The Phoenicia Times - Follow Up on the News

Onteora’s New Future?

The big news, as a result, was that the Onteora Middle/High school auditorium will close its doors before the winter break as the administration prepares for renovations.
At Tuesday night’s December 16 school board meeting at Phoenicia Elementary, KSQ architect Armond Quadrini gave a series of presentations including a time line between the auditorium bid process and a projected completion time. Bidding begins December 23 with construction targeted by mid-January.
Quadrini said that he expects many bids to come in because of the downturn in the economy.
“We’ll get the best bids possible,” he said.
The renovations were approved by voters nearly two-years ago by an EXCEL State aid package. But because of a backlog of requests throughout the state, the aid was stalled. Quadrini said he doesn’t expect an aid package like this to come through again.
“If we get any more EXCEL aid, consider it a blessing,” he said.
Completion is expected by the end of the summer. All fingers crossed, students will find a new auditorium by the new school year in September 2009.
The school board unanimously approved the transfer of transportation contracts from Mulligan Bus Company to Birnie Bus Company based out of Utica, NY beginning January 1, 2009.
The transfer was listed in the consent agenda and this led Trustee Donna Flayhan to request that specialized items be placed separate from the consent agenda.
“I just want to make sure the consent agenda is used for routine approvals,” she said.
The district switched from using multiple bus contractors to a single company in 2006. Initially the single bid was awarded to Hoyt Bus Company on a one-year contract. Voters rejected a three-year contract with Hoyt on a locked in price. Hoyt was sold to Mulligan Bus Company in 2007.
Later during an audit report, tempers flared between Flayhan and School board president Ralph Legnini over the process of requesting information. Flayhan requested that a comparison be done on bus contractors based on information she learned from an auditor report. But her point came to an abrupt end when Legnini learned she did not make a recommendation and banged his gavel, calling a five-minute break.
Flayhan continued to speak, but her microphone was cut off.

‘Tis That Season Again?
According to Shandaken Supervisor Peter DiSclafani, that timing question was raised last week when he and other town officials were asked to meet with the state Department of Environmental Conservation official who is overseeing the Belleayre Resort’s review process.
And that official, Daniel Whitehead of the DEC’s Division of Environmental Permits, told DiSClafani and others at the December 5 meeting in Shandaken last week that as far as he could tell, the only thing he could think for such timing was that it might have something to do with State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) regulations. Although he couldn’t be sure.
The meeting was called by Whitehead, DiSclafani noted in a press release, to discuss the local towns’ ability to review the imminent Suplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement (SDEIS), awaited since former governor Eliot Spitzer announced his controversial Agreement in Principal at a Kingston press conference in September 2007, as well as specific socio-economic and environmental impacts for the proposed Belleayre Resort at Catskill Park and adjacent build-out at the ski center.
Also in attendance, according to the supervisor, were Andrew Labruzzo and Jaime Ether of the New York Department of State’s Division of Coastal Resources, Ulster County Legislator Brian Shapiro, and recently re-elected Shandaken board member Doris Bartlett.
“Among the concerns discussed was the importance of our zoning laws and comprehensive plan being in conformity, which would give the planning board a stronger planning foundation; and the ability of the Town to have enough funding to properly review and/or proceed with the permitting process… Funding that could hire professional guidance and technical support for the volume of material needed to be reviewed,” DiSclafani noted in his Friday press release, written soon after the closed-door meeting. “Another concern was that the town understood the importance of having an adequate fee schedule to cover the zoning and building aspects for a project of this size and scope.
The pending SDEIS everyone’s been awaiting for over a year, DiSclafani added, involves plans and possible impacts from (and alternative proposals for) the construction and operation of the Wildacres Resort and Highmount Spa Resort complex by Crossroads Ventures; expansion of the Belleayre Mountain Ski Center by the state DEC, including ski-in-ski-out public access to the proposed Highmount Spa Resort; DEC acquisition of approximately 1200 acres of Crossroads property; and similar acquisition of a 78 acre parcel known as the Former Highmount Ski Center, along with a related 21 acre Highmount Spa Easement.
“The initial idea for the meeting was that this thing (The multi-volume SDEIS) would be dropping onto our desks in the next few weeks,” DiSclafani said in a separate interview about the ratcheting back up of Belleayre Resort concerns after such long dormancy. “Now, though, it’s looking more like February or March, according to Whitehead, before anyone sees anything.”
Hold ups in the submission process, he added, seemed to be coming more from the state. Not only does the DEC need to add to the existing Crossroads DEIS ample documentation regarding its own Belleayre plans as well as a new Unit Management Plan that addresses the Spitzer AIP, but word is that it’s also wrestling with possible changes to those plans arising alongside the major budget cut discussions currently underway in Albany. The latter are not expected to reach any form of conclusion for weeks yet, and maybe even months.
“I think the deal is that the state wants us to realize that the distant future is fast approaching,” the supervisor said. “They want us to be ready.”
Whitehead held similar meetings with officials at the neighboring Delaware County Town of Middletown, as well as with representatives of a number of the environmental non-profits that signed on to the Spitzer AIP last year.
The question of paying for consultants, though, seems to have been left up in the air, at least in official terms The DEC says it can’t cover such costs, after its own review, and has no way of forcing the developer to do so, even though Crossroads has said it would pay. Meanwhile, the town has no money budgeted for consultants on such a scale.
At the same time, DiSclafani has said that he’s worried that his town’s planners might lack the collective will to take on the giant project, given its current make-up. With one new appointment expected in January, no one expects a majority to be willing to dig deeply into a process that has already split the town and region politically over the past decade.
“That’s my fear,” he said when asked whether there was a chance the town would skip its own review of its largest project, ever.
As for when all this kicks off, on a local basis, the supervisor said no one was sure. Once an SDEIS is formally submitted, it will be subject to full review by the state DEC, which is serving as lead agency on the SEQRA process. That will require public hearings, public commentary and the possibility for issues conferences and adjudication, as happened with the resort’s first DEIS three years ago.
“Apparently, this is all very much up in the air,” DiSclafani said. “Whitehead was unsure where it would go. And he noted that all the side questions regarding funding issues don’t come under the review’s purview.”
Middletown Supervisor Len Utter, meanwhile, recently answered questions about his own interactions with Whitehead by stating that primarily, the questions he was asked were about community character, which he answered by describing how his town was 50 years ago.
No word was released, as of press time, from any of the environmental groups Whitehead was purported to have spoken to. Whitehead himself was on vacation through next week.
“We were neither invited nor did we know they were happening,” Crossroads spokesperson Joan Lawrence-Bauer said this week of the recent meetings. “As to progress on the SDEIS, we are months away from any submissions.”
Later, in a separate press release, she indicated that, despite the worries expressed by DiSclafani, the Belleayre Resort developers would pay for local review if needed.
“The taxpayers of Shandaken and Middletown can rest easy that every relevant environmental detail and regulation will be enforced by the appropriate state and city agencies,” Lawrence-Bauer wrote. “There will come a time in the next year when the Belleayre Resort project will apply to the planning boards of Shandaken and Middletown for requisite permits to build the project. Crossroads has for years assured the towns that at the point when their respective planning boards are called upon to commence their review of the project the developer will provide the funds necessary for them to engage appropriate consultants.”
As to all questions and discussion regarding the holiday happenstances, the spokeswoman was terse.
“There is nothing, to our knowledge, hitting,” she wrote in an e-mail. “So that is a comment without merit.

The $90,000 is more precisely $91,417 in grant funds to be provided by the State’s Environmental Protection Fund, through the Esopus-Delaware Corridor Revitalization Strategy. The project will involve a “regional visioning process” that will be facilitated by conspirators in the towns of Andes, Hurley, Middletown, Olive and Shandaken as well as the villages of Fleishmanns and Margaretville, with the aid of the landscape architecture program at the SUNY School of Environmental Science and Forestry. (ESF)
“Part of (the grant) will go to The Catskill Center (for Conservation and Development), part will go to SUNY ESF because design students are going to help municipalities come up with individual plans along the corridor,” explains Chase, who is also a vice president of the Catskill Center. “For Olive, we’d like to go through a ‘visioning.’ We’ve not done that, although some of our neighbors have. (The Center’s former Regional Planner) Helen Budrock did this for Phoenicia, Middletown, Fleishmanns, Arkville and Margaretville, trying to help the community decide for itself what it is they want to have help with, what they want to change and, yes, beautify.”
What is meant by “Visioning” here would appear to be a study of certain areas along 28 and the Esopus Creek to imagine what they might look like after some creative improvements are made. Olive supervisor Brendt Leifeld thought immediately of sidewalks when the topic was brought up, “so people could park their car and walk around a little community center.”
“In Boiceville, we don’t have any sidewalks,” Chase concurs, mentioning the Boiceville area as a prime focus of attention for several reasons. “We’re getting a new sewage treatment plant. There are a lot of things we can do for ourselves, with a little help. I need to put together a group of community people who have an interest in the Boiceville area to conceive new project ideas to bring the community together. We don’t even have a main street. An idea in mind goes toward having one in the Boiceville area. I’d like to have something develop both there and the Shokan area but we only have money for along the Esopus.”
Sorting out the organizations and programs involved is a bit like trying to figure out the number of transgenic species in your breakfast cereal. Possibly because of linkage to the NYS Dept. of State’s Local Waterfront Revitalization Program, a focus on water seems to be an ingredient, as it is in Margaretville’s make-over.
“We’ve got a number of things happening here,” Chase observed. “We’ve got the ‘scenic byway’ portion. We’ve got the (intermunicipal) Central Catskills Collaborative (CCC), which is to work together under the DOS grant and that’s the $90 k (sic) oriented to the east branch of the Delaware and the Esopus...”
The CCC was formed to protect the regional assets held in common by the 7 villages and towns along the 28 corridor which passed resolutions this year to commit representatives to the endeavor. Part of the idea is to form a regional consciousness and pride although there may be a Hegelian dialectical twist in the inevitable competition for funds, there’s no sign, yet, of a “Long Road Law” to share the grant money with other towns not directly situated on the east-west highway and compliment the “Large Parcel Law.” That may only be because Albany legislators have been too busy polishing their rat skills to think about the Catskills.
Partnering with neighbors, Olive with Shandaken and Hurley, Shandaken with Fleishmanns and Olive, and so on, may in fact help forge a greater regional identity than the United Nations’ designation of the Catskills as a world “biosphere region.” Or, at least that’s one of the desired future outcomes for the Collaborative. Some dreams can come true. One of SUNY’s ESF “Vision 20/20” goals, for instance, conceived in April 2001, included as a “major target to achieve” by the year 2020, was to “(b)e a major player for environmental consultation by business, government, grantmakers and the like.” Their role in this project seems to confirm that they’re well on their way to achieving that goal.
An ESF aim of coaching “stewardship of both the natural and designed environment” echoes the Catskill Center’s description of “community visioning” with themselves as a “third neutral party” working “(t)hrough a series of facilitated workshops, our staff leads communities through a process that helps them formulate a broad vision for the future, pinpoint strengths and weaknesses, develop a series of specific project ideas and prioritize those projects for implementation.”
Helen Chase has been mulling a few raw ideas about presenting an attractive face to Route 28, herself, considering the former Trail Nursery property that the town is now testing on the real estate market and behind which the treatment plant is scheduled to reside.
“I’d like the town to keep (the property),” she muses. “Personally, I would like to see a new town office there.”
That’s not all. She sees enough open space for a community garden, a “meandering sidewalk” through the businesses, along the shoreline of the Esopus, past the plant and the new town office. A perfect place to stroll and dream about a better economy.
More will be learned about the possibilities at the next meeting of the CCC at the Pine Hill Community Center, a “central location for wintery weather,” as Chase points out.
If there was a walkway along the Esopus bank now, with benches along the way, we might see our neighbors and visitors sitting there pondering questions like “Why don’t grants come in round numbers?” or “When will the Wall Street evangelists on the NPR Marketplace radio show admit that their bosses’ economic claptraps are collapsing in a crescendo of corruption while our no account federation of elected high officials are erasing the word ‘accountability’ from the statutes?” Thoughts like that, maybe. Perhaps just sitting, feeling relieved that the President-elect’s internal investigation cleared him and his organization of any involvement in that messy “buy a seat in Illinois” affair. Or maybe just watching the water go by. There’s a lot of things you can do when you have a scenic walkway by the water.
If the walk is covered by snow, there’s an alternative, according to Olive councilman Peter Friedel, who has just announced that he’s arranged for discounts at the Belleayre Ski Center for Olive residents. An excellent opportunity to meet our partners in open conspiracy at the western end of the Central Catskills region.

“I don’t get it,” one churchgoeer was heard telling another outside of the remaining parish church in Phoenicia last Sunday. “The archdiocese doesn’t get rid of anything.”
The current sell-off comes after years of changes, though.
Earlier this decade, the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette, who founded the parish with the building of the Phoenicia parish church in 1902, handed over control of their parish to the Archdiocese of New York after an indiscrete case involving a former pastor forced a settlement.
In January 2007, the archdiocese announced plans for a major realignment that called for closing some churches, parishes and schools. St. Francis De Sales was listed as a parish that would disappear once the plan was finalized. That would have meant the closure of the main church in Phoenicia and its two mission churches, one in Boiceville and one in Allaben.
Upon hearing word of a plan to eliminate the parish, members of the congregation formed a committee to convince the archdiocese to reconsider and the archdiocese ultimately decided to close the parish’s two mission churches, Our Lady of Lourdes in Allaben and Our Lady of La Salette in Boiceville, but retain the parish and a full complement of daily services at the Phoenicia church.
At the time of the decision, there were no plans to sell the mission churches, but the Rev. Phillip Tran, pastor at St. Francis De Sales, said the archdiocese had eventually reversed itself.
Our Lady of La Salette is on 1.1 acres and has a list price of $179,000. Our Lady of Lourdes is on three-fourths of an acre and has a price of $129,000. The church, built in 1879, is listed as one of the town of Shandaken’s historic structures.
While no one wants to see the churches sold, Tran said, the parish will at least reap some benefits of the sales.
“Part of the money would come back to our church,” he said. “I’m not sure what percentage, though.”
Father Christopher Berean of St. Mary’s of the Snow Parish in Saugerties, who oversaw the parish for several years after its shift from the Missionaries to the Archdiocese, based in New York City, said that he felt for those who were hurting because of the loss of their home churches, but understood the main office’s decision to sell.
“They were wonderful, nice things, but also a financial burden,” Father Berean said, remembering how he used to feel traveling from his main church three miles in either direction to the mission churches also under his wing. “It was like having a second home that you paid to keep heated and clean so you could have lunch there once a week.”
Continuing, Berean pointed out that the idea of mission churches, and the increasing number of ecclesiastical buildings becoming residential homes or businesses in recent years, comes as the result of the changes of the last century… just as some of the old-timers have been saying.
“These churches were all built during a day when people walked or rode horses to get places. Things have changed,” he said. “They were nice, but it’s like losing that time when doctors made house calls. I feel bad for the people who loved their church but have to also see this from a practical point of view.”
Father Berean paused, as if in memory of his Sundays past.
“They were nice,” he said. “But they were luxuries for a poor parish.”