Follow Up on the News
“It was all about abuses of power and an employment climate that was completely out of control,” Dunn said this week, describing the 15-page “Complaint” that will be decided over the coming 18 months… and had the various defendants served with legal papers starting March 8. “I think you’ll find that our case is quite compelling.”
The two plaintiffs represented by Dunn, former Emerson Sales & Marketing Director Carol Martineau-Lopez and Bonnita Benjamin, former Catamount Manager and Director of Weddings and Special Events for the complex, charge that they were demoted for demeaning reasons and later fired for attempting to complain about sexual harassment tied to their earlier demotions.
Martineau-Lopez has charged Wright with replacing her with someone he said had a “sexier image” that appealed to Emerson Place’s “vision of a physically desirable employee;” while Benjamin noted that she was delivered a termination letter by an Emerson employee, accompanied by a town police officer, six days after she complained about sexual harassment on Wright and Inge’s parts.
Both women, longstanding Shandaken residents, said that Wright had a habit of commenting on his women employees’ looks, age and weight, including frequent gestures and references to his own sexual history; while Inge insisted that all employees fill out a “Personal Coaching Assessment Form” that included questions about personal sex lives, levels of “sexual satisfaction,” and types and styles of “intimate wear.”
In addition, they spoke about Wright’s complaints that the Emerson was not as successful as it should be because too many employees were “overweight, dumpy or desperately needing makeovers,” and “not sexy enough to make customers spend flattery dollars.” They allege he asked female employees to display more cleavage, said, on several occasions, “We need more tits and ass here,” and generally made demeaning and degrading comments about the plaintiffs’ “upbringing and residence in a rural environment.”
When Benjamin filed a complaint against Wright, she was fired within a week. Martineau-Lopez, after being replaced, was offered an accounting position later withdrawn.
Both women started filing their claims, part of a lengthy administrational process, during the winter of 2005… within months of their being fired.
Before coming to Emerson Place, where he was listed as a co-owner, Wright served as a leading light of the Australian tourist industry for years. He was let go by Emerson within a week of the fire that took the award-winning Emerson Inn last April, soon after Spotted Dog first got wind of their former employees’ planned lawsuit. He lives in Big Indian.
Inge is a former CBS executive who now runs Avalon Training, “an independent management and systems consultancy.” and writes a weekly business column in The Catskill Mountain News. She lived in Fleischmanns.
Calls to all of the defendants were unreturned except for an e-mail from Inge, who said that Emerson Place has offered legal representation for her, Wright, Spotted Dog Ventures and the payroll Potemkin by Beth Bourassa, an attorney with their Albany-based firm, Whiteman Osterman & Hanna.
In February of last year, after she contacted Dunn about her case, Martineau-Lopez sent a letter to local newspapers outlining a long history of bad employment on Emerson Place’s part, including 22 cases of company executives, two thirds of them locally-hired, who she said were fired or forced to resign from their positions.
The company never replied to her allegations.
According to court papers on file with the Northern District of US District Court, the Martineau-Lopez/Benjamin case will now move towards an Initial Conference set for 10 a.m. on July 5 in Albany before Magistrate Judge Randolph F. Treece. A Civil Case Management Plan from both parties is due the week before.
Emerson Place had previously announced plans to complete renovations of its complex by July 4.Beth Bourassa of Whiteman, Hanna and Osterman said on Wednesday that she was preparing to "vigorously defend" her clients with a full response to the allegations filed by Dunn on behalf of Martineau-Lopez and Benjamin, which she expected to file in early May.
"Sometimes these laws are used as a vehicle for employees to vent their anger over losing their jobs," she said of the Complaint. "Emerson Place is one of the largest employers in the region... They provide a beneficial career path of local residents."
Be Ready!
He did say to expect some form of a resolution calling for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection to reduce the flow of water coming from the Schoharie Reservoir through the Shandaken Tunnel and into the Esopus Creek, a major trout stream that will greet anglers on April first. Cross has long maintained that the high, muddy water spewing from the Schoharie hurts the fishing locally.
In other news, Cross might report that evening on recent goings on with the Coalition of Watershed Towns and recent defections from the ranks (see related story).
And this Friday, more than a few curious web surfers will go to www.shandaken.us, the towns official website, to see whether anything is listed for the upcoming meeting.
A measure, presented by Democratic Councilman Peter DiSclafani, was brought forward earlier this month to require the site to list resolutions after the Supervisor previously announced that he felt no obligation to the public to do so.
DiSclafani felt March was an appropriate time for the board to reconsider the matter. The week of March 13-19, he said, commemorates the New York State Freedom of Information Act and Open Government Laws enacted in 1974. Often called Sunshine laws, the Freedom of Information Law governs rights of access to government records, while the Open Meetings Law concerns the conduct of meetings of public bodies and the right to attend those meetings.
Cross notes that the laws do not require officials to post resolutions or even meeting agendas prior to meetings and such acts are purely a courtesy to the public. And at the March 6th meeting Cross turned out to be the swing vote, deciding that his board would not extend any such courtesy, or at least be forced to, because he didn’t want the responsibility.
His vote was surprising given that he participated in a thorough on-the-spot alteration of the resolution to make it more palatable to DiSclafani’s Republican counterparts.
DiSclafani and Councilwoman Jane Todd voted in favor of the resolution. Cross and Robert Stanley voted against. Councilman Joesph Munster was absent.
The main clause of the resolution stated that all resolutions to be presented at the monthly meeting be posted for public review on the website by the end of the Friday business day prior to the monthly town meeting.
Todd added the phrase “whenever humanly possible” to the end of the statement. Stanley called the resolution “political junk” and accused DiSclafani of offering it simply for consumption by local media.
Ironically some resolutions, including this one, were posted on the website the day of the meeting. It remains unclear what will happen next month.
Robert Freeman, Executive Director of the State Committee on Open Government, said he expects that soon the sunshine law will have the teeth to require that resolutions be made public at least 72 hours prior to meetings.
“Our Committee has been requesting just such an action for years,” he said. “Legislation is being introduced about this in the Assembly this year.”
The Coalition Starts To SplitConversations with other Ulster County member towns, which include Shandaken, Denning, Woodstock, Warwarsing, Olive and Marbletown, as well as the county itself, reveal growing unease at the once-powerful entity’s recent decisions to side with Olive and the Sullivan County town of Neversink in an attempt to have state “Large Parcel” legislation changed to remove reservoirs from its purview, as well as the manner in which the Coalition has weighed in against a state Department of Environmental Conservation’s decision to send to full trial-like adjudication “community character” and other issues surrounding Dean Gitter’s controversial Belleayre Resort proposal for the heart of the region.
At the same time, towns are questioning the Coalition’s long-held communications methods for membership entities whose annual dues just went from $100 to $500 a year. Apart from paying bills, mailed out once a year, member towns can attend meetings “if and when they like,” according to one supervisor’s reporting of instructions from longstanding CWT President Pat Meehan. Or they can try reaching Meehan through the municipal offices of the Greene County Town of Windham, where he has been supervisor for over two decades now.
Meehan became head of the Coalition after resigning his seat on the Catskill Watershed Corporation, the nonpolitical joint venture between regional towns and New York City in charge of implementing watershed regulations and disbursement of City funds brokered by the state via a 1997 Memorandum of Agreement from the CWT’s fight against the city.
Shandaken town supervisor Bob Cross, Jr., Ulster County’s representative on the Coalition’s Executive Committee along with Olive councilman Bruce LaMonda – both up for re-election by the committee come May – said this week that he has called for a “private” meeting of Ulster County’s watershed supervisors at his own offices on Thursday, March 30 to discuss what’s been happening at the Coalition, to both hear grievances about the entity’s recent actions, and to assure members of better communications in the future.
Cross said that although communications are now handled from Meehan’s Windham town office, which sends out typed meeting minutes by mail weeks after they happen, he will work to translate that information for e-mailing to his county’s supervisors.
“My own feeling is that the Coalition didn’t belong there, dealing with the Large Parcel issue. The Coalition, by my understanding of it, is set up to oversee the New York City DEP and how their actions effect community life up here,” Cross said. “Eight of nine towns in our county were against what they did. It turns out when they said they’d heard support from Denning, the person they talked to had left the supervisor’s position years ago. Now is that good representation?”
“I’m considering taking consideration of membership to our board,” said Marbletown supervisor Vin Martello this week, after reading of Hardenburgh supervisor Jerry Fairbairn’s action. “We have lost of questions like why we’re still part of it and what benefits we get from this membership.”
Martello said he and his board “were not happy” with the Coalition’s recent decision to back Olive on the Large Parcel issue, which he had been assured by Meehan they wouldn’t do, the day before they did. He also said there were rumblings that the CWT’s position regarding the Belleayre Resort review was also “not very appropriate.”
“Considering our current consideration from your organization, or lack thereof, we respectively decline membership for the current year of 2006,” Fairbairn wrote in a letter to the Coalition’s Executive Committee that was read, and discussed, at its monthly meeting at CWC offices in Margaretville on Monday, March 20. “We suggest more direct dialogue and communication with your membership.”
Meehan countered, according to those in attendance, that Fairbairn and other towns had been communicated with, but then asked the Committee’s two Ulster County representatives, LaMonda and Cross, to try and change Fairbairn’s mind. Cross replied that he would, but also noted similar trepidation, based largely on the recent Large Parcel decision, from Martello, of Marbletown, as well as Supervisor Jeremy Wilber of Woodstock.
Asked whether he was considering taking his town out of the Coalition this week, Wilber said he was not, but added, “I can’t say whether we will or not. I am certainly a bit leery of the Coalition veering off into these new areas of concern… I’m just not sure, yet, if their vices have outweighed their virtues.”
Martello said that he finds his town, and others in the area, to be in a different position from many of the Coalition’s key members, who harbor “a deeper resentment” towards the City based on its impoundments of the last century.
A letter from Fairbairn to Meehan, reprinted in several Delaware County newspapers this week, asks Meehan to produce documentation of Coalition communications to his or any other towns about its actions in recent years.
To date, Meehan has made no answer… and has been unreachable at his Windham town offices, rendering the Coalition incommunicado, as well.
Also at its most recent meeting, Meehan announced he had sent a letter to state Environmental Conservation Commissioner Denise Sheehan, asking her to delay decision on a request from New York City to extend its upstate land acquisition program for five years… until the coalition had a chance to present a case against such a move based on allegations it has made, and the city has refuted, that the City has bought properties outside watershed boundaries on several occasions. Details of the case, which have not been revealed to the public, were the focus of a three-hour closed-door meeting of the coalition’s Executive Committee. Among those present at the session were coalition attorneys Jeff Baker and Kevin Young, Catskill Watershed Corp. Executive Director Alan Rosa and members of a technical advisory group assembled to assist the coalition. Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, said the city only wants more time to solicit land in the watershed region. “The permit was issued ... for 10 years with a provision that it could be renewed for an additional five years. We are seeking only to renew the permit for those five years, not to modify it,” Michaels said. “I’ve heard the claim about buying land outside the watershed but have never seen it substantiated.”
Since 1997, Michaels said, the city has purchased 42,600 acres throughout the watershed. Of that, he said, 23,400 acres have been opened for public recreation.
“For me, it is safer than daily life,” he says of his exploits on the wire, which have brought him to crossings in or over the Cathedrals of Notre-Dame and St. John the Divine, the Pompidou Center, the Javitz Convention Center, the Louisiana Superdome, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and innumerable other sites. “I have designed everything carefully and installed the cable myself,” he muses in his French accent. “I love the process. It is the safety net of wisdom, stronger than any nylon net. I never take a risk on the wire. On the ground, I am clumsy. I break glasses, I sprain my ankle, but when I am juggling or on the wire, I am pretty clever. It has to do with concentration.”
Petit taught himself magic at the age of six, juggling at 13, tightrope walking at 14, and he left home and family at 17 to travel the world, having been expelled from five different schools for practicing magic, juggling, and stealing the teacher’s wallet. He was, in fact, a pickpocket for several months, until he decided he did not want to spend his life in jail. “Now I do it onstage, and people applaud,” he says. Petit is currently at work translating his sixth and most recent book, “The Art of the Pickpocket: A Primer”, not so much a guide to thievery as a philosophical contemplation of his poetic approach to an art that he calls “a magnificent ballet of the hand.” Two chapters address methods of protecting oneself from pickpockets, and the book is illustrated with Petit’s drawings and examples from his collection of pickpocket art.
Like the lectures he gives to students and businesspeople around the world, the book is a means of sharing his unique way of thinking, creating, and living. Petit explains, “I try to broaden people’s horizons.” When a self-taught man who has walked a quarter-mile in the air without a safety net tells people anything is possible, they tend to believe him.
He was recently invited to address a religious group in Italy. In To Reach
the Clouds, his book on the World Trade Center walk, “I talk a lot about the god in the wire, the god in the shoes, the god in the wind, the god in the towers, although I don’t believe in gods. They wanted to know, what do people who don’t believe in gods believe in?” The answer, summarized briefly, is that “I have a kind of faith in ‘secret lives’ inhabiting objects we take for inanimate. Actually, I’m sure it’s us human beings who insufflate our own energy into certain inanimate things that we link ourselves to. Such communion can only happen if one is ‘possessed’, passionate about the linking with the thing in question. As a wirewalker, passionately in love with the wire, I see in the steel cable a live animal, a soul-carrying object with which, with whom I must communicate.”
This winter he was awarded the prestigious Chevalier des Arts and Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. “It’s a big deal over there, but I took it with a smile,” he comments. He and the French Minister are currently planning two events, a high-wire walk in the steel and glass dome of the renovated Grand Palais in Paris, and a hurricane benefit in New Orleans. Meanwhile, Petit is studying Spanish so he can give a lecture to CEO’s in Spain. He could have an interpreter, but he is drawn to the challenge of speaking to them in their native language.
Yet another project in the works is a documentary about the World Trade Center walk. Although he has had multiple offers for the rights to his story from film companies over the years, he felt it was too personal to hand over. Now he has found an independent company, Red Box Productions, that will allow him to be intimately involved in the film and is about to sign a contract that will immerse him in filmmaking for a couple of years.
Then there’s his plan to do a show in Easter Island with Saugerties artist and inventor John Kahn, who spends several months a year there and wants to mount a benefit to help the residents. Petit visualizes a high-wire walk in which the islanders will participate by helping to set up the rigging, chanting as they walk along on the ground beside him, and creating an event that will draw media attention to the isolated island..
Locally, he would like to work with Olive resident Valerie Fanarjian, whom he calls “an incredible artist—she constantly creates. At dinner, she scribbles all night on the napkins, makes collages, folds them up. She used to have an art center on Route 28. Many local artists would come and meet each other, and they had model drawing classes. I would like to associate myself with her and create something for artists.”
Life is not simple for a man with so many ideas and ambitions, particularly when they are coupled with high ideals and limitations of time, space, and money. “Ten days after the World Trade Center walk, I had so many offers to appear in ads, I could have been a millionaire, but I didn’t take any of them. It would have killed my soul,” he says. His paying work takes him to many parts of the world, and he maintains an office in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where he is artist-in-residence, and a room in Paris that is too small to be a legal residence. “It’s really a large broom closet. I’ve had it for forty years.”
Behind his little house in Shokan, he is building a barn by hand, using eighteenth-century tools and methods. He uses the barn to store his high-wire equipment, and in winter he practices there for three hours a day, juggling and walking the tightrope, since the high wire in the garden ices up in cold weather. There are still two windows and a door missing from the barn, and he looks at it every day, thinking how quickly he could finish it with modern materials, but he can’t bring himself to do it. “It’s going to have hinges of wood and will hang slightly askew so the door will close by itself, a little trick I learned from a book. I love this dialogue with matter, although it makes an absurdity of my life.”