Follow Up on the News
This is the latest ripple
effect from news two weeks ago that Belleayre faces State Department
of Environmental Conservation cuts. While no specific figures have been
released, staffers and local officials have heard of 181 job cuts, less
trails and less chair lifts. Amenities such as the ski school and the
nursery, which is a form of day care for infants while moms and dads
hit the slopes of the family based facility, are also slated for closure
and/or severely scaled back operation.
At a meeting of the Belleayre Region Lodging and Tourism Association
at Belleayre’s main lodge last week, Republican Senator John Bonacic,
who represents the region, told the Association’s anxious ranks
that he is working with DEC to ensure that Belleayre remains the “economic
engine” of the Route 28 corridor.
Toward that end, Bonacic said that he has asked DEC Commissioner Pete
Grannis to come see for himself what would happen if Belleayre is allowed
to fail.
Never mind that Grannis was already set to come for the annual Open
Government Day put on by the Catskill Watershed Corporation… or
that all matters raised as fears at the Association meeting, as well
as a pro-Belleayre rally organized by the Coalition for Belleayre on
September 13, have simply been matters either raised in ongoing budget
decisions, or raised as things that MIGHT have been discussed.
At present, the timeline for any decisions about the ski center’s
budget remain unclear, especially given the news that Gov. David Paterson
is warning he may need to call the state Legislature back into session
before Election Day to make further cuts to the state budget amid growing
troubles on Wall Street. The Governor is expected to make that decision
by the end of this week.
Meanwhile Belleayre’s plight has caught the attention of United
States Senator Charles Schumer. In a prepared statement released last
week, Schumer said the ski center is bursting with economic benefits
for Ulster County and cannot be allowed to fall to the wayside.
“I hope that the DEC will heed the community’s call and
commit to a full ski season at Belleayre so that we can keep the jobs
and revenue generated by the ski mountain,” Schumer wrote. “It
would be a severe blow to the region should the ski center not operate
for a complete season….the benefits that would be achieved by
cutting operating costs at Belleayre Mountain would pale in comparison
to the economic turmoil it would create in the region. I cannot overstate
the significance that Belleayre Mountain Ski Center has on the local
economy.”
And even though the possibility of Belleayre cuts have brought together
supporters of the proposed Belleayre Resort with the Catskill Heritage
Association and Save The Mountain, members of the Belleayre Region Lodging
Tourism Association are now talking about the need to swell their own
ranks in order to have a stronger voice in Albany whenever their livelihood
is in peril.
Stay tuned for some real news in the coming month… we hope. And
then the 2009 budget talks, set to kick off in January… and make
those of the past year look like largesse.
Reese, who
defended himself with the aide of two “paralegals,” friends
in the local community, stated that he needed to work in the stream to
protect his property, which was periodically damaged by rampaging flood
waters that took out his bridges and side buildings, and implied that
no longer had the patience to wait for DEC permits that would allow him
to do what he felt needed doing to improve his property. He tried to question
the very premise of a system of protections for streams such as the Esopus
which, he said, basically made it impossible for homeowners such as he
to survive against Mother Nature.
State biologists noted numerous conversations they’d had with Reese
since he bought his property in 1999, three years after major floods damaged
the area and six before he was hit by major 2005 flooding along the Esopus.
Noted Jack Isaacs, a 28 year old DEC employee now the Habitat Manager
for the region, “You’re fighting a losing battle there.”
Jury selection whittled down a choice of six jurors and two alternatives
from a roomful of approximately 30 citizens, only one of whom said they
had read published reports of the case. Most seemed to take the day’s
activities as seriously as town justice Mike Miranda defined the process…
as “one of the most important things you can do for your country
besides serving in the military.”
Miranda noted, before the questioning of prospective jurors, how agencies
such as the state DEC and New York City Department of Environmental Protection
are “not the most beloved” in the Catskills and asked that
people describe any deep prejudices they might have as early as possible.
Some left then while others noted having become too familiar with local
landuse legal issues through participation in last year’s Woodland
Valley water harvesting case to feel they could be impartial.
A former state trooper was excused along with some who knew Reese and
his property and didn’t feel they could be fair dealing with it
or the man. When asked whether jury duty was an imposition, one woman
who answered “of course” later disappeared from the pool of
possible jurors.
The prosecution, by county Assistant District Attorney Dana Blackmon,
took testimony from DEC Police Officer Vernon Fonda, who spoke about being
tipped off that Reese was working in the stream with an excavator on August
6, when the property owner said what he was doing was permitted, and then
again on August 27, after he had determined that no permits actually existed
as Reese had ascertained, and again found evidence that there had been
work in the protected stream on Reese’s property.
Fonda backed up his assertions with 45 photos taken on August 27 and,
when cross-examined by Reese, pinpointed where activities had taken place
on a map of the creek which, despite the defendant’s assertions
that the map was not official, indicated that the channels running through
the property were considered part of the Esopus.
The officer also described Reese as having been combative and uncooperative
during his site visit, made legal through use of a search warrant and
backed up by the observations, and documentation, of alleged pollution
of a protected stream. He also described how Reese had urged two other
men on his property not to answer any of Fonda’s questions and later
placed some paperwork in his car without asking permission.
Reese attempted to sow doubt about the source of the polluting element
of turbid (muddied) waters, noting the existence of various streams coming
down the sides of nearby Tremper Mountain. He also questioned whether
the “braids” of the Esopus running through his property could
be seen as channels of the larger, protected body of water.
Fonda, at one point, described how turbidity, no matter its source, can
“choke out the life” in a body of water.
Later, Isaacs spoke not only about how any channel of a stream such as
the Esopus, no matter how dry it might seem absent major flooding, is
protected, but of how many times he’d spoken with Reese over the
years. He said there had been no permits, or even permit applications,
from the Mt. Tremper man in the past two years.
Reese asked about emergency applications to work in streams, and Isaacs
noted how they were usually reserved for municipalities… and only
during actual emergencies, while floods were occurring.
“You’re wasting your time playing in that stream,” Isaacs
told Reese after the defendant asked what a homeowner like he could do
to protect his property from ever-changing channels. “there is little
you can do to protect yourself in a flood channel”
“I’m a homeowner, a strong conservationist. I own a humble
home that occasionally floods.” Reese said in his summary argument.
“In order to protect myself I have to take certain actions.”
Blackmon, for the prosecution, noted that Reese had basically admitted
to all he was charged with and what was at stake was a matter of law,
not of the judiciousness of such legislation.
“I sympathize with him and anyone who lives next to the Esopus and
gets flooding,” he said. “But you shouldn’t give sympathy
to someone who decides to work without a permit. I’m not a tree
hugger but there are laws, and the properties of neighbors to consider.”
Before the jury came back with a decision, Reese spoke about how he had
bought his property from the son of the man, Howard Harr, who used to
manage what was once the Lutheran Camp where the Monastery now is.
“I wanted to be close to them. It’s a beautiful property,”
he said. “It’s just subject to flooding.”
After two hours of deliberations, the jury came back with verdicts of
guilty on all three charges. Sentencing was set for Thursday, September
18, in Shandaken Court.
Reese, for his part, spoke afterwards of problems he had with the case,
including one juror he had tried to bar from sitting with the others and
the subpoena upon which Fonda’s warrant was based. He spoke about
the “overkill” of having been sent to Ulster County Jail for
six and a half hours after his arrest and forced to pay a $5,000 bail,
even though he’s “an officer of the court” and respectable
local property owner.
Asked if he would be appealing, he said he didn’t know… he
wanted to wait until after sentencing to make up his mind.
“I have a feeling it’s probably time to drop this,”
he said.
As for potential fines and other elements of such sentencing, Reese said
he’d heard that the DEC was looking for a $6,500 payment…
and remediation work to put all that had been done in the stream channel
back to where it had been.
Reese noted that he’d have to do such work… with the same
equipment he was found guilty of using in the same locations without a
permit.
“I’d rather pay $100,” he noted.
On September 18, Judge Miranda postponed sentencing until November 13.
Soon afterwards, Reese reported what he termed, “kind of a surprising
development,” which he believed could end up changing everything.
According to the defendant, found guilty of three charges, he’d
just been to another of his homes in Maine where he found a copy of a
permit granted him for stream work by the DEC.
Did this mean he would, then, be filing an appeal?
“No, I think it would be considered newly discovered evidence,”
he said. “What a sad waste of time…”
Gerald Celente, top futurist at the Trends Research Institute he directs in Rhinebeck, can legitimately make that claim, as can the many who subscribe to and heed his firm’s newsletter, the Trends Journal. But, apparently, the congressional leaders who were stunned to silence by descriptions of the situation from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke at an urgent Capitol Hill meeting last week cannot.
Media reaction cascaded across the political spectrum when the gravity of the damage began to become apparent. “Staggering,” wrote Nicholas von Hoffman in The Nation on the 19th, “(S)o deep and sticky it may be necessary to sacrifice wildlife programs, preschool education and scientific research. Even without knowing the numbers, we can kiss health insurance goodbye.” Conservative pundit Patrick J. Buchanan announced “the party’s over,” predicting that the Crash of 2008, “which is now wiping out trillions of dollars of our people’s wealth” will usher in the era of a “more sober and much diminished America.”
Celente, a financial Nostradamus whose record of accurate forecasts stretches back into the 1980s, has been waving a red flag since July of last year, warning of an inevitable collision with harsh financial reality. He is emphatically not at all surprised at how dire the situation has become.
“We’ve been saying this loudly and clearly,” Celente declared Saturday afternoon as he prepared a Trends Research bulletin for a Monday release. “It’s bigger than the collapse of Wall Street. It’s the collapse of the American empire. Wall Street is a just a symptom of the collapse. It’s much bigger.”
As Wall Street does its imitation of the melting witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz, Celente sees a larger scenario crumbling in the nation’s infrastructure which he believes will unavoidably alter the destiny of the entire world.
“It’s not like they’re pulling a rabbit out of a hat,” he said. “They’re doing it in broad daylight, with the cameras rolling. This isn’t a federal bailout. It’s a bloodless coup by the ‘Wall Street Gang’ taking over Washington. There’s no doubt about it. Now they don’t have to worry about the ‘too-big-to-fail’ companies. They’re in control of the biggest. They’re in charge of the government.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter administration who co-founded the global-interest Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973 to create a “New International Economic Order” summed up the future of the state in his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era [1970], declaring that the “nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.” Brzezinski, currently an advisor to presidential aspirant Barack Obama, outlined his ideas for the state’s replacement at that time and elaborated a geopolitical redesign of the world in subsequent books. Advisors to both McCain and Obama are cited by numerous sources as contributing directly to the current state of affairs. Celente endorses neither of them.
Quoted liberally in every major newspaper in the land and many abroad, it’s difficult to name a news-oriented network program to which Celente hasn’t contributed his analysis . Sought-after keynote speaker for corporations like Metropolitan Life, Bank of America, Dupont, American Express and many others, his words bear substantial weight in the business community whose fate he now discusses with tones of woe, forecasting a devalued dollar, massive unemployment and the same kinds of strife inflicted on the Third World nations which defaulted to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in decades past. By now, Trends is no longer a voice in the wilderness and many others have joined the alarm, some declaring that the circumstances have been deliberately orchestrated.
Identifying Secretary Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, as the player spearheading the “coup” with demands for unrestricted authority to expedite a $700 billion “bailout” from taxpayers that Celente views as a “heist,” he offers a further prediction: “Having accurately forecast the current financial debacle, we confidently now forecast that taking swift sction will prove- as it did in Iraq- far more catastrophic than allowing Wall Street to suffer the consequences of its greed and mismanagement.”
Dean Starkman, writing in the current Columbia Journalism Review, takes a similar view of the dark heart of the crisis, chiding the business press for “ignoring the simplest, most basic but most important” concern in “the breath-taking corruption that overran the U.S. lending industry, including and especially the brand names, and the extent to which Wall Street drove that corruption.” Finding coverage, including that of the Wall St. Journal, “treated the global credit panic as a given, as though it were the result of some kind of natural disaster or a particularly nasty turn in the business cycle,”Starkman believes the media has misplayed “a story that promises to surpass in scope, gravity, complexity and social and economic consequences anything this generation of business reporters and editors has ever experienced.”
A self-described “political atheist” disciplined to view things as they are rather than as he would wish them to be, Celente elaborated the corporate and political underpinnings of the current ‘coup’ in fascinating detail (forbidden by the space afforded here), noting he had begun seeing through the charade of office-holding spokesmen (and women) for true power when he spent an hour with Ronald Reagan in the 1970s while hiring the future President for a firm he represented. Although he had once been politically involved in New York and Washington, including a stint as assistant to the Secretary of the New York State Senate, Al Abrams, Celente stepped away from that partisan world to fine-tune his BS meter during the Jimmy Carter/Iran hostage crisis.
“Anybody that believes that Washington is going to bail them out is delusional,” said Celente, also a martial arts master, originally from the Bronx, whose timber of voice brings to mind Michael Parenti, with shades of Lenny Bruce, when transmitting irony. “So, the first thing to do on a local level is to call every legislator in your area. Make a nuisance of yourself. Tell them you don’t want to hear why they’re in favor of the bailout- you’re not interested. You know enough about the details. You’re not up for bailing out Wall Street. Here’s the federal government telling the State of New York, Vermont, wherever, to pony up for these people. You’re going to start hearing intelligent people say ‘hell, no.’ Until Congress votes on the (Paulson) plan, it is not yet a fait accompli.
“This is a perfect Titanic sinking. The metaphor couldn’t be more clear. This unsinkable great ship goes down and the little people are too small to save. They were locked down in steerage. The wealthy were given the lifeboats. They were too ‘big’ to sink. The same thing is happening now.”
Saying that he thought the consequences of the collapse will trigger a new and viable third party initiative, Celente sketched the next steps of the falling house of cards, citing commercial real estate, seeing large-scale folding of industry in China and numerous other items lurking in the near future. He offered advice to those who may be concerned about the stability of their own banking service.
There are over a hundred banks in our region. Some of them, including the “too-big-to-fail” banks, will go under, Celente believes.
“Everybody’s threatened. Everybody,” he said. “A small, sound bank could be in great shape. I don’t know what their balance sheets look like, so I can’t comment but they could be a good investment. If your money’s protected and they didn’t overplay the real estate markets, great. Commercial loans will be the next shoe to fall. People aren’t talking about it. They call it ‘non-residential construction,’ ha! How about ‘commercial real estate’? All these malls, developments, office buildings, condo complexes. What’s going to happen when you don’t fill them up- when you see more bankruptcies? It’s not the subprime problem. Not the mortgage problem. That’s the smallest part of it. How about these leveraged buyouts? All these multibillion dollar companies bought on a future earnings base with virtually no money down?
Banks used to loan money to build businesses. Now they loan for speculations. The real estate markets are dying and they’re not going to recuperate.”
Celente suggested those concerned to inquire into their bank’s balance sheets, how many foreclosures they’re facing or delinquencies on loan payments. Are people paying their mortgages on time? Do they have enough in reserve, relative to exposure? Are they on the FDIC “problem list”? What is their exposure to credit default SWABS? Do they have anything with collateralized debt obligations? If they had to sell their financial instruments, mortgage-backed securities, could they be sold on the market? Nobody wants to buy them.
There will be books written about this week in finance which will be able to offer a measure of perspective unavailable to us, today. Corporate structures, built upon bigness, distance and endless growth are doomed. The final collapse will be horrendous. Yet, in all of the shattering darkness of the fall, Celente sees a glimmer of light.
“The good news is that something corrupt is dying,” Celente said. “The culture of greed and fraud is being exposed for what it is and when we learn how to survive in the ruins and people move forward from there, we can create a much better, more human system.”
The Highmount
tower sends signal into parts of Pine Hill and Fleischmanns, especially
in the Red Kill area and along Brush Ridge Road. There’s even some
signal from that tower hitting the Roxbury Run area.
The tower in Olive was built and is owned by Masterpage Communications
Inc., and Verizon is renting space on the tower and has placed a cellular
antenna at a height of 122 feet and a six foot wide microwave dish at
a height of 30 feet.
While this is good news for cell phone users - well, Verizon users anyway
- it has been a long time coming. It was July of 2007 when Verizon announced
it would immediately begin setting up and turning on at the South Mountain
Tower.
A new tower has been set up in Shandaken at Glenbrook Park, but to date
has no communications equipment on it. Shandaken Supervisor Peter DiSclafani
said Tuesday that although he has heard that Verizon expressed interest
in occupying the Glenbrook Tower, there are no firm plans that he is aware
of.
Christopher Ciolli, the Chief Development Officer for Mariner Tower, the
firm that built and owns the Glenbrook facility, said Tuesday that his
company remains in negotiations with two cellular service providers but
at this time no deal has been reached. He would not say which providers
Mariner was talking with, but did say that he was pleased to hear that
the South Mountain Tower was transmitting so strongly.
Ciolli said the South Mountain Towers performance is unusual and that
people should not expect all towers to do as well. He explained that South
Mountain Tower has the advantage of being at a high elevation coupled
with lots of flat acreage that is the surface of the Ashokan Reservoir
around it.
Service, at this point, runs down the Route 28 corridor to Shokan down
near the plazas, then blanks out until the vicinity of DuBois Road.
Asked if a Verizon signal at the Glenbrook Park would close the gap between
Phoenicia and western Shandaken, he said he did not think so.
“But intermittent coverage is better than no coverage,” he
added.
Meanwhile, availability of service brought out loads of students at Onteora
High School in recent days to make calls.
It appears that, because of the lack of service up to this point, the
school has yet to work out distinct policies regarding use of cellular
phones in school.
The school board later approved
$600 to Pyramid Brokerage Company to assess the fair market value of
leasing or selling the West Hurley Elementary School, which has been
vacant in recent years.
In other business, the board cast a re-vote on the Boiceville site water
filtration system in order to remove a high level of Manganese in the
water. A previous vote taken on September 9 to approve a greensand system
was considered moot since a quorum of a school board majority must approve
the measure. The previous vote was three-to-two.
But at Tuesday night’s, September 23 school board meeting at the
Middle/high School, the board did not vote in favor of any of the three
systems, either greensand, water softening or sequestrate. This left
the district in limbo with a State board of health warning to get it
fixed. A majority of school board members were undecided based on lack
of information. The only solid votes came from four board members with
opposite perspectives.
School board president Ralph Legnini and trustee Donna Flayhan voted
in favor of a greensand filtration system that would remove all the
Manganese. Trustee Rick Wolff and Michelle Friedel voted in favor of
a sequestrate system that would not remove the manganese, but mask the
discoloration and foul taste. All other school board members still had
questions.
Trustee Anne McGillicuddy, who initially voted for greensand, voted
against it second time around.
“I received some information about the Ion Exchange (water softening),
and I thought I should share it with the board because at the last meeting
I voted for the greensand filtration system and since then I have this
new information and I am not feeling completely informed on all of our
options,” McGillicuddy said, explaining that she spoke with a
water expert in Vermont who believed that a water softener was safer
than greensand. She also asked to explore another option made by Charlie
Blumstein during public be heard, that, “You could reduce the
size of the system substantially and run new piping through all of your
potable water stations thereby reducing the amount to be filtered considerably.
There is no sense to treat water if it runs through the toilet.”
The school board discussed whether the Manganese was coming from the
well source or the pipes. The water was tested as recommended by the
State closest to the wellhead. Trustee Maxanne Resnick does not believe
that the district’s copper pipes can corrode. Superintendent Leslie
Ford noted that Manganese started showing elevated levels around a year
ago.
Resnick noted that she had discovered that the town of Ulster provides
three water filtration plants using greensand since 1956 and have not
had problems. “So that makes me feel better.” But she is
concerned not only about the high cost of greensand, $80,000, but also
the high cost associated with maintenance.
Wolff reminded the school board that they are treating water that is
still considered potable by the department of health. He explained that
if they put in something like greensand filter at the Boiceville site,
they are not following the State’s recommendation, “That
we could be opening up another can of worms.” He suggested that
this could eventually result in requesting solutions to any elevated
test results of the other water systems in the district.
A heated argument arose when Flayhan said the agenda had two specifically
controversial issues that she believed did not belong with routine approvals.
One was the added addendum for the school board to approve an Interim
Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction at a cost of
$500 a day. The other was an implicated transfer of a teacher through
a replacement. Flayhan said, “I would like to see the assistant
superintendent on the addendum, which the first time I saw it was tonight
and we are proposing to pay this person…”
Legnini said, “We can’t talk about personnel issues in public…”
Flayhan said, “I am not going to use anyone’s name, I am
talking about a certain amount of money we are going to pay a substitute.”
Legnini said, “I am just cautioning you…”
Flayhan asked to wait on a decision to digest the cost and validate
the need for an assistant. She also noted the implications of using
a substitute, instead of a full time person, listing problems within
the athletic department because of an interim filling the spot for nearly
a year.
Flayhan continued on another matter. “The long term substitute
touches on the transfer of a teacher and I won’t mention the teachers
name.”
This hasdto do with parents and students who have protested over the
transfer of High School Physical Education teacher and Cross Country
coach Patrick Burkhardt to Phoenicia Elementary.
Legnini spoke over her, stating that she cannot mention personnel issues.
Flayhan listed parent and student concerns, noting that it was all public
information brought to the school board.
“To ignore 300 signatures, 30 letters and a teacher with a record
that’s stellar and nobody is giving us any reason why,”
she noted. “We can’t talk about public information at a
public meeting?”
Legnini banged his gavel and the school board took a break, after which
he suggested a commission to look into the athletics department.
After the break Flayhan made a motion to take the assistant superintendent
position off the table. The school board would not second the motion
and instead voted in favor of the hire. Flayhan was the only no vote.
Clarification #1: In the September 11, 2008 Olive Press and Phoenicia
Times it was stated that after a board majority vote against a sequestrate
water filtration system that Trustees Friedell and Wolff left the meeting.
They voted in favor of the system, but did not leave because of the
vote as some believed was insinuated. They left because it was late.
The meeting went until 1:30am. At this week’s September 23 meeting,
Flayhan made a motion that they end at 10:30pm, but no one seconded
the motion. The meeting was over by 10:45pm.
Clarification #2: September 11 issue stated that the greensand filtration
system was the only choice to remove Manganese. But a water softening
system as one of the proposed solutions also removes Manganese and Iron.
Additionally it carries other health and environment concerns since
salt is added to the water.