Wrapping Up Business

            An early moment of levity occurred when Town Clerk Laurilyn Frasier read the price on the winning and only bid received for propane to heat Phoenicia‚s water pump house. The price was 52.3 cents per gallon, suggesting that the bid may have been lost in the mail since the 1980's as most people in Shandaken pay two to three times that amount. The bid was from Agway, based somewhere in western New York State.
            After passing several town housekeeping resolutions, the board adopted a resolution creating a committee to assist the town board with the operation, design, and renovation of the newly created Pine Hill Water District. Five Pine Hill residents with extensive knowledge of the system's history and operation were named to the committee. A similar committee had been recently established for Phoenicia.
            Moving on to more controversial issues, two significant resolutions were passed by the outgoing Democratic majority on the board. A resolution affirming the town's "absolute, unequivocal opposition" to casino gambling in Shandaken was adopted, after being tabled last month. At the request of board member Jane Todd and others including Dean Gitter, references to former county legislative leader Ward Todd, Jane‚s husband, had been deleted, along with an oblique reference to the Belleayre Resort project. Also deleted was a request that the State Attorney General's office investigate the circumstances surrounding the signing of Ulster County's 2001 contract with the Modoc Tribe of Oklahoma. The version adopted however, does put the town on record as denying the validity of that agreement, opposing restrictions on Shandaken‚s rights to municipal home rule contained in it, and urging the county legislature to review and if possible revoke the contract.  Todd, alone, voted against the resolution.   
            The most immediately time-critical resolution passed by the board was one authorizing Di Modica to sign a Memorandum of Agreement with NYC DEP, which will be providing funds to the town for Shandaken‚s consultants on the Belleayre Resort SEQRA review.  The fiscal impact review authorized by the town board will be prepared by Robert Burchell, PhD, whom Di Modica described as the country's leading authority on the subject. Burchell chairs the Urban Planning Department at Rutgers University and has authored 30 books, including the Development Impact Assessment Handbook and The Fiscal Impact Handbook.  According to Di Modica, every other consultant he interviewed acknowledged Burchell‚s preeminence in the field.  The memorandum Di Modica expects to sign shortly also provides for the City to pay for consulting services required by the planning board in connection with the Belleayre Resort review.
            Under its terms, the planning board will select its own consultants subject to DEP preapproval, and retain full control over the scope of work designated by the board as well as their work product and findings.
            Planning Board member Bob Kalb took exception to the fact that Burchell had been selected by the Town Board without consulting others, and that the resolution authorized Di Modica to sign a memorandum on behalf of the planning board which its members had not seen. Di Modica responded by pointing out the time-critical nature of the situation, given that DEC's  "completeness determination" for the project gives the town very limited time to find the help it needs, and prepare and submit detailed findings simply to qualify for participation in the SEQRA process.  
            The final meeting date for the year to close the town‚s books was set for Monday December 29 at 7:00 PM. The date for the incoming administration's Reorganizational meeting was set for January 5, 2004, with a nod of assent from  Supervisor-Elect Bob Cross, Jr. The meeting will be televised next Wednesday, December 10 at 7:00 PM on Time Warner Cable channel 23. 

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Moving Up

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The Face Of Hunger

            People's Place has been serving the greater-Kingston area, including anyone who makes regular trips into the County Seat for various purposes, for 28 years. Peter Quinlan, executive director for the past three years, says he gets needy people in from up the Route 28 corridor, and from all the way down in Pine Bush. They serve 170,000 meals in a year, utilizing between 12,000 and 15,000 pounds of donated food a month.
            Ulster County's poverty rate for last year was 11.6 percent- or 18,793 individuals. The number of children living poverty was 17.4 percent, or 6,843; with 28.3 percent of all school-aged kids in the county, or 8,289 students, right on the edge of the line.
            There are worse counties nearby. Ulster's median household income is $40,425 compared to Sullivan County‚s $33,958. Their poverty level's at 16.5 percent; the number of kids living near the range almost half of all in school there.
            And yet such comparisons don‚t serve the people needing to line up for three days worth of food once a month at People's Place, or taking regular meals at the various soup kitchens and free meal places around.
            At noon the same Monday the turkeys were getting handed out at People's Place, a few blocks away, the Caring Hands Kitchen started serving over 80 people for lunch, as they do every weekday, year-in, year-out. Turkeys and asparagus, bean soup and salad, coffee and cake were the fare, dished out by volunteers at a long line. People ate in long rows, a mix of ages from pre-schoolers to the aged and infirm, from toothless men ashamed to be seen in such a state to proud middle-aged women with their big opportunity just around the corner.
            Victoria Langley, head of the Markertek Foundation, a leading force in Woodstock's Daily Bread Food Kitchen, and a member of the advisory board of the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley, notes that a recent Workforce Involvement Board study for the county found that with current costs, a single breadearner needs to make $15 an hour to break even these days.
            "You know how the new needs are manifesting themselves," she said, after noting Ulster County Social Service Director Glenn Decker's recent request for four new employees before the county legislature."We've got a whole new genre: the working poor. We‚ve got people working two, three jobs and having to make decisions on what to pay for: the rent, the electric, the cable, or food."
            Quinlan was even more specific, saying that although this year's Thanksgiving numbers were looking somewhat down compared to last year, they were still high.
            "You get a lot of people on fixed incomes who have to decide what to do each month: toothpaste or shampoo, toilet paper or milk. You have a car and that car breaks down for some reason, there goes all your budget," he said, standing in the midst of the swirl of pre-Thanksgiving activity at People's Place, which stretches across several storefronts across from UPAC. "Then there are those working seasonal jobs, or retail, or Fleet, say. We see different folks at different times of the year. One lady, say, works at the college in New Paltz and does fine most of the time. But when school's out for vacations she doesn't have enough to make it through the month. We call it 'food insecure'."
            The Hunger statistics for the Hudson Valley show that 63 percent of those utilizing food banks are women. 37.6 percent are children under the age of 17. 13.6 percent are seniors over 65. 34.6 percent are from households where at least one adult is working, while 35 percent are from single parent households. 35 percent are Caucasian, 34.2 percent are African-American and 24.5 percent are Hispanic. Only 1.7 percent are homeless. 66 percent of those who utilize the services have incomes below the official Federal poverty level.
            On the assistance level, there were 6,384 participants in the federal Food Stamp program in 2002, representing 3,490 households of an average size of 1.83 persons. In October, 2001, a sample month released in a recent Food Bank of Ulster County report, a total of $484,942 Food Stamp benefits were issued to county participants, an average of $76 per person. Those numbers are being dropped.
            In terms of emergency food assistance, there were 22 food pantries in the county in 2002, with 77,696 visits and a total of 654,264 meals distributed. There were two regular soup kitchens in the county utilizing the services of the Food Pantry, and not counting Meals on Wheels and several church-sponsored programs. 31,476 meals were served in a total of three shelters. 8,289 students received free school breakfasts and lunches, county-wide. In addition, there were 2,339 participants in the Women, Infants and Children program.
            The figures just reflected those participating in Food Bank and other institutionalized programs, according to Langley. And the weight of the numbers did not tell the story of the ever-growing amount of administrative work involved in all social programs, or the way even the most minor cuts can effect so many.
            Langley told about recent cuts to Domestic Violence programs that closed a special food bank for victims of abuse not wanting to go to the larger outlets. There had been a "safe house" food pantry - but no longer. Similarly, a slight increase in regulatory requirements for determining who can get help and who can‚t can force a need for more social service workers, or volunteers, if need be, that puts extra strain on the means for getting food out to people.
            Quinlan says there are entire parts of the county that are underserved. For every Woodstock, Rosendale or Saugerties, with its own food pantries and soup kitchen programs, there are outlying, deeply rural areas where there are no programs easy to reach, or a continuing culture of shame surrounding the needy.
            "We can supply people with three days of food each month, but we always have room for emergencies," he says. It's like tomorrow, where we'll have an hour open for those who didn‚t reserve time to pick up food today."
            Recent national figures made available by the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley estimate 30 million Americans being hungry, or at the risk of hunger, on a regular basis. 13 million of that total are children.
            In New York state, the figures go on, there are over 3 million people living in poverty in New York State, over 2,900 food pantries and soup kitchens feeding 3.6 million New Yorkers each month, and more than one in five children now living in poverty around the state. One out every six people using an emergency feeding program is now a senior citizen. And 80 percent of all those using such programs are working, disabled or retired.
            "You know what's sad," says a man cleaning his plate with a piece of white bread over in the church basement as the lunch hour draws to a close. "„I know about two thirds of these people like family. And even sadder? There‚s always new ones coming in."
            "There"s soup kitchens every day but you can't get to some of them without a car," says a woman down the table from him. "That makes for good days and bad."
            The Food Bank of The Hudson Valley, based in Cornwall-in-Hudson, distributes over 6 million pounds of food throughout six counties each year. The operation is funded solely through community donations and individual contributions.
non-food items, transportation, in-kind services, fuel, and time. They work a lot with mislabeled and discontinued items, the flawed elements of consumer culture, as it were. Donations become write-offs for those donating. They also pass on government packaged foods and do co-op buying. Grant monies are starting to become available, from the state and federal government, as recognition of nutrition gains prominence in the newly announced fight against national obesity.
            The Massachusetts-based Food Security Institute has meanwhile reported 11.1 percent of all households in the nation being „food insecure,‰ not knowing whether they can make it the next week. That accounted for 12.5 percent of all Americans. One third of thoise facing such insecurity had faced real hunger - missed meals, days without food - during the previous year. Over the past three years the numbers had increased 14.5 percent. Only one fifth of those families received the sort of assistance the local figures reflect.

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