Maybe Not The New Years Message You Wanted

Sixteen months ago things changed overnight, and nobody didn't understand the post 9-11 world would be very different. Some changes are still unfolding, slow enough they don't always register but fast enough to keep our collective level of anxiety pretty high. It's justified. Our country's poised to go to war, something it does as well and as professionally as such things can be done. We all want to see everything that's humanly possible done to neutralize the terrible threats we face, but at the same time, we recognize that's something we may not be able to accomplish. For now, the front line of the war is half-a-world away, though most of us doubt it'll stay there. If our government thought it would, we wouldn't be planning to inoculate tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of us against smallpox, a plague we thought we'd seen the last of generations ago. Whatever feelings we may have about the war that's coming and irrespective of whether it's successfully executed or not, few of us really believe it will make our world a safer place.

We are a small town, two hours drive from the city most likely to be the target of any chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons directed against our nation. Regardless of whether the worst comes to pass or it doesn't, the fear that it might will continue to impact us into the future, just as it already has. Everyone understands there's a relation between anxiety in the City and housing prices in the Catskills, which in our area are up 20% or more just since 9- 11. So to go on planning our town's future without factoring in the rest of the world makes no sense at all. We have to be realistic, and plan for things not being the same as they've been, because they're not the same.

So what is it we really need to do in Shandaken right now? The short answer is we need to take better control of our own future. We need to build our community as strong as we can, starting with our local businesses. We need to work on our infrastructure, from water storage and treatment to wastewater and telecommunications. We need to make sure our emergency services are as well staffed and equipped as we can possibly afford. We need to see that the local government and the regional agencies which are supposed to serve us and protect our interests really do that. We have to keep building toward a sustainable and diversified local economy that's not dependent on the rest of the country doing just fine, or on any particular sector of the economy doing fine. We have to plan on doing whatever we do in an investment climate potentially more dismal than the one we're in now, with the Dow perhaps at 6,000 not 10,000 next year, because nobody knows where the national economy's going. And we have to PLAN for the fact that the worse things look to people around the country, the better they'll look in beautiful and relatively safe Shandaken. We believe the economic future of our region and our town is very bright. But we also believe if we're going to capitalize on it without losing much of what we treasure about our town, there's a lot to do in maybe less time than we'd like.

Since long before 9-11, our town of course has been grappling with the issue of large-scale development. We have before our town and our Planning Board a single proposed resort project that's 5 to 7 times the size of Phoenicia and that by itself would double the number of people in Shandaken on any given day. Now that it's been resubmitted to DEC, we need to review that proposal ourselves and decide what our town wants to do. We need to finish our Comprehensive Plan, and put it in place. We need to see whether our zoning code can handle the kinds of new development pressures we'll be under if things change for the worse elsewhere, irrespective of whether there is or isn't a Belleayre Resort in our future. Hardly anyone's even looked at that code in 15 years, and our own Department of State believes a review's overdue. And we need to understand what "full buildout" in Shandaken would really look like; not just for "vacant" land but everywhere, because it could really happen in the space of just a few years.

We know perfectly well no one wants to even think about a lot of this stuff. Sure, it would be great if we could all just go back to thinking our biggest problem was getting more tourists to spend more money here. Of course that's one of the things that'll help us, but to pretend that's some kind of responsible plan for our future is just a pipe dream, and anyone still puffing away on that could use a good cup of coffee to go with it. It's a new year in a different world than it used to be and it's time to wake up. That's not to say we're asleep, because as communities go, we're more awake than most. There's a huge number of positive things going on which most of us see all the time, and plenty of people, even outside our area, are increasingly aware of. Those things reflect a wisdom and a maturity and a common set of sensibilities based on caring for one another and for the land. They cut across all ideological and party lines and they're what define us as not just as a place that's special but as a real community. We need to keep building on what we've got, and though we're on the right track, we also need to pick up some speed.