Budget Worries Hit The Town Level

This time he and the town board were accused of holding back funds previously promised to a local non-profit organization, and asked to make a commitment for the filling of flower boxes over the coming summer, half a year away.
DiSclafani, a Democrat, has come under fire recently, suffering challenges from what remains of the town’s Republican hierarchy for supposedly playing fast and loose with taxpayer money and not always following proper procurement procedures.
At the recent meeting, the Executive Director of the SHARP Committee, originally set up as a fundraising tool for the town, asked the board to explain why they refused to authorize the release of $2000 in funds to the agency, which recently took over a Phoenicia-based beautification project.
“We’re at a little budget crunch at this point,” DiSclafani said.
It was eventually determined that Kibe was asking for 2009 funds, and a future budgeting promise not included in the town’s recently adopted budget for the coming year. But complaining about a cut in promised funds for the current year.
After Board members explained why they refused to release the funding (moneys set aside can’t be spent before the fiscal year begins), Kibe said she was trying to get the money now because materials for the project are being ordered now. She said that she was not convinced the town board would actually come up with the promised funds if she waited.
Two years ago the project in question, which lines Phoenicia’s business district with floral arrangements, became a political football and was dubbed “Flowergate” when it was determined that the administration of Supervisor Robert Cross Jr. appeared to be funneling several thousand dollars to the program, without notifying anyone, to pay for watering chores,. As a result, the current town board, elected in 2007, planned to not fund the program at all, according to Kibe, but then allocated $2,000 to help SHARP after it contributed funds and held fundraisers throughout the season to help pay for the project.
“I thought it was going to be zero,” Kibe said at the time.
On Monday Kibe said she just wants to be sure that the town funds allocated for the coming year are secure because of the way things went earlier this year.
No matter that every agency across the county, state and nation is asking the same thing about their funding.
“We were promised $5000 this year….we got $2000,” she said.
No other discussion of SHARP projects including home heating help, weatherization of other social programs came up.
Further fiscal talk at the meeting included an exchange about a recent decision by Dsclafani to have the outside of the Town Hall partly cleaned.
“In an era of fiscal responsibility do we pay somebody $20 an hour to clean the town hall,” asked Rob Stanley, the town’s sole remaining Republican board member and a much-discussed prospective candidate for DiSclafani’s position.
“We did,” replied the supervisor, without going into a discussion of prevailing rates for such work in the region.
In other business, various housekeeping resolutions included a motion by which the board renewed its billing contract for the town ambulance service, set new water rates of $3.50 per thousand gallons for Pine Hill after a public hearing, and increased the income range for partial tax exemption of seniors and landowners with disabilities of limited income. The board also adopted a law providing property tax exemption for veterans who rendered military service during the “Cold War” and noted that new bylaws were forthcoming for the Phoenicia Water District.
The town board announced that it will be going to contract on a $5,000 grant awarded from Hudson River Valley Greenway to build a recreation trail in Pine Hill, which would encircle the hamlet’s playground and connect with Belleayre Lake and potentially connect with DEC’s Cathedral Glen Trail. The grant requires a 20% match which the town will fulfill with in-kind services from the highway department.
The town also approved a significant expansion of its Winter Recreation Program with the Belleayre Mountain Ski Center. Residents who register for the program will receive a swipe card entitling them to deeply discounted lift tickets for skiing both on Sundays($20) and on Wednesdays($25) from January 4 through March 29. The program also includes a $10 lift ticket on “Kick Off Day,” Sunday, December 14, and $25 lift tickets on December 26, 29, & 30. Residents will also have the ability to bring guests at the special resident rates 13 times. Some conditions & registration deadlines apply. For complete information, contact Program Director Tina Rice at 688-2106.
Finally, the board set its end-of-year meeting to close books on 2008 for December 29, with all bills and vouchers due by December 17. The town’s reorganizational meeting for 2009 was set for January 5.

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A Truly Watery Decision
Poncic, channeling a request to the ZBA through the town’s planning board, is asking zoners to decide whether his project falls into the category of the law that would allow him to proceed.
At a Zoning Board of Appeals meeting on November 19th the matter was discussed among board members and although one member said that he talked to the Chairman of the Ulster County Planning Board and a lawyer for the Association of Towns who both agreed that there must be a public hearing on the issue, no public hearing has yet been set.
Instead, a vote was called on the question: Is the harvesting of water for non-potable purposes (the filling of swimming pools etc.) a similar use to water bottling?
Chairman Keith Johnson voted yes along with Steve Stettine. Rolf Reiss voted no and Gary Guglielmetti abstained. Tom Hickey was absent. As a result, the board lacked a majority vote to decide the issue.
It has been tabled until the next ZBA meeting on December 17th at 7:30 pm.
The ZBA’s interpretation is a crucial one for the project. Although ZBA members are quick to remind that they are not voting on the Poncic project but only working to clear up the meaning of zoning code language, all know that the decision will make or break Poncic’s efforts. Should the ZBA decide that water harvesting, which Poncic plans, is a similar use to water bottling, it paves the way clear for Poncic to seek approval from the Planning Board, which had previously approved the project only to see that decision overturned by the courts.
Should the zoners decide it is not similar in nature then Poncic has no grounds for project approval.
At the last ZBA meeting, the hair splitting on such had begun… along with conjecture about whether a decision would best be left until the new year, and a new board. Different legal opinions as to whether the ZBA needed to hold a public hearing on the subject were raised. There were also opinions about the interpretation itself, with one board member, Woodland Valley resident Rolf Reiss, saying that his understanding of the law is that it refers to related uses for an existing water bottling project.
Others, like Chairman Johnson and Stettine, believe they are being asked if water harvesting is kind of like water bottling.
Should the majority of the board agree with the latter interpretation then Poncic can move forward. But much debate is expected on the 17th.
Assuming that Guglielmetti gets the information he needs to make a decision and Hickey, who was absent last month due to emergency surgery, appears and is prepared to vote, there may be another attempt at scheduling a public hearing, which would put the matter over into January.
Making matters more interesting is the fact that terms are ending for Stettine and Planning Board chairman Gerry Setchko at the end of this month. This week Supervisor Peter DiSclafani announced that both seats “are available” and he has begun advertising for applicants.
Stay tuned…

Setting Healthy Priorities

Preparing For Worse

We’ll put aside for a future moment the colossal coup which occurred behind the taxpayer bailouts of this year and all of the underplayed political implications associated with them to take a quick gander at the fallout from the bailouts.
As we await the final sorting out of the New York State budget, Michael Berg, Director of Family of Woodstock, expresses apprehension about what the figures will mean to his organization.
“Our greatest danger is in the cuts that are going to come from the state in the 2009-2010 budget,” said Berg as he assessed the growing influence of the Wall Street meltdowns on the local economy. “If they’re going to have to cut out those billions, it’s going to have a huge impact on us and our ability to respond to the needs of our community at a time when those needs are going to be greater.”
Family’s ability to address human problems in Ulster County is funded by individuals and groups like the Ulster Savings Foundation and the Mary K. Cosmetics Foundation but, as Berg breaks it down; “(t)he bulk of our funding comes from states and federal monies. We fund-raise a substantial amount, about 12 or 13% of our overall budget, and we also get money from United Way, for which we’re very grateful, and we get some from local governments. A very small piece of our income is from program service fees. Very few of our programs charge any fees at all.”
As cities and communities across the country report an alarming rise in hunger and homelessness, states like New York and California, which have been heavily invested in the securities markets, are expected to be hit hardest as the next forecasted stage of the meltdown arrives in the form of commercial real estate collapses. As malls close and critical sales tax revenues fall, it is anticipated that some downward burden-shifting will occur from federal and state assignments to county and town budgets. Meanwhile, supplies at food pantries across the nation were at unprecedented lows for the Thanksgiving holiday.
“What we’re seeing (at Family) is a lot more people utilizing our food pantries and a lot of people coming in who have never been in before-people that are working and still can’t put food on their table and make their ends meet,” observed Berg, who has been involved in Family since its inception 38 years ago. “We’re also seeing people that came in and said ‘I have no money to buy school clothes for children. We never had that before.”
Hunger, concern for the well being of their children and sheer financial desperation work like an acid on the pride of families in times of economic crisis and organizations like Family are often the first line of defense against hard times. They can see a tide rising from poverty-level residents upwards.
“I think a greater percentage of the community is financially distressed and people are being forced to make very difficult choices about whether they pay their heat, whether they pay their rent, whether they fix their car, whether they can take care of their child’s co-pay for medication,” Berg said. “It’s an either/or (situation). It’s not that I can do all those things as I may have at one time been able to.”
Although he hasn’t seen the homeless numbers spurt significantly upwards yet, Berg said Family expected to see a rise as winter sets in.
“Right now, it’s at about the level it’s been-which is high, don’t misunderstand this,” he said. “The last I heard, there were 55 families in motels and our six sheltering programs are pretty much full, so the numbers are up but they’re been up for a long time. The heart of the issue is we haven’t built affordable family housing in this county, with the exception of 80 units in Kingston, in the last 20 years... We have made a dent in creating housing for seniors and there are less seniors under the poverty level than 10 years ago but the same is not true for families.
“The gauge for rental housing is a study done by the county’s planning department that estimates the county’s vacancy rate,” Berg continued. “A healthy community will have a vacancy rate of 5%, meaning that at any given time 5% of the apartments are empty and, therefore, you have someplace to go when you need a bigger apartment. If you want a different apartment, you have some chance of finding one but, over the last 5 years in our county, the vacancy rate has varied from 1% to 1.6%, so people needing to move don’t have a place to go. Also, because of the tremendous increase in the cost of housing, more people are not able to afford to buy houses and, therefore, the pressure on rental housing is even greater because there are more people looking to rent than before.”
As recent Congressional hearings have demonstrated, there’s been a growth industry in Harassment Professionals at collection agencies greeting folks by their first name on home answering machines but the downturn, otherwise, continues to look steeper by the week as the Wall Street wizards who dug the seemingly bottomless financial pit in the first place are staying on to maintain it. Excuse me, I meant fix it. But let’s save analysis of what has happened and is happening in the world marketplace until after budget figures are handed down from the clouds in Albany.
In the meantime, Michael Berg is grateful that the bottom hasn’t dropped out of donations to Family as they try to cope with human emergency in Ulster County.
“We don’t know what our annual solicitation will bring,” Berg said. “This year we’re hoping to raise about $500,000. We’re told that people are struggling and we’re worried about it but we also have faith in the support we have in the community.”
Open 24/7, as they say, there’s someone there to answer the phone at all times and, as Berg suggests, if Family isn’t able to help, they’ll most likely know of all of the resources which are available to those in domestic difficulty and “We’ll certainly try our best to help.”
So, if you’re in need, as Michael Berg advises, “Call Family.”