Independence
I once lived in an isolated town in New England, population 560. There was no big city nearby, few homes were second homes, half of us were natives and half were born somewhere else. There was more snow than in the Catskills, and twenty below was a normal winter's night. The people weren't any nicer or more interesting than they are here. But I had a richer, more diverse, and more fulfilling social life than anyplace I've ever been. People lived as if their lives depended on one another because they did, and everyone understood it. And it created a place where caring and compassion and respect for one another colored everything including local politics. So I admit it. I still harbor a secret desire to see Shandaken become more like Chelsea, Vermont in the late 1970's.
When I came here 13 years ago, my friends - some old, most new back then - helped me rebuild the shell of my old house. At some point I started going to town meetings, but casually, like I played softball. A former councilman pulled me into the sphere of public affairs by championing a particularly poorly conceived idea called Quality Deer Management which sailed through our town board on its apparent way to State approval. Nobody realized that although it read like a wildlife proposal, it was really a huge if unintended assault on property rights fraught with public safety, liability, and legal problems. So when a handful of us started asking questions, people quickly put two and two together and most of our local hunters had the good sense to oppose it. Because they did, you can still hunt deer for food in Shandaken the way people always have.
Our town board back then wasn't trying to stop subsistence hunting, actually they wanted more hunters to come. It's just that nobody had thought anything through. They were so focused on deer and the size of their antlers that they forgot our town has people living here too, and that if you change laws for people it's mostly people that are affected. In their certainty they knew what they were doing, they didn't think they needed to check with us, and the public was excluded from pointing that out, or talking through the implications of what was being proposed. All that of course has changed as we've come to expect a much higher level of openness in town government, and in a relatively short time. Now, if someone proposes something stupid, we talk about it and we get rid of it but the process is public, not private. I doubt we'll ever go back to the days when town business got decided over a bar, and questions at town meetings were dealt with by innuendo and nasty cracks, whether from the back of the room or the front. Even I remember those days, as many of you no doubt do, and few of us would look forward to going back.
What I remember most clearly from my early experiences with our town government was its near total lack of confidence that what we did here mattered much, that we couldn't fight the State, that we couldn't fight the City. Well we can do either one if we need to, and we can more than hold our own. We've already blown some opportunities because we were afraid of taking them on. But we're doing it now. Shandaken's working with the State and the Association of Towns to come up with a reasonable way to assess public forest lands. We've helped move the City off its plans to review our local issues in connection with the Belleayre Resort, and we're getting money from them so we can do it ourselves. We're going to be fighting for the City to pay for the maintenance of Phoenicia's sewage treatment or community septic needs. And when that issue comes front and center soon, the City's going to have their hands full, because we're in the right.
But more important than any of the particulars, we in Shandaken continue to raise the bar in our region on the level of public involvement in our own governance. For all the problems that come with it, that's good. People show up in Shandaken. People read and think and talk about the best way to get where we're going, and they understand that our voices on whatever side of any issue make a huge difference. So we're finally starting to get it. And as we do, the lack of confidence with which Shandaken used to see itself is disappearing fast.
227 years ago, the Continental Congress voted on the Declaration of Independence and it wasn't unanimous. 9 colonies voted in favor, 2 against, 1 was undecided, and 1, New York, abstained. A consensus decision perhaps, but one they all signed off on because there is a greater good that needs to be respected, and that's our collective future. Because of Thomas Jefferson's brilliance and the wisdom of our founding fathers, our nation is still the light of the world, though we shine only as bright as the clarity with which each of us and every community sees itself. As we celebrate our independence this year, let's remember we're also celebrating our freedom to choose the future we want for our children and their children. The legal guarantee of that under State law is called Home Rule. Whatever you read, whatever anybody tells you, it means we decide what happens here, not someone else, not even some agency in Albany. It means independence, our birthright as a town almost 200 years old under the great Constitution of New York State. And it is a great constitution.
Where our growing sense of empowerment takes us is up to us. And taking responsibility for our community's well being is something we need to see in the same way as we take responsibility for our families. Things are always going to come up, and we're always going to have to deal with them together. If we can try to build on what we share and work through problems like we really want to solve them, we'll do fine. In fact if we can pull that off, we might just create a future far better than our past ever was.