Hudson’s popular (ice-) creamery LICK naturally is open only in the (semi-) warm months. So this winter, their storefront is morphing into LOAF, a bakery. After hearing the news, artist/designer Ben Veronis, decided to take their business incubation idea to the next logical extreme...
There’s a second installment, coming soon...
Local realtor Mary Mullane’s recent suggestion that Hudson’s Waterfront plan should encourage cruise ships to dock at (and bring passengers' wallets to) Hudson was met with derision by some Common Council members, as if this were some pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
But there is a very large cruise ship docked right now—on a rainy Wednesday afternoon—at The Point in Catskill. Real, live passengers are disembarking from the American Cruise Line vessel out of Wilmington, Delaware. A guide is giving them a list of attractions they can visit, and most are hoofing it up the hill to check out Catskill's main street.
Cruises of course are only one of many obvious economic development ideas that a full-fledged marina would attract on the east bank if the River—from bars to boat-builders. Yet as things stand, Hudson is poised to let those dollars and more flow instead to their more westerly neighbors.
A:
And:
Hudson could have these things, and a lot more. If it edges Holcim out.
Does the Holcim corporation make much in the way of a contribution to the finances of the City of Hudson? Not much, especially in comparison with other parts of the City, according to numbers obtained from local assessment rolls.
Some hard data appears below to answer the question of what, precisely, Holcim contributes to Hudson’s tax base—and how this compares with other taxpayers.
According to the 2010 Final roll prepared by Assessor Garth Slocum, Holcim’s assessment represents just 1% of the City’s total taxable value:
Yet in exchange for that unimpressive 1%, the company seems to be getting 99% deference in planning the future of the City’s waterfront.
Meanwhile, many business owners have expressed grave concern that this deeply flawed plan will forclose the possibility of adding a second major economic engine to complement that of the main street business district. So, how much does Warren Street contribute to Hudson’s tax coffers?
Properties on Warren represent 19% of the City’s total taxable value. In other words, 1 in 5 dollars that the City would in property taxes this coming year will come from Warren Street; only 1 in 100 comes from Holcim. (The taxable properties in the 500 block alone, highlighted in blue above, have an assessment four times higher than Holcim.)
And if Garth Slocum’s 2010 roll is thrown out by Acting Supreme Court Justice Paul Czajka in response to the HPOC lawsuit, and the 2009 roll were reinstated, the disparity would be even starker. Holcim’s share of the Hudson property tax pie would fall to less than 1% (.0084), whereas Warren Street’s share would rise to 21.5% (.2145).
In fact, the table above shows that individual blocks around the City contribute more to the City’s property tax base than Holcim. The 200, 300, 400 and 500 blocks of Union Street each represent between 1.2 and 1.6 times the assessed value of the seemingly all-important Holcim parcels in South Bay. Green Street and Glenwood Boulevard each contribute double what Holcim does. The 500 block of Warren contributes nearly four times Holcim’s property taxes.
And so on.
This hard data raises the question again: Why does a single company that contributes far less than locally-owned businesses and home owners get treated as if they are the only game in town by City officials? Holcim, to this site’s knowledge, also does not contribute sales tax revenues to the City coffers (being a bulk/wholesale operation, with subsidiaries based either out of state or out of the country entirely). Moreover, there is not a shred of evidence available to indicate that the draft Waterfront plan’s support for such destructive uses would create new jobs for local residents. As with this company’s failed “Greenport project,” the economic assumptions and claims made by Holcim and its boosters have no factual basis. They appear to be driven more by a nostalgia for a long-gone day when technology was less advanced, meaning that such industries actually employed thousands of people—which they no longer do.
During a recent meeting with Common Council representatives, planner Frank Fish of BFJ made a raft of unsubstantiated claims to support his firm’s decision to ignore public input— choosing instead to cheerlead for the supposed value of having a heavy industrial presence at the Hudson Waterfront.
Among Fish’s offhand comments was a claim that doing so would be “good for the tax base.” The planner offered no data to support his unsourced notion, and the draft LWRP which he and City attorney Cheryl Roberts presents no analysis of the benefits and trade-offs which would result from their choices.
And indeed, the 2005 ruling by Secretary of State found that zoning out discordant and incompatible heavy industrial activities would ultimately be better for the economic growth and stability of Hudson—because it would bring more people to the River, and allow other more mutually-supportive businesses to thrive.
New York Magazine food critic Adam Platt has selected the organic yogurt from Milk Thistle Farm in Ghent as the best in the State. Platt also named their organic whole milk as the best available at NYC greenmarkets, calling it “cereal milk for the gods.”
Dante Hesse’s yogurt and milks (and creams) can be purchased locally at Hawthorne Valley Farm Store. The farm is looking for new investors, as Dante noted in this video interview by ccScoop some time ago here.
From Michael Moore's most recent movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story," a proposal made by FDR one year before his death...
Back in March 2006, Metroland covered the kick-off meeting of the Hudson Common Council’s newly-appointed Waterfront Advisory Steering Committee. In light of more recent Waterfront developments, the kindest thing that can be said is that the current situation is not lacking in irony.
The story was subtitled “Citizens of Hudson are given the opportunity to reimagine their waterfront,” and covered “what Linda Mussmann, chair of the Waterfront Advisory Steering Committee, hopes will be a series of meetings meant to guide and shape Hudson’s Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan.” The rest of the article included the following passages... which can only fill the mouths of those who remember the optimism and energy of those initial meetings with the bitter taste of wormwood:
- The room filled with more than 100 residents who buzzed with excitement over the chance to construct a waterfront district. The energy in the room was palpable as members of the Common Council, Mayor Richard Tracy and Department of State Coastal Resources specialists Bonnie Devine and Nancy Welsh took their seats. Applause erupted frequently as officials welcomed the crowd.
- Said Mussmann, “To have an opportunity to have access [to the waterfront] is a big thing. It always seems to have a fence in front of it or a barge of an industrial plant...”
- While the LWRP’s history is a long saga, [Basilica Industria developer and former LWRP Subcommittee Chair Patrick] Doyle says he is now focused on the future. “It’s all in the past. It’s a new age now. It’s about unifying the community, opening up the process.”
- Mayor [Dick] Tracy agrees that giving the community a voice is the key in moving the LWRP forward. “They have been denied the opportunity to offer input for too long,” he said.
- What may have really sparked the turnout on Wednesday, however, is the recent defeat of the proposed St. Lawrence Cement plant. Hudson residents seem to realize they have a chance to take control of what they so nearly lost.
- According to Mussmann, the delay surrounding the LWRP has stemmed from a number of different pressures. “In my opinion,” said Mussmann, “Many government officials knew about it but the public wasn’t informed. In terms of openness it was handled in a less public way than I think was helpful to this city. . . . There was also some lag time because of the huge cement plant that was potentially coming to our shores. People were awaiting the result.”
- The Secretary of State’s April 2005 decision rejecting the St. Lawrence plant declared that Hudson’s current waterfront zoning is “far too broad and does not recognize the value of the waterfront as a historical, cultural, commercial and recreational zone for the city.”
- Members of the public brought up simple suggestions such as acquiring signage to let people know Hudson has a waterfront and connecting the waterfront to downtown. Others worried about eyesores such as prominent power lines and towers on St. Lawrence property abutting the waterfront. Some expressed hope for a museum or a research center[,] a bird sanctuary or some other kind of environmental center, free of development. DOS representatives reassured participants that these are the kind of decisions that would be made by the community as a whole.
- Robert O’Brien, president of the Common Council, and Mussmann both stressed that the goal is to get as much community input as possible.
- “It’s an opportunity to re-create this area in the way that the citizens of this community would like to see it happen,” [Mussmann] said, “and it’s the first time they’ve had the chance.”
The extraordinary irony is of course that Mussmann, along with City Attorney Cheryl Roberts, became in 2007 the principle advocates of ignoring public input, and instead using the Waterfront plan to permanently ensconce or even expand the cement company’s blighting industrial presence next to public parks, recreation areas, small boat launches, habitat restoration projects, and appropriate commericial development such as restaurants, kayak rentals, marine supply, and the like.
So it’s no wonder they decided to erase all traces of the March meetings of the WASC from the narrative of public input on the draft plan. That glaring bit of historical revisionism has been brought to the attention of the City and State in Save the South Bay’s 32,000-word submission of comments on the schizophrenic and short-sighted draft LWRP currently under consideration.
