What You See is What We Got

Alright. So Phoenicia won’t be getting a new septic treatment plant. That’s what its property owners voted for; it was their choice and no one else’s. Now that they’ve made it, what will it mean for the future? No one knows for sure, and we’d frankly prefer not to tell you our view, since we try, wherever possible, to accentuate the positive. But it’s probably better just to get it over with, so here goes.
Okay, so no public bathrooms in Phoenicia’s future. Well, we’ve gotten by without them for a long time. And STS won’t be physically expanding into some sort of major regional theatre or anything. But, you know, it’s community theatre and we love it in whatever space they have and porta-potties aren’t so bad when you really gotta go. And the library should be OK. Yeah, well, a bigger library facility would have been nice too but maybe not as cozy. Sweet Sue’s? Sure, it would have been good if she could have expanded but that’s not happening now either. Of course the condemned Phoenicia Hotel building crumbling into dust…Okay, that prospect’s even more depressing than the place was open in its final years. And just as sad is the fate of the long-quiet Riverwalk project for Phoenicia’s commercial redevelopment which has gone from dormant to dead, along with its 210 planned parking spaces. Also now gone is the prospect of utility lines moved underground, new sidewalks, pathways, seating and lighting, and who knows how many other things that won’t get built or rebuilt.
By our rough count, the no-vote in the referendum February 3 cost Phoenicia between $25 and $30 million in direct investment, public and private, in the hamlet’s infrastructure and short-term development. That a lot of money for a small place to have committed to it and then lose, around $80,000 or $90,000 for each and every household and business in the hamlet. By comparison, that’s more than twice the money that’s now invested in the old IBM facilities in Kingston, and that’s a good-sized project by anyone’s standards. Some of course are saying don’t worry, the City will be back with another offer but we don’t think so. It took them 80 years to give Phoenicia a second chance at municipal wastewater treatment and we doubt the issue will see a third coming anytime soon.
Will everything be OK? We don’t know. But the prospects for meaningful economic development in Phoenicia have just gone from very good to somewhere south of fair. Will there still be opportunities? Of course. But the upside potential for any of them will now be considerably smaller. Because when the future of any town’s business district hinges on one toilet at a time passing muster in an increasingly tightening regulatory environment, what you see now is, more or less, what the future holds. Some are OK with this, others disappointed including us. We’d imagined Phoenicia as a thriving local business district and a major visitor destination in the future and now neither one seems terribly likely.
What’s hard about seeing all this disappear is that this kind of hamlet-based redevelopment is the one thing almost everyone agreed was desirable throughout our long and difficult comprehensive planning process. As a town, we can plan all we want for Phoenicia, but when the hamlet votes to be the one place in the Catskills that time forgot, that’s it’s future. It’s our fervent hope that somehow time will prove us wrong on this.
We’re not going to do a detailed post-mortem on what happened, everyone’s got their own explanations and almost everyone’s partially right. But the sewer project didn’t fail because most people in Phoenicia didn’t want centralized septic treatment for the hamlet. Most of them did, whichever way they voted. Many who voted against it said they did so because they wanted a better deal from the City. That’s easy to understand. We’ve been fighting for that for years and the town’s wastewater committee probably did do the best they could, given the total lack of support for that position from the watershed’s political leadership. Unfortunately, any prospect of a better deal wasn’t what was on the ballot.
But the unfortunate truth is our town government did a poor job of communicating the answers people needed to the questions that were raised. Some of the most important answers didn’t arrive in residents’ mailboxes until just days before the vote. People were given assurance the system’s operating costs wouldn’t exceed a fixed amount, but not that their own bills wouldn’t rise by more than a fixed amount. In short, confusion reigned that could have been reigned in, and of course some things were said that simply weren’t true or relevant and which frightened people. And when people are afraid, any change seems scary and they’ll vote most every time for the devil they know over whatever option they don’t fully understand. But regardless, it’s never easy to get people to think about the long-term future when the short-term issues are unclear. And further compounding the issue was what one resident publicly characterized as a lack of trust for the board. Justified or not, that feeling was evident months in advance of the vote, and only intensified as it grew closer.
To those who say the project failed because it “became political,” we disagree. People who both favored and opposed it came from both sides and the middle of Shandaken’s political spectrum. Everyone’s views were their own and party affiliation or political perspective played little part. Trust in some of our elected officials? Well, yeah, that was a big issue.
In the short term now, we’re hopeful that CWC will quickly make available funding for a septic maintenance district, so that at least home and business owners will have a mechanism available to refurbish their existing systems as required. Beyond that and for now, we’re just looking for a solid snow cover to protect the water mains from freezing and come Spring, some clear thinking about infrastructure for the rest of the town. Hoping everybody’s keeping warm… BP