Follow Up on the News
“What’s been published is a working document” emphasized Paula Benway of Rochester-based Stantec Consulting group, a 6,500 employee firm which more typically contracts to build large factories, international airports, casinos, and major public works projects. Stantec was awarded the $55,000 contract to produce a new plan by the town, using state DOT and DOS grants secured under the previous committee.
A light turnout of two dozen or so town hall regulars attended the meeting, which was called on relatively short notice. Most, it seemed, had downloaded and reviewed the document which had been posted on the town’s website several days earlier.
While the tone was friendly, Benway spent much of the two-plus hour meeting making factual corrections and research notes based on comments from the audience on three of the plan’s four sections. A draft of the final section on “implementation” should be ready by mid-January, she said.
The informal consensus appeared to be that the draft in progress was both shorter and lighter in content than previous versions of the plan, a point seen both positively and negatively from different perspectives.
“I’d like to commend Stantec for producing a document which to this stage of development has remained non-specific,” said Gary Gailes, a consultant to developer Crossroads Ventures and former project manager for the company’s proposed Belleayre Resort, now under SEQRA review. “The more specifics you include,” he said, “the more trouble you have…This is a document on which we could reach community-wide agreement”
“I hope that the plan as it develops will have some substance and some direction” said former supervisor Pete Di Modica. “Remember that the county found the biggest problem with the Schuster plan in 2000 was that it was lacking in specific detail. The real substance should be in the last section on implementation, which we haven’t seen yet.”
While few in the audience took issue with what specific language there was in the draft, the final of three proposed “development goals” proved an exception as well as a possible flash point. “Large-scale terrain altering development outside the hamlets is generally undesirable” it reads, “but may be considered on a case-by-case basis, subject to necessary measures to protect the sensitive environment.”
Many readers inferred a reference here to the proposed Belleayre Resort. That language explained Benway, was taken directly from the Schuster draft. But according to ZBA member Kathy Nolan, Schuster’s committee approved only the declarative sentence ending “generally undesirable”, not the qualifying clause, which Schuster reinserted in the final draft he submitted. Later, Committee Chairman Chuck Perez, said the full sentence represented compromise language agreed upon by that Comp Plan Committee. Many in the audience spoke to the point, some, including Planning Board Chair John Horn, arguing in favor of leaving the clause in, others favoring its removal.
“If you start altering this paragraph” warned Crossroads’ Gailes, “it will start a firestorm of objection.”
Gailes’ vigorous defense of a single clause in a single sentence may suggest its importance: One version of that sentence appears to allow the developer to argue its project conforms with the town’s Comprehensive Plan, the other would not. And that, according to some in attendance, is the crux of the issue; Would the town’s adoption of a weak Comp Plan actually facilitate Crossroads’ obtaining approval for its resort? Based on Benway’s stated intention to avoid directly considering the project, it’s unclear whether and how this question might be answered.
In general, comprehensive plans are supposed to provide guidelines for future planning & zoning, and Benway pointed out that Shandaken’s Town Law requires “all town land use regulations must be in accordance with the comprehensive plan.” Yet she was quick to qualify that with a legal opinion she’d obtained, that no case law exists in NY state, mandating that zoning regulations actually be brought into compliance with the plan.
No date for the next meeting has been set, though Benway said that a draft of the plan’s final section should be ready by mid-January. According to Perez, Benway told him that she is planning to address each and every comment made by the public at Monday night’s meeting, the next time she returns.
“There really hasn’t been a lot of back and forth between Stantec and the committee or me ” said Perez. “They were given a charge. The ball’s in their court.”
Stantec’s draft plan is available online at www.shandaken.us under “news” or at www.phoeniciatimes.com.
After testimonials from current students and parents, High School Principal Barbara Rubin opened up the presentation by noting how the Onteora programs, started and run by Judy Upjohn four years ago, were currently being eyed by other school districts throughout the region as a prototype for engaging non-committed students on a par with BOCES and other more established programs.
“People talk about a new breed of kids,” she said, bringing up a litany of adults’ complaints about the rising generation’s lack of remorse, conscience, or the ability to fit in with society at large. She thanked the board, and Onteora administrators, for their “courageous” support of Upjohn’s vision over recent years.
Upjohn, who started the Indie Works program after being left money by her father and wanting to bring to the local public school some of the excitement she’d found over the years working with private school students, referred to a letter of introduction she had included in a packet handed out to those in attendance.
“Our aim was to address the large middle population, who generally do not have access to special opportunities or extra funding. We wanted simply to increase attendance and help teachers engage students in a way that was not normally possible,” she wrote. “The program was so successful that it has expanded every year, in terms of physical space, more students, more Onteora teachers involved, and also in the different classes we offer for different ‘types’ of students… Indie/ASPIE is Onteora’s first major response to the school board’s goal of providing innovative educational alternatives.”
Upjohn then introduced Peter Griffin, her program’s new Director of Education. Griffin, with the aid of a student-produced Power Point demonstration, walked the board and audience through Indie’s various programs and goals.
The three main elements of Indie include the original “Works” program, focusing on Regents-track social studies and English Language Arts classes for 10th and 11th graders; the “Lab” elective, for all high schoolers, which mixes social studies and media production work; and the new “Community School” for 9th and 10th graders designed to utilize the engagement methods from the older programs for a wider, interdisciplinary theme-based curriculum, and currently working with 34 students.
ASPIE, Upjohn’s region-wide, tuition-based school for “Autistic Strength, Purpose and Independence in Education,” is proving a highly successful way of providing full-day educational programs for students on the “autism spectrum,” including those with Asperbeger’s Syndrome, high functioning autism, and Pervasive Development Disorder and other social/communication disorders, an area of education previously overlooked by local public schools.
“ We’re setting students up to succeed, not to fail,” Griffin explained, reading comments from some of the program’s 174 students used to being considered “bad” but finally finding their potential. “The idea is to engage these students and not come at them punitively.”
Subsequent discussion featured board members’ touting of such signs of Indie success as the number of its students passing Regents’ exams, returning with regularity to help out with the program, making films shown at the Woodstock Film Festival, making weekly television programs, and re-invigorating the overall Onteora student body. But the board’s newest member, West Hurley parent Dave Patterson, reminded everyone that the oppositional concerns raised November 3 still needed to be addressed.
“A year ago, I was one of those who didn’t get it,” Patterson said, speaking about the various negative aspects he’d felt about Indie, reinforced by the sight of so many attitude-rich students making their way from the main High School building to the Indie facility just down Route 28 in Boiceville, as well as the sight of so many of those same students smoking outside their building regularly. “The negatives are going to haunt you and it’s a shame those people who spoke out at the last meeting weren’t here to see your presentation.”
Patterson suggested that both Upjohn and the students involved in Indie and Aspie programs begin thinking up ways of bettering their “public relations” to avoid similar future attacks, even if they are based on “stereotypical misrepresentation.”
Later, while Patterson was leading talk of the inaugural meeting of the Communications Committee he has helped initiate — which drew 20 attendees, including three students, last Wednesday, November 10 – the idea of bettering communications about innovative programs such as Indie, Aspie and the new “Community Schopol” came up.
Patterson and fellow board member Kathy Hochman each spoke about how all in attendance felt a district-wide newsletter, to be inserted into this paper, the Phoenicia Times and Olive Press, would go a long way towards overcoming rumors and misinformation. Other avenues of increasing communication, both said, included working with the towns of Olive, Shandaken and Woodstock to get regular Onteora programming onto public access channels available, through Time Warner, to municipalities.
“People wanted to say that they felt they were never listened to when they spoke up at our meetings’ ‘Public Be Heard’ segments,” Hochman added. “They wanted to know how to go through the chain of command to be heard, whether their letters were read, and so forth.”
Patterson added that many of the items discussed at the first meeting will be formalized into an agenda and mission statement, with a set of attainable goals, by the committee’s next meeting at the High School on Wednesday, December 1.
Upjohn suggested working with her students to better the Indie reputation over the coming weeks, while others suggested the students, via their own enthusiasm, would likely be doing the same, on their own.
Superintendent Justine Winters, along with trustees D’Orazio and Neil Eisenberg, spoke about recent meetings with state Assemblyman Kevin Cahill and Senator John Bonacic about changing legislation to take the approval of large parcel taxation decisions out of school board hands. Each, Winters said, promised to help Onteora and put forth amendments in their respective legislative chambers. But asked whether such action would see actual results, both D’Orazio and Eisenberg said they didn’t think so.
Finally, the district approved contracts to remove the current stage rigging in the High School auditorium and install structural reinforcement to a 50-year old I-beam that had torqued over time, failing recent state inspections. The expenses will add up to $74,825. A second bid to replace old rigging with new was tabled until after the first two stages of work were completed. The Holiday Concert will be held at UCCC.
McGloughlin went away for college, never really thinking she'd be back home again. But here she is. And loving it for a solid 20 years now.
She's an artist's artist, one of those rare people who embed themselves in a tradition and carry it on, painting and printmaking and working in pastels and ink washes as though her very breath depended on a constant remaking of all she sees. A sharpening of observation. An ever deeper dive into the meaning of things as they are, be it in a landscape she enters, or via a still life she sets herself as a challenge on a table in the studio where her life truly centers itself.
`McGloughlin says she started painting early, as a girl. Though she went to the University of Arizona from Onteora High because "it was as far as I could get away without hitting the ocean" and "wanting to be an English Lit major," she soon found herself pulled back to art. Then, when circumstances brought her back home, art called again in the form of a series of scholarships at the Woodstock School of Art.
`There, McGloughlin studied printmaking alongside the school's master, Bob Angeloch, who himself studied under a previous generation's master, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, one of the stalwarts of the Woodstock art scene during its great 1920s and 1930s heydays.
“I feel I'm carrying on a great tradition, and part of something much bigger than myself, or my own talent," the artist says.
We're speaking about the latest exhibit of McGloughlin's work, a body of paintings and prints entitled "Running Water," all drawn from a residency she did at the Catskill Center's Platte Clove cabin two summers ago, that opened at Kiesendah; & Calhoun Contemporary Art in Beacon last weekend, and will be up through January 30. It's beautiful work, focused on a set of waterfalls over which the small artist's retreat is poised… where I, too, stayed this past summer. And found myself thrust into an intense period of creation.
The artist says she's decided, after completing this body of work (and just returning from the class she teaches in Italy each summer), to retreat for the coming year. To start turning down work, keeping only her ongoing printmaking classes at the WSA (where she is now a board member), so she can concentrate on what she started in the cabin, and then followed up on, for the current show.
"I want to focus on what I can see from here," she says, looking out over the fields she grew up playing in, haying, milking goats in, and then building on. "I'm taking a courageous step here, turning work down and refocusing myself. I need chunks of time to really work on my art now; I want quiet. I feel it's time."
Returning to talk of the tradition she feels so much a part of, both in her home life, carrying on several generations of Catskills life (she just spent the morning baking for an old family friend's funeral) and her artistic self (shifting between painting, pastels, watercolors and printmaking of various types), McGloughlin speaks of the Woodstock artists she got to know when she was in her early twenties. People like Jane Jones and Kuniyoshi's wife, or Carolyn Haberlin and Eugene Ludins… people who themselves went back to the days of Bellows and Speicher and the great naturalists, now hanging in museums.
"I used to drive them around and listen in as they all talked about their art, and their memories," McGloushlin says with verve and immediacy.
Outside, the sun is coloring as it sets to left, behind High Peak.
"I want time for more contemplation," she says. "I've always loved the way artists will rework the same pieces for a lifetime. Painting the same jar over and over again… it's just about making art, in the end. About investigating what's there ever further."
Kate McGloughlin says she feels lucky to have made her life as an artist, and to have had the chance to mine such beauty so close to her heart.
"Oh, I tire of hearing about people I grew up with not being able to buy a house. But I also like the newcomers," she muses about changing Olive, the shifting Catskills.
She figures she has the best of two worlds. They feed each other, deeply.
"I'm a painter and printmaker," she says, turning on her own lights as nature's fades. "But I still bake for funerals. I still live right here."
For further info on McGloushlin's work, visit www.katemcgloughlin.com.