Follow Up on the News
There were only a handful of onlookers at the firehouse when the votes were tallied, but all were in celebration mode. Olive Councilman Henry Rank, who owns land in the hamlet, said, “I think it’s great; Now the town won’t fold up.”
Following a study which concluded that a wastewater treatment plant would be the most efficient and effective means of treating sewage in Boiceville, the Olive Town Board agreed last year to proceed to the design phase, in which a system was designed to handle an estimated 62,240 gallons of wastewater per day from the customers within the Boiceville district. The issue of forming the district was the subject of a public hearing in March.
The May 8 vote was on whether or not to form the district. In legal terms, forming the district green lights the project. A vote against the formation of the district would have been a death knell for the plan.
A similar vote in Phoenicia earlier this year resulted in a $17 million offer from New York City being rejected, the first time in the program’s ten year history. The specter of that defeat rose again, as it seems to do every month, with questions and the need for a new letter addressing a New York City “final offer” for a system at this month’s Shandaken Town Board Meeting on May 7.
On Monday night Supervisor Robert Cross Jr. read aloud a letter from Jeffrey Graff, the acting Chief of Watershed Lands and Community Planning for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. The letter states that the City is prepared to fund the project should Phoenicia change their minds and decide to go with it.
Voters turned it down by a slim margin in February, but the City will keep the $17.2 million set aside to build the system should Phoenicia okay it by the end of June 2008.
But there is a catch. Graff’s letter requires Cross to sign an agreement by the end of the month agreeing to the City’s terms.
“If we do not receive the countersigned letter by May 31…we will assume that you do not wish to pursue this project further,” Graff wrote.
It also appears that signing the agreement prevents any further negotiation on who pays for the operation of the system, although some board members didn’t think that was the case.
Tempers flared when opponents of the project reminded the board that the community has already said no the current deal.
“Didn’t we have a vote on this already,” said Helen Morrelli.
Councilman Rob Stanley felt that the town should do whatever is necessary to keep the door for the project open because, according to Stanley, the vote in February was tainted by strong misinformation campaigns launched by both supporters and opponents.
“I don’t think the people of Phoenicia should be damned because this whole thing was mishandled,” he said.
Mike Ricciardella, a major opponent of the project, got hot under the collar over the matter. He accused Cross of mishandling the process and acting hastily. Ricciardella also strongly echoed Morelli’s notion that this decision had already made by the community when the majority of voters said no.
Cross chastised Ricciardella for raising his voice, telling Ricciardella he needed to show the people in the room more respect.
In the end it was agreed the letter would be reviewed by the town attorney. The hope is to sign the agreement with a corrective clause stating that negotiations can continue. Cross will also send copies of the letter to all Phoenicia residents and hold a public session to discuss the matter.
Meanwhile, the cost of construction of Boiceville’s collection system will be paid from a block grant from the Catskill Watershed Corporation. Operation and maintenance fees for residences will be capped at $100 per year. Businesses will be charged according to usage, with a $250 minimum fee per year. The city will pay all else, including a majority of that owed by the Onteora School main campus, whose presence in the system serves to keep costs down for others.
Councilman Bruce LaMonda was on hand for the vote count. Although not a landowner in the district, LaMonda, a frequent critic of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, said he was glad the project was approved.
“It’s an opportunity,” he said. “We would have been remiss if we didn’t help make it happen.”
The Olive town board unanimously endorsed the project on Tuesday, May 1, when CWC Executive Director Alan Rosa, engineer Henry Lamont and attorney Kevin Young answered questions from the public about the proposed system, which Rosa described as a one-time good deal other towns in the region fought hard to get. Olive audience members, predominately male and older, sat cross-armed and shouted out questions and comments as the presentation proceeded, expressing their general wishes that they not have to deal with New York City, a school district based in their town, or any outside bothers not of their asking.
“We fought for these dollars for the communities,” Rosa said. “The city of New York never wanted to build these systems. We fought for this!”
Rosa further pointed out that if and when a community turns down a sewer system, it faces the possibility of having New York regulate local septic systems by forcing them to shut down. He talked about situations involving businesses that he’d seen in Greene and Delaware counties, and added that monies available for private septic system replacements from his current entity, the CWC, is limited, and not fast to access. After all, there are over 22,000 such systems within the affected watershed region not covered by municipal sewer systems.
Later, Rosa said that, opinions to the contrary, Phoenicia “was not going to be getting a better deal” than that it turned down.
“I, too, would like to go back to the seventies and eighties when people would just leave us alone up here,” Olive Supervisor Bert Leifeld summarized when his board gave its unanimous support to the Boiceville project last week. “But that’s not going to happen. The City’s not going away; the school’s not going away. I just really believe that we should take advantage of this offer; they worked hard for this money. I wish we didn’t have to think about any of this… but we do.”
All moot now as Boiceville gurgles ahead into a new future as the town’s bonafide business center.
And Phoenicia awaits its next flood, and an uncertain future…
A Calm Before The Storm?
Long known for their volatile atmosphere, these meetings are places where important issues are tossed and turned and scrutinized over and over. For some reason, perhaps because of the calm before the upcoming election storm, May’s session lacked the abandonment of meetings past even though several issues, still unresolved, have a track record of being hot topics.
A case in point is the never ending cell service debate. Most everyone in town knows that the most recent plan to get cell service in town went down in flames when Masterpage Communications announced in March that it could not do the job. On Monday it had become official, the contract the town had with Masterpage to build a tower on the Glenbrook Park property had officially expired, putting the town right back to square one.
Very little was said on the matter, with the exception of Supervisor Robert Cross Jr., who announced a plan to prepare a request for proposals (RFP) to send out… a fishing expedition of sorts to try and reel in a company ready to work with Shandaken.
Councilman Rob Stanley had a different idea. He thought the Supervisor could just call potential providers and invite them to come to town and talk about it at a public meeting.
Instead, there will be a special town board meeting set up in the near future to hammer out the RFP. Although a motion was made and passed to hold the meeting, there was no date set. Cross was asked why no date was set and with no real explanation, Cross, who has a checkered past when it comes to notifying the public about such sessions, insisted that everyone would know well in advance.
“I’ll make all the phone calls,” he said.
The town’s ambulance service has remained a hot button issue since January when the department, due to conflicts between ambulance personnel and town board members, began to gradually dismantle. By March the department was completely overhauled with new staff and leadership, but many of the old issues remain. One of those, that of no quarters for out of town staff, may be close to being solved, albeit in a slap dash manner.
Cross announced Monday that the town once again owns the Phoenicia property now occupied by Maverick West Health Clinic. A garage on the premises that was converted to offices in the 1980’s is being eyed to become a residence for ambulance workers that live too far away from town to be useful. By converting the garage to some apartment-style setting, Cross said, staffers can come to town for their shift and have a place to hang their hat.
But for some reason there’s a time issue. Even though the town boasted of having filled out their department with a host of local staff, Cross said these quarters need to be prepared pronto. He wants to meet with any and all contractors interested in doing the work as soon as possible. As for funding, the money would either come from a building fund in the town’s budget or Cross would take it from the town’s good neighbor fund, an account established 10 years ago with a $600,000 cash gift from the City of New York.
There is no estimate on the project cost.
Mount Tremper resident Kathy Nolan asked if the project could be rolled into the larger project on the property, where Maverick West plans a major renovation of their current offices. Perhaps grant funding would be available, Nolan thought, under the umbrella of the much larger project. Cross said no, that it would take too long to accomplish.
In other news, Cross said that the details of the town’s franchise agreement with Time Warner have been worked out. He said that by summer all services, including the company’s popular “triple play” program, would be available town wide. Cross also said the Oliveria Valley, much of which has no cable service, would now get it running all the way up to the Full Moon Resort. McKinley Hollow Road would get it too, he said, if the owners of the restaurant at the head of the hollow agreed to sign up.
There was another matter raised Monday, one which came and went with little notice or debate, but has all the earmarks of one that will make many a Shandakenite stand up and take notice soon. Cross casually mentioned that the board is taking steps to change the position of town tax assessor from an elected position to an appointed one.
Noting that all other towns in the county have made the switch from elected to appointed, Cross said the reason that this is now being entertained is because it would save the taxpayers money, as the town’s two assistant assessors, both elected positions as well, would no longer be needed.
It remains unclear exactly when the switch would be made, but the list of potential candidates for the job is short. Longtime Assessor Rosalie Boland is one, but Boland is now fighting a lawsuit filed by the Shandaken Landowners Association that alleges unfair assessment practices. Another candidate may be Republican party loyal John Horn, who ran for the position of tax assessor a couple years ago and lost. Since then, according to SLA President Peter Vinci, Cross told him Horn has been unofficially working on a townwide revaluation, said to be about 65% completed.
Stay tuned.
Mother’s Day...
My mother’s mother came from Puerto Rico. She went to school until the second-grade, when a flood swept the region, and my grandmother was nearly killed, walking to school. This was when she stopped attending.
My mother’s mother had a breathtakingly beautiful voice, but her stage fright impeded any singing career she could have pursued. Instead, she plied an anonymous trade with her hands, working the sewing machines in a garment-producing sweatshop, enduring the unspeakable conditions that accompanied this lifestyle. But she was crafty, frugal, and industrious. She took home little scraps of this and that, and clothed my mother and her three sisters. She crocheted bible covers and a great many other things, selling them wherever she betook herself.
Motherhood is an act of selfless love, as in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, a book I’ve carried away from my childhood. In its loving protection, generosity, and altruism, it is one of the most beautiful things on this green earth, and should never be overlooked.
Mother’s Day impends, it is true. But I would venture to say that there is no single time in a year to express gratitude towards anyone who has offered assistance, without asking anything in return. Gratitude is enormously cherished by any who have the fortune to receive it, and anyone can give it. I will say it again: anyone can offer gratitude!
I, your faithful journalist, may be found guilty for offering little in the way of thanks. My attainment of adolescence has certainly taken its toll on the “harmonic duality” of my mother and I. It has impeded, not our love, which is absolute, but the expression of our love. Speaking as a part of a household, growing older is difficult because, as new effects are created, old effects are destroyed, and I encounter new difficulties in getting along with my mother. We both struggle to be heard over the other’s rising voice. I write these words to you – I speak of gratitude, and of love – because I hope that a part of me is listening, too. (Ooh; that makes me a bit of a hypocrite, doesn’t it?)
The bond between mother and child is as strong as ever, despite tension brought by growth, society, and dispute. Every human values the guidance, pride, and care offered by another human. Maternity is a divine thing, and should be valued as such.
Every act of spontaneous kindness, and every act of compassionate protection or generosity, every such boon and every such loving thought (regardless of one’s age, gender, or relation) is a little part of a great love. This spirit of motherhood is prominent among the things that brighten our lives and our world.
Voting will take place from 2 p.m.-9 p.m., Tuesday, May 15 at all four elementary school polling centers. Kindergarten-through-grade six students will have an early dismissal at 1 p.m. A special meeting of the board will follow at approximately 9:30pm at the Onteora Middle-High School, Boiceville, to accept the votes cast. The Onteora school district PTA hosted a candidate night at the Middle/High School on May 7 that was sparsely attended. The Mid-Hudson Chapter, League of Women moderated the event and the audience had an opportunity to ask questions.
Two of the three candidates vying for two board seats are from Olive, and Richard Wolff and Michelle Friedel are running as a team. Running independently is incumbent school board president Marino D’Orazio of Marbletown.
D’Orazio has lived in the Onteora community for over twenty years. He has served on the Onteora school board for nearly ten years. Married with three grown children, he works as a lawyer on Front Street in Kingston. He is a graduate of Brooklyn Law School and received a PhD from City University of New York.
D’Orazio says he wants to continue with his work as a school board member because he feels he cannot “jump ship,” during a time of change. “I think that this is not a good time for me to retire…we have a brand new superintendent, we are going to be putting before the voters a capital improvement project with possibly a reconfiguration of district facilities and I think we have a lot of new members on the board and they could use a little experience.”
While on the board, he has been through the mascot controversy, division as a result of the Large Parcel Legislation, West Hurley elementary school closing, “and don’t forget past board fighting and legal issues involving the past superintendent (Dr. Hal Rowe).” His most difficult time was when Superintendent Justine Winters passed away.
D’Orazio did not support closing West Hurley Elementary School. Commenting on proposals to possibly close additional elementary schools, D’Orazio said, “My gut feeling is that I support community schools, but I am pretty open minded and I will listen to other proposals, I do support a separate middle school, but I can’t see myself supporting a single campus.”
D’Orazio also did not vote in favor of the special education reductions in 2006. He supports this year’s budget and tax levy set at 3.86 percent, but notes caution when giving too much fund balance back to taxpayers. “I believe that you have to have a cushion for emergencies.”
D’Orazio is uncertain what kind of future the Large Parcel Legislation will have because he believes the town of Olive has come very close to equalizing taxes. Last year he said there was a very small tax gap between the towns and that is why he voted in favor of the piece of legislation that would take the New York City reservoir and divide the tax equally among the district.
“The town government in Olive really did everything it could to meet the concerns of the board of education in the past in respect to Large Parcel and they worked hard to do it…maybe this year, it (equalized taxes) will happen by default and we won’t even need to address it,” he said. “I think that our job as a school district is to treat all our tax payers the same way.”
Wolff has lived in Olive for 23 years, has four kids and along with his wife considers himself an active participant in school issues. He has attended school board meetings for the past eleven years and said that was his reason why he would like to run for school board.
Wolff works as a school bus contractor and manager of Ethan Allen Enterprise Incorporated in Kingston. He has never conducted business with the Onteora district, and therefore was not affected by the consolidation of contract bus companies last year.
Wolff is primarily concerned about the budget and loss of educational programs due to cuts. He believes last year the school board wasted time with special education cuts and having to restore them, causing a lot of grief for parents. He raised the same concern this budget season.
“Sometimes you have to cut because enrollment is going…even this year in music to cut half a position,” he said. “But maybe the music department has to look at their department, maybe there is a teacher retiring, you don’t have to eliminate that other person.”
Wolff believes if the district had more fiscal control and long-term budget plans in the many departments, than maybe educational programs would not be affected.
Of the three renovation plans for the district mapped out by KSQ architects, Wolff prefers to keep the local schools open. He believes the middle school should separate from the high school in a six-through-eight model.
Wolff said the district rushed into closing West Hurley and once again planning long term was his theme. He noted especially the large acreage of grounds that West Hurley sits on and the potential for better facilities. But he said, “I would think if you are going to keep three community schools you could probably have West Hurley, but you have Woodstock and they like having their own school…but I am not sure, everybody seems very happy here at Woodstock, I think the transition went well.”
Large Parcel was another issue that Wolff believes too much time was spent pondering. “It should not even come to the table, look at how much time is wasted on the LP issue.” He would prefer the legislation was not brought up, but will vote no if it does.
Wolff is Vice Chairman of the Olive zoning board of appeals, sits on the board for United Cerebral Palsy of Ulster County, is a member of New York State school bus contractors association, New York Association of Pupil Transportation Supervisors and a council member of Redeemer Lutheran Church.
Friedel has lived in Olive for five years, but has been a resident of the Kingston area since 1989, is married and has two kids. She would like to be on the board because of her concern for quality “educational programming” and to make “sure we have a great school.” She is an educator for Ulster County BOCES in the career tech center and an early childhood development instructor for high school students interested in entering the field. Friedel’s profile sheet said that she would like to ensure that students have the skills to compete in a global workforce. She has a Masters Degree in Education from the College of Saint Rose in Albany and a Bachelor of Science in education from Castleton State College in Vermont.
Of the three plans proposed to reconfigure the schools she says she does not have enough information to make a solid decision and wants to keep an open mind. “As a community member and a parent and as a board member, I would really have to look at the figures and the enrollment…A or C are the two plans I like, I personally believe the middle school-six-through-eight would be a really nice environment for the adolescent age because they are a specialized age group.” Plan A keeps the three elementary schools open and Plan C will close an additional elementary school.
Friedel said the recent cuts in special education services are State mandated and could not be reduced. On the school board’s move to cut special education she said, “But there are two sides of every story...I was not part of the decision making process so I don’t know what the facts were.”
She supports the 3.89 percent tax levy but would maybe like to use the fund balance to lower it even more. “I say go for it, if you are not going to cut any services or programs.” She also believes some reserve money is necessary for long-term savings.
Like Wolff, Friedel would not like to see the Large Parcel legislation be a part of board business, but will vote no if it comes to the table noting that it tears communities apart. “I am sure people would be upset with that, but I also feel I have to vote no. Even the national school board does not vote on any tax property policies or actions, so if the national school board does not touch it, then the local school board should not touch it.”
Proposition #1 on the upcoming ballot asks voters to approve the 2007-2008 Onteora school budget, which is slightly above a contingency budget, If voters defeated the budget two times, it would automatically be reduced to a 4.11 percent increase and all equipment purchases removed from the budget under State law.
Proposition #2 asks voters to approve money for the purchase of four in-house buses to replace four aging, high mileage and high maintenance buses at a total cost of $279,825. Requested are a 29-passenger wheelchair accessible bus not to exceed $60,238, a 66-passenger bus not to exceed $87,378, a 20-passenger bus not to exceed $44,843 and a 65-passenger bus not to exceed $87,378.
In 2006 voters rejected two of the four buses proposed on this years May 15 ballot.
