Town To Sue Onteora?

            It is thought by many Olive residents that certain resentful towns in the district spun the numbers to convince the school board that the town's tax advantage should be shared by other municipalities with no regard as to how and why it was created. Olive town board members are rumored to be reading Joel Best's new book More Damned Lies and Statistics: How Numbers Confuse Public Issues.
            The town board also discussed refounding their own school district and seceding from the Onteora District. It was thought that a test of public opinion on the issue was needed before proceeding in that direction.
            Dismissing Chris Johansen's complaints against Police Commissioner Robert Schank's alleged listing as a "police officer" with the NYS Division of Criminal Justice Services as "petty nonsensical politics," the board nonetheless resolved to send a notice to DCJS stating that Schank is a police commissioner and not an officer.
            Councilman LaMonda asked Johansen what the point of his objection was and what difference the distinction made.
            "It doesn't make any difference," Johansen replied. "But it appears as if somebody's falsifying business records. Somebody put his name on as a police officer 7 different times, starting in 1991."
            "What benefit would that be?" asked LaMonda, puzzled about the motive of a commissioner padding an unpaid position with an additional nothing.
            "That I don't know," replied Johansen.
            Sylvia Rozzelle noted that many images of old Olive from the Vera Sickler Collection, donated recently by her cousin John D. Emler, have been added to the Olive archives at the town offices and the library. The many images were scanned by Mark DuBois, a former Olive resident and DEP employee now living in Woodstock who donated his time, and presented to the town on a cd-rom.
            The board also resolved to support Senator Bonacic's bill to amend a new state law which seeks to keep all traffic fines for the state. Previously the town was allowed to keep a surcharge portion of fines which were plea-bargained down. In some towns the capture of these monies by the state would necessitate a rise in local taxes. In Olive, it would mean a difference of $50,000 to $60,000.
            Rozzelle also mentioned the new situation wherein people attempting to pay
school taxes in person at the school were told that they would not receive a receipt for their payments and that, now, the funds were being sent to Syracuse, where they were being handled "for free" by J.P. Morgan Co. Some older residents objected to sending the money west and not receiving a receipt, she said, while others apparently thought the banking arrangement
slightly peculiar. Or, as they say in the 'hood, What's up with that?

            City Department of Environmental Protection officials replied that the rules and regulations had to be written for over 100,000 acres of land on both sides of the Hudson. They tried explaining that nearly half of the 80,000 plus permit holders currently using City lands for recreational uses are from more suburban or urban locations on the East side of the Hudson, in Westchester and Putnam counties, as well as from the City. The portion of the system that's truly wild, they inferred, was small- similar to the way there are over 60,000 anglers, at presentm, versus 6,300 hunters.
            And yet for those cross-armed men, as well as a number of other influential men from around the Catskills filling elected town seats, or heading such entities as the Catskill Watershed Corporation, the City's catch-all attitudes are maddening.
            Comments at the September 14 meeting ranged from Shandaken supervisor Bob Cross' point-by-point questions addressing wording errors and designation vagueness, to angler and hunter Hank Rope's practical knowledge.
            Quietly percolating behind the surface of the meeting, shifted at the last minute from Shandaken Town Hall because the City had forgotten that town buildings were being used for statewide primaries that day, was recent news that the City's proposed regulatory changes had NOT been well received by the Catskill Watershed Corporation the previous week in a special meeting on the subject. Or that a growing number of local sporting groups, supposedly represented on an advisory council to the DEP's rule-writers, were not happy, either.
            At a special meeting held on September 7th in Margaretville, the Watershed Corporation's Executive Committee stood behind a group of sportsmen that claimed the City's proposal is in violation of the spirit in which the DEP is supposed to work with upstaters in preserving the historical use of the lands for hunting and trapping.
            In 1997, the Watershed Corporation formed a Sporting Advisory Council to render opinions on the recreational use of over 100,000 acres of City owned land. The deal was designed to protect the quality of the City's drinking water, which flows from the Catskills, while at the same protect the quality of life for Mountain dwellers that must abide by the water quality rules the City is empowered to enforce.
            But on September 7 the Sporting Advisory Council, noting that the deal was meant to establish a healthy partnership between upstate and downstate, now claims that the City is being too heavy handed by planning to pass laws that restrict recreational use rather than preserve the local heritage of hunting and trapping.
Faulting the City for possessing "a strong anti-gun,anti-hunting, preservationist attitude," the resolution passed by the SAC and later adopted by the Watershed Corporation charges that the proposed laws treat hunting and trapping as "culprits" instead of willing participants in water protection.
            "To ignore the voice of a large segment of upstate residents is continuing to sow ill will toward the city as we see our attempts to control our own future being slowly taken from us by an unreasonable and unapproachable landlord," the resolution states.
            Sportsman at the CWC meeting, as well as this past week's hearing, said that the proposed regulatory changes designate what can happen in different activity areas without saying where the "designated areas" are, or giving criteria for such designation; noted that the appeal process is only to the DEP; pointed out how the new regs cover the reservoirs, but not the main feeder streams; and wondered how the DEP plans to enforce what they're proposing.
            "Whereas the role of the SAC has been relegated to insignificance with the power of DEP being brought to bear reducing this Council to the role of futility," read one of the clauses in the CWC resolution, reflecting the advisory council's frustrations. "We believe that the DEP is expressing the opinions of an urban mentality rather than that of the 'country people' who live here and want to hunt here."
            DEP Land Management official John Potter tried to explain, at the recent hearing, that the City stayed vague on much of the new regs' wording so that they could maintain discretion for different areas of the watershed, which has an ever-lessening amount of old-style wilderness within it. And he said that all comments would be considered for final changes, which the department would be making over the coming months.
            But that wasn't enough to assuage many of the men in the dark room at Belleayre, or such local figures as Alan Rosa, Executive Director of the CWC, who said this week that the misunderstandings expressed by the new regs only indicated a growing sense of split between New York and the Catskills.
            "There has been a deterioration in the relationship in the last six months," Rosa said this past week in an interview, adding that he could not put a finger on specifically why things have changed, but that he felt there was different "tone" coming from DEP toward upstate.
            Last month Rosa testified at the Issues Conference on a proposal to build a massive new resort in the central Catskills, Dean Gitter's Belleayre Resort proposal, that, "The second-home market tears our mountains all to pieces."
            Cross has also spoken publicly, including quotes in The New York Times, about the disparity between city people and native Catskillians.
            DEP spokesman Charles Sturcken replied to Rosa's comments this past week by noting that recent bitterness is due to the high profile, high stakes debate over Gitter's project, as well as the fact that both sides have different missions in general, with DEP protecting water and upstate protecting its older, fast-disappearing rural traditions. Like hunting-
            "It's a very difficult relationship. I wouldn't say it's deteriorating though," Sturcken said. "Maybe it's the seven year itch- but we're not going anywhere."
            Written comments on the new rules and regulations, which are available online, at local libraries, or in town offices, will be taken up through Thursday, September 23,  when the final hearing will also take place at the Neversink Town Hall in Grahamsville from 7-9:00 P.M.  

Dear Mister Bloomberg...

         The town is still awaiting a response to Leifeld's letter of August 20th which calls for the reopening of the City-owned reservoir-skirting road which was closed in the immediate wake of the deadly attacks on the City in
2001. Intimating that, despite all of the squabbles and formal legal actions between the municipalities during the decades since the Ashokan Reservoir was built, the common spirit and stance of the residents of the town has been staunchly protective of the reservoir itself, the letter asserts that "for nearly 100 years...the town has enjoyed a harmonious relationship with New York City as we both strive to ensure proper drinking water to the residents of New York City."
            "Unfortunately, certain actions taken by the NYC Department of Water Supply (have) caused great harm to the residents of the Town of Olive," it continues. "Unilaterally, the Board of Water Supply has blocked off the road traversing the main dam... The justification for this action was that security concerns necessitated by 9/11 require these actions. Both the Town Board and the residents (of Olive) do not see it that way."
            When Leifeld had finished reading the letter, an audience member said that DEP Police Chief Edward J. Welch had claimed at a public meeting in August of 2003 that he would privately provide proof to town officials that the dam was at risk and asked if Welch had done so. Leifeld admitted that no such evidence had been presented.
            At that meeting, Welch had alluded to an interrogation of Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, a reputed Al-Qaeda leader captured in Pakistan the previous May. But Khalid's relationship to that country's military intelligence service has raised questions which cloud the entire issue of the 9-11 attacks and numerous citizen's groups, some representing families of that day's victims, have demonstrated at the conventions of both major political parties to demand answers. On the third anniversary of the attacks, the 1,000 seat Manhattan Center left hundreds of citizens on the street outside hoping for cancellations to a program hosted by actor Ed Begley Jr. called "Confronting the Evidence: 9-11 and the Search for Truth." A Zogby poll revealed that over 40% of New Yorkers do not accept the official story of the attacks.
            Joanne Valentine, a representative of the 9-11 Visibility Project in Kingston, says she began to really take notice when former Senator Max Cleland resigned from the 9-11 Commission and saw him quoted on the 9-11 Visibility website as saying "Americans are being scammed" on CNN's Newsnight on November 13, 2002. She immediately went to the CNN website to verify the quote but was unable to find the transcript. Emails to CNN only confirmed that the transcript was "missing" and they would investigate. Two years later, she's still waiting for the completion of that investigation.
            "Like so many others, I wanted to understand how something like this could
happen," Valentine said of how she became interested in the Commission's work. "I can't remember exactly when I became aware of significant deficiencies in the official line but it was through the Internet."

            Valentine said she also read Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's The War On Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked and spent weeks painstakingly checking out the author's sources. Since that time, she's learned that Ahmed's book
was one of a number that have been soundly ignored by mainstream media. Although some, such as David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor and former NBC executive business news producer Daniel Hopsicker's Welcome To Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up In Florida have sold briskly, the loosely-affiliated citizen's groups critical of the commission point out that the hard questions outlined in such works were not only left unanswered by the panel but left unasked.
            If a follow-the-money strategy had been fully pursued by the commission, it
may have led to some astonishing facts relating directly to Khalid's supposed "confession" to targeting Olive and his association with Pakistan's ISI, an organization said to be under the thumb of our own CIA at least since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
            It was the ISI's bitter rival agency in India which leaked to The Times of India the eye-opening fact that ISI Chief General Ahmad had $100,000 wired to alleged skyjacker Mohamed Atta shortly before the 9-11 operation. At the time of the attacks Ahmad was, himself, having a breakfast meeting with former CIA agent Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham- both office holders from Florida (a busy state of late) and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who would later be selected to co-chair the 9-11 congressional investigation. As outlined in Professor Michel Chossudovsky's book War and Globalism: The Truth Behind September 11, Ahmad's unusual visit began on September 4th and ended shortly after the attacks. When the funds transfer became public, he quietly retired and dropped out of sight.
            The commission's critics contend that this is merely the tip of the iceberg and fill their websites with evidence suggesting that the attacks were an "inside job" and that the secrecy which will shroud their core findings for decades is designed to cover that ugly fact. All of this is off-limits to mainstream media, they claim, and citizens without an Internet connection are cultivated like mushrooms. Even the Chairman of the Commission, former N.J. Governor Thomas Kean- himself accused of conflict of interest because his Saudi business partners, Khalid bin Mahfouz (Osama's brother-in-law) and Mohammed Hussein have been named as Al Qaeda financiers in a trillion dollar lawsuit filed by families of victims of the 9-11 attacks- has charged that 3/4 of the classified material he read while heading the commission should not have been classified.
            It is this kind of secrecy which Olive residents point to when addressing the Monument Road closure. Could it be that it's secret because it is based, like the "evidence" linking Saddam Hussein with 9-11 or even, as some suspect, the still unrevealed ties of bin Laden to the attacks, on bogus material?
            Olive councilman Bruce LaMonda raised a question at the meeting about the
"prison-break" flood lights erected at each end of the dam road, so bright that they "cast shadows in Moonhaw," one resident observed.
            "These new spotlights they've got up there - to light up the target for everybody," LaMonda said. "Could we write a letter asking them to redirect them so that they don't blind everyone coming up the hill there? They've got that lit up pretty good. I don't think it'd be hard to find at all."
            After an audience member pointed out the irony of reversing the wartime blackouts of the 1940's, Councilwoman Helen Chase offered that she had recently spoke with the DEP's Ira Stern and he had said they had already planned to shield and redirect the lights due to driver complaints.
            "Total closure of this road is not necessary," Leifeld's letter reasoned, saying it would be equivalent to the City closing a tunnel or bridge. "The closure of the road prevents residents...from using the most direct route from one side of town to the other... This route has been available to the Town since the dam was completed in 1913. This hardship to...residents and
visitors could be eased by your decision to monitor, but not close, the road on the main dam."
            The letter also reminded Bloomberg that "when New York State passed a law on June 3, 1905, which enabled New York City to own the Ashokan Reservoir in the Town of Olive, certain conditions were attached... Our legal advisors
tell me that New York City was required to build such highways and bridges as may be necessary by the construction of the reservoir and to repair and forever maintain such additional highways and bridges. ( I have taken the liberty of enclosing a copy of Laws of the State of New York, Chapter 724 of 1905.)"
            The letter closes with a request that the mayor investigate "the reopening
of the road on such terms as may enable the security concerns for all parties."

 For Art's Sake
            After living in Woodstock through much of the 1980s, affording his own artistic lifestyle by fixing up abandoned houses at Byrdcliffe and elsewhere around town to keep his expenses low, Slowinski started getting discouraged at the number of galleries who told him his work was simply too political and "weird" to be saleable. So in 1987 he found a storefront in the then-dispersing East Village art scene on Manhattan's 10th Street and founded the Limner Gallery, named for a  Medieval term for manuscript illuminators that eventually became a descriptive term for itinerant artists.
            At first, Limner sold only its owners' works. He'd borrowed and saved enough money to stay open for a couple of months, but did well enough selling off his own paintings that his second show featured other artists. And then those sold and he was of and running.
            Changes in the art and real estate markets forced a number of location moves for Limner over the years, taking it to Soho, Little Italy, and the midtown edges of Chelsea, the new art Mecca. Finally, Slowinski burned out on the city and decided to move back Upstate to a Woodland Valley home he'd been renovating over recent years. He closed up the city gallery this past winter after securing the Phoenicia site last summer. Now it's all system go- albeit after a giant, swerving circle of seven years making.
            Over the years, Limner has shown a number of local artists, many of whom Slowinski first met while living in the area in the 1980s. Among the top is Saugerties-based Ernest Frazier, a true original, and one of the leading African-American artists in the nation for years.
            He's abetted this high-level coterie of artists with those he finds through advertising and competition, many of whom pay a fee to be part of what he puts together, including Direct Art.
            Slowinski says the move Upstate made sense because he was sick of the City- and a majority of his purchasing clients, the collectors all art is aimed at for support, are from Florida and California and sundry distant locations, doing most of their viewing and buying either online or through the mail.
            "It just made sense to be up here," he says.
            As for the changes he has seen in the area since moving away for 17 years, Slowinski says Woodstock had already started becoming a difficult place for artists to afford living in way back then. It's only worse now.
            He adds that Phoenicia and Olive, to him, are the new Woodstocks. Moreover, with the hip new street traffic in both locations spurred on by constant mentions in the New York media, he feels it may actually be a better location for a gallery than the town he'd originally settled in a quarter of a century ago.
            "I've gotten better traffic into the gallery here than most of my locations in the City," he said. "I don't thin I'll be going back down now. It doesn't make sense to."
            His new show, like others in the small space on Main Street, in the Phoenicia Hotel building, is big in its effects. Although many of the best pieces in "Fantastic Visions" are relatively small, their obsessiveness and intricate craftsmanship are memorable.
            William Ayton, from Rhinebeck, has a haunting ink-rendered portrait entitled "Manowar" that could have been dug up from any classic civilization of the last ten, or future dozen millennia. Canadian artist Oscar De Las Flores' "Blake's Spirit and Exhumation over a Mass Grave," another medium-sized pen and ink piece, does the great mystic poet's legacy right in its complex sense of a darkly spiritualized world. Donna Dodson's "Pregnant Owl," one of the show's only sculpture's, is naturalistic and suggestive at the same time.
            The themes spread across the globe, with works in the latest, and all Limner exhibits coming from as far afield as Blooming Prairie, MN and London, England, in styles ranging from the intimacy of pen and ink to large, cartoonish oils and acrylics with pop-graphic narratives their obvious rendering skills.
            Two particular favorites in the current show include Kansas drawer Kris Kuksi's morbidly-fascinating "The Decomposition of Kuksi," a graphite depiction of the artist's own death that seems to match adolescent self-pity with an adult cynicism. And best of all, Californian Mark Thompson's wildly creative commentary, "Release 2: Scripting Symbol of Paper Worth as Forest of Thought Begins," a delicately small watercolor and ink masterpiece redolent of both Goya and Daumier at their caricaturing best.
            And yet all dim behind the memorable paintings Slowinski himself has been turning out over the years - colorful, almost comics-like super-realist commentaries on life that have been popping up in group shows all over the region, including this weekend's big Tattoo & Body Fest in Woodstock.
            "Taste is a result of personality, and it all reflects my own painting style," he said of his concentration on the surreal, the fantastic, and the politically ironic.. "I like things political and emotionally intense. I like a certain amount of weirdness in art."
            Limner Gallery is located at 59 Main Street in Phoenicia. Call 845-688-7129 or visit www.slowart.com for further information.