Large
Parcel Flunks
New board members
Cindy O’Connor, Rita Vanacore and Mary-Jane Bernholtz,
all of Olive, and all elected after gaining near-unanimous
support from their fellow town residents, all voted against
enacting the Large Parcel, along with new board president
Dave Patterson of West Hurley, who came out against the
controversial bill this summer.
Also voting against the bill this time was former supporter
Lev Flournoy, an Olive resident, who said he had changed
his stance based on taxpayers’ outcry
“I believe firmly ORPS (NYS Office of Real Property
Services) and the [state] Legislature, need to return to
the drawing board and I believe the towns need to return
to our politicians, legislatures and senators and talk to
them about this - this is not school board business,”
Flournoy said, gaining applause from the large crowd on
hand.
“I will challenge everybody sitting at this meeting
and a town of Olive resident, as soon as we are done with
this meeting, tomorrow morning, to start making phone calls
to get this changed,” Patterson said before his vote,
noting his concern that future school board elections become
“one issue” unless it not come back as something
school trustees must act on each year.
Voting for the issue as last year were board veterans Herb
Rosenfield, of Woodstock, and Marino D’Orazio, of
Marbletown. Although both decried the bill’s existence,
they defended their votes based on their continuing concerns
for “equity” between towns, and their belief
that the bill, however faulted, had been moving in that
direction.
When some of the crowd called for D’Orazio to stop
talking, Patterson, his replacement as board president,
asked for calm and noted that trustees were allowed to speak
at length.
“I represent all the towns, not just Olive,”
D’Orazio said. “The other towns have just as
much as a voice in this debate as the town of Olive.”
Defending the Large Parcel bill, which was purported to
aim at evening out tax payments between towns by allowing
the school district and county to exclude the amount of
property taxes paid by New York City for the Ashokan Reservoir
from Olive’s portion of the school levy, supposedly
spreading the benefit of those taxes evenly throughout the
rest of the district, were a handful of Woodstock town officials
and residents… and not a soul from Shandaken.
“I find it a shame that the amount of energy that
has been spent on the divide and conquer mentality and pitting
one town against another could have been spent on developing
a long term plan for our students when money was cheap,”
said Bernholz during the meeting. “I encourage all
of you to assert yourself in lobbying higher levels of government
for long term solutions, such as a mandated reval system.”
O’Connor stated she would never support a bill “where
somebody is always going to be a loser.”
When, during public discussion, several speakers addressed
the length of time it had been since Olive had last revalued
its properties, Olive deputy town supervisor Bruce LaMonda
assured everybody his town would complete it’s current
reval, counter to rumors now circulating in Woodstock.
In the past, LaMonda has noted that Shandaken is long overdue
for a reval, as well, without the excuse of pending lawsuits
with New York City that kept Olive from doing its own for
years.
Woodstock town supervisor Jeremy Wilber continued to anger
Olive residents to the boiling point by drawing long-winded
comparisons between homes and their tax levies.
It’s all moot, for now.
Town of Olive property owners will save $476.87 per $1,000
assessed valuation in the coming year
Rates per $1,000 assessed valuation approved by the board
at the recent meeting were for: Hurley at $12.33 for a $1.17
increase of 10.48 percent, 8 cents higher than under the
large parcel law; Marbletown at $11.10 for $4.84 decrease
of 30.36 percent, or 90 cents higher than under the large
parcel law; Olive at $1,563.54 for a $296.95 decrease of
15.96 percent, $476.87 lower than under the large parcel
law; Shandaken at $39.64 for a $3.65 increase of 10.14 percent,
$3.21 higher than under the large parcel law; Woodstock
at $11.94 for a 78-cent increase of 6.99 percent, or 97
cents higher than under the large parcel law; and Lexington
at $12.33 for a $1.17 increase of 10.48 percent, $1 higher
than under the large parcel law.
On a county level, it was announced this past week that
a recent failed vote on the Legislature’s part to
re-enact the Large Parcel formula for county taxes may come
back onto the lawmakers’ agenda later this month,
based on one legislators’ decision to change his vote
and force a second reading of the matter. Stay tuned.
In other business at the recent meeting, it was announced
that the school district’s insurance company pay most
of the defense costs incurred from the pending lawsuit filed
by Charles Blumstein against numerous entities over its
implementation of the Large Parcel law; the board okayed
up to $50,000 for architectural and engineering services
to conduct a review of building conditions and come up with
a five-year capital facilities plan; the board decided to
place new restrictions on use of the High School parking
lot, with the possibility of ticketing illegal parking;
and the board approved placing of a plaque in the High School
Band Room in memory of Lawrence Stowe, the former music
director in whose honor an entire wing may be named.
September 6, the day after Labor Day, will be the first
day of the 2005-2006 school.
Drive safely.
Up,
Up In The Air...
”I gave
(the application) to our expert just a few days ago, so
I don’t expect anything to happen in the next couple
of weeks,” said Olive Town Supervisor Brendt Leifeld.
“But it’s definitely on the move.”
The application is for a special permit to build a facility
on property belonging to Maurice “Skip” Lane,
who operates a lumber mill at the Tonshi foothill site.
It would include a 140 ft. monopole with 3 GPS antennas
at an 80 ft. Level and 12 panel antennas at 138 ft. Each
of 3 coverage sectors has a capacity for 20 radio frequency
channels but will be limited to a maximum of 36 channels
for all three sectors. The tower will transmit at frequencies
between 851 to 866 million hertz and receive between 806
to 821 million hertz. A 240 sq.ft. shelter at the base will
shield the attendant equipment.
Declaring itself a “public utility” deserving
of “favored treatment in
zoning matters,” Nextel boasts of the flexibility
of its Enhanced Specialized Mobile Radio services (SMR)
which combines voice, data and text messaging through a
single handset. It notes that “(t)here is also a public
need for the Applicant’s service, as evidenced by
the granting of a license
to the Applicant by the FCC.” Indeed, three separate
Radio Station Authorization forms licensed to Nextel License
Acquisition Corp. of McLean, Virginia, are included with
the application and supervisor Leifeld had no serious reservations
to express.
”I think there’s a large population in town
that want cell tower service,” Leifeld said, mentioning
that his wife uses a track phone which operates via satellite
rather than through towers. His first concern, he said,
was with the application for a tower on South Mountain in
West Shokan from the Masterpage corporation of West Hurley
now in court to mediate pre-existent zoning violations.
“Masterpage, under the Freedom of Information Act,
wants to know everything. So, that’s fine. We’ll
tell them. I keep asking (town attorney) Peter Graham where
we stand legally and he says we’re on firm
ground.”
Nextel, in their application, agreed with Graham’s
opinion from their own
perspective, saying they were “aware of the proposed
Masterpage Communications tower. However, since that tower
has been the topic of federal litigation, it is not yet
approved and not yet constructed.
Therefore, such tower is not an existing tower.”
Skip Lane, climbing out of a lumber truck driven by his
daughter to point
out the stakes driven into the ground to mark the intended
tower site, said that he had received mail from Nextel which
he had discarded without much notice. When they finally
came to visit, he said, he started to listen.
Nextel’s aggressive siting strategy matches the marketing
assertiveness of
its new partner.
On August 12th, in what even the industry website Wireless
Week.com
describes as a “rubberstamp” action by the Federal
Communications Commission
(FCC) and the Justice Department, the Nextel corporation
completed its merger with the global service provider Sprint,
making Sprint Nextel the
world’s third largest telecommunications firm (behind
Verizon and Cingular),
with 80,000 employees and revenues of $40.8 billion in 2004.
Two weeks prior to the merger, Sprint announced a doubling
of its network capacity in Europe to address “the
global communication requirements of corporations that need
to connect employees, customers and business partners.”
Since William Kennard sits on Nextel’s board of directors,
there seemed
little doubt of the merger’s approval. Kennard was
the FCC’s general counsel
from 1993 to 1997, shepherding through passage of the Telecommunications
Act of 1996 during the Clinton administration and serving
as FCC chairman from
1997 to 2001, when he joined the Carlyle Group private investment
firm and also became a director of the New York Times Company.
Fellow board members at Carlyle include former President
G. H. W. Bush; former CIA official and Deputy Secretary
of Defense under President Reagan, Frank Carlucci; former
British prime minister John Major; former Security and Exchange
Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt and other elite world
figures, including members of the bin Laden family.
If further evidence of political clout is required, a glance
at Nextel’s 13
other directors will impress- William E. Conway, Jr., Chief
Financial Officer of MCI, Chairman of United Defense Industries,
Inc. and also Carlyle Group director; retired Bank of America
vice chairman and director of Rayonier Corporation, EnPro
Industries, Inc. and Cousins Properties Inc., James H. Hance,
Jr.; Judith Muhlberg- a former senior vice president at
Boeing and aide to chiefs of staff Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld during the Ford administration; and so on. Sprint
Nextel is not a company lacking political influence.
”They’re right off (Route) 28, which is very
favorable to them,” said Leifeld. “I’m
sure people in the neighborhood there are going to have
something to say but, at least, it’s going to be on
one or two sides and not on four sides.”
Leifeld, who first met with Nextel representatives in May
to go over the general requirements with their attorneys
and Olive’s Peter Graham, said that- unlike the balloon
test on South Mountain which drew calls asking what was
going on- the Nextel test in July seemed to go unnoticed
by town residents. That doesn’t, however, indicate
that visual impact will not be an
issue in the coming weeks, along with the health hazards
increasingly associated with cellular towers despite the
telecommunications industry’s efforts to downplay
a growing body of evidence from published scientific tests
beyond the control of the experimental models the industry
has
enforced in recent decades.
”There’s no timeline, yet, for what happens
next,” Leifeld said.
The
Milk Stealing Bear
At this time there was a bounty on foxes—two dollars
for a red and three dollars for a gray fox. One night not
long after I bought the gun, after I had gone to bed, nature
called and I had to go out to the outhouse. I had my two-cell
blue flashlight. As I flashed the light in the field behind
our cow barn, I saw a pair of eyes. I went into the house
and got my shotgun. I walked down the road in front of our
barn and flashed my light and a gray fox was there. I fired
one shot and had the fox.
As I carried him to the road, I dropped him by the roadside
and flashed the light in front of the barn. I saw another
pair of eyes. I ran down the path past our garden that I
walked every day to school. I got ahead of the fox in the
cow’s pasture field after I got over the bars. I put
the light on in the pasture field and the fox was coming.
I fired one shot and had the second gray fox. I paid for
the gun in one night. T
he last time I saw Nelson was at John Carney’s Auto
Shop and the last words he said was “you always paid
your bill”. I killed more game with that shotgun than
all the other guns I ever owned.
It was September 19, 1947 that my boyhood friend, Buddy
Eckert, informed me that we were going fox hunting. Prior
to this date, Mr. Lewis had rented a house that Rudy Thornebee
owned where my mother sold milk to Mr. Lewis as we had a
farm. She was taking the milk in quart bottles and leaving
the bottles on the back porch. He kept saying that the milk
was gone. My father walked down through the woods and found
the empty bottles behind the house in the woods.
As we left my home or Bud’s on my bicycle we came
to Mr. Thornebee’s place. At this time, Bud was on
the bicycle with me on the cross bar holding my 12-gauge
shotgun and blue light. We heard the gate rattle. Bud turned
the light on and there was a bear standing up with his feet
on top of the gate.
I don’t know exactly how it was done and how I got
off the bicycle with the light and gun. I climbed up on
the stonewall and the bear was over by the creek. I fired
one shot and hit him. He came to a tree and I shot again.
By this time my friend Bud caught up with me. There was
a little stream of water with a plank over it and the bear
was growling. I remember Bud’s famous words, “Look
out Lince, here he comes”. I shot him again, and he
turned and went across the bridge with the loose planks.
I can still hear those planks rumble. As he was crossing
the bridge, I shot him again. We followed him across the
bridge and heard him crying. We got to him and I guess I
was so nervous that it took two more shots to finish him
off.
We pulled him back across the bridge and up past the flowerbeds,
across the main road behind the hedge or shrubbery. I can’t
remember just how Bud’s father was notified. He came
down with the Ford tractor with the platform on the back
and got the bear and took it to the barn.
I also can’t recall just how my father came to the
barn. He helped clean the bear that weighed between 100
to 125lbs. My mother told me Dad made this statement when
he heard the shot. “What are those kids up to now?”
Mother also sold milk to Mrs. Portel who was Rudy’s
Mother-in-law. Mother told me that we scared that good lady
very much.
It was four years after I was seriously injured in an accident
that I borrowed $100 from a relation and bought a Savage
lawn mower from Nelson Boice and started mowing lawns. I
mowed a lawn for Mr. And Mrs. Morris Kaplan who lived on
Watson Hollow road. He told me about a story in a New York
paper about two boys killing a bear in West Shokan. I told
him that was Bud and me. I’m sorry I did not ask him
what paper. Mr. Lewis must have put it in the paper, or
maybe Mr. Thornebee did.
I can’t remember how my sister and Bud’s sister
arrived on the scene, but my sister reminded me there was
much traffic on the Watson Hollow road and I found out later
that a celebration party was taking place at Hanover Mountain
Lodge owned by George and Selma Ritemier. That was the reason
for all the traffic. To my knowledge my father was the only
person who heard the six shots of double O buckshot and
number 4 shells. I have not talked to Bud or his sister
about this true bear story, but I trust it is accurate.
p.s. As for my single barrel 12 gauge shot gun, and with
the help of my wood shop teacher, Mr. William Oskay at Kingston
High School, I replaced the stock and I still have my gun
I bought for six dollars on time that gave me a black and
blue arm many times. Florence Guiliano still has the Ford
tractor her father transported the bear on.
A
Jar Of Olives...
Last week we
said good-bye to Peter Wittl, Olive’s one full-time
police officer, who died much too young. More than a dozen
people commented, “I just saw him yesterday, the day
before he died.” Chances are hundreds more did. Peter
was “out and about” stopping around town for
coffee, riding the roads and waving to the citizens he knew,
directing traffic and responding at a moment’s notice
to any accident or incident. Everyone sensed that presence,
that demeanor, that Pete was there if we needed him. He
was our neighbor.
In Olive, “keeping up with the Joneses” means
something different from its competitive upgrading of property.
It means “keeping track of, keeping aware of”
our neighbors. We are “our neighbor’s keeper”
in Olive.
I, in fact, have two neighbors named David Jones to keep
up with. One, the famous one in Olive, has a short stack
of pancakes with real maple syrup with his eggs at the Pineview
Bakery every Sunday. The other one, known elsewhere as singer
David Bowie, is just as much a neighbor. Olive’s volunteer
fire department and ambulance squad would respond just as
quickly for both.
This column will be about neighbors. It will remind people
of events coming up on the horizon such as the Republican
Picnic at Davis Park on Saturday, August 13 and Olive Day
at Davis Park on September 10. It will give information
about people past and present. Did you know that Babe Ruth
used to fish the Ashokan Reservoir with Barney Bachor and
Ray Smith? Did you know that Lena Bachor had to create waders
to fit the bambino’s girth by sewing a tire’s
inner tube to the two legs of the rubber waders?
By now, my neighbors in Olive are breathing a sigh of tax
relief knowing that the Alternate Large Parcel Option was
defeated at the County level on August 11. What they may
not know is the process. Since this was my first time as
a spectator to this spectacle, I was amazed at how things
get done there. Prior to the seven o’clock public
meeting, the two political parties caucus separately. Items
on the agenda get hashed over there before they get to a
public forum. I believe that both sides, Republicans and
Democrats, and opponents of and supporters of any issue,
know prior to the public meeting how the votes will fly.
In this case, The Large Parcel Option was pulled from the
agenda. Coincidentally, the resolution from Olive’s
Town Board opposing this method was missing from the written
list of correspondence. After an objection to “pulling”
the resolution by some of the committee members, a motion
to over-rule placed the decision back on the agenda. Many
supporters of Large Parcel spoke to delay a vote saying
that it would give more time to explore information. Opponents
of Large Parcel wanted to vote since many Olivites and Olivians
were present and had signed up to speak to the issue. Speakers
focused on the intention of the bill according to letters
written by Senator Larkin and stressed the Home Rule/Host
Community right that has come up so often with casinos and
developments. Supporters of Large Parcel claimed “fair
and equal” taxation based on a two hundred thousand
house being equal no matter where it is. The one moment
of levity was the question posed by a down county legislator
who asked, “Where do you find this two hundred thousand
dollar house?” She went on to ask if you could buy
comparable property in Olive and in New York City for four
hundred thousand dollars. It allowed a few laughs on a very
tense topic.
The vote went ahead with a “long vote call.”
This means that each legislator gets to speak to the issue
and vote audibly. It was interesting to me that the yes
voters simply said “Yes” without eye contact
to the audience which was seated to the right or left of
the legislators. Those who voted no prefaced their vote.
It was heartening to hear someone from New Paltz say that
she would support Olive and that voting no was “ the
right thing to do.” Legislator Donaldson, who first
supported the Large Parcel, voted against it because Olive
had taken steps to undertake a town wide reval.
When the final tally was taken, the vote was 14 for using
the Large Parcel method and 13 against it. The audience
was silent. There was an audible sigh. Then it was pronounced
that the resolution had failed. Stunned, we looked from
side to side wondering what had happened. Legislator Jeannette
Provenzano noticed the confusion and angst and asked the
acting chairman, Mike Stock, to please explain to the audience
what just happened. Since the resolution needs to be passed
by a majority vote, seventeen votes to support the resolution
are needed. With six legislators absent, the Large Parcel
Bill lacked three votes to pass. Would it have played out
differently if all were present? All I know is that on this
day, Olive earned some more breathing room to resolve this
issue that will haunt us each and every year until it is
found illegal or amended.
Since this is the first column, I invite my neighbors to
share their stories with me, and I will share them with
others in our community of Olivites and/or Olivians. Which
is it?
You can email me at clamonda@hvc.rr.com
