Follow Up on the News
The portal is a big drainpipe for the Schoharie reservoir, which the City of New York has been emptying in order to do work on the 1920’s reservoir’s decaying dam.
Acknowledging that the dam repair is important, Jameson said he is seeking some cooperation from the Big Apple, which refused to consider stemming water flow during the recent flood season this past spring.
Jameson said that the high water makes the currents too swift and waves too high for all but the most expert tuber. The result is that his business is only running at 60 percent capacity as he turns away all novice and beginner tubers.
Jameson was expected to make his case to City officials on Wednesday, June 21st.
In related Esopus business of late, the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, has upheld its own 2001 ruling that rejected opinions from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection that the agency did not need discharge permits to add silt to the Esopus Creek, which spills into the Ashokan Reservoir, thus also upholding a $5 million penalty against the city for violating Clean Water Act laws.
The rulings arose from a lawsuit filed in 2000 by the Catskill Mountains chapter of Trout Unlimited Inc. against the Department of Environmental Protection. The group was seeking to end the discharge of muddy water from the city’s Schoharie Reservoir into the Esopus. Fishermen had reportedly nicknamed the waterway the Yoo-Hoo Creek. “This turbidity impairs use of the Esopus for fly fishing and other recreational activities,” the three-judge appeals panel wrote, referencing the town’s tubing industry as well.
Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection, said the city agency was disappointed by the ruling and is weighing options, noting that “it’s inappropriate to apply rules intended to regulate sewage and industrial wastewater to the conveyance of untreated, natural drinking water that is part of a public water supply… This decision has the potential to compromise the reliability of the city’s water supply, which serves 9 million New Yorkers daily.”
“This environmental victory should remind everyone of the importance of clean water and the need to be vigilant in protecting it for our health and our communities,” noted State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a candidate for governor, in a press release about the decision.
Let’s see how the summer’s waters now flow…
Hinchey’s Our Patriot
When asked what he can remember of his first trip into either Olive or Shandaken, Hinchey laughs. He says it’s difficult to discern the exact moment.
“I was reading about the Catskills before I ever got here, in Irving and Cooper,” he says of the 19th century’s two great American authors. “It seems I’ve been coming into them my whole life.”
Hinchey was born in New York City 68 years ago, but grew up in Saugerties, where he graduated high school before going on to SUNY New Paltz and eventually, after stints working the cement factories that used to line the Hudson in his youth, a career in politics as a Democratic winner in stolidly Republican districts. And a solidly old-style liberal Democrat at that.
How perfect, we note at some point in our recent talk, he driving, that Hinchey would end up being our state’s only representative on the Congressional commission that created the new FDR memorial in our nation’s capital.
“The Catskills have a mystique and wonderment to them that’s just marvelous,” Hinchey says, after having received a “Steward of the Catskills” award from the Catskill Preservation Corporation, the organization of leading regional and national environmental groups that came together two years ago to fight the mega-development proposed for the region’s central high peaks area by Crossroads Ventures. “They represent the most important watershed in the world, as well as one of the key protected park areas in our nation.”
The congressman jokes about getting legislation passed to fight the current infestations of tent caterpillars that have denuded many of the region’s richest forests for the second summer in a row. But then he grows more serious… talking stewardship issues.
“By the middle of this century, water issues will be a dominant concern. This reservoir system, which now serves 9 million, will be key to the lives of 15 million people as the Long Island aquifers decline,” he says. “It’s important that this are be protected.”
Do others in Congress understand the importance of Hinchey’s mission, which has ruled his political life since joining the state Assembly as Ulster County’s first Democratic representative in three quarters of a century back in 1975?
“I don’t think they do,” the Congressman replies. But not for his trying… explaining that, no matter a growing reliance on filtration systems around the world, the need for something more.
Should New York City ever be forced to pay upwards of $10 billion to filter its water, he notes, the cost will end up effecting the economy of the entire U.S. Especially with the likelihood of the City then having to choke up $500 million a year in maintenance costs.
Hinchey, who has served on the House of Representatives powerful Banking and Appropriations committees for years, keeping an eye on the way money moves in the nation, and helping bring federal aid to our region with regularity, says more, not less, should be done to aid the protection of the Catskills and its watershed resource.
Has the area changed over the years, we ask? The Congressman talks of having pulled together a commission to study the region’s importance back in the 1970s, and being threatened by old school politicians in Delaware County as a result.
“Of course, I never did stop,” he said of those threats, and what they wanted of him.
So what issues does Hinchey feel are key to we Americans of the Catskills this July 4 weekend?
“We’re involved in a very different world from what I grew up in, what so many of us came to expect,” he says. “Our populations are growing, nationally and on a global scale, creating a new need for all of us to protect the natural resources key to life. It’s absolutely imperative that we protect our water supplies. As important as anything having to do with energy.”
The Representative, who lives in Hurley, ads that he’s found the current Congress lax, to the point of antagonism, at protecting the rural values he feels are key to America’s independence. He’s trying to fight a move, being pushed through government, to consolidate the dairy industry within three giant corporations. He’s doing what he can to protect what remains of small farms, in his district and across the country.
“More and more, things have been dominated by corporate interests. That’s not good for our future,” Hinchey says. “On this weekend we should remember the author of our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson. There’s a guy with vision who knew how important it was to protect rural America. And what he warned about is happening.”
Any message for the readers of these papers?
“I think the quality of life in these communities is good and needs protection,” he said. “Remember: development is good only if it’s responsible.”
Until that evening, the very same one where Kellerhouse got approval to build his 180 foot tall tower on town land near Glenbrook Park, it was common knowledge that the grand plan presented by the current administration was to help Masterpage build a network of three towers to allegedly supply 75 percent of the town with cell coverage.
The tower, complete with another 18 feet of whip antenna on top for a total of 198 feet, will be built in a couple months.
It’s ironic that, at the same session, Nextel representatives were on hand to give a presentation to the board on how the coverage would be if the three towers were built. The one unanimously approved on June 14th would send a cellular signal roughly two and half miles in all directions, Nextel says. If two other towers are built, one on the Umhay property on a hill above the Phoenicia Diner and the other on Pine Hill property owned by Peter Goertzal, there would be similar sized coverage cells around them, but a much weaker signal would bleed out and cover a fair portion of the town. Even so, the coverage would not be continuous along the route 28 corridor. Worse, it would only be for Nextel customers.
“I never said I’m building three towers in town…we’re here for this application only,” Kellerhouse said, insisting that previous “rumors” about his plans to build on other sites were incorrect.
Phoenicia resident Marcy Meiller took issue with the claim that they were rumors, noting that Supervisor Robert Cross Jr. made it clear last year that he was negotiating a package deal with Masterpage with a goal toward providing cell phone coverage throughout town. Now, the reality is that Masterpage will use only one tower located near Glenbrook Park along side route 42 to take care of it’s own needs to provide pager signal in the area as well as enhanced signal for local emergency services. There was plenty of hopeful talk on the part of Kellerhouse, some board members and Cross at the meeting about how other providers are waiting in the wings to rent space on the tower, but many wondered aloud that, if that were the case, why haven’t these providers come forward already.
There was also plenty of hopeful talk about the other towers. Cross, who led the charge last year to sign a contract with Kellerhouse for the Glenbrook Tower and sold the plan to the public by claiming that it was the first of three that Kellerhouse was building, back-pedaled quickly at the session on the 14th. Cross now says that, yes, he did speak about three towers, and there may have been some confusion about what that meant exactly, but nevertheless he hopes to see the other two built eventually.
After the meeting Cross said privately that Kellerhouse did have plans to build the other towers but backed out of that commitment because of the way he has been treated in town by critics of his tower plans. Skeptics of the three tower plan have doubted the plan’s ability to really provide adequate cell service. And on the 14th Nextel’s’ own calculations were called into question, with Mount Tremper resident Kathy Nolan asking for the precise locations of the tests and suggesting that Nextel’s software used for the testing was not adequate.
Also, it appears that Kellerhouse has little need for additional towers. The one erected at Glenbrook is expected to cover much of the town with the signal needed for his pager company. It will also provide signal for emergency service communications. These types of signal are not “line of sight” meaning one does not need to see the tower to get the signal.
While everyone is pleased to see enhanced emergency service coverage, it now appears that benefit is somewhat redundant. Jody Rossitz, the Chief of the Big Indian/Oliveria Fire Department, noted that communications had been poor for years but have been greatly enhanced by recent upgrades supplied by the state and county, though there are still gaps here and there in town. At the time Cross was making plans with Masterpage for beefing up the coverage that enhancement had not been implemented.
It was also not clear at the time that Shandaken and Kellerhouse were making plans that Kellerhouse could build another tower in nearby Olive, where the approval of the project slated for South Mountain was tied up in court. Last winter, however, a US Appelate Court gave him the green light to install a 142 foot tower, which Kellerhouse now has under construction.
It is important to note that it was the Planning Board that asked Nextel to test the other two sites, not Masterpage. The fact that Goertzal has been at most of the board sessions involving the tower project, including the one on the 14th, suggests his interest in erecting a tower with or without Masterpage. Umhey has tried before. He made a deal with Crown Atlantic Inc. several years ago to build a tower, but the company backed out of the deal.
Councilman Rob Stanley expressed concern about the overall quality of cellular coverage in town. He too recalls how Cross and the town board represented the plan for three towers, and expressed disappointment.
Unless something else happens, Stanley said, cellular service may go the route of cablevision in town, where the easiest and most profitable areas get coverage, and the rest of the town gets nothing.
Yet the ten in attendance took the opportunity to work out strategies to keep gambling’s chances at entering the central Catskills at their current minimal level, and spoke a great deal about developments elsewhere in Ulster County, including a controversial proposal aimed at the Woodstock 94 Winston Farm site in Saugerties and an all-but-forgotten deal with the Oklahoma-based Modoc Tribe, for a casino near Ellenville, brokered by then Legislative Chairman Ward Todd six years ago.
The Olive event was sponsored by the Catskill Heritage Alliance, which has sought to allay regional fears that major developments pegged for the central Catskills not be opened to possible gambling in future decades.
According to reports brought forth at the Open Forum, prospects now appear remote that the Seneca Cayugas of Oklahoma and their partner, billionaire mall-developer Thomas Wilmot of Rochester, will be building anything in Saugerties, now or in the foreseeable future. On May 15, the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a lower court’s dismissal of the tribe’s lands claim case, effectively dealing a fatal blow to any future casino business in the state for them.
A spokesman for the Schaller family which owns the property, however, was quick to point out “that doesn’t preclude us from talking to other tribes.”
A local accent to such talks is being lent to the venture by Al Spada, the former GOP County Clerk of 39 years who is now working part-time as a lobbyist for the Seneca-Cayuga-Wilmot tribe, as some have started calling the developmental entity seeking to push through its plans despite growing local opposition..
Also still a possibility is a prospective though somewhat mysterious reputed bid… for another possible casino site at the former IBM recreational facility on old Route 32 in the Town of Ulster. Options on that property and adjoining ones are reportedly held by the Oneidas.
Countywide, casino prospects have dimmed considerably since last year’s “home rule” resolution ruling them out in any towns which oppose them. In Saugerties both the village and town boards unanimously did just that, and prospects seem little different in the town of Ulster… even though such resolutions hold no force against tribal claims, per U.S. law.
Aas if to counter such opposition, the Pataki administration took its most aggressive position ever last week, promising full support and asking the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs to expedite its review of all current tribal claims in the state, including the backing of a plan by the St. Regis-Mohawk tribe to bring gaming to the Catskill’s doorstep.
The project, a joint venture between the tribe and Empire Resorts, would convert about 30 acres at the Monticello Raceway into a “sovereign nation.”
The site appears to be the only potential one in New York that could actually obtain federal and state approvals before Pataki leaves office next January.
“The Governor strongly supports the tribe’s efforts to build a casino at the raceway site,” wrote Pataki’s Assistant Counsel and chief gaming advisor Greg Allen, in a letter to federal regulators last week. “I respectfully urge the BIA to expedite its review process and promptly notify this office once the potential environmental impacts have been satisfactorily addressed.”
“We’ll do what we have to do to get it done” added the Governor’s spokesman Saleem Cheeks.
Pataki’s advocacy appears to extend to the adoption of an expedited environmental assessment completed in the late 90’s for an earlier but similar project on the site. That study, accepted by the BIA in April, 2000, determined it would have “no unmitigated significant impacts” on the community despite a projected increase in traffic of 5.9 million vehicles per year.
Local groups opposed to the casino say the old data is of little value and highly misleading in the current economic climate, and that an up-to-date Environmental Impact Statement should be required.
“Sullivan County has turned around dramatically in the years since those studies were done,” said David Colavita, president of CasinoFree Sullivan County, a grassroots coalition opposed to the project which local anti-casino forces has been paying close attention to. “Every economic indicator is up significantly post 9-11. And we know from our recently completed county Master Plan that casino development ranks at the bottom of the list for preferred economic development choices here. But the Governor is more interested in shoehorning a casino into Sullivan County than he is in the interests of the people who live here.”
Ultimately the decision as to what constitutes an acceptable environmental review rests with the BIA’s regulators. In April, the agency had asked
the tribe for additional information: “We’re very close to responding to (that request) said Charlie Degiomini, a spokesman for Empire Resorts. “We’re just about there.”
A decision is now expected from the BIA within days or weeks.
The governor’s move in support of the project was almost immediately followed by an unannounced vote of Sullivan County’s 9-person legislature, accepting a newly negotiated $15 million/year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement with the St. Regis Mohawks. Should the BIA find in favor of the casino, Pataki would need to declare his agreement with their “no unmitigated significant impact” assessment, after which the BIA would issue a final land trust agreement permitting construction to begin.
“I can’t get excited about (Pataki’s letter to the BIA)” said state Sen, John Bonacic, whose district includes the site, as well as our own Central Catskills region, and who was once supportive of up to three casinos in the region before starting to show a change of heart in recent years. “We’ve been down this road before, several times in fact.”
Stay tuned…
For those in attendance from Ulster County, the scene seemed old hat at first. After all, it was only last summer that people in the Phoenicia area were talking about the infestation of Forest Tent Caterpillars and Gypsy Moths, which essentially denuded a majority of trees up and down the Route 28 corridor through the season’s early half, as the third of several plagues that had hit the Town of Shandaken (the others being fire and flood).
So they were getting what Ulster had already got. Haha.
Turns out, though, that the happily-chomping tent caterpillars do their thing in an area for two to three years before naturally dying out for a decade or so. And what had seemed passé in Phoenicia in late May is actually mid-stream… and moving fast eastwards into Woodstock and even Kingston.
“We’re telling people to sit tight,” said Horticulture Educator Teresa Rusinek of the county’s Cornell Cooperative Extension office, who has been fielding calls from concerned homeowners along with Community Horticulture Coordinator Donna Crawford. “They’ve already done their worst damage and should be finished in the next couple of weeks. At this point the caterpillars are getting ready to pupate and turn into moths.”
Rusilek added that she and Crawford had received a majority of calls from Phoenicia and Kingston, where the pests were even hitting “street trees.” She noted that the number of omplaints from Woodstock, other than its Western half, has been on a par with what she’s heard from Gardiner. Where she lives, near Marlboro, has seen nothing. Same with New Paltz.
We asked her about rumors, largely from Woodstock, that the state Department of Environmental Conservation might have released black flies to combat the plague of caterpillars. Or maybe even sprayed.
“They might have done that in the past, but no anymore.” Rusilek replied, “I’ve heard those stories… Besides, the rule is that the bigger the caterpillar gets, the harder it is to spray.”
Tom DiCillo, the man in charge of pesticides at regional DEC headquarters in New Paltz, said his department would never do any spraying any more, and haven’t done any since 1980.
“It’s just too controversial,” he noted.
As for the release of flies to combat the caterpillars, he said he’d “not heard that one” and referred such inquiries to his agency’s forestry division.
They were all in the field all week but a look online found an extensive report on caterpillar infestations from last summer.
“Forest Tent Caterpillar (Malacosoma disstria) is a native insect found in hardwood forests throughout North America and is especially abundant in eastern North America,” reads the official description at the start of Naja Kraus’ 2006 page-turner, “NYS DEC Forest Tent Caterpillar Defoliator Report 2005.” “In New York they prefer to eat sugar maple, aspen, cherry, apple, oaks, birch, ash, alder, elm and basswood. They never eat red maple, sycamore and conifers.”
The report notes how the caterpillars live for five to six weeks from early Spring through June. They spend three weeks in cocoons (never tent-shaped, as one might expect. Those are gypsy moths, which like oak tress for nourishment and living space.) Then five days as a moth, in July, before laying eggs that then lie dormant for ten months before the cycle starts again.
They don’t like to nest in the trees they’ve eaten down to bark.
Outbreaks “are episodic and may last two to nine years,” although ten year intervals seem the norm, with bad batches seen in 1887, 1896-1901, 1923 and 24, 1935-1940, 1951-55, 1980 to 1982, and 1991-1993. At their worst, in the 1950s, they damaged a total 15 million acres of forest in the northern part of the state.
Defoliation, the report says, can be severe but rarely mortal, although tree harvesting (chopping them down) is not recommended until a caterpillar scourge is well past. Too much cutting can take away natural predators. Natural factors leading to “outbreak collapse,” it is noted, are similar to the ways in which gypsy moth outbreaks stopped in the last ten years. For those wishing to spray privately, it is suggested, the cost for the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) runs to about $25 an acre. Bt, first discovered in 1911, is considered safe to people and non-target species, such as wildlife, and acts by producing proteins (delta-endotoxin, the “toxic crystal”) that react with the cells of the gut lining of susceptible insects. These Bt proteins paralyze the digestive system, and the infected insect stops feeding within hours. Bt-affected insects generally die from starvation, which can take several days. Shandaken Supervisor Robert Cross Jr. recently told those gathered at one of his town board meetings that he had had the foresight to order 10 cases of the stuff, which the town would sell to residents at cost… directly out of Cross’ office. “We’re down to two cases, but we’re trying to order more,” Cross said. In a press release from the Catskill Forest Association announcing its recent presentation titled “Caterpillar Killers?” at Belleayre Mountain’s Overlook Lodge, it was noted that, “There are several management strategies to control the numbers of caterpillars, ranging in intensity from physical removal (squish!), to large-scale aerial spraying (cha ching!). Around your home, you can scrape the cocoons from sheltered areas of your porch or siding. By the end of July, look for egg masses and remove them too.”
We looked through several appendix pages to the DEC report and found an item about a natural predator that increased as tent caterpillar populations increased…
“Sarcophaga aldrichi (superficially resembling a large housefly) can be so abundant that it is almost as much of a nuisance as the caterpillar,” the report reads. “The adult fly oviposits on the cocoon of a FTC and the maggot burrows into the pupa reducing the FTC pupa to a liquefied mass upon which the maggot feeds. The population of the fly increases during successive outbreaks and is often very abundant in the year before an FTC population collapse.”
Good news, we guess. But… eeeewwww!
Also drawn by the caterpillars, it seems, are a number of birds that will flock to an area defoliated by the little critters.
“Some eat only the insides,’ it says of sapsuckers, cuckoos and woodpeckers, which have also been reported as on the increase… not coincidentally, it appears.
There have been other reports, in sporting columns from the west and south of us, of fisherfolk making flies resembling tent caterpillars, or actually using the little buggers themselves, to catch trout and whatever else swims in local streams.
“We’re hoping this is the last year,” Rusinek said from Cornell Extension offices. “People have been seeing a lot of dead caterpillars. There have also been new reports of caterpillar beetles, these big black bugs that eat the caterpillars, coming in.”
She said she’d heard of some private spraying, especially involving large tracts of land in the Big Indian/Highmount area. And Woodstock.
But she’s just counting time until it’s all over, at least for now.
“You get an all clear for eight years and then…” she started saying, her voice trailing off where the Whammo would be.. “That’s nature for you. Sometimes you just have to let it run its course.”