The Good News

At a recent event to benefit two of our neighbors who lost their home to fire, a public official from Hunter quietly said something interesting. “There’s a great community here,” he said. “It’s just that a lot of it lives somewhere else.” He was talking about the part-timers, the second homeowners whose emotional ties to what’s happening here are often as solid as the rest of ours. He was right, and they were out in force that day when over $15,000 was raised to help Wendy and Carl Cappello of Pine Hill make a new start for themselves. Impressive, we thought, but more typical than atypical of how our communities respond when we need each other. And we do need each other and part of our strength is knowing it.
We need each other and yet we’re never going to always agree. We’re never going to see everything the same way nor interpret the same data or circumstances even similarly. It doesn’t mean that some of us are right or others wrong. It just means honest differences exist when it comes to trying to make sense of what the future holds and how best to plan for it. That’s a job we all share insofar as the future’s almost definitely coming, and most of us are almost as definitely not going anywhere. So we’re going to talk about that future a little, beginning with a conclusion we’ve often shared here. That is, that we see the future of our towns as enormously promising and positive for just about everyone.
Nearly every indicator we look at tells us this is true. Our regional economy is diversified and solid and its growth potential looks better all the time. Personal income of our full-time residents is growing faster than in other towns in Ulster County… except for the six hundred and some people in Denning. Similarly rising is the growth rate in educational attainment of our full-time residents. But this kind of info from the census data doesn’t begin to track the full picture of what’s happening locally because it only takes into account 55% of the housing units and households that pay taxes here. The rest comes from our part-time community, which pays, excluding City and State contributions, well over half of all local property taxes while requiring very little by way of services. It also supports a hefty portion of the rest of our local economy, as every contractor knows. It’s an equation that’s been stable enough for two generations to have become our status quo. The only downside is that with so much housing owned by non-residents, the number of school age children’s declining, leaving us obviously some tough choices ahead.
But on balance our schools are a very strong positive factor for our future. Onteora is clearly the best school district in the Catskills, one of the best in our region and essentially on par with many more affluent districts downstate and elsewhere. It both draws people here and supports everyone’s property values. So does the fact that we’re one of the last ‘frontiers of the metro NYC housing market, where we’re still undervalued but unlikely to stay that way long term. Like every rural district and most suburban ones, tax affordability is a problem, but we also see a solution on the horizon. We think between the state courts and our new Governor, the coming years will see a long overdue shift from property-based to income-based school funding...a nd that the ultimate solution will benefit us enormously.
We’re also beginning to see some benefits from our county’s change in political leadership, particularly in terms of a new accountability to its taxpayers. We’re even going to have a modern county government soon, run by people we can elect and un-elect, and actually hold responsible for what they do.
There are of course, many more factors that figure in, including the prospect of future 9-11 type events downstate which could change our region overnight. But regardless — and over time — what secures our future is our quality of life and the quality of our environment here. By those measures we are some of the richest communities in our region, measured in things people want and don’t want in their lives and are happy to pay either to have or to avoid. But if we don’t start planning better for our rising fortunes, all the change in the world may not help us much, or it may come with costs we don’t want.
Our one historical weakness in the 28 corridor is planning. Zoning we’ve actually. done fine with. But when one looks at the quality of planning in Shandaken and Olive in recent years, we’ve a long way to go in both towns. Our other weakness, not quite as severe and certainly not as historical, is infrastructure. In Olive, our attempts at a careful process seemed to work well. But then larger forces pushed us into a system that’s resulted in no service. Talk about good intentions run awry....
The other big infrastructure issue in both towns is wastewater treatment. Phoenicia will shortly hold its sewer referendum; we’re reminding people it’s a vote on the future of Phoenicia and not on the current Town Board’s handling of the issues involved. But it’s an issue Olive should pay attention to, what with its own offer of a different system fast coming down the pike and needing resolution.
We believe in infrastructure because we believe in the future. We believe in the future because, in tandem with the present and the past, it’s what matters.
BP