Wood Costs Are Rising...

That, the industry’s logger men are saying, is because in addition to demand being much, much higher than usual, some recent state laws inaugurated in recent months have started effecting supply.
“Business is up this year, definitely,” says Mark Anaust, who draws most of his clientele from the Woodstock area (and advertises in these pages). “I’m way ahead of where I was last year.”
He noted that many he knows working the firewood business have been hard hit by a new state Department of Environmental Conservation ruling from set into place June 4 that forbids the movement of logs beyond a 50 mile radius, as a means of curbing the spread of various pests devastating Northeast forests. But then adds that, drawing most of his own supply from local forests, some of which he owns, his supply hasn’t been effected all that much.
Former Hurley town supervisor Mike Shultis, whose made his own living from firewood for 33 years now, says he HAS been hit by the new DEC regs because he tends to buy bulk wood from suppliers, which has forced him to set up new purchase arrangements.
“Last year I’d buy wholesale log lots at between $65 and $70 a cord,” he said of his process, which sees him preparing firewood for delivery through splitting and cutting, drying and measuring. “This year, that cost’s gone up to $100 to $110 a cord.” And there’s a shortage of it. There’s a shortage of wood pellets, too, with most folks only able to buy directly from whomever sold them their stove in the first place…”
He said there’s an opening for wood moved over 50 miles… but it involves heating firewood to over 170 degrees in its center to kill off any pests.
“I can’t afford that,” Shultis said. “This has been an absolutely crazy year.”
He noted that he’s had to turn away over 100 potential customers in recent months, and has limited his dealings with new clients to e-mail, just so he can keep ahead of the 300 to 400 customer base he’s maintaining. Shultis added that he’s also working harder to shift more of his clientele from a September through Christmas buying season to ordering in the Spring, when he’s offering cut-rate specials.
“Smart people buy then,” he said. “Procrastinators buy now.”
Anaust similarly explained his business as being “a bit funny” in the way “it involves an expense people put off to the last minute. They tend to want a superior product next Wednesday at the latest. They just don’t buy it until they need it.”
He says one of his considerations has always been regarding the number of times one handles the stove wood he’s selling… the more times, the higher the price. Dry it too much, the cost goes way up. As a result, he says, he and others in the business for some time tend to, “give people exactly what you say you’re going to give them.”
Shultis noted that, with wood use expanding, the business has been pulling in some neophytes and even crooks. He’s been getting calls, he said, from folks getting half cords instead of full, or wood that’s too green to burn.
Neither man has seen that much of an increase in the use of wood furnaces to date, partly because of the local outcry and increasing number of local laws piling up against them. But they do believe folks are using their woodstoves more because of the rising costs of oil and natural gas, as well as financial worries that are pushing folks towards stockpiling things they can’t have taken away from them. Especially when it comes to stock comforts, like food… and heat.
“Wood heat is still a bargain,” said Shultis, who noted that a cord of wood ran about $40 when he started business in 1976. “One cord equals about 180 gallons of home heating oil. That’s quite a savings, even if you didn’t lock in at over $4 a gallon, as a lot of seniuors I’ve been speaking with did.”
Anaust added that he knows things have been rough by the number of jobs he’s been paid for with singles and five dollar bills.
“Price is a big consideration for these things,” he said.
“It’s taken me a lot of hard work to get caught up,” Shultis added. “I’m only thirty to forty orders behind now and expecting to be all but done by the holidays. I had to go to e-mails only when it got so I’d come home to 30 phone calls needing returns. I haven’t seen anything like this since the early 1980s, and even that pales in comparison.”
He added that, given the way things are going, he suspects the fuel of the future, at least in the local area, will end up being pellets… both wood only, and combined with grasses and other biomass materials.
Anaust added that he always tries to keep something aside for deep winter, when folks start running out of what they have. Although like Shultis, he’d like it if people started taking their heating needs, especially involving wood, more serious as a long term investment, and not something that’s always rushed at the last minute.
“I guess in the end,” he said, “It all comes down to the fact that wood is just something that the government can’t take away or the power company shut off when you need it most.”
Good point, that.

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Election Season, Again...
“Is it arrogance or ignorance?” asked Jordan, a former interim superintendent and principal for the Onteora School system, after DiSclafani brought up the fact that he’d foregone putting an alternative sewer system study bid out to bid.
His reasons, the current supervisor explained, were two-fold. First, he said he had spoken to the key companies who could perform an outside-funded study looking into an alternative reed bed wastewater treatment system and found one significantly under the others in cost, while the others expressed comfort with making their bids verbally. Secondly, given that the town has only until January 31, 2009 to come up with a new plan for a new sewer system to present to Phoenicia community voters who voted down a more traditional system in public referendum two years ago, DiSClafani said he felt time was more important to the process than procedure.
Shandaken has been wrestling with what to do about getting Phoenicia a second chance at what was a $17 million offer from New York City to build a sewer system similar to those built in every other major community throughout the Catskills watershed, narrowly voted down in February, 2007. At the time, opponents voiced concerns that there were no assurances they could afford future plant upkeep, despite city promises, or meet all construction costs. But there was also much grumbling that quite a few voted against the project because of the way Cross and others had presented it.
DiSClafani has said that he doesn’t feel right bringing the same proposal once voted down by Phoenicia residents back a second time, and believes it may not be legal. Hence his work, over the past year, to not only put together a new sewer proposal for the town, but to find one that would come in lower enough from the city’s funding offer to assuage local voters fears of cost overruns and future encumbrances.
At the town’s November 5 meeting, Cross dramatically submitted a Freedom of Information Law request to Town Clerk Laurilyn Frasier saying he intends to review all the documents pertaining to the hiring of Rennia Engineering Design, a Dover Plains firm that DiSclafani picked to prepare the preliminary design for the proposed reed-bed alternative technology sewer system.
Jordan, meanwhile, backed up the former supervisor by pointing out three other instances where DiSclafani admitted to fudging procedures… including the hiring of a planning consultant to prepare official comments on the controversial Belleayre Resort needed two weeks after he came into office without an official meeting vote, and by approving a new welcome sign for one of the town’s hamlets without full discussion.
Later, leading GOP supporter Al Higley, a former county legislator, wrote a letter to local papers trying to make the matter a key political issue (see Letters inside).
Rennia is expected to receive between $8,000 and $12,000 for the work, and perhaps another $4,000 for additional services under consideration. All of the funding comes from a grant supplied by the state Environmental Facilities Corporation, approved by New York City to fund such surveys up to $16,000. (See separate story for details of the completed report).
DiSclafani apologized for his actions, but later talked about the bigger picture of getting the town in to a position where it could again consider a multi-million funding package, especially given the current economic climate.
He added that he would like to have another request for an extension considered by New York City, to be able to get a new proposal before Phoenicia voters by next summer, if possible.
“I talked to an attorney about all of this and others spoke to the Association of Towns and all agreed it wasn’t as if there were any gross malfeasance or anything like that,” DiSClafani said. “It’s a feasibility study being performed by some leading figures in the field who I met at a meeting with the City DEP, who are funding it all.”
He added that since three of his four board members had no problem with what happened, he didn’t feel it was as serious as explained… and agreed that there was an element of grandstanding to the opposition on November 5.
“It’s not like I was favoring someone I knew,” DiSclafani summarized. “It’s not even town money, for heaven’s sake.”
Chalk it all up to another local political season taking shape, Shandaken-style.
Meanwhile, the town adopted a $5 million spending plan for 2009 at the same November 5 meeting following a spirited public hearing where several people lobbied for funding of local programs and others worried that projected revenues were perhaps wishful thinking given the economy.
After scraping about $25,000 off the bottom line by cutting raises for all elected officials and dropping the planned raises for non union employees to 3% instead of 4%, the board buckled to pressure to reinstate funds for the Phoenicia flower program and for two local Veteran organizations.
$4000 will go for flowers and the American Legion and VFW will get $500 extra each.

What’s The OCS Effect?

Albany’s Razor Dance

Then again, the senator — who will be shifting from a majority to a minority member of the body he’s been part of for nearly a decade now – admitted that there hasn’t been an economic crisis quite like that being faced by New Yorkers in memory. Maybe ever.
Although by the looks of things in the gilded Senate chambers Tuesday, and later in the more tattered and plebian Assembly quarters across the capital, no one seemed to be in crisis mode.
Bonacic gladhanded Democrats from the city as well as fellow Upstate Republicans after the body’s gaveling in and immediate move to recess during the lunch hour, as snow started to fall in fast flurries outside.
What was going on?
Gov. David Paterson had proposed $1.5 billion in new spending cuts for the remainder of the current fiscal year to help hold off a nearly $20 billion and fast-rising deficit being caused by hits being taken by the state’s leading revenue source: Wall Street. Yet the 90-minute meeting closed-door meeting between he and legislative leaders Shelly Silver of the Assembly and Dean Skelos of the Senate was reported to have been filled with accusations, name calling, several new alternatives not heard before… and no cuts, or agreement.
According to Bonacic, all that was accomplished was an agreement that everyone would go back to the drawing boards and return December 16, when Paterson would also produce a 2009 spending plan to center further discussion.
Which, he added, meant that any further cuts were ostensibly off the table for the remainder of this fiscal year.
At least until the GOP loses control of the Senate for the first time in decades on New Year’s Day.
The governor’s proposed cuts, released in draft form over the past week, had drawn crowds of protesters to the back lawn behind the capital Tuesday because of threats against education, health and social services spending. Signs and placards identified various unions, interest groups, as well as many asking for “Better Budget Choices,” as well as hand-lettered calls to, “Tax The Rich.”
Prior to Tuesday’s sessions, Senate Republicans, angry over Paterson’s part in their electoral defeats two weeks ago, had been expected to simply refuse to take up the governor’s bills. And Assembly Democrats, meanwhile, were rumored to be favoring a tax hike on those earning more than $1 million as a way to help balance the budget, as well as simply waiting until they have power of the entire Capital in less than six weeks.
The cuts for next year’s budget floated by Paterson to date have included major hits to hospitals and insurance companies, rises in state college tuitions, and added burdens for richer districts (see Onteora story). Also being hit, and responded to in great flurries of press releases over the past week, have been everything from libraries to the state arts council, as well as the possibility for further reductions at Belleayre Ski Center, including an indefinite suspension of a private/public partnership for a resort approved in principle by Paterson’s predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, who left office in disgrace last March (see Briefs inside).
In separate news this past week, a local press release battle erupted when resort opponents at the Catskill Heritage Alliance addressed the governor, suggesting formal cutting of the Spitzer proposal. Resort developers, Crossroads Ventures, countered by noting the need for their project’s economic development promise while longstanding Belleayre Ski Center supporter sided fully with the developers.
Bonacic, speaking from the Capital Tuesday afternoon following the Special Session’s adjournment, said that as far as he knew, no decision, up or down, would be made regarding the Belleayre Resort project and state funding for it pending resolution of litigation brought against the state by the Sierra Club challenging the Spitzer agreement.
“This is a typical legal strategy for fringe environmental groups trying to deplete deep pockets; a fly in the ointment,” the senator said, noting the dangers of such national and international groups. “We’re still pushing forward for approval, feeling it is instrumental to economic development in the Catskills.”
Bonacic added that funding for a proposed Catskill Interpretive Center, as far as he cared, was “on ice,” and that he was waiting to see what the governor was planning for the ski center, apart from what he termed “light cuts so far” come December 16.
He said that he wished he could have saved more of the ski center’s budget this year but feels it fared better than many other state-owned entities. He said that the major shift will be from a majority of the slopes’ snow being man-made to a greater reliance on Mother Nature.
As for the coming year under Democratic control, the senator spoke about how he felt it boded bad for Upstate, because of the downstate city-based power of the Democratic caucus. He also derided the governor for what he termed, in a long diatribe, as his “weakness” in not bringing a bill forth to be voted down in his chamber.
“It looks like he caved in,” Bonacic said of Paterson. “We were prepared to vote today. It costs money to bring us all to Albany for something like this.”
“It’s going to be a painful year,” he added. “I’m hoping the challenges will make us all more bipartisan.”