No Team
No voice in the Catskills has more consistently called for serious cooperation between our towns than we have here. Everyone who knows us or reads The Phoenicia Times or The Olive Press knows that, and many know that we’ve been fighting for this privately and with our elected officials for a good many years. It’s not a complex message, and so we’ll just say it one more time: Wake up folks, If we don’t work together, we’re going to get our asses kicked, one little municipality at a time. We think it’s high time people dropped the sanctimony, dropped the acrimony, got off their high horses and tried to figure out how to do that.
So let’s start with school taxes, and from the position that with respect to the large parcel bill, nobody’s got a corner on truth, justice, and the American way here. Olive has solid arguments about its unique situation and the historical price it’s paid for the reservoir that the other towns haven’t. However. It is fundamentally unreasonable that similar properties in adjacent towns pay wildly different taxes to support the same school system. This isn’t an argument that Olive can win claiming an American Indian type exemption: our grandfathers got shafted so we’re entitled, in compensation, not to pay the same kind of taxes our neighbors do. That won’t fly in reasoned discussion in Olive, to say nothing of outside Olive. Unfortunately there is no way to compensate for what happened to our native civilizations, nor has anyone thought up, so far, just compensation for the armed robbery of most of the Town of Olive by New York City in the early 20th century. It’s done. The best we can hope for is fair tax remuneration from them.
The City and the State have finally agreed on a reasonable assessed value for the Ashokan Reservoir. We think that because they have, the large parcel bill probably doesn’t apply to the Onteora School district, legally anyway. But what we think isn’t terribly material, because the issue properly belongs before a court. And if Olive can make the case that the bill doesn’t apply, that’s where it’ll be resolved, and that’s where the town’s efforts should be focused. We think much of the rest of the sound and the fury has been somewhat misdirected at its neighbors. In any case, with the reservoir reval in place and assuming the rest of Olive’s reval is actually finished soon, we don’t think Onteora will need to adopt the large parcel bill again, in order to keep intact last fall’s tax reductions for Woodstock, Shandaken, and Hurley. We sincerely hope however, the courts will decide this one way or the other before our school board’s called on to do it again. As for continued discussion of Olive’s succession from the district, we think it can neither work, nor is it fundamentally wise.
The issue of the assessment of state land however, recently raised by Olive’s town board, continues to be an ongoing example of our towns’ shared, parochial stupidity in refusing to work together. We tried some years back to get Shandaken to join Hardenburgh’s suit against the artificially low assessment of state land there. Not our problem said Shandaken, with little thought that when ORPS had finished that snack, they’d turn to us for lunch, which is of course what they’ve done. We’ve tried to bring the Coalition of Watershed Towns in on this issue, plenty of them are losing lots of tax revenue every year over this, including Olive, Woodstock, and yeah, The Onteora School District too. Not our problem said CWT, we’ve got too much on our plate dealing with the City. Back in Shandaken, former Supervisor Di Modica turned to the state Association of Towns in 2003 to try and address the method of calculating state land values head-on: He hit some walls, he made some progress, and current Supervisor Cross responded to the effor twith a public and sarcastic “Good luck.”
Cross’ comment was just emblematic of a larger problem, which is that the defeatist mentality that makes positive change next-to-impossible is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so things fail because we’re afraid to try and make them work because God forbid, we might fail. Well there’s plenty of things we haven’t even tried on this state assessment business, starting with bringing the County in to represent us. In fact Ulster County’s got plenty of revenue dollars at stake. So does Delaware County, and they love a good fight over there. And where Delaware County’s attorneys go, so goes the Catskill Watershed Corporation and the Coalition of Watershed Towns. Hardenburgh should have been the battleground case on this issue, but the rest of us left them hanging out to dry. And now throughout the region and the Onteora School district, we’re dealing with the consequences of thinking not-my-town, not-my-problem.
All of us can think better than that, but if we’re not willing to try then nothing’s going to get better, not the raw deal for Olive from large parcel, not the raw deal for Shandaken on state land, and not the raw deal for Onteora on both. And if we can’t figure out how to stand together now, it’s going to cost us way more than the lawyers we haven’t hired, because there’s plenty of ways to split a bill counted in thousands against municipal revenue counted in millions. If we field enough players we can move from defense to offense, maybe even, you know, win sometimes. Only problem of course… no team…



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