Newsbriefs

3/26/2008

Gas Spill Update
The Country Store in Phoenicia should be able to reopen soon. Closed since January, the owners, Verona Oil Inc., have suffered schedule set backs due to the discovery of fuel contamination underground at the site. But, according to Wendy Rosenbach, a NYS Department of Environmental Conservation spokeswoman, Verona Oil was granted permission to continue the job of installing new underground gas tanks at the Main Street site on March 10th when the company signed another consent order with DEC.
That consent order spells out plans for a full scale spill investigation on the site to determine how bad the contamination is.
“As long as we have a plan for the investigation they can put the new tanks if they want,” Rosenbach said Tuesday.
It remains unclear when the investigation would be complete, or if the investigation would prompt a requirement to dig up the new tanks as the details of the consent order were not available at press time.

Ski Together?
Four counties and five ski areas of the Catskill Mountain Region have finally announced a new marketing initiative to promote spring skiing in the Catskills… harking back to the time, two decades ago, when the region had its own fledgling (and ultimately undone) Ski The Catskills program. Representatives from Belleayre, Holiday, Hunter, Plattekill and Windham Mountains, along with leaders from Delaware, Greene, Sullivan and Ulster Counties, hosted a press conference earlier this month at the Ulster County Office Building announcing details of the plan.
The effort is the result of meetings this past winter between the five ski area businesses, four county tourism directors, and the leaders of Greene and Ulster’s economic development agencies. As an immediate outgrowth, the ski centers have launched billboards on strategic highways with a carefully crafted message letting passersby know that they could have played more and traveled less if they had chosen to ski the Catskills.
The signs direct travelers to the Catskill Association of Tourism (CATS) website, VisitTheCatskills.com, where a 25% discount to anyone presenting a lift ticket from anywhere outside of New York is prominently featured. Furthermore, to maximize exposure and improve the chance for success, operators of each mountain have posted the
promotion to their homepages and CATS has sent out an e-mail blast to thousands of subscribers.
“This partnership greatly enhances our overall marketing efforts,” said Belleayre Director of Operations, Tony Lanza, whose state-owned mountains backers had earlier called for boycotts of competitors, and neighboring counties’ recreation efforts. “The additional revenue generated will benefit all of the businesses and local governments in the area. I appreciate the leadership of Ulster and Greene counties for bringing everyone together.”
“Hunter Mountain is thrilled by this joint campaign between the winter sports areas of the Catskills,” said Brian Czarnecki, Director of Marketing for Hunter Mountain. “The five winter resorts and the surrounding towns hold so much natural splendor for skiers and riders traveling from New York City, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New Jersey,”
“I cannot overstate the significance skiing has on our regional economy,” Ulster County Executive Mike Hein said. “This collaboration between multiple county governments and the private sector is an innovative approach to ensure that the regional ski industry remains strong and vital and that it continues to generate jobs. This is a great first step toward future collaboration.”
The campaign was paid for through a combination of county and private funds with CATS utilizing I Love New York regional matching funds for part of the cost and the ski areas funding part of the cost.
Concurrent with the announcement, the state changed its mind on an earlier-announced end-of-March closing date for its Belleayre property, allowing Lanza to keep it open as long as possible this season.

Board Candidate?
The Onteora Central School District announces that petitions are available to nominate candidates for the Board of Education. Petition forms may be picked up at the Onteora Administrative Offices, 4166 Route 28, Boiceville, New York, from the District Clerk between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. each business day. Petitions will require at least 81 qualified voter signatures and must be returned to the Clerk by 5:00 P.M., Monday, April 20, 2009. There are three (3) vacancies for Board Seats:
Voting at Large is for three vacancies to be filled, including two Three Year Seats to run July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2012 and the unexpired term of Ralph Legnini, commencing on May 19, 2009, and expiring on June 30, 2011.
Candidates must have one year residence in the school district at the time of the election. The Annual Meeting and Election will be held on Tuesday, May 19, 2009, in the four elementary schools.

Collaboration!
The Central Catskills Collaborative, set to meet again in the coming week, is moving ahead with plans to submit an application for designation of the Route 28 corridor as a Scenic Byways thoroughfare, raising its potential funding profile in these difficult times, with the promise of $50,000 in new funding from the Catskill Watershed Corporation.
“The CWC wants to fund the Corridor project,” CWC Executive Director Alan Rosa has said of his regional entity’s funding, referring to the scenic byway nomination.
Peter Manning, the Regional Planner for the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, said the CWC funds would be used to prepare a corridor management plan.
The plan, a requirement for Scenic Byway nomination, will be the Collaborative’s vision of the roadway, offering ideas as to how best to show the connections that all the communities have with one another.
“Route 28 has a story to tell,” he said.
Margaret Bryant, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at SUNY ESF, spoke at a recent CCC meeting about how her College’s design studio in Delhi is putting the finishing touches on some design ideas expected to be included in the corridor management plan.
Bryant said the design team, which has visited the region to collect data, has focused on three categories: tourism, recreation and access to water.
“The strength of this project is that it is an idea generator,” said Bryant.
The Central Catskills Collaborative is a group of designated representatives from seven municipalities along over 50 miles of the Route 28 Corridor: The Towns of Andes, Hurley, Middletown, Olive, and Shandaken, and the Villages of Fleischmanns and Margaretville. These communities are working together to protect and promote the resources along the Route 28 Corridor. The communities are in unique partnership involving the landscape architecture program of SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and the regional non-profit, The Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, Inc. Together they will conduct community visioning exercises and produce both corridor-wide and site-specific designs for communities along the Esopus Creek and the East Branch of the Delaware River.
The Collaborative will host Sherret Chase and Jim Infante of the Friends of the Catskill Interpretive Center at its next meeting the evening of March 26, when the guest speakers will provide an overview and update on the long-envisioned Catskill Interpretive Center proposed near Mount Tremper.
The mission of the Friends is to encourage the State of New York, in conjunction with local governments and the private sector, to build the Catskill Interpretive Center. The center will serve as a public gateway to the Catskill Region and become an important focus point of environmental, cultural, educational, and economic activities in the Catskills.
The public is invited to attend the meeting, which will be held at the Andes Town Hall on Thursday, March 26 at 6PM.
For more information, contact Peter Manning, Catskill Center Regional Planner, at 586-2611or visit www.catskillcenter.org.
For more information about the CCC please visit www.margaretville.org/ccc.

Referrals Ending?
The Ulster County Planning Department is asking municipalities to reduce the number of referrals to the county agency from their own planning boards as part of a new streamlining effort.
UCPD head Dennis Doyle said that the decision was based on the county’s new charter, and not his own department’s recommendations.
“We had a change in the county Planning Department’s function relative to the charter where we’re now going to be reviewing subdivisions and we also have jurisdiction outside a 500-foot rule (for projects near municipal borders) under (state) General Municipal Law,” he said. “We are meeting with communities to discuss these changes.”
Among changes in county Planning Board policy is adding a week to the deadline for municipalities to submit material. Doyle said a waiver would be available for requests involving minor actions.
Doyle encouraged local officials to contact the county Planning Department when state agencies are involved in applications.
“We will act as essentially a gateway agency for all of the agencies that are under review at the county level,” Doyle said. “The would be the Health Department and the Public Works Department and we’ll reach out to the New York state Department of Transportation where we have some leverage to ask them to attend, and set up meetings so that an applicant can come up and meet with all of us at a single point.”
The Planning Department also recently sponsored a Land Use Leadership Roundtable at the SUNY Ulster Campus in Stone Ridge where County Administrator Mike Hein suggested further streamling of local review processes to ensure projects under review take no longer than five years to get through such processes…

Empire Zones…
A Kingston-based wine and liquor distributor relocating to Greene County will take state Empire Zone tax benefits with it, thanks to a decision by the city’s Common Council earlier this month. The decision to aid Empire Merchants North, which is moving its operations and dozens of employees from Kingston to an industrial park in Coxsackie, was made in light of worsening economic conditions and the city and county’s need to do all it can to make sure residents are employed, even if that involves travel.
Officials with Empire Merchants North have said they will do everything they can to make sure the 150 employees who live in Kingston and the surrounding area stay employed.
The Empire Zone benefits involve a limited number of opportunities in each area where they are located. In recent years, Kingston has been requested to extend their benefits to Shandaken for possible use by the proposed Belleayre Resort project still in its environmental review stage. Discussion of the matter was tabled pending completion of that process.

Bipartisanship?
Ulster County’s legislative leaders have issued a call for a new era of bipartisan cooperation via Majority Leader Brian Cahill and Minority Leader Glenn Noonan’s recently delivered 2009 platform addresses, saying the county could no longer sustain old-style bickering.
“Each of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, are in this together.We owe it to the residents of Ulster County to end our tolerance for petty bickering and obstruction,” said Cahill, of the Town of Ulster, referring to the county’s new administrator position. “No longer saddled with day-to-day oversight responsibilities, we should dedicate our time to delving deeper into the substantive background of the issues before us. We should be creative, innovative and now, to a new degree, objective.”
He then called on making the county more business-friendly, tackling local domestic violence issues; reducing childhood obesity, and instituting an “Arts Mean Business” campaign, among other imperatives.
Noonan, R-Gardiner, called on legislators to lay out a less aggressive agenda for the upcoming year and was highly critical of Democratic legislators and Democratic County Executive Michael Hein, while also calling for bipartisanship.

Reval Update…
Municipal assessors in Ulster County would like the state to place all assessors on an equal footing by requiring re-assessments at the same time.
Right now, they vary from municipality to municipality and in Ulster County, they have asked lawmakers to adopt memorializing legislation asking Albany to do that. The issue came before the Administrative Services Committee of the County Legislature Tuesday.
“Assessments in all the towns and the city (of Kingston) will all be done on a regular basis so that you don’t have one town every five years, one town every 10, one town every seven,” noted Committee Chairwoman Jeanette Provenzano.. “This way, you get them on the same cycle and they are all done at the same time.”
The full County Legislature must now vote on the measure before it is sent to Albany.

Emerson Changes
Emily Fisher and Dean Gitter, owners of Emerson Resort & Spa, recently announced the appointment of Naomi Umhey as chief operating officer and Tracy Lynch as general manager. Between them, the two long-time executive team members share nearly 27 years experience working for the property.
“It is no surprise that these difficult economic times have required us to re-examine our business plan and approach,” said Fisher. “Naomi and Tracy’s experience, creativity and insight have been instrumental in streamlining and developing new efficiencies which we believe will ensure our future success.
Previous CEOs and general managers at the resort, which includes two hotels, a spa and a shopping area, have included Gitter’s son, former Woodstock radio personality Ron Van Warmer, and Ted Wright, whose term included a tragic fire that took the old Emerson Inn’s former home and is currently the focus of an ongoing lawsuit involving charges of sexual harassment against local female employees of the resort set for completion this coming autumn.
Umhey’s career with the Emerson includes management positions in almost every aspect of the resort’s operations, including service as General Manager of the Country Store, General Manager of Maintenance, IT and Property Services, and consulting work for the Company’s real estate and land holdings operations.
Starting in 1998 in retail for the Country Store, Lynch was quickly promoted to the accounting department where she gained extensive knowledge of the property and its operations. After serving as financial controller, she worked as the Emerson’s Sales Director.
In their new roles, the Emerson’s owners have stated, both Umhey and Lynch will be responsible for financial planning, goal setting and overall daily operations.

Jail Finale?
While there still is some work to be done at the Ulster County Law Enforcement Center, county officials say the $1.73 million settlement reached in recent weeks with project management firm Bovis Lend Lease and architectural firm Crandell Associates closes the books on the county’s dealings with the nearly 20 contractors who had a hand in the most troubled construction project in the county’s history.
A final accounting of the bungled project’s expense is still at least months away, but rough estimates put the total cost of the jail construction at more than $91 million.
As a result of earlier settlements reached with some vendors, the county assumed responsibility for completing some of the work for which vendors otherwise would have been on the hook… because it would prove ultimately cheaper for Ulster residents
There still is several thousand dollars worth of outstanding work to be completed, including upgrades to Albert Street and the city of Kingston transfer station property that was used as a staging area during construction of the Law Enforcement Center.
Originally estimated to cost $53 million, the construction project ballooned to $72 million once all the construction bids came in to more than $95 million as the work fell nearly three years behind schedule.
To date, the county has paid out $92,717,537, but it will get $1.73 million back through the March 11 settlement with Bovis and Crandell.
The construction delays — which pushed the project’s completion from April 2004 to February 2007 — also forced the county to spend a combined $6 million to send overflow prisoners to other counties and rent space for the Sheriff’s Office.
County officials said the settlement with Bovis and Crandell — the companies that county officials blame for the cost overruns and construction delays — was the best the county could hope for. Legislature Chairman David Donaldson said that to go to trial would have delayed closing the books on the project even longer and would not have resulted in a significant payoff.
“The biggest culpability the county had was the way it hired the people it hired,” Donaldson said. He said the Republicans who controlled the county Legislature at the time the jail project was started gave Crandell an “inside track” for the architectural work despite the fact that “he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.”
He added that Bovis, also hired by the then-Republicans majority, failed to properly manage the project and that county leaders failed to keep tabs on the project.
Democrats won control of the Legislature in November 2005, having made the GOP-led jail construction a central theme of their campaign.

Drilling Dangers
A growing number of families living in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, the forefront of the new gas drilling boom under the Marcellus Shale that could move into the Catskills and local watershed region if allowed by the state, have been reporting major health difficulties tied to contamination of their drinking water wells by the controversial new process.
In Dimock township, about 150 miles north of Philadelphia, Cabot Oil & Gas has drilled about 30 wells since 2006, 20 of them just last year. Industry spokesmen have maintained that groundwater is protected by meticulous safeguards and that any chemicals used are heavily diluted and pose no health threat, while state officials say their tests have shown no reason for concern. But people who live there are convinced otherwise, according to nearly a dozen interviews recently conducted by a variety of news agencies.
Some geologists believe Marcellus has the potential to meet total U.S. natural gas needs for a decade or more. But the gas is trapped deep within layers of rock, requiring a mix of highly toxic chemicals for drilling that. Even with companies paying royalties to landowners for drilling rights and for gas recovered from their properties, many are now saying has the potential to harm entire quifers and communal sources of the region’s drinking water.
According to Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, a Pennsylvania group that opposes drilling, there have been leaks of toxic chemicals into groundwater at hundreds of natural gas drilling sites in Colorado and New Mexico. And both Cabot and state officials agree that the drilling in Dimock has released methane into the water supply, which a number of homeowners have said has made it possible for them to ignite their well water. In one case, a gas buildup blew the cap off a well.
Companies won’t disclose exactly what chemicals they use in their new methods, saying the information is proprietary, and residents complain they can’t run meaningful tests because they don’t know what to look for. The Endocrine Disruption Exchange, a Colorado research group, has identified 201 chemicals and found almost 90 percent had the potential to harm skin, eyes, and sensory organs; 50 percent could damage the brain and nervous system, and 29 percent may cause cancer.
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has meanwhile called a moratorium on use of the new processes while it researches their potential impacts.
Stay tuned…

Local Growth
There are 239 less people calling Delaware County home according to estimates released last week by the Census Bureau, which say that in July 2007 there were 46,324 residents, while one year later that number dropped to 46,085.
Nearby Sullivan County suffered near as great a loss. In the same timeframe Sullivan’s population went from 76,418 to 76,189. That’s 229 less residents.
Greene County lost 61 residents, down from 49,503 to 48,992.
In contrast, Ulster County’s population grew by 77 residents from 181,593 to 181,670.
All of these estimates represent a change of less than one percent. The data released did not include a breakdown to the Town and Village level.
New York State’s population grew by 0.3 percent to 19.5 million, according to the estimates. The state’s modest growth continues to be fueled by New York City, which has grown as its immigrant communities thrive. The larger New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island metropolitan area grew 0.4 percent to 19 million.
The numbers reflect the related trends of declining manufacturing jobs in the area and people seeking opportunities in the South and the West.

Suit Tossed
A federal court has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Coalition of Watershed Towns, seeking to void the federal government's granting of a 10-year filtration waiver for NYC's water supply. The Coalition had argued that aspects of the waiver should have been subject to SEQRA and to local review. According to its attorney Jeff Baker, the court "basically said we have no standing in the case. We don't think the decision makes sense." The Coalition will be appealing to the US Supreme Court.

College Time?
The Onteora High School Guidance Department is hosting a College Admissions Information Session on Thursday, April 2nd at 6:30pm in the High School Chorus Room (#121A). Important information about post-secondary education and the college admissions process will be presented. This workshop is essential for college-bound Juniors and their parents. However, all Onteora High School students and their parents are welcome to attend. For further information, please contact the Guidance Department at 657-2373.

Cats Rescued…
A total of 21 live cats and one dead one were removed from a residence in Woodstock and the resident, Andrea Kopp of Woodstock, was arrested earlier this month.
Kopp, 54, is charged with 22 counts of failure to provide proper food and drink to impounded animals, a misdemeanor under state Agriculture and Markets Law. She was released on an appearance ticket returnable to Woodstock Town Court.
The Ulster County SPCA investigated allegations of animal neglect at 287 Wittenburg Road in Woodstock, obtained a search warrant and found the residence in complete disarray, with garbage, cat urine, and feces all over, said SPCA Executive Director Brian Shapiro. No evidence of food or water for the cats was found.
The cats were taken to the SPCA facility in Kingston where they are receiving medical attention.

Food Bank!
On Thursday, April 2, the Phoenicia Food Bank will be holding a penny social at the Phoenicia Elementary School, from 6:00 PM on, as a benefit for its increasingly necessary activities in the community.
The Food Bank, run by Helping Hands of NY, is open at MF Whitney Phoenicia firehouse every 2nd and 4th Monday of the month. Working, aiming towards eventually being up and running every Monday of each week. Hours are from 3 to 7 PM.
The effort, up and running since last November, is currently working with upwards of 300 people each time they’re open and has to date given away over 10,000 pounds of food, including regular contributions from the Hudson Valley Food Bank and the Northeastern Regional Food Bank of New York..
Donation of gifts are being taken for the April 2 event and may be dropped off on food distribution days at the firehouse, at the Sharp Committee building in Phoenicia, or by calling 688-9825 for other locations and times.

Revocations…
President Barack Obama has finally ordered a review of George W. Bush’s guidelines for implementing legislation passed by Congress, at the same time saying that he would employ his own version of how he wants the government to follow the law.
In a memo to senior government officials, Obama said they must check with Attorney General Eric Holder before relying on any of Bush’s signing statements for guidance. Bush often issued a statement when signing a bill into law, and critics said the statements at times showed government officials how to circumvent the law if Bush disagreed with it on constitutional grounds.
“There is no doubt that the practice of issuing such statements can be abused,” Obama wrote. “Constitutional signing statements should not be used to suggest that the president will disregard statutory requirements on the basis of policy disagreements.”
Obama ordered his administration to work with Congress to let lawmakers know about concerns over legality before legislation gets to the White House for the president’s signature. He also pledged that he would use caution and restraint in writing his own signing statements, a reference to the fact that his predecessor utilized the mechanism double the amount of any of his predecessors.
Bush used his statements to circumvent Congress’ ban on torture and prohibitions against using federal tax dollars to build a permanent military base in Iraq.
The Justice Department said the memo would help officials make better decisions.

Sentenced...
A 50-year-old Phoenicia man was recently sentenced in U.S. Northern District Court in Albany by Judge Gary L. Sharpe to 6-1/2 years in prison and 10 years post-release supervision on charges he possessed child pornography. James Elsis was also prohibited from having unsupervised contact with minors and was ordered to participate in a sex offender program and to register with the state Sex Offender Registry.
Elsis, who pleaded guilty Sept. 11 to two counts of felony possession of child pornography, admitted that on or about June 16, 2006, he used a computer and his credit card to subscribe to a Web site that offered access to thousands of still and video files containing child pornography, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. On July 12, 2007, Elsis consented to the seizure of his laptop computer by federal agents, who found more than 1,000 images depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct. On Dec. 27, 2007, a federal search warrant was executed at Elsis’ residence and another computer he used was recovered. About 100 pornographic images depicting minors were found on that computer, authorities said. Elsis was arrested Dec. 12, 2007 by agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Homeland Security, which conducted the investigation.

New At CCCD
The Catskill Center for Conservation and Development has hired Lisa Jemison as its new Education Coordinator.
Jemison will be administering Green Connections, a program designed to establish a partnership between classrooms in the West-of-Hudson NYC Watershed and in New York City. The program is a yearlong extension of the Watershed Forestry Institute for Teachers (WFIT), held annually for twenty K-12 teachers in July. She will also be assisting with the implementation of the Catskill Stream and Watershed Education Program in thirty 4th-12th grade classrooms annually, among other Center programs.
Most recently, Jemison worked at the Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks (the Wild Center) as Project Manager for Public Programs and the Naturalist Cabinet. Additionally, as a Certified Interpretive Guide Course Instructor for the National Association for Interpretation, she has taught numerous weeklong courses for staff and volunteers of various organizations. Previously, Jemison also worked as an education intern at the Teton Science School in Wyoming, the Goodwin Nature Center and the Beardsley Zoo in Connecticut, and the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.
Jemison possesses a B.S. in Natural Resources Management & Engineering, and a M.S. in Natural Resources: Land, Water, and Air, with a Concentration in Education. She has conducted ecological research in Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, and nesting behavior and critical habitats of the wood turtle in Connecticut, among other research.
For more information, visit: www.catskillcenter.org.

Catskills Vision!
“2020 Vision for the Catskills,” a series of environmentally-themed lectures being presented around the region, will continue next Tuesday, March 31 at Sullivan County Community College with an illustrated talk on how advancing technological tools are helping to visualize the region in a new way.
“Geospatial Tools – A New View of New York (and your own backyard),” will be presented by Susan Hoskins of Cornell University’s Institute for Resource Information Sciences (IRIS). The 4:30 p.m. program in Seelig Theater (Building E) on the Loch Sheldrake campus, is free and open to the public. Hundred-year-old maps, large scale airphotos and sub-meter resolution satellite images remain important tools for exploring landscapes, inventorying resources and analyzing change in the environment. Over the past five years, though, geospatial tools of remote sensing, geographic information systems, and the global positioning system have experienced a fast-forward evolution as well.
Geospatial products and resources are continually collected, processed and distributed by public agencies and commercial firms. This survey of resources in New York highlights the vast array of images and data that are available for the Catskill region. With these tools, casual users and resource professionals, youth and adults, can visualize the landscape from a new perspective.
Coordinated by the Catskill Institute for the Environment (CIE), the 2020 lecture series is a continuation of a dialog on environmental issues and human interactions confronting the Catskills in the coming decade.
Remaining lectures in the series will be held Wednesday, April 8 when Christy Caridi, affiliate assistant professor of economics at Marist College, discusses “Changing Demographics in the Catskills: Implications for Environmental Policy” at Bard College; and Thursday, Apr. 16 at SUNY Ulster, Stone Ridge, where Benjamin I. Cook, a NOAA Postdoctoral Scholar at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory addresses the topic “Climate Change at Mohonk Lake.” All the talks start at 4:30 p.m. and are free.
The CIE, established in 1998, is a consortium of representatives of colleges, institutions and individuals that encourages, through symposia and research, environmental awareness, education and cooperation in the Catskill region.
For more information, contact Dr. Morton (Sam) Adams, chairman, madams@mail.nysed.gov.

Found Guilty…
On February 26, Algernon Reese was found to be guilty, by a jury trial, of “Obstructing governmental administration in the second degree,” a class A Misdemeanor of NYS Penal Law, in the Town of Shandaken Justice Court, before Judge Miranda. The prosecution was based on an incident on September 3, 2008, involving Reese and the NYS Environmental Conservation Police, who were on Reese’s property with a search warrant checking for environmental violations and damage to the Esopus Creek from a prior incident and disturbance by Reese.
Reese was found guilty of tampering with the creek’s stream course in an earlier jury trial and sentenced with a monetary fine. He will be sentenced by Judge Miranda for the current conviction on March 26.

Dollar Shift…
A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar. Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.
Persaud, chairman of consultants Intelligence Capital and a former currency chief at JPMorgan, said the recommendation would be one of a number delivered to the United Nations on March 25 by the U.N. Commission of Experts on International Financial Reform.
“It is a good moment to move to a shared reserve currency,” he said.
Central banks hold their reserves in a variety of currencies and gold, but the dollar has dominated as the most convincing store of value — though its rate has wavered in recent years as the United States ran up huge twin budget and external deficits.
Persaud said that the United States was concerned that holding the reserve currency made it impossible to run policy, while the rest of world was also unhappy with the generally declining dollar.
“There is a moment that can be grasped for change,” he said. “Today the Americans complain that when the world wants to save, it means a deficit. A shared (reserve) would reduce the possibility of global imbalances.”
Persaud said the panel had been looking at using something like an expanded Special Drawing Right, originally created by the International Monetary Fund in 1969 but now used mainly as an accounting unit within similar organizations.
The SDR and the old Ecu are essentially combinations of currencies, weighted to a constituent’s economic clout, which can be valued against other currencies and indeed against those inside the basket.
Persaud has long argued that the dollar would give way to the Chinese yuan as a global reserve currency within decades. A shared reserve currency might negate this move, he said, but he believed that China would still like to take on the role.
Meanwhile, the World Bank has warned that the world is falling into the first global recession since World War II as the crisis that started in the United States engulfs once-booming developing nations, confronting them with massive financial shortfalls that could turn back the clock on poverty reduction by years. They cautioned that the cost of helping poorer nations in crisis would exceed the current financial resources of multilateral lenders. Such aid could prove critical to political stability as concerns mount over unrest in poorer nations, particularly in Eastern Europe, generated by their sharp reversal of fortunes as private investment evaporates and global trade collapses. They called on developed nations struggling with their own economic routs to dedicate 0.7 percent of the money they spend on stimulus programs toward a new Vulnerability Fund to help developing countries.
Despite the United States’ position as the epicenter of the crisis, investors are flocking to U.S. Treasury bills and the dollar, squeezing developing nations out of global credit markets. Additionally, only one quarter of vulnerable developing countries, the World Bank said, have the ability to launch their own stimulus programs or to independently finance measures such as job-creation or safety-net programs.
The World Bank remains well financed and is positioned to almost triple spending to $35 billion this year. But it warned the scope of the need in the developing world will exceed the combined ability of major multilateral lenders, and it called on governments in major nations and the private sector to pitch in more.

Martha’s Newest
Local author Martha Frankel - whose recent memoir on gambling, “Hats & Eyeglasses,” was recently released in paperback – will be helping beautician Janea Padilha finish up her own new lifestyle book called Brazilian Sexy—with advice “on love, life, and being sexy”—as part of “a five-figure deal.”
Padilha is one of the J Sisters, the Brazilian doyennes of waxing who run the 57th Street salon where celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Lindsay Lohan, Cameron Diaz, Sarah Jessica Parker and Uma Thurman have gone to get neat and trimmed.
“In the book, I talk about what happens in the room where I work,” Ms. Padilha thas said. “My clients are always telling me I should write a book—I give all my clients very good advice about beauty, about men, about life.”
Ms. Padilha will relay her wisdom to author Frankel, who will do the actual writing of the book.
The book will be published in 2010.

People’s Garden!
With help from local schoolchildren, Michelle Obama broke ground this month on the first White House vegetable garden since World War II. The First Lady, known for her devotion to healthy eating habits and workouts, will grow 55 kinds of vegetables in the 1,100-square-foot garden, including spinach, broccoli, carrots, rhubarb, fennel, shell peas and more. One notable exception? Beets, which the president hates. The fruits and vegetables grown in the garden will be harvested by White House chefs and used for both casual family dinners and more formal affairs. Start-up costs totaled just $200.
Shortly after Obama was elected last November, chef and locally-grown food cheerleader Alice Waters volunteered herself as an advisor on food policy, a member of the president’s “kitchen cabinet.”
“I cannot forget the vision I have had since 1993 of a beautiful vegetable garden on the White House lawn,” she wrote in a letter to the Obamas. “It would demonstrate to the nation and to the world our priority of stewardship of the land—a true victory garden!”
Now, let’s all get our own growing…