Handpicked Nation has a web feature up about Grazin’ in Hudson, including an extensive interview with manager Andrew (Chip) Chiapinelli explaining their “farm-to-table direct” philosophy and status as the only Animal Welfare Approved restaurant in the entire United States.
Claims about organic, sustainable, locally-sourced and humane food practices are notoriously hard to verify, but this place is the real deal.
The New York Times Magazine has published a new interview wwith Marina Abramović, the subject of the new documentary The Artist is Present, and who of course is planning a major performance art (or rather, performing art) institute in Hudson.
The interview by Andrew Goldman is lively, but he seems a bit more intent on gathering gossip about the artist’s love life and appearance than having a substantive discussion of her art. Perhaps as a result, the comments so far on the article are pretty much of the know-nothing, dismissive variety that Abramović has endured for much of her career, and of which the documentary (shown recently at the Berkshire International Film Festival) makes mincemeat.
WRGB in Albany (a/k/a Channel 6) has a story which seems sure to go viral: A letter sent by Jonathan Davis from Chatham to Hudson traveled some 350 miles via the USPS to make the 10-mile journey, according to the online tracking for which he paid extra. The Post Office offers an explanation, of sorts.
The topmost blocks of Warren Street in Hudson continue to blossom, most recently with the advent of Content at #722.
Jade-Snow Carroll, former managing director of Design Observer, quietly opened the ambiguously-monikered shop during Pride weekend. (Hint: the name is pronounced like the Information Age noun, though the adjective seems appropriate enough, too.)
The store, which will also double as a graphic design studio, features a winning mix of vintage and locally-made new accessories, clothing, furnishings, furniture and other objects.
For home owners, there a few things more stressful than dealing with an incorrect property tax assessment. The process can feel intimidating—trying to understand the law, gathering data and “comparables,” meeting with a local assessor, “grieving” before the Board of Assessment Review—because those in power hold so much sway over one’s financial future.
In our region, BARs are known often to give grievers token reductions (so they don’t feel they went away empty-handed) while protecting the Assessor’s underlying position overall. Meanwhile, citizens often suspect that their elected officials may have some kind of special “in” when it comes to the whole assessment process.
Recently, I spent several weeks quizzing City of Hudson officials and their attorney Cheryl Roberts over a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for documents related to a citywide assessment performed by GAR Associates, as part of a $170,000 contract. That contract was awarded by the Hudson Common Council and monitored by its President, Donald Moore. The documents eventually coughed up by the City show that Moore had extensive interactions with GAR, some in person and some via email.
In emails from the Fall of 2011, Moore can be seen going back and forth with GAR’s David Barnett about their ongoing work for the City—peppering him with questions about parcel counts, notifications, taxpayers conferences with GAR. All of these questions were seemingly relevant to the public task at hand.
Moore then addresses an email blast sent by local resident and politician Ellen Thurston, in which she urged constituents to double-check GAR’s new measurements and stats for their houses, since they had bungled hers badly. On September 16th, Moore addressed a host of other assessment topics in an email message before coming around to Thurston’s email:
I wish Alderman and soon to be County Supervisor Ellen Thurston hadn’t gone broadcast yesterday but she did. But I wish even more that your appraiser had not have [sic] missed her house completely.
More remarkably, the Council President then veers off into discussing his own property with the City’s assessment consultant:
Further, I need to measure my house. I am not sure you got my dimensions correctly. But I will get back to you today on that.
Barnett replies with some boilerplate instructions on how his firm calculates “dimensions and square footage” using each house’s external dimensions. If Moore indeed “got back to” Barnett about the topic as he promises above, it must have been by phone or in person, because that does not appear in the emails.
Now, Moore here does not ask explicitly in writing for any property tax reduction. And like every taxpayer, he has every right to check that GAR had his particulars correct.
But the process for doing so should be the same one that all “ordinary” taxpayers have to go through—not via direct messages within the context of managing a $170,000 contract. An implied reminder from the Common Council President to the City’s consultant about his own status as private property owner, overtly raising a potential concern about the stats which undergird his own home’s assessment, has no place in official communications.
This at minimum raises an appearance of impropriety, whether legal or not. In governmental ethics, appearances count because they can undermine public trust in the entire process.
Moore could point out that in the end his own tentative assessment for 2012 went up modestly, from $212,300 to $238,000, a 12% increase. But a look at all the 14 properties listed on the same block as Moore which are in the same class (210 Residential, meaning a single family) shows that the overall increase there was higher (18%) as was the average (20%). Moore’s house is tied for the 3rd lowest out of those 14 houses.
Two similar homes on the block were raised 49% each, and another was bumped up a whopping 80%, making 12% look very reasonable by comparison.
More nuggets sifted from the FOIL request will be forthcoming here over the next week or so.
Carole Osterink reports from Hudson that the Front Street restaurant MOD was abruptly padlocked as part of some sort of landlord/tenant dispute.
Owner Dana Wegener has now posted this notice on MOD’s website:
We would like to personally thank you for your support, patronage, and friendship over the past six years. Some of you may have already heard, or have been wondering, and I would like you to hear it from us.
We regret to say that MOD Hudson has permanently closed as of Monday June 11, 2012. We are so grateful to all of you who have been loyal customers both at the cafe in Catskill and for the last year at our restaurant in Hudson.
Dana will continue to dish up her hearty meals prepared with love. Please email for private chef services or off site catering. The dedicated staff will be finding new paths as well.
According to the 2012 Tentative Assessment roll for Hudson, 18-22 South Front Street is owned by Andrew King.
Gossips also passes along “a rumor that Joe Fierro, owner of American Glory, wants to open an Italian restaurant in the space.”
Another Italian restaurant—great thinking! As Marty Davidson noted Hudson already has Ca Mea, Vico and Baba Loui... Not to mention Scali’s, LaBella’s, Rigatony’s, Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Joe’s, plus a half-dozen or so other 12534 restaurants with either pizza or pasta on the menu.
Hudson still doesn’t have any Greek or Thai places, or a Jewish deli, or easy access to countless other national cuisines... But, hey, why do something different that expands Hudson’s horizons, when you can compete with other local businesses for a limited market?
The Crimson Sparrow, a much-anticipated bar/restaurant from Benjamin Freemole and John McCarthy—two vetarans of wd-50’s “molecular gastronomy” kitchen in Manhattan—is expected to open in the 800 block of Warren Street on June 20th. Lots of preview pictures can be found on their Facebook page.
Meanwhile, Steve Walsh’s Brazilian food cart is on the move again, this time to the sidewalk adjoining the ice cream haven Lick in the 200 block (on Sundays) and outside Spotty Dog (on Friday and Saturday nights).
During the Q&A after Saturday’s Berkshire Film Festival screening of the documentary The Artist is Present, Marina Abramović clarified an important point about her planned institute in Hudson.
The center will focus, she explained, on all of the performing arts—including for instance music and dance—not just on the specific type of performance art for which she herself is known... The kicker being that she intends to focus on “durational” performances of six hours or more, from many disciplines.
Does the City of Hudson take New York State’s Freedom of Information Law seriously? The answer seems to be a definite yes for the City Clerk, but no for most other prominent officials, as we’ll see below. But first, a bit about FOIL and how to use it...
FOIL is a powerful tool which any citizen can use to obtain government records; and you don’t need to be a lawyer to use it. Any reasonably-described request to any agency of State or local government requires a timely response.
You can, for example, send an email to the general email of your municipality, putting it to the attention of the “Records Access Officer” with the subject “FOIL request,” followed by a brief description of what you’re seeking in the body of the message (say, the minutes of the Planning Board for the past year). Include your name, address, email, and whether you want the response electronically or on paper.
You don’t have to explain or justify why you might want these records, so long as your request isn’t overly-broad. Which is to say: don’t ask for all of your town’s records for the past century... though you can describe your request broadly enough to include things that might pertain to the topic, but which you might not know exist because they are buried in some official file.
Agencies have five days to either (a) cough up the records, (b) tell you there are no such records, (c) tell you it will take a little time to gather them, and give you a date no more than 20 days later to do so, or (d) deny the request specifying one of the few grounds allowed under the law. (An agency can be anything from a Zoning Board of Appeals to the Building Inspector’s office to the Town Board.) An agency can’t just ignore a request, even if it does not like it or doesn’t have the records.
If you do want to get to know more about the legalities of FOIL, the State maintains a handy web guide, and the Committee on Open Government’s Bob Freeman is generally easy to get on the phone to address citizen queries. But again, it really isn’t necessary to become an expert to use FOIL effectively.
Now: On May 9th, this site sent a message to the City of Hudson which requested in part:
a copy of any contract(s) with GAR Associates which was entered into by the City following the Council's March 2011 vote (Resolution 6) authorizing the Mayor to do so, and any official correspondence or amendments related to the terms or ongoing oversight of that contract to or from GAR. [...]
(This FOIL request applies to all sub-agencies of the City; please if necessary share it with those departments or officials who may retain records responsive to this request.)
The admirably-responsive City Clerk, Tracy Delaney, responded almost immediately, providing access to the GAR contract and other documents. She also indicated that the request also had been forwarded to the Assessor and Mayor.
Upon reading the lengthy GAR contract speedily provided by Delaney, I noticed that it required GAR to provide the Common Council with “monthly reports.” On the 11th, I followed up with Delaney to make sure that the City’s response to my FOIL would include those reports. (These are of special interest, since various City officials have professed to have been broadsided by GAR’s abrupt switch of all local bed and breakfasts from residential to commercial tax classification.) Delaney again promptly replied that she had provided what she had in her own files, and that:
The Council President does maintain his own files and he has received your FOIL request.
It has now been a good deal more than five business days since Council President Don Moore, Assessor Garth Slocum and Mayor Bill Hallenbeck have been in possession of this Freedom of Information Law request, but none of the three has responded—in apparent violation of that unambiguous State law, which states:
Each entity subject to the provisions of this article, within five business days of the receipt of a written request for a record reasonably described, shall make such record available to the person requesting it, deny such request in writing or furnish a written acknowledgement of the receipt of such request and a statement of the approximate date, which shall be reasonable under the circumstances of the request, when such request will be granted or denied...
Emails were sent to Delaney and Moore bringing the situation to their attention; Delaney again responsively replied that she had re-forwarded the request to Slocum and Hallenbeck. Their lack of response thus far seems to bespeak either a lack of interest in following the law, or a reluctance to provide the records, or perhaps both.
More to come on this, once the City responds... or doesn’t.
UPDATE #1: Following a firm nudge at the City, I have now received a response from Garth Slocum indicating that he has begun work on responding to the request.
UPDATE #2: Don Moore also finally responded last week that he had “made a mistake” in assuming that the City Clerk’s response relieved him of the responsibility to respond himself. (This, despite the Clerk’s clear indication by email that her files were separate from his, and that the request had been brought to his attention for a separate search.)
UPDATE #3: City Attorney Cheryl Roberts called at week’s end to say that they Mayor’s office was also now working on the the request, and that she is assembling all of the materials, but that they would not be ready until the middle of next week. Roberts agreed that the City’s FOIL procedure has become unnecessarily fragmented, claiming that she “tried to address this in 2006” without success.
I’ve raised that problem with Moore and other local officials before. Under the balkanized “system” instituted during Scalera’s reign, citizens effectively became obliged to play a guessing game about which City department might have records responsive to their requests, and then badger each department head separately.
As an agency under the State’s definition, the City needs to have a Records Access Officer responsible for overseeing the search for documents, even if that officer delegates the task of finding them to individual department heads. Otherwise, the intent of FOIL to open up government to the public is foiled, as delays, denials, clarifications and appeals proliferate for what is meant to be a single, direct process. Hudson is classified as a “small city,” but it is really not that big, and thus really shouldn’t treat its agencies as far-flung fiefdoms in the way that Albany or NYC might need to.
