Follow Up on the News
“We’ll know in about a month if there will be a motion for summary judgment,” Dunn said of the case he filed March 6, 2006 with the Northern District of U.S. District Court on behalf of two former Emerson Place employees against the complex’s Spotted Dog Ventures LLC mother company, its accounting offshoot, Kaatskill Payroll Services, and former Emerson CEO Ted Wright and employment trainer Margaret Inge on behalf of former Emerson Sales & Marketing Director Carol Martineau-Lopez and Bonnita Benjamin, former Catamount Manager and Director of Weddings and Special Events for the complex. “If they don’t file then there will be a trial in the summer and it will be a heck of a trial…fact is so much better than fiction.”
When first filing the case for Benjamin and Martineau-Lopez, Dunn described his clients allegations of sexual harassment as reading “like a cheap novel” and including numerous references by Wright and Inge about the character of local women.
“It was all about abuses of power and an employment climate that was completely out of control,” Dunn said at that time.
For the moment, Dunn said he and his clients are preparing for trial. Dunn expects, and hopes, that the matter does go before a judge and jury, claiming that the sworn testimony given during the depositions of Wright and Emerson principal Dean Gitter will be prime entertainment, along with information provided by one of Wright’s predecessor’s, Mark Johnson, and others including former Manager Jerry Jacobsen and Rich Fuqua, who replaced Martina Lopez.
Saying he is aware of Gitter’s flair for self-expression and his history of inflamatory public comments , Dunn said, “He’s going to be our best witness.”
Then he corrected himself. “No, wait. He’s going to be our second best witness. Our best witness will be Ted Wright.”
Dunn noted that the sworn testimony in all depositions taken would be public record once the proper paperwork is filed with the court. Such documents are expected to be available to the public by early May.
In other pending court cases currently affecting the town and its businesses, the case of the Woodland Community Association & Adjoining Neighbors vs. Shandaken’s Planning Board and Andrew Poncic’s Good Water Corporation continues to inch forward, following its filing in state Supreme Court last November 16, and responses filed by the Planning Board’s counsel Drayton Grant in recent weeks.
This article 78 suit challenging governmental process concerns the legality of the Planning Board’s issuance of two special use permits for Poncic’s proposed water harvesting project near the state’s Woodland Valley Campground. Plaintiffs claim these permits were issued without consideration of the town’s lawful requirements for doing so, without a proper Site Plan or required County referral, and without required presentation to, interpretations from, and variances required by the town’s ZBA.
Now before State Supreme Court Judge John Egan, a decision is expected within 60-90 days. Grant purportedly filed over 1500 pages in response to the original suit… including the entire file of near-unanimous letters filed by town residents against the project during its review process.
Also expected by summer are further briefings and a decision from a 5-judge panel in Albany on an appeal filed by counsel from the Shandaken Landowners Association in August 2006 to the dismissal on technical grounds of their Article 78 filing, which has challenged the town’s tax assessment procedure in 2005.
If reinstated on appeal, that filing will continue along with the group’s second lawsuit, alleging federal civil rights violations on the part of Supervisor Cross, Assessor Rosalie Boland, and other town officials for their role in Shandaken’s 2005 partial reassessment of private property owners with parcels larger than 20 acres.
While the Article 78 suit seeks to redress alleged unlawful procedures by the town, the Civil Rights suit seeks damages totaling $3 million, claiming the town’s actions violated the plaintiff’s rights to equal protection under the law. About 250 private landowners were impacted and about 30 of them owning approximately 17 percent of the town’s private land are represented in the matter. This suit is still in its discovery phase and is expected to continue for some time.
Back To Square One
At the April town board session, board members and audience alike were stunned when Supervisor Robert Cross Jr. read aloud a letter, faxed to his home at 4 pm that afternoon, from Masterpage Communications, which currently has a contract to build a tower on town owned land before May 2007.
Masterpage made the deal with the town a year and half ago but only got as far as the design phase and receiving approval for the project from the town planning board. Last month Masterpage owner Kevin Kellarhouse admitted to the town board that he could not build the tower and asked that the board give the lease agreement to Homeland Towers, LLC. and extend the deadline to allow Homeland to construct the facility this year.
The deal fell apart though because, according to Masterpage Attorney Christopher Buckey of the Albany based firm Whiteman, Osterman and Hanna, the main tenant slated to rent space on the tower backed out.
Buckey wrote that Homeland backed out only hours earlier Monday.
“Counsel for Homeland advised us this morning that Homeland does not intend to move forward with the assignment of the lease and construction of the telecommunications facility at the site,” Buckey stated. “ Homeland has based its decision upon its failure to secure a replacement telecommunications carrier for the site.”
Cross said that he called Homeland President Manny Vicente, and was told that Nextel backed out due to project delays and uncertainty about the projects future.
With the town back at the starting point, resident Mary Herrmann said that although the town was unsuccessful in attracting other cellular providers to Shandaken when all this began four years ago, perhaps it was time to try again.
“It looks like we’ll be heading that way,” said Cross.
Meanwhile, Verizon representatives met with Olive town officials last week to try and move forward with building a cell tower on town owned land near the Olive transfer station in Olivebridge. According to Supervisor Bert Leifeld the project is Verizon’s idea, but he and the town board are not fully convinced that Olive would benefit much from the tower in terms of enhanced cellular coverage.
Leifeld said Verizon reps displayed coverage maps that are said to estimate where wireless signal would reach.
“We questioned the maps,” Leifeld said Monday. “There was a big dead spot right in the center of town. They couldn’t explain that.”
Verizon is slated to also occupy the built but not yet operational Masterpage Tower on nearby South mountain. Verizon reps claim the Masterpage tower would not do much to supply the area around the lower basin of the Ashokan reservoir, an area that also includes parts of West Hurley. This appears to be Verizon’s explanation for why the second tower is necessary.
As a mechanism to prevent the proliferation of towers in town, Olive’s telecommunications law requires cellular providers to occupy existing towers. Leifeld is not sure that Verizon can legally erect their own since the Masterpage structure is already up. He will discuss the matter with the town attorney.
A second meeting will not be set until the Attorney offers an opinion. If Verizon is allowed to proceed then the town board will discuss other elements of the deal.
“We haven’t talked about money yet,” Leifeld said.
Although Superintendent for Business Victoria McLaren jadc presented a potential tax levy of 5.63 percent, the board has reduced the levy to 3.89 percent by asking for the use of more money from the fund balance to offset local taxes.
The board also approved a proposition for voters to purchase four buses: one 29 passenger wheelchair bus not to exceed $60,238, one 66 passenger bus not to exceed $87,378, one 20 passenger bus not to exceed $44,843, and one 65 passenger bus not to exceed $87,378. Vanacore was the only no vote.
Last year voters rejected the 29 and 66 passenger buses. The two buses in need of replacement will no longer pass inspection after the end of the school year and the district would need to look into other options for purchasing the vehicles, such as a yearly lease or borrowing the money, should the new proposition again fail. Because of obligations with union in-house drivers, the routes cannot be contracted out.
Ford thanked the public, staff and board for working with her through the recent budget process and said she “really had a good sense of community, in the past month.”
In terms of specific staffing reductions that drew out a large crowd to the meeting, it turned out that the school’s popular INDIE program was restored after a proposal to eliminate it and create an alternative program in the high school failed to muster community support. According to Ford, INDIE reduced its charge to the district by $35,000, hoping they will fundraise to fill in the gap. The district’s cost will be $150,000.
Later Ford said that proposed music teacher reductions, which also drew a large community protest, fall in line with the district’s lowering enrollment figures, which has seen Onteora lose seven elementary level classrooms since 2004. She also said the reduction of special education teacher assistants falls in line with IEP (individual education plan) needs.
At the board’s March 29 meeting. Vanacore and Patterson requested a zero budget increase, meaning department funds would be calculated upon what is spent instead of what administrators request. McLaren and Ford warned that a zero budget increase does not make fiscal sense, especially with teacher contracts up for renewal.
McLaren added at the time that the tax certiorari suit by New York City against the town of Olive and its assessment of the Ashokan Reservoir should be taken into account for all budget discussions. If Olive were to lose the lawsuit dating back to 2003, Onteora district could end up owing $14,293,667. With only $3,851,255 saved, that would leave an exposure of $11, 819,571, whose responsibility of payment would fall on all of the district’s taxpayers… handleable only through a long-term line item.
“They will not force you into bankruptcy but you will have to increase your budget,” she said, noting how by law, the district can only keep money for tax certiorari proceedings up to four years.
In regards to INDIE, currently housed off-campus, Ford had proposed moving the program to the high school. Judy Upjohn Culture and Media Studies (JUCMS) previously charged the district $180,000 for the INDIE program. Sam Hood, who founded the program with his wife Judy Upjohn, negotiated the program’s new deal with the district over the last week.
Last year’s budget season saw ASPIE, a program designed for students with high functioning autism, brought to an end as part of budget cuts.
In other matters, the OCS board accepted the passage of the March 29 EXCEL aid vote with all towns voting in favor by a wide margin. This will free up $1,862.711 of reserved money for a new boiler at Woodstock Elementary School and renovations to the High School auditorium. State aid from the EXCEL fund totals $662.711 and the State will cover 30 percent of the additional approved money. Proposition one passed with 743 voting yes and 167 voting no. Proposition two passed with 734 voting yes and 153 voting no.
Accident-Prone Hot Spot!
“We’ve been studying Route 28 since back in the early 1970s and right now the highway’s biggest problem in Ulster County is in Olive,” said county Traffic Safety Board chairman Charlie Schaller on Tuesday. “People are driving too fast, too close, and being inattentive about what they’re doing, failing to yield the right of way. They’re essentially traveling too fast to stop.”
Schaller added that with the Friday fatal accident coming on the heels of another rear-ender in Phoenicia on Thursday, April 5 and a Tuesday, April 3 situation where someone pulled onto 28 from DuBois Road without looking properly, the time for action was here. He said that over the past year, the local stretch of 28 has taken over the county’s top accident stretch from Route 209, and the lower four-lane part of Route 28 in Hurley before that.
Lower 28 had a number of major head-on and rear-ending accidents in the late 1990s before the speed limit was lowered and tightened speed enforcement was made policy by state police and the county sheriff’s department.
State police said that the April 6 accident occurred when Theresa F. O’Neil, 60 of Palenville, was eastbound on Route 28 at about 12:30 p.m. when she stopped to make a left turn onto Old Route 28, near Desilva Road and the Boiceville Inn, and was struck from behind by a car driven by Cassie Merwin, 17 of Fleischmanns. The impact pushed O’Neil’s car into oncoming traffic, where she was struck by a westbound vehicle driven by Dana Rossman, 31 of Connelly.
O’Neil was flown by helicopter to Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, where she was pronounced dead on arrival. Merwin suffered head injuries and was flown to St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie. Rossman was taken by ambulance to Benedictine and treated for neck, arm and leg pain. Police said the injuries suffered by Merwin and Rossman were not life threatening. They added that all three drivers were wearing seat belts, the airbags in the vehicles deployed, police said, and that alcohol was not a factor in the crash, which caused a seven hour detour that ended up effecting Easter weekend traffic that use Route 28 to get to homes in Delaware, Otsego and Schoharie counties to the north and west.
The April 3 accident, also in Olive, occurred when a car making a left turn onto 28 from Dubois Road in Shokan drove into the path of a westbound pickup truck causing the pickup to cross into oncoming traffic, flip over and land upside down in a ditch next to the eastbound lanes. The driver of the pickup and his passenger had to be removed from the vehicle by emergency service personnel and all three of the people involved were taken to area hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries.
On April 5, an accident involving an allegedly drunk driver sent a woman to the hospital. Police said she was westbound on Route 28, near state Route 214 in Phoenicia, when she was rear-ended as she waited to make a left turn onto South Road. The man in the rear vehicle, Clinton Cure Jr., 54 of Highmount, was charged with drunken driving and assault. The woman was taken to Benedictine Hospital with head injuries. Cure was not injured.
“I started doing a study not long ago on teen drivers,” said Schaller, speaking from an office at the Sheriff’s new headquarters in Kingston. “Sometimes you don’t see the trees for the forest…”
According to Schaller, there were 35 fatal accidents involving teenagers in some way during the period from January 2000 to March 1 of this year. During that same time, 29 teenagers died from such accidents, 36 were seriously injured. Nearly three to one of the involved were males.
“The largest percentage were 17 year olds, followed by 20 year olds, 19 year olds, 18 year olds and then 16 year olds,” Schaller added. “Six involved DUIs.”
As for the highway itself, Schaller noted that for the stretch of 28 in county that’s two lane, he’s found that the average driver tends toward 15 miles over the speed limit. As a result, rear-ending is a problem; although he’s also seen a rise in the number of accidents caused by people misjudging the break in traffic they are pulling out into.
“The statement we hear over and over again is, ‘We looked but didn’t see,’” he went on to say. “People are paying attention to their cell phones, radios, CD players, I-Pods, food and drink. One person was even reading a newspaper. They call it multi-tasking… People think it’s a joke, but it’s been proven one’s chance of being in an accident increases by six times once one starts talking on a cell phone. They say they can drive one-handed, but forget they have only one brain, and you don’t do anyone any favors using it on something other than driving when you’re on the road.”
So what’s the solution? A lower speed limit?
Schaller says the Route 28 speed limit’s fine as is… the problem are the numbers of people driving over it. He said greater enforcement crackdowns will be needed, utilizing state police, the sheriff’s department, and local police, including the New York City DEP.
“There’ll be a lot of tickets issued, which will make for a lot of unhappy motorists,” he said. “But it’s for everyone’s safety…”
Schaller added that detours caused by overstretched investigators reporting from accident sites pose their own dangers. Something has to be done.
“”The bottom line is that to stop such accidents, we need people to slow down and stop trying to multitask when they’re driving,” he said. “I see all the crashes that occur in Ulster County and follow the hot spots. It’s not a good distinction to have.”
In other words… be careful. Drive safe.
“The water’s too cold,” Hank protested when I asked him to take me fishing on April 2. “The fish aren’t moving yet. Call me in three weeks.”
“It has to be this week!” my editor insisted. “April 1 is opening day. And freezing in the water is part of the experience.”
I called Hank back and explained, “I don’t have to catch anything. I just have to experience fishing.”
“Okay, but you have to get a fishing license—that’s $19—and you need hip boots, which are $60.”
I called a fishing friend, who said he could lend me hip boots, but he wasn’t going to be in town until later in the week. “I’ll be fishing near Saugerties on opening day,” he said.
“But isn’t the water too cold to catch anything?”
“Yes, but I don’t care.”
He told me Dick’s Sporting Goods has hip boots for $20, and I figured I could use them for other stream-related activities, so I went to the mall and sprang for a pair. I got my fishing license at Morne Imports in Phoenicia, where I met up with Hank at 11:00 on a chilly, breezy Monday morning.
He looked at my hip boots and shook his head. “You should have felt soles. The Esopus is very slippery.” His $450 chest waders have waterproof liners that fit into felt-soled boots. “You’ll just have to be really careful,” he shrugged, and we headed to Glenbrook Park in Shandaken for a casting lesson. “I like to start people on the grass. Once you get on the creek, the water is gonna distract you.”
In the truck, he warns me again that we probably won’t get near a fish. “The water is 37 degrees today. We’ll use flies that sink. When it’s cold, the fish are sitting down there on the bottom. They’re lethargic. They’re not even gonna look up, but they’ll eat if you put something in front of them. You might be able to catch something with worms.” But he doesn’t offer to use worms.
If he weren’t going out with me today, Hank says, he’d fish on the Ashokan Reservoir. “There you can get five- or six-inch brown trout. As the ice retreats, they sit at the edge, looking for food. And they taste good—like the finest steaks. If you want to fish for dinner, that’s the place to go. But I like fishing the creek better.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s alive, it moves. It’s more of a challenge. One of my clients was this guy from Long Island who had a 36-foot boat. After I took him on the creek for the first time, he couldn’t wait to get home and tell his wife what it was like.”
He says our best chance is to fish the oxygenated water where streams enter the Esopus. Since November, the rainbow trout have been up in the tributaries, where they have just finished spawning and whence they are now heading back to the reservoir. At the park, Hank takes out a $150 graphite rod, one of the two he lets clients use. He joins the halves of the pole and quickly threads a neon orange line through the metal loops spaced along the slender, flexible shaft. Usually he spends half an hour orienting beginners to leaders, tippets, knots, fly lines, but we want to get into the water quickly. We go out on the grass, and he shows me how to cast. “You bring the rod back to one o’clock, hesitate while the line goes back, then bring it forward to eleven o’clock. Seventy-five percent of your energy goes into sending it back and only 25 percent into bringing it forward.”
I practice, struggling with the details—straight wrist, elbow glued to side, the length of the pause, the angles. It feels good, a languid motion somewhere between gentle and forceful. After a number of patient corrections from Hank, we put on our hip boots and waders and drive down to the creek.
He has already checked out his favorite angling spots. There’s a great one in Boiceville, but the gage there is reading 900 cfs (cubic feet per second), according to the U.S. Geologic Service website, which he checks frequently, also noting figures from the gages at Allaben, Cold Brook, and the Shandaken Tunnel portal. “The water’s too high at Boiceville,” Hank says, “We’d probably get knocked over.”
One of the gages also reports water temperature, which is how he knows it’s 37 degrees today. “The fish don’t start happening until it’s about 52,” he says. “At 58, it gets really great.”
“What temperature is too hot?”
“Seventy. They can’t get enough oxygen. When it’s really hot like that, the ethical guides quit working. The stress of fighting wears the fish out, and when you throw them back, they’ll die.”
“Wait a minute—throw them back? Don’t you eat your catch?
“I kill two fish a year to eat. One in the spring, one in the fall. I can’t kill the rainbows. They’re too beautiful.”
“But isn’t a painful for a fish to get hooked and then released?”
“Yeah, but not much. I’ve had hooks in my hands, in my head. When you catch ‘em on a fly, it’s so different. On worms, they get down in the gullet—you almost have to kill the fish. With new customers, on their first fish, we use a regular hook. Then I ask if I can bend the barb back. That way, as soon as you touch the fly, the hook pops right out of the fish’s mouth. Actually, my smart-ass answer is, when does it hurt the carrot, when you pull it out or when you cut it up?”
We pull over by the creek, and Hank assembles a fiberglass rod. I’m not a real client, so he’s going to fish alongside me. “I never carry a rod when I work. How would you feel if you’re my customer, and I’m catching all the fish?”
He opens two boxes crammed with flies, bits of fuzz (feathers, fur, wool) tied onto hooks. These shapes attempt to imitate stream insects of various species in both adult and larval, or nymph, forms. The choice of lures depends on what species are currently active or hatching, as well as how active the fish are. Extras of each type are required in case a fly breaks off the line. Flies are only about $1.95 each, but you need a lot of them. “I can’t afford it,” says Hank, who ties all his own flies.
He teaches an annual series of fly-tying classes at the Phoenicia Library. The classes are free, but he leans on the students to make a donation to the Jerry M. Bartlett Memorial Fishing Collection of books, flies, and memorabilia, housed at the library. He also teaches classes for children, who are not allowed to pay. His nine-year-old granddaughter is an enthusiastic fly-tier.
Hank attaches flies to our lines, bending back the barbs with pliers, and leads me down a depressingly litter-strewn bank to the water. As we advance into the current, he stands downstream in case I slip. (I don’t slip.) He points out holes among the underwater rocks, which he can see through his glare-cutting polarized sunglasses. Hank is solicitous without being condescending, keeping me in water that’s fast enough to be exciting but won’t knock me over. Thirty-five percent of his customers are women.
When we’re almost knee-deep in the water, I start casting toward an area of flat water alongside the rapids. The fish rest in the shallows but will strike at prey passing on the current, Hank explains. Sunlight and wind bounce off the streaming water, and the motion of the rod joins their rhythms. I fall into a regular pattern of draw, fling back, pause, toss forward, arc gently to the side (“mending the line”), turn slowly to follow the fly’s drift, wait a few beats when it stops, then repeat. I forget about the fish. I could do this all day if my arm weren’t getting tired.
We move downstream a few times, then upstream, but no fish nibble at our lures. My feet, to my surprise, are not cold, encased as they are in thick rubber and two pairs of wool socks. Even my bare, wind-whipped hands do not suffer, kept nearly lukewarm by the action of casting. Eventually, life’s other duties beckon, and we leave the water.
On the drive back to town, we talk about the local economy and Hank’s pet peeve, people who ride inner tubes down the creek. “In the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, every little store on Main Street sold fishing flies,” he says. Today, with two thriving tubing businesses in town, the fisherfolk have to compete with tubers for space on the creek. “Kayakers aren’t usually a problem,” says Hank. “They stay out of our way. But tubers—one, they don’t have much control over where they’re going, and two, they don’t care. When fishermen come to town, they spend a lot more money than tubers, who are just gonna buy a bologna sandwich and a six-pack.” At the height of tubing season, he sometimes takes clients to Roscoe, where tubing is banned, or Margaretville.
We make one more stop for a photograph. “Fishing involves a lot of different sciences,” I comment as we put our shoes back on. “Physics, biology, entomology, hydrology. Plus the art of tying flies, and the beauty of nature. No wonder people get so caught up in it.” Hank says a basic outfit for a beginner isn’t that costly. If only I had just a little more money, a lot more time, and fewer obsessions already in place.