SamPratt.com

While Hudson Mayor Rick Scalera and the City Youth Department leadership were focused on dismantling popular cooking, gardening and yoga programs at the Boys & Girls Club, it looks like they should have been concerned about other Departmental staff instead.

Writing in today’s Register-Star, Jamie Larson reports that the U.S. District Attorney’s office has charged Youth Department employee Dowayne “Dee” Scott with creating child porn. Larson’s report discloses that Scott was fired after being “arrested by the FBI for allegedly creating child pornography with a 15-year-old girl.” In addition, the article notes that Scott was hired despite the Youth Department knowing full well that Scott had a “drug-related” record and spent several years in prison.

(Meanwhile, the article also mentions that another Youth Department employee was a victim of the recent shooting on Columbia Street, an incident whose details remain murky.)

The Reg-Star story further suggests that because of this news, Youth Commissioner Daryl Blanks’ own position is now on the chopping block, though it remains to be seen whether he survives the scandal. Blanks acted as Scalera’s hatchet man in the campaign to axe Clark’s Kids in the Kitchen program and the senior citizen Yoga Buddies programs, and also has helped lead the assault on the raised bed gardens outside the Club.

Even before this news broke, some Hudsonites speculated that the push to get Clark and her colleagues out of the picture had something to do with not wanting alert, responsible eyes noticing anything else that was going on in the Department. The main motivating factor, however, for getting rid of fun, educational and successful kids programs would seem to be the Mayor’s longstanding personal animus toward the program’s organizer—who for much of the 1990s and well into this new century was a watchdog (and thorn in the side) of City Hall.

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The destruction of the Kitchen and Yoga programs (which had long waiting lists due to their popularity) was based on trumped-up political outrage that Clark was making “$50 per hour”—a misleading figure which the Mayor and his allies put repeatedly into the public domain. This soundbite cleverly covered up the fact that Clark was paid solely for the small number of hours per week that she was actually cooking with the kids, face-to-face.

Clark evidently was not paid for her shopping, organizational, travel, lesson planning and other preparation time. That time likewise included countless volunteer hours soliciting donations of food and equipment for the kids’ benefit from area farms and businesses. A bottom-line analysis of her compensation would likely show that the actual rate of pay, with all those unpaid hours included, amounted to more like minimum wage. An intensive 1-2 hour class of this type requires tons of time before and after each session to make sure it is a true educational experience for the kids, but Clark was not compensated for those hours. Again, if that time were added into the equation, the Kids in the Kitchen project was equivalent to an $8/hour part-time job at best.

This was a passion for Clark and her colleagues, not some big moneymaker as has been implied. (If she wanted to make a pile of dough, she’s more than qualified to be a top chef at some fancy boîte or a consultant to a major food service corporation; instead, she decided to transfer her considerable culinary skills to kids, who responded strongly to her efforts.) Anyone who knows Carole knows that she is incredibly conscientious in putting these types of community programs together; and that this was a true calling in her retirement after years of running Charleston, the pioneering Hudson restaurant.

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There’s a general lack of understanding in the U.S. of how freelancers make a living. Typically, they barely do. Most everything in our society is (consciously or unconsciously) organized to discourage working for yourself.

When a freelancer charges an hourly fee, that fee has to cover all of the overhead costs that a full- or part-time employee of a company never has to think about. Out of that hourly fee, the freelancer has to pay for their own equipment, phone lines, liability insurance, marketing, transportation, computers, printers, office supplies, software, retirement plans, bookkeeping, health care costs, and much more. (That’s not to mention high self-employment tax rates. While some of these expenses can be written off, taking more than modest deductions is a sure way to get audited by the I.R.S., and freelancers get audited far more frequently than the general population.) If any of those costs are billed to clients, that usually just means the hourly rate for services is correspondingly lower.

Moreover, freelance work is not steady. Freelancers don’t get paid during business slowdowns or downtime. If sales at a store are slow in a given week, its employees still get their salaries. Freelancers don’t get paid vacations, medical or maternity leaves, benefits, etc. They only get a check when an actual sale gets made, or a service is delivered (and often not until well after the job is completed). For those on salary, the hourly rate is the actual net amount taken home after all the company’s overhead costs are taken out; a freelancer’s hourly rate is the gross revenue before all those expenses are subtracted.

So if—as was the case with Kids in the Kitchen—you only get paid for a few hours a week on a given freelance job, that’s hardly going to keep a roof over your head, let alone allow someone to live a luxurious lifestyle as was sarcastically implied in Clark’s case. A freelancer would need to have a dozen of these types of clients just to make an average living, once all the costs involved of delivering such highly-specialized services get figured in.

The only real reason to go freelance is to earn a small degree of personal freedom—some sense of control over one’s own destiny—which is why a small percentage of people are willing to try skiing down that Most Difficult trail.

Portraying the cooking and yoga programs as some kind of cash cow was thus completely unfair and underhanded. Now that other, truly serious problems with the Youth Department are coming to light, it’s time to consider reinstating those popular and beneficial programs to their rightful place.

Yours truly is the unspecified “friend who was considering turning the old place into a dining club” in this New York Spaces article about Frank Faulkner’s latest architectural turnaround act.

Spaces got it wrong, however. My intention was not to convert this handsome South 4th Street building (which had been a law office continuously since the time of the Civil War) into some sort of supper-by-subscription operation. In fact I was contemplating a literary society along the lines of my favorite college haunt.

And that was really just a speculative cover for my true interest— making sure the building wasn’t ruined. So when Frank very tactfully let drop that he would be interested in buying the place if I didn’t, that mission was accomplished. I was happy to keep my money in my pocket, knowing Mssrs. Faulkner and Kesinger would do right by the place.

This is just the latest of more than a dozen homes to benefit from Frank’s restorative eye in Columbia County, many of which can be seen at his website. Some enterprising nonprofit really ought to organize a benefit tour of all his area projects; in Hudson alone, he’s saved and renovated places on East Allen, South 7th, Warren Street, North 5th, and now South 4th.