacher in Japan. She uses the finer needles and gentler intervention techniques of the Japanese system, combined with the diagnostic and treatment protocols of the Chinese system.
“I see a lot of people with psychological and emotional problems: anxiety, depression, stress,” she said. “The Japanese techniques work well on an energetic, emotional level. But I treat basically everything. In Chinese medicine, we don’t separate the mind and body. An ailment in one can lead to an ailment in the other. Nowadays, we’re all under so much stress and strain, it’s always important to treat both.” Her brochure lists a range of examples, including addictions, cardiovascular problems, skin disorders, digestive issues, musculoskeletal conditions, gynecological and urogenital ailments, pain, and such needs as chemotherapy support, post-operative recovery, weight loss, insomnia, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis.
While acupuncture treatment can be extremely effective in addressing these problems, she said, “I expect people to do their homework too. They may need to make changes in their lives, such as diet, exercise, and specific habits. If you have a shoulder problem, and you sleep with your arm like this—,” pausing to raise her arm and lay her head on her shoulder before continuing, “you may need to change that. Acupuncture is great for addictions, but it’s not a substitute for will power. Sometimes people just need permission to slow down and take time for themselves.”
Rose came to the Catskills to visit a friend in 1999 and fell in love with the area, eventually buying a house in Woodland Valley. She continues to maintain a practice in Manhattan half the week, while offering services in acupuncture, Chinese herbal treatment, and Chinese orthopedic massage on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday at the Phoenicia Healing Arts Center on Main Street.
Chinese medicine works well in conjunction with Western medicine, she said, often speeding recovery rates by strengthening the body’s core and energy. She has visited the doctors at the Maverick West clinic and is excited to be involved in “providing quality health services to this area. We have great health practitioners here.” She cited the physicians at Maverick, the beloved general practitioner Marguerite Collins, and physical therapist Heather Roberts, who recently set up her practice on Main Street.
“Chinese medicine is really medicine,” she said, “not some New Age voodoo practice. It’s safe and effective. I like it because it’s about helping someone to heal instead of forcing the body to heal.”
Julia Rose may be reached for an appointment at 688-7198.