Budgets Rising Fast

While the overall hike in the tax levy from this first stab at budgeting, up for discussion in the coming weeks, is for just under 7%, the levy for the general fund portion of the budget, or the non-highway department half, is slated to skyrocket over 11%.
In contrast the Highway department side of the budget has an increase of less than one quarter of one percent. With a tax levy increase of only $27,302, the Highway side of the equation drags the general fund’s increase down.
On Monday, Supervisor/Budget Officer Peter DiSclafani made no such distinction.
“It’s about a 6.8% increase,” he said.
With no discussion, DiSclafani announced that the preliminary budget had been prepared and the board agreed to submit it to the County as is required by law.
Taxpayers will have a chance to be heard on the budget next month at a public hearing set for Monday, November 3 at 6:30 pm. By law, the budget is supposed to then be adopted by the Thursday following the November 4 election… which can be extended by several weeks, legally, if need be..
The largest single chunk of the tax increase comes from the town’s Ambulance Department, whose administration is seeking almost an 18% increase over this year’s funding. The department has seen substantial cost increases before. Last year the department was given a big increase- from 2007’s $218,496 to $250,400 for 2008. Now the department wants another $44,607 to bring the total operating budget up to $295,007.
Department Captain Richard Muellereile spoke briefly at Monday night’s town board meeting. He did not discuss specifics of the proposed increase but did note that the department’s revenues are coming in as expected, perhaps slightly better than usual.
If they get what they want for next year, the Ambulance Department would for the first timehave a budget that exceeds the town’s Police Department.
The police are asking for a hike too. Operating this year with $278,093, the Cops want a 41/2% jump to $290,803.
As for employee salaries, all are set to receive a 4% raise.
In contrast to all the above-mentioned increases on the general side of the budget, the Highway department side of the budget has only an increase of less than one quarter of one percent.
Highway Superintendent Eric Hofmeister said Monday that he had to increase the budget $27,302, but other than that no spending hike was necessary to take care of the town’s roads next year.
“The increase is only for payroll. There’s plenty of money there to do things,” he said.
Other notable budget increases include a jump in spending in the Phoenicia Fire District. District costs were $185,000 this year. Next year they are expected to be $222,167. The town’s three other fire districts have either minimal increases or none at all.
Copies of the preliminary budget are available at town hall.
First attempts at budgets in neighboring towns have seen similar surprises in recent weeks, with Olive superintendent Bert Leifeld waltzing his Preliminary spending plan out October 7 at “an 8 or 9 percent hike” over last year’s, including a requested 27 percent hike in highway costs, as well as uncontrollable rises in the cost of fuel, insurance, and workman’s compensation, as well as a major drop in mortgage tax revenues. In Woodstock, the preliminary 2009 town budget prepared by Woodstock supervisor Jeff Moran calls for a property tax increase of approximately eight percent, a measure that the supervisor deemed necessary in order to compensate for a drop in revenue, primarily from mortgage tax receipts, and a rise in costs, while maintaining town services at their current level.
Both towns are scheduling several special meetings before November to discuss ways of lowering their spending plans.
At the recent Shandaken town board meeting, Gary Gailes of Big Indian suggested that it might behoove the board to form a committee to start looking for new areas of revenue, given the likely drying up of outside moneys from county, state and federal levels of government.
Along those latter lines, Governor David Paterson recently set November 19 as a date when state legislators are to return to Albany to discuss further cuts to this year’s state budget, which he sees slipping into greater stress with recent losses on Wall Street, a major revenue source for all New Yorkers.
Expected to come up will be further cuts to state programs, likely including localized revenue sharing, in the 2009 budget scheduled to be presented by Paterson in January and voted on by the state sometime before or after its April 15 budget new year deadline.
Hold on, folks, it could prove a rocky ride…

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A Blessing On Wall Street

Gerald Celente, top futurist at the Trends Research Institute he directs in Rhinebeck, can legitimately make that claim, as can the many who subscribe to and heed his firm’s newsletter, the Trends Journal. But, apparently, the congressional leaders who were stunned to silence by descriptions of the situation from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke at an urgent Capitol Hill meeting last week cannot.
Media reaction cascaded across the political spectrum when the gravity of the damage began to become apparent. “Staggering,” wrote Nicholas von Hoffman in The Nation on the 19th, “(S)o deep and sticky it may be necessary to sacrifice wildlife programs, preschool education and scientific research. Even without knowing the numbers, we can kiss health insurance goodbye.” Conservative pundit Patrick J. Buchanan announced “the party’s over,” predicting that the Crash of 2008, “which is now wiping out trillions of dollars of our people’s wealth” will usher in the era of a “more sober and much diminished America.”
Celente, a financial Nostradamus whose record of accurate forecasts stretches back into the 1980s, has been waving a red flag since July of last year, warning of an inevitable collision with harsh financial reality. He is emphatically not at all surprised at how dire the situation has become.
“We’ve been saying this loudly and clearly,” Celente declared Saturday afternoon as he prepared a Trends Research bulletin for a Monday release. “It’s bigger than the collapse of Wall Street. It’s the collapse of the American empire. Wall Street is a just a symptom of the collapse. It’s much bigger.”
As Wall Street does its imitation of the melting witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz, Celente sees a larger scenario crumbling in the nation’s infrastructure which he believes will unavoidably alter the destiny of the entire world.
“It’s not like they’re pulling a rabbit out of a hat,” he said. “They’re doing it in broad daylight, with the cameras rolling. This isn’t a federal bailout. It’s a bloodless coup by the ‘Wall Street Gang’ taking over Washington. There’s no doubt about it. Now they don’t have to worry about the ‘too-big-to-fail’ companies. They’re in control of the biggest. They’re in charge of the government.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter administration who co-founded the global-interest Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973 to create a “New International Economic Order” summed up the future of the state in his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era [1970], declaring that the “nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.” Brzezinski, currently an advisor to presidential aspirant Barack Obama, outlined his ideas for the state’s replacement at that time and elaborated a geopolitical redesign of the world in subsequent books. Advisors to both McCain and Obama are cited by numerous sources as contributing directly to the current state of affairs. Celente endorses neither of them.
Quoted liberally in every major newspaper in the land and many abroad, it’s difficult to name a news-oriented network program to which Celente hasn’t contributed his analysis . Sought-after keynote speaker for corporations like Metropolitan Life, Bank of America, Dupont, American Express and many others, his words bear substantial weight in the business community whose fate he now discusses with tones of woe, forecasting a devalued dollar, massive unemployment and the same kinds of strife inflicted on the Third World nations which defaulted to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in decades past. By now, Trends is no longer a voice in the wilderness and many others have joined the alarm, some declaring that the circumstances have been deliberately orchestrated.
Identifying Secretary Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, as the player spearheading the “coup” with demands for unrestricted authority to expedite a $700 billion “bailout” from taxpayers that Celente views as a “heist,” he offers a further prediction: “Having accurately forecast the current financial debacle, we confidently now forecast that taking swift sction will prove- as it did in Iraq- far more catastrophic than allowing Wall Street to suffer the consequences of its greed and mismanagement.”
Dean Starkman, writing in the current Columbia Journalism Review, takes a similar view of the dark heart of the crisis, chiding the business press for “ignoring the simplest, most basic but most important” concern in “the breath-taking corruption that overran the U.S. lending industry, including and especially the brand names, and the extent to which Wall Street drove that corruption.” Finding coverage, including that of the Wall St. Journal, “treated the global credit panic as a given, as though it were the result of some kind of natural disaster or a particularly nasty turn in the business cycle,”Starkman believes the media has misplayed “a story that promises to surpass in scope, gravity, complexity and social and economic consequences anything this generation of business reporters and editors has ever experienced.”
A self-described “political atheist” disciplined to view things as they are rather than as he would wish them to be, Celente elaborated the corporate and political underpinnings of the current ‘coup’ in fascinating detail (forbidden by the space afforded here), noting he had begun seeing through the charade of office-holding spokesmen (and women) for true power when he spent an hour with Ronald Reagan in the 1970s while hiring the future President for a firm he represented. Although he had once been politically involved in New York and Washington, including a stint as assistant to the Secretary of the New York State Senate, Al Abrams, Celente stepped away from that partisan world to fine-tune his BS meter during the Jimmy Carter/Iran hostage crisis.
“Anybody that believes that Washington is going to bail them out is delusional,” said Celente, also a martial arts master, originally from the Bronx, whose timber of voice brings to mind Michael Parenti, with shades of Lenny Bruce, when transmitting irony. “So, the first thing to do on a local level is to call every legislator in your area. Make a nuisance of yourself. Tell them you don’t want to hear why they’re in favor of the bailout- you’re not interested. You know enough about the details. You’re not up for bailing out Wall Street. Here’s the federal government telling the State of New York, Vermont, wherever, to pony up for these people. You’re going to start hearing intelligent people say ‘hell, no.’ Until Congress votes on the (Paulson) plan, it is not yet a fait accompli.
“This is a perfect Titanic sinking. The metaphor couldn’t be more clear. This unsinkable great ship goes down and the little people are too small to save. They were locked down in steerage. The wealthy were given the lifeboats. They were too ‘big’ to sink. The same thing is happening now.”
Saying that he thought the consequences of the collapse will trigger a new and viable third party initiative, Celente sketched the next steps of the falling house of cards, citing commercial real estate, seeing large-scale folding of industry in China and numerous other items lurking in the near future. He offered advice to those who may be concerned about the stability of their own banking service.
There are over a hundred banks in our region. Some of them, including the “too-big-to-fail” banks, will go under, Celente believes.
“Everybody’s threatened. Everybody,” he said. “A small, sound bank could be in great shape. I don’t know what their balance sheets look like, so I can’t comment but they could be a good investment. If your money’s protected and they didn’t overplay the real estate markets, great. Commercial loans will be the next shoe to fall. People aren’t talking about it. They call it ‘non-residential construction,’ ha! How about ‘commercial real estate’? All these malls, developments, office buildings, condo complexes. What’s going to happen when you don’t fill them up- when you see more bankruptcies? It’s not the subprime problem. Not the mortgage problem. That’s the smallest part of it. How about these leveraged buyouts? All these multibillion dollar companies bought on a future earnings base with virtually no money down?
Banks used to loan money to build businesses. Now they loan for speculations. The real estate markets are dying and they’re not going to recuperate.”
Celente suggested those concerned to inquire into their bank’s balance sheets, how many foreclosures they’re facing or delinquencies on loan payments. Are people paying their mortgages on time? Do they have enough in reserve, relative to exposure? Are they on the FDIC “problem list”? What is their exposure to credit default SWABS? Do they have anything with collateralized debt obligations? If they had to sell their financial instruments, mortgage-backed securities, could they be sold on the market? Nobody wants to buy them.
There will be books written about this week in finance which will be able to offer a measure of perspective unavailable to us, today. Corporate structures, built upon bigness, distance and endless growth are doomed. The final collapse will be horrendous. Yet, in all of the shattering darkness of the fall, Celente sees a glimmer of light.
“The good news is that something corrupt is dying,” Celente said. “The culture of greed and fraud is being exposed for what it is and when we learn how to survive in the ruins and people move forward from there, we can create a much better, more human system.”

John Parete’s Legacy

“The party basically was in shambles,” said Parete. “We couldn’t get candidates and we were up against a very well established machine. I mean, this was a completely Republican county except for the City of Kingston and the Town of Olive. Marbletown, for instance, had a slim Democratic majority but they couldn’t vote a single one of them into office. So that was the situation when (Assemblyman) Kevin Cahill and (Representative) Maurice Hinchey came to the Boiceville Inn (which he owns) and asked me to take the chairmanship and go out and find people who were willing to be involved.”
Whether he found them or they found him, for many in our county’s current leadership John Parete WAS Ulster County’s Democratic Party. He was the one person who was always available to anyone with questions, willingly shared what he knew, and was a touchstone for many — and not just Democrats — looking to understand or be involved in local, regional, or state-level politics.
But in recent weeks he’s resigned his volunteer party post and announced that by the end of the year he’ll be leaving the paid job he’s held since 2005 as the county’s Democratic Election Commissioner. Although holding the positions simultaneously is common, some see it as a conflict of interest. Rather than giving up one post he’s opted instead out of both.
The relevant background is that seeds of dissension with Parate’s leadership were sown deep last year, when he backed Vincent Bradley’s bid to participate in the party’s primary for the county District Attorney’s race. In the ensuing months tensions continued as some party members felt he didn’t support John Sennett, their eventual nominee, with his usual energy. Sennett narrowly lost that race to GOP candidate Holly Carnright as a direct result of Bradley’s independent candidacy. It was the only major position county Democrats didn’t win in that election, and the only setback they’d had in recent years.
Currently Democrats hold 20 of 33 legislative seats, along with a large and growing enrollment edge. Although long-term demographic shifts are clearly a factor, few in either major party would argue that Parete hasn’t been the driving force behind the shift in leadership. Like him or not — and most people seem to — consensus is that he’s been one of the most effective party leaders in the county’s modern history.
If Parete’s disappointed by what’s happened he’s not saying so. He isn’t surprised that Republican legislators joined with a minority of Democrats in forcing the dual-position issue to a head through proposed changes to the county Ethics Law. For them, he surmises, perhaps it was a chance for payback to the guy most responsible for moving them to the minority side of the aisle.
“This has been a great experience and a great education for me,” Parete said. “There’s a lot of people out there who are focused on improving the quality of government and the political process. I’ve enjoyed working with them because anybody who puts their name on a ballot line is somebody I respect. It’s easy to complain about things but people who are willing to step up and take responsibility are rare. So I have nothing but the utmost respect and friendship for the people who’ve been my opponents. They’re not enemies or even adversaries, just people I respect and with whom I’ve differed. And I’m incredibly grateful to Maurice Hinchey and Kevin Cahill, who’ve always been there and have supported me every step of the way.”
“But the truth is,” Parete continued, “We’ve been successful with every single thing we wanted to accomplish. We gained a majority in the legislature and held it through the next election. We elected a terrific Sheriff, Paul Van Blarcum, and great judges, Mary Work to Surrogate Court and Tony McGinty to Family Court. And we didn’t just change the politics of the county, we changed the government of the county. Now, this year, we’re voting on a County Executive and a Comptroller for the first time. ‘Till now we were nearly the largest county in the state that didn’t have a County Exec. But by January we’ll have one, and I think Mike Hein will do a great job. And in the process we’re actually reducing the size of county government from 33 down to 23 legislators. We did it by forcing a referendum on redistricting and an end to multi-seat ‘megadistricts.’ And we did it by opening up county government and turning it into something that’s finally accountable to everyone. So I feel like we’ve built a base and a structure from which this party should be the favorite in every single race from now on. We’re earned the trust that people have given us, and we’ve changed the climate.”
“So I think it’s a good time for me to move on,” Parete concluded. “I’m not a kid, I’ll be 67 at the end of the year. I still have our business The Boiceville Inn, which has supported our family for 38 years and helped us raise four great kids. I’m thrilled to be leaving the Commissioner’s position in Cathy Minh’s hands; there’s nobody better qualified. And I’ll continue to chair the party in Olive where I can focus on my friends and neighbors, and where we still have a few more projects. The sewer system is a big deal, we need to insure that our seniors have adequate housing, and we’re hoping to expand recreational opportunities for Olive residents but also for everyone from Kingston to Pine Hill. But we could use some new people with new ideas and new visions and I’m always hopeful they’ll come find me.”