Follow Up on the News

The occasion for the three reports – one on the “historic” partnerships designed to protect New York City drinking water via a mixture of regulations and clean development incentives, one the summation of an exhaustive six-year study of 110 streams in the region, and one an overview of the region’s economic life before and after implementation of the watershed’s new regs in the late 1990s – was the passing last year of the tenth anniversary of the Memorandum of Agreement.
Upstate attendance at the gathering, which the event’s moderator called embarrassing, was limited to a handful of folks come out to protest Dean Gitter’s proposed Belleayre Resort project, which that same moderator, Environmental Psychologist Mirele Goldsmith, said would likely be the subject of its own NY Academy forum in the future.
Goldsmith started things out by noting everyone’s wish to start “working towards sustainability” in regards to the watershed’s health. She said the evening’s reports would focus on ways of protecting the region’s hydrological systems, how decisions get made in a democratic fashion, and what the costs of the MOA and its maintenance are, directly and indirectly.
Cathleen Breen, Watershed Coordinator for New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), presented the findings of a new report card on the MOA’s first ten years by the Clean Drinking Water Coalition, a partnership between NYPIRG, Riverkeeper, Inc. and the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development. Running through a fast power point presentation, she gave out As for general water quality improvements and septic system replacement programs, but noted that grades could have been higher if the City increased its funding and logistical support for its incentive programs, if there were better training so more people could help the region catch up with its septic system replacements, and the DEP’s land acquisitions program were more user friendly.
For the latter, Breen noted that although city land holdings had grown from 3.5 percent of the huge watershed region in 1997 to 11.5 percent in 2007, the time might be right to start using land trusts and development covenants instead of outright purchases. The report also pointed out that much more could be done in terms of education and outreach to lessen the decades of animosity between Catskills residents and the City. Ways to do that would include more work on the DEP’s part to prevent local flooding, and definitely new training programs.
In conclusion, the CDCW Report Card on the MOA said all programs needed to be stepped up and better funded, but also noted that the city’s East of Hudson Croton system would do better with an organization such as the Catskills Watershed Corporation in place to oversee its projects, and needs.
Bern Sweeney, director and senior research scientist with the internationally-recognized Stroud Water Research Center then presented findings from his institute’s six year study of 110 streams and 12 reservoirs in the watershed, completed on behal of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state Department of Environmental Conservation over the past six years.
He termed his findings “a baseline for future reference to show if we’re doing better or worse,” as well as a demonstration of the need for new water purity parameters; and lamented the fact that, at present, there are no further plans for study of the watershed at present.
His studies of various chemical traces in sampled stream waters, as well as local insect populations, showed that water in the Catskills ranged from Good to Very Good, but was still 24 percent off what it would have been at the time of Hendrick Hudson’s first visit to the region 400 years ago. This latter point, he added, was important given that the Croton region was 42 percent off what it could be and hence in need of filtering. Sweeney said the issue was to find ways of not only preventing the Catskills watershed from needing filtration, but even getting its ratings better than they were in his findings.
Those included a few surprises… streams near places with impervious surfaces, be they roadways or parking lots, showed marked increases in salt and other runoff, which was posing a danger to local fish and insects that served a role in natural filtration of the water. Furthermore, trace amounts of pharmaceuticals were starting to show up significantly in streams near nursing homes and other concentrations of seniors taking prescription drugs.
To stem and possibly reverse any worsening of the region’s water quality, Sweeney’s report suggests greater conservation of water to allow local septic systems and wastewater treatment plants to do their jobs better, and the planting of more trees around all water courses.
“Trees clean our water,” Sweeney concluded, adding that policymakers also had to look at upgrading private and public wastewater systems, and ensuring that all communities get sewer treatment plants of the highest quality, without exception.
Presenting last, John Jay College Professor of Economics Joan Hoffman presented a first-ever study of impacts of the Watershed Agreement on the economy in the affected towns, as compared to both their surrounding counties, other rural counties in the state, the state, and the nation as a whole. Put simply, she found no significant adverse effects from the new interaction itself, and many benefits. But also some unforeseen developments.
Hoffman spoke of a region with 57,238 residents that represented a “vulnerable thin market” before and after the signing of the MOA in 1997, filled with small farms and businesses and a growing number of giant box stores clamoring for attention and shopper dollars on its outskirts, totaling up to a $1 billion economy helped hugely by nearly $1.2 billion in City investments in the past ten years.
In the past ten years, she added, unemployment has gone down, and trended better than comparison groups, while self-employment has gone up, reflecting new contractors and other new arrivals come up from the City post 9/11. Yet Hoffman also found worrisome signs of poverty bulwarked by a growing population over the age of 65, plus a poor wage picture that’s actually gotten worse since the implementation of the MOA (See editorial on page 39).
Concurrent with the poor wages, she said, retail businesses have had a net loss… partly because of the new shopping trends involving surrounding box stores, but also a shift towards tourism within the area not supported by the low wage local population.
Furthermore, Hoffman pointed out troubles in the farming world, where younger people weren’t coming into the once prevalant industry and land prices were driving many to sell off family farms.
The economy professor said her findings led her to several conclusions. First, she felt the local economy needed diversification away from tourism, but also “greater use of DEP lands in the local economy.” She felt new incentives for the continuation of farming in the region needed to be explored, and wages had to be raised, by state, federal and local means.
In questions and answers following the presentations, several policy sorts asked for direct recommendations. These included further studies, use of better land preservation tools in the region, and a change in the nation’s mindset similar to that used in the building of structures.
“When we look at safety factors in construction, it’s usual that we double the safe level. And yet we talk about bettering our drinking water, or our food supply, in the smallest of increments,” Sweeney said. “WE need a different mind set.”
A majority of those traipsing up to the mics made statements against the Belleayre Resort and asked for comments from the panel. All declined to address the issue.
As Goldsmith said at the beginning, that would be a future topic for discussion.

A Challengers’ Sweep

Which seemed only right, given that the issue pulling the biggest blocks of voters out had to do with a pending decision to close at least one community elementary school in Phoenicia to create a new 5-8 Middle School on a rapidly centralizing Boiceville-based campus rather than the Large Parcel threat, or reality, that drove Olive voter turnout since 2005.
“Taking Large Parcel off the table changed the demographics,” said Ralph Legnini, the evening’s top vote-getter and a West Shokan resident, after all the tallies were counted. “I’m glad people came out and participated. They spoke out to change the way things have been going.”
Legnini received a total of 2,460 votes, with Woodstocker Donna Flayhan at 2,379, Phoenicia-resident Ann McGillicuddy at 2,294 and Willow resident Laurie Osmond getting a total of 2,267 votes.
On the incumbents side, O’Connor received a high of 1,446 votes, current board president Bernholz got 1,384 votes, and Rita Vanacore ended up with 1,301. All were from the Town of Olive, which voted for them overwhelmingly, albeit by slightly less numbers and splits than other candidates have received in recent years.
Woodstock-based High School senior Adam Pollack got a total of 739 votes but promised to try again next year.
All four propositions on the ballot passed. The budget, a proposed $48,215,077 budget representing a 3.08 percent hike in spending, won 2,468 votes to 1,165; a proposition to purchase $189,127 worth of new busses, got through 2,063 to 1,529 after several previous failures; a $1.8 million expenditure of already-there capital reserve funds was okayed 2,062 to 1,457 and finally, a request to establish a Child Safety zone requiring use of school busses to pick up and drop off kids near the high school in Boiceville passed 2,642 to 964.
“I’m just so pleased we passed a budget, a proposition to get new busses, and a child safety zone; all really wonderful things that are good for the kids of Onteora,” said District Superintendent Leslie Ford after hugging the incumbent board members who hired her, and with whom she’s worked for the last year, and welcoming their replacements warmly. “We welcome the new board and their energy… That is a feature of working with the board, that is the democratic process so that’s not something to be disappointed over.”
Asked about how she and the district would handle a series of pending decisions — some made like the decision to create a 5-8 Middle School at the high school and take that issue out for bonding in January, and others about to be okayed, such as the official closing of the Phoenicia School that had been set for mid-June, Dr. Ford spoke about process.
“The new board will decide what still stands. The new board, as it formulates, will decide the directions they want to go in. As you know, I serve at their pleasure.”
Osmond, as the lowest vote-getter of the four winners Tuesday night, was sworn into office during a terse board meeting where all results were accepted by the current board. She will be filling the vacated board seat of Herb Rosenfeld, and will be up for re-election next May.
“I am overwhelmed that the community spoke and got to vote on the direction that they want the schools to go in,” Legnini said after it was all over. He said that come July, when he and his three other challengers take office, they would work on a proper procedure to overturn the 5/8 middle school proposal. “We have to reflect the vote that was cast by the community-we ran on those issues and the community spoke.”
“I feel like the vote was so overwhelming that it’s a mandate for the four of us,” added Flayhan. “Clearly people voted for us because of what we are against – the $70 million bond and the five-through-eight middle school. We have a mandate to move forward to fix the elementary schools and make sure we keep the student teacher ratios low.”
She added that she and her slate had also spoken about shifting away from the current committee structure, a governing style picked up from the town of Olive that the challengers feel may have insulated the defeated incumbents, and entire board, from truly hearing from the wider community about their wishes and dislikes.
Voting breakdowns, in the order in which they were posted, had Hurley going 221 for Pollack, 399 for Flayhan, 418 for Osmond, 428 for Legnini, 301 for McGillicuddy, 310 for Bernholz, 328 for O’Connor and 281 for Vanacore. Woodstock voted for 189 for Pollack, 967 for Flayhan, 928 for Osmond, 942 for Legnini, 937 for McGillicuddy, 116 for Bernholz, 130 for O’Connor and 108 for Vanacore. Olive voted for 202 for Pollack, 270 for Flayhan, 186 for Osmond, 339 for Legnini, 288 for McGillicuddy, 867 for Bernholz, 893 for O’Connor and 834 for Vanacore. Shandaken, coming in at almost 10:30 PM, went 127 for Pollack, 743 for Flayhan, 736 for Osmond, 751 for Legnini, 768 for McGillicuddy, 91 for Bernholz, 95 for O’Connor and 78 for Vanacore.
Turnouts were about 50 percent higher this year than any previous year in Shandaken, about the same in Woodstock and Hurley as voting three years ago, and about 40 percent down from a 2005 high in Olive.
Asked about the election following the official totals were posted, O’Connor, Bernholz and Vanacore refused official comment, although Lisa Valvo, O’Connor’s sister, said, “I think you should leave them alone.”
“No comment, I am not going to comment at all to anybody,” said Vanacore when one reporter persisted.
When asked “Why not,” she replied, “Read your own newspapers!”
“I think this is a sign of very good things to come,” said Osmond, soon after being sworn in as the first new boardmember of four.
“it was a grass roots effort by so many members of the Onteora community,” added McGillicuddy. “I look forward to working with everyone in the community.”

“I grew up in Phoenicia and Mt. Tremper,” says Roberts, sitting in her Catskill Mountain Physical Therapy office in the 1890 House at the corner of Main and Bridge Streets. “I was a waitress at Brio’s for eight years. My mother, Susan Robertson, ran the Mt. Pleasant Lodge, now Catskill Corners. Like most teenagers, I couldn’t wait to get out of our small town.”
She went to New York City and earned a degree in biology from Fordham University, then taught high school in the Bronx, but, she says, “I hated the city. I never felt at ease there. I’m also a retired professional mountain biker, and I do a lot of outdoor activities, so that pulled me back here.” However, leaving town provided perspective: “I used to come home on weekends to relax. My first weekend back from Fordham was the first time I really looked at the mountains.”
Next came studies in physical therapy at Russell Sage College in Troy, and then she landed a job at Kingston Hospital, where she became assistant director of physical therapy. Later obtaining an advanced masters degree, she left the hospital for private practice in Woodstock, while living in Saugerties with her husband, Wyatt Roberts. On a trip to Phoenicia, “I saw the 1890 House was up for rent, and I wanted it. I did census research on the needs and volume of the area, and it looked like I would be able to handle it.”
She moved into the ground floor in 2005, after renovation that retained the heavy, squared, hand-hewn beams and posts that give the former McGrath family farmhouse its nineteenth-century character. The luscious wood paneling on the walls was installed by John Byer a couple decades ago.
“Once I opened up and started reuniting with the community, I realized we had never integrated with the community in Saugerties,” Roberts recalls. “I was pregnant for the second time, so we needed more space, and my husband had grown up in Silver Hollow in Chichester. We ended up buying Dr. Lippert’s house, across from the post office,” a short walk from the office.
Her practice took off immediately. Unexpectedly, she had clients coming from Stone Ridge, Margaretville, Hunter-Tannersville, and Woodstock, as well as Shandaken. Soon she needed help handling the caseload, so she hired Cheryl Donahue, a physical therapist for twenty years and formerly Roberts’s co-worker at Kingston Hospital. “The struggle has been that what I do is a little non-traditional,” Roberts notes. “I use osteopathic hands-on techniques, and it’s hard to find experienced physical therapists who do that. The community is my baby—I don’t trust their care to just anyone.”
While many physical therapists are mostly exercise-oriented or rely on a lot of machinery in their work, Roberts prefers to emphasize manual techniques. She does use electrical stimulation, ultrasound for pain and swelling, taping, and hot and cold packs. She also uses exercise to get the body moving better and improve posture. The central room of her office is a gym, with a weight machine, stationary bike, treadmill, therapy balls and weights. When clients have recovered and no longer need hands-on therapy, if they had been using equipment in the gym, they may continue to work out at the office at no cost.
“We have four or five people that come in regularly,” she reports. “I can see them post-rehab and check in, and we have a nice social thing in the gym. They get a mini support group going in there.”
The current challenge is financial, with costs rising while insurance contracts remain at the same levels. “We try to take all insurance, but soon we may have to drop the lower-paying contracts, which is hard because it will cut off some of our clients. To compensate, we’re moving toward offering wellness programs and exercise classes, so we can see a client once a week and get them exercising one or two days a week. It’s a challenge to keep my doors open financially and still provide for the community. It’s happening all over—I read about it in chat rooms on the Internet. Many offices are cash-based, but we don’t have that option here. Many people can’t pay out-of-pocket, even if they get reimbursed later by insurance.”
Another problem: late cancellations. “We struggle with last-minute cancellations and no-shows, when we could have had paying clients in those time slots,” she sighs.
One of the advantages to working in a small town is that, unlike many city practitioners, she doesn’t have to specialize. She gets to see a wide range of issues, from joint replacements to stroke deconditioning to torn rotator cuffs, treating backs, necks, jaws, shoulders, knees, elbows, and hands. “It’s so interesting,” she remarks. “If I had to treat just hands all day long, I would go crazy.”

Saving Habeas Corpus...

Last week, the CCR filed suit in Los Angeles federal court against CACI International, CACI Premier Technology and L-3 Communications Titan Corporation, private companies that have served as “dungeon masters” interrogating detainees supplied by the U.S. government.
“We believe private contractors...should not be involved in any part of fighting a war, partly because they don’t have the same kind of supervision, training or accountability and are, to me, way of avoiding (the law),” said Ratner, a part-time Olive resident with his wife Karen Ranucci, who works with the national radio show Democracy Now. Among questionable legal activities the Center is focused upon are such evasions as the use of mercenaries for activities which may be seen as lawless misconduct on the part of a government or the shifting of such actions to countries where legality is a lesser consideration.
“(P)rivate security forces have behaved brutally, with impunity,” Ratner told Jeremy Scahill, author of a book on Blackwater, a company CCR litigated against for their role in the Nisoor Square massacre in Iraq. “These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law....not subject to constitutional limitations that apply to both federal and state officials and employees.”
Even more dramatically last week, charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, one of the Guantanamo Six now facing the death penalty before a military tribunal were suddenly dropped without prejudice (meaning they can be reinstated at any time), removing this CCR client from the upcoming trials. One of several individuals accused by the government of being the “20th hijacker” of 9-11, al-Qahtani has been held in the Camp Delta facility at the U.S. base in Cuba since 2002, where he denied, confessed under torture, and then recanted the allegations. Records of his detention recently sought by retired general Michael Dunlavey, who had supervised Guantanamo during that year, were found to have disappeared along with their “back-ups.”
The tribunal al-Qahtani avoids is one in which, as described by the NYT in February, “Prosecutors will be able to use evidence obtained by improper means, including by torture. The rules will be stacked in the government’s favor, so hearsay evidence that would not be allowed in civilian courts may be allowed. Prosecutors may rely on classified evidence that the defendants will not be able to challenge. Defendants may not be allowed to call important witnesses (and) even if the defendants were somehow to beat the charges, they would not be set free. They would simply go back to being detainees in Guantanamo.”
“If you want to prosecute terrorists, there are plenty of criminal laws to use,” Ratner said in an interview with Mother Jones magazine. “You don’t have to make up special new laws like military commissions or holding people indefinitely.”
The tribunals are legitimized by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which former NY congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman said “countenances abuse of detainees in defiance of the Geneva Conventions and the country’s past moral values and it suspends habeas corpus in defiance of the Constitution (as well as extending the) grant of a pardon to President Bush and his top Cabinet officials for any crimes they may have committed under the War Crimes Act of 1996.”
What is momentous about the events of the past two weeks is the unknown projected effect upon the prosecution’s case against the other defendants, all of whom are said to be portrayed in the hundreds of hours of interrogation videos (24,000 interrogations) recently destroyed by the CIA in defiance of a court order. With destruction of state evidence seemingly almost routine throughout these proceedings it isn’t difficult to envision a collective collapse of the cases.
In late April, the CIA, already under fire for withholding information from Congress, responded to FOIA requests from CCR and other human rights organizations, admitting possession of over 7,000 documents related to its “extraordinary rendition” program, partly because of content including correspondence from top administration officials. At the time of our interview, Ratner was irked by what he perceived as the press having underplayed a story of high officials’ involvement in devising the torture program. The Center is expected to file a response to the CIA’s legal tactic this month.
“We just saw on ABC that Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney and a few others sat around the White House dozens of times, according to the story, approving various torture techniques to use against detainees in CIA custody and the press should be screaming ‘How is this legal? Shouldn’t that subject you to prosecution? How did this administration get away with blaming lower level soldiers for what was a torture program from the highest level?’” Ratner said in April, finding additional media fault in continuously giving “some people free passes on a series of lies told to us about the Iraq War” and a program of falsehoods “from politicians and the press in particular” that pushed us into a war that shouldn’t have been fought which “anyone with a modicum of intelligence knew we were having shoved down our throats.”
With 151 members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, having invested $196 million in companies with Department of Defense contracts bringing in $755 million a day in 2006, over $275.6 billion according to the non-profit group OMB Watch, it’s hard to dismiss the profit motive. With names like Kerry, Sensenbrenner, Lieberman, Harkin and many others cashing in on the profits of war, (Hillary Clinton sold her stock in Raytheon, Boeing and Honeywell last year), can that factor be ignored? Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committee members, alone, have between $32 million and $44 million invested in DoD-contracted companies as they oversee the Iraqi misadventure. In what some see as an era of unabated corporate plunder, with overcharged and unfinished projects in Baghdad, there are questions as to how much of the terror war itself is a colossal swindle.
Ratner feels that Homeland Security money was an issue in the DEP’s decision to close the Ashokan’s Monument Road and it was certainly a major factor in the round-up of “suspects” sent to our tropical gulag in Cuba where only a small percentage will face trial and a vast majority of those freed thusfar were released without charges. (Others were sent to secret trials in Afghanistan which make the tribunals look civil in comparison.)
“The way it worked was, when the Afghan War began, they dropped leaflets all over saying ‘Your family will be rich...You’ll never have to work again’ (if you turn in a ‘terrorist’),” Ratner said of the 86% of detainees who were brought in when large bounties were offered. “The average award was maybe $5,000 in a situation where warlords are running all over, deciding to turn in opponents or people they didn’t like...or bad neighbors needing money- that’s a lot of the people. In fact, I just did a panel with the German attorney for (Murat Kumaz) who just got out and wrote a book {Guantanamo: Five Years An Innocent Man) and he was taken off a bus in Pakistan and the warlord was paid $3,000.”
A typical prisoner, interviewed for an article on routine torture in Afghani prisons by the British newspaper The Guardian, related; “At the end of my time in Guantanamo, I had to sign a paper saying I had been captured in battle, which was not true...I was stopped when I was in my taxi with four passengers. But they told me I would have to spend the rest of my life in Guantanamo if I did not sign it, so I did.” While, in the eyes of some observers, such captures have helped justify swelling terror war expenditures and the rising profit margins of recession-proof techno-security companies sopping up an increasing percentage of the federal budget, others see them as overwhelming cause to rethink current policy.
“The fact that torture is a subject of debate in this country right now; the fact that it isn’t slammed by the press on a daily basis- that the press doesn’t say ‘When are we going to have accountability,’ whether through Congress or the courts, and stop it? That these aren’t questions at every press conference, I find shocking,” Ratner said, vowing to seek accountability for evil-doers in office through “universal jurisdiction” cases which can prosecute torturers almost anywhere in the world.
Ratner’s CCR has led the legal battles against the alleged abuses at Guantanamo for 6 years, sending the first habeas attorney there and organizing the largest coalition of pro-bono lawyers on record to defend rights they see as essential to a free nation. His Center was also in the forefront of the international initiative to arrest the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and active in numerous arrests and convictions of European and African leaders accused of similar crimes against humanity. They have contributed to the arrest warrants, under international law, of certain officials who have left the current administration, for instance Donald Rumsfeld, who had to flee France last October to avoid a warrant for his arrest for war crimes.
The object, as CCR sees it, is a restoration of justice in the American system of justice and the opposition, as they view it, is a shadow government that operates in secrecy to criminally pursue goals they serially misrepresent to the public. The Center’s own leader, Michael Ratner, dreams of upstate trees and mountains, saying “Since I’ve been coming to Olive for 35 years, going back into those woods is always with me, wherever I am in the world. That’s the place I love most.”
But duty calls.