According to well-placed sources, PCB handler/processor TCI of NY filed an application last week with the Town of Ghent to rebuild its facility on Falls Industrial Park Road. The company’s application is said to have been accompanied by a check which has been placed in escrow by the Town.
However, the application reportedly has been returned to TCI as incomplete, as it did not contain all of the required information. Some town officials have informally signaled that TCI would need to go before its planning board if it wished to resume operations
As it happens, the Ghent Town Board has its regularly-scheduled meeting tonight (Thursday) at 7:30 pm at Town Hall, located at 2306 State Route 66.
To date, the Town has not cited TCI for any of many evident zoning code violations which have been brought to its attention. Activities such as fuel and explosives storage, handling of high-concentration PCBs, safety precautions and hazard prevention, and the introduction of multiple tenants into a building, are all clearly regulated by the Town’s zoning code and State fire safety regulations which are the Town’s obligation to enforce. Records obtained via FOIL and from private legal files held by neighbors indicate that many or most of the company’s uses of the site have never been the subject of a permitting review.
TCI left Ulster County in the mid-1980s after a fire similar to the one in Ghent led Newburgh fire and code enforcement officials, as well as State regulators, to cite the company for multiple violations. The company then attempted to set up shop again in Greene County, but were blocked among other things by stiff opposition from Athens firefighters, who noted that Athens did not have the equipment or resources to fight a major fire at such a facility. It was then that TCI came to Columbia County, representing themselves as an electronics recycler, and claiming that any transformers accepted onsite would be drained and contain at most scarce traces of PCBs.
In addition to having two fires at its plant in just the past year, TCI’s tenure in Ghent includes the death of a young worker on the job due to exposure to freon gas, and two failed applications (one to build an incinerator, the other to process household hazardous waste) which cost the Town enormous legal fees.
In a comment on the previous post here about Hudson getting younger, 3rd Ward Alderman John Friedman noted that:
One problem that I hear from younger Hudsonians and those aspiring to be is that the cost of rental housing in the city has climbed precipitously (is that an oxymoron?) in the last year or so and make finding a decent place to live difficult for this particular demographic. The City is trying to figure out ways to stimulate a market response to this demand but that usually takes 2 years or so...
Speaking as a former Young Person, I can attest that every generation thinks that The Rent Is Too Damn High. But since complex issues like this require more than cursory analysis, below are some examples and considerations that might be taken into account:
In the documentary film Two Square Miles, recently screened at Basilica Hudson, a local resident complains that landlords are asking “six, seven hundred dollars" for an apartment, calling these prices “crazy.” It is suggested by some that “those people” are trying to “push all of us out.” Now, that interview was shot almost ten years ago. A decade later, I still see that same interviewee daily, walking his dog on Warren Street. He’s still here; he didn’t get pushed out, in spite of the alleged “craziness” of Hudson rents.
Today, one can readily find on Craigslist listings such as this: a newly-remodeled
three-bedroom apartment in uptown Hudson for under $1,000. Three young people could
share it and pay just $325 each per month. (Does unsubsidized rent get any cheaper than that anywhere in the Hudson Valley, unless you’re prepared to live in a free-fire zone in Newburgh?) One can find many similarly-priced options on Craiglist; while offerings from local realtors tend to be more of the luxury variety.
If rents do need ameliorating, the main way the City of Hudson can help is to get its budget and taxes under control, since rents correlate closely to taxation here. Overall, private investment has been a great benefit to Hudson: derelict structures are saved, delinquent properties go back on the tax rolls, contractors get work doing renovations, and formerly-closed-up apartments go back on the rental market, increasing supply. But if a landlord is paying taxes that exceed their montly mortgage payment, that is going to add substantially to what they have to charge in rent just to hold onto their building. Few if any landlords will take a loss on a rental, and high taxes will lead to high rents.
Another strategy that could moderate rents would be for the City to encourage or require un(der)used properties to be activated again. One example is Galloway’s apartment building on the corner of Warren and 2nd street: it was cleared of tenants at purchase time nearly a decade ago, and inexplicably has remained empty ever since. Ditto the former “Apartments of Distinction” building at the corner of Union and 5th Street, formerly home to multiple families, There are many other examples of “warehoused” residential space all over town—I recall seeing a figure of as much as 15-20% of housing stock being empty here in one recent report. Get those apartments back on the market, and rents will surely come down, if the law of supply and demand is not an economic fiction.
As far as rents going up, it’s worth trying to sort out anecdotal reports from the actual situation before officials take any major action. If a couple of folks’ rents go up, and they talk a lot about it at a local bar frequented by young people, it becomes easy in a small town to jump to the conclusion that everyone’s rent is exploding—even when those two examples are exceptional. For example, just yesterday I went to watch football at the newly-purchased house of a Hudson “young person.” (That in itself is, anecdotally, a good sign.) There were about seven of us hanging out—two of whom had just moved to Hudson to work at a local business. They had been crashing on friends’ couches in search of place to live, and literally during the Patriots/Seahawks game, one of them got a call and they left to move into their new apartment. So what is the reality? Are rents going up too high, or are young people finding apartments? If rents are so problematic, why are young people moving here at a rate unheard of a decade ago? In short, the City might first want to try to collect some rigorous data to find out what is really happening on the ground, rather than acting in haste based on sketchy info.
It remains that Hudson has a tremendous amount of subsidized housing, per capita—certainly higher than any other municipality in the County. This subsidized housing stock has not diminished in the past 10-15 years. And it probably also ranks in the top five in the region in terms of providing affordable housing (again, per capita). In the Terrace apartments, for example, if your situations qualifies you, you can get an apartment at a rent which is pegged to your actual income: you only pay what you can actually afford at any given time. This is not something that most towns offer.
In that context, it would be useful to determine how Hudson rents compare to rents in other towns and small cities nearby. Is it more expensive to rent an apartment in Hudson than, say, Philmont? Kinderhook? Catskill? Albany? If one thinks that rents are too high in Hudson, where else would one go—and what would one be passing up by moving, in terms of either job or lifestyle opportunities? If you move to a place where rent is cheaper, will there be any work or anything to do after work in that place, or would it be cheaper precisely because it is dead? If housing is really hard to come by in Hudson, it must be even harder elsewhere; and to that extent, rental pressure is a New York State or American problem.
Our American capitalist system is an unfair one, and one that needs fixing. Even former Alderman Quintin Cross (a past master of divide-and-conquer local politics) acknowledges toward the end of Two Square Miles that it is “not the fault” of people who have embraced Hudson’s potential that our society remains full of economic and social ills. With that in mind, it would be good for City officials to consider ways to address the most catastrophic rental situations—such as when a building sells, and longtime renters are given minimal time to move out. Renters ought to have the right to a lease, and a reasonable amount of time to find new quarters if owners change.
Like every place inhabited by humans, Hudson has some greedy landlords, some slumlords, as well as some elitists whose rental rates are calculated to enact some sort of social engineering. And like every place inhabited by humans, some people latch onto shallowly-understood buzzwords such as gentrification, deploying it as a social pose or way to assuage their own guilt over being privileged, without ever backing it up with actual data or acting meaningfully upon that concern. Gentrification is common in our society; people interested in really understanding and addressing are rare. If anything, thanks to Hudson’s situation, its resources, its walkability, its building stock, and most of all its people, the City may be better positioned than most rural towns to address with the profound flaws of that system.
As noted by that film’s co-producer Sven Huseby at Basilica the other night: if you visit similar towns around the country, one quickly realizes that Hudson’s survival and slow, steady improvement is not merely exceptional in America today, it is almost unique.
There’s still a lot of hand-wringing about the Hudson population dropping over the past decade, as if this were some sort of catastrophe for the life of the town. Official census figures show the number of residents dropping about 11% between 2000 and 2010, from 7,524 to 6,713—about a third of that drop attributable to changes in how prisoners in the Hudson Correctional Facility are counted.
Whether such figures actually speak to the health and fortunes of this “small city” is debatable at best, verging on dubious. Hudson’s population was never higher than in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when residence rose well over 12,000 people. Does anyone want to go back to the mid-1930s, just to be able to say that the population has risen again?
Still, ever since this writer moved here full-time in the dank February of 1998, it’s always been fashionable to predict imminent doom for Hudson. Yet things have kept steadily improving, despite the efforts of certain officials and entrenched interests to impede progress. Then-City Attorney Giff Whitbeck once was heard to declare that the merchants of Warren Street were shell businesses on the verge of collapse—mere façades. That was in the late 1990s. Today, there are probably five times as many occupied storefronts on Hudson’s main street.
Indeed, closer look at voter rolls maintained by the Columbia County Board of Elections tells a somewhat different story about what’s occurred in the past decade or so. Despite the Census showing nearly 800 fewer people in town over the past decade, the number of voters on record in 1999 in comparison with today has dropped by only 56 people.
The percentage of Hudsonians registered to vote thus has actually increased, from 49% to 54%. As a basic measure of civic engagement, one could argue from these numbers that while there are fewer people in Hudson now, there are more interested in its future. To some extent, this reflects the number of concerted voter registration pushes in the years of 2000-2005, when there was a series of hotly-contested City races in the individual five wards as well as Citywide.
Now, turnout in the 2011 Hudson election was notably dismal, possibly because of the lack of contested alderman and supervisor races in the City; the upcoming Presidential, Senatorial, Congressional, Assembly and Legislature contests may be a better test of how engaged these voters really are.
More telling is the average age of registered voters, which has dropped from 54 years old to just 50 over that same period (1999-2012). In other words, the Hudson electorate is getting younger—an improvement, many would say, as a frequent concern in the 1990s was that Hudson’s population was not merely dropping, but also aging. That measurable shift demonstrates with hard figures the anecdotal sense that Hudson is indeed getting younger.
One sees the benefits of this shift economically when venues like Basilica Hudson can routinely bring out 600-800 young people on random weekday nights for bands like Grimes and Godspeed You Black Emperor. (Obviously, many of those attendees were young people from around the region, from Bard to RPI to SUNY to as far away as the Five College area of Northhampton, Mass. But the attendance was also boosted by local residents.
The answers as to why Hudson might be getting younger are not hard to imagine. There is a growing music scene, with multiple venues on both a grand and small scale, from Basilica to Spotty Dog—few of which existed until the last five years or so, let alone in the late ’90s. There are far more options of places to hang out in both day and nighttime, and more places for young people to work. Countless businesses which many newere residents take for granted (from retail and restaurants on Warren Street, to service and manufacturing off it) just weren’t here a decade ago, such as Etsy and Digifab. There’s just a lot more to do now.
Thus when it comes to population, it may many less how many people live in a place, than who. Better to have three people who pay attention to what’s going on, work in town, spend their income locally, support local civic institutions, and get involved with their community, than four who are apathetic and disengaged. Hudson still has a long way to go, but the increased youth of those who have stayed or moved here is a hopeful sign.
It’s been a light week for posting here, due to other obligations, and also the fact that I don’t like to post just for the sake of posting... That said, here are a few regional tidbits worth reporting:
Chef/author Zak Pelaccio’s much-anticipated upstate restaurant with Jori Jayne Emde on South 3rd Street in Hudson reportedly will be called Fish & Game, with renovations continuing at a fever pace in hopes of opening this winter.
HUMP, a/k/a the Hudson Museum of Photography, opens this Saturday with a solo show by Stephen Johnson entitled Moonman. HUMP is located at 552 Warren Street.
After a hiatus following the death of Don Blasko, his wife Mady has reopened the Turnpike Inn.
In other Town of Ghent drinking news, longtime Kozel’s bartender Ned has stepped down to enjoy some well-deserved leisuretime after many years of solid service. It’s rare to find a real oldschool barkeep of Ned’s caliber around here.
Laetitia Hussain’s recent three-story installation at John Davis Gallery, Sycamorphology has sold and is said to be headed to a publicly-accessible space in New York City.
According to several sources the Laskin family is no longer involved with the operation of TCI of NY, the PCB waste company David Laskin moved to Ghent from Newburgh after a fire there in the 1980s. It thus presumably was just a coincidence that (as several other sources have pointed out) the 165-acre Laskin family compound in Old Chatham went on the market for $3,200,000 on August 3rd—just two days after the most recent and most catastrophic TCI fire.
Also regarding TCI, Albany TV stations and other print outlets are reporting that the August 1st fire has been cleared of any suspicion of arson by the New York State Police, though their official report on the cause of the fire is not complete. The August conflagration was TCI’s second fire of 2012, and occurred in the context of a series of other fires in the Route 9H corridor—one of which was affirmatively deemed an arson. (Since the time of this site’s post on that topic, residents have noted several additional fires on roads just slightly off 9H.)
It’s come to this site’s attention that several Hudson elected officials are unaware that the City has an adopted Comprehensive Plan, which can be downloaded in two parts via this link. The plan straddled the Cranna and Scalera administrations, being developed in 2000-2001 and passed in 2002. Due to the then-raging St. Lawrence Cement controversy, and the City’s decision to hire SLC’s own planning firm as its consultant, the final plan was greatly watered down, but it does include a few useful nuggets; more on that next week, probably.
This Sunday will feature the last farmer’s market of the season in Philmont, according to Sally Baker of PB, Inc. The market’s hours are 10 am to 1 pm.
Formation of one of more than a dozen fireballs over the TCI facility on the night of August 1st, as seen in this YouTube video
Ghent resident Patti Matheney of GhentCANN attended Monday night’s meeting at the Ghent Community Center of the Columbia County Environmental Management Council. Though the meeting was scheduled on Columbus Day, some 60 people still managed to attend.
According to Matheney’s notes, the meeting was attended by Ghent Zoning Enforcement Officer Gil Raab, and two Ghent Town Board members, Pete Nelson and Richard Sardo (who apparently stayed only a few minutes). County Board of Supervisors chairman Pat Grattan was also there for much though not all of the discussion. Assembly member Didi Barrett, who organized a previous forum on the fire, sent a representative.
EMC chair Ed Simonsen posed 10 questions developed by the Committee to Dr. David Carpenter, a PCB expert affiliated with SUNY Albany. Previously, Dr. Carpenter and others, such as cancer specialist Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, have questioned the methodology used by the State to test for PCBs, and the cancellation of promised tests for highly-carcinogenic dioxins known to form from the burning of PCBs.
The 10 questions posed by the Committee were as follows, as recorded by Matheney, with notes regarding Dr. Carpenter’s answers:
Have there been incidents like TCI in other communities, and if so was it handled differently? Dr. Carpenter knew of no similar incidents. He explained that much of the State testing approach was apparently based on the infamous PCB contamination of a State office building in Binghamton in the early 1980s, but that case was quite distinct from the Ghent fire, as it involved the indoor contamination of ventilation systems, not an uncontrolled outdoor burn. Nevertheless, it required 14 years to clean up
Where would toxins be found from a fire like this? Contamination from the fire would be most likely found in soot, according to Dr. Carpenter. He commented that he would not have bothered so much with all of the air, water, and soil testing done by the State, focusing instead on scraping soot off of surfaces, sampling and testing that. [Editor’s note: Nearby residents who had visible deposits of black clumps of material from the fire on their decks, pools and cars reported that State officials refused to take samples.]
Can local residents or scientitest be trained to do the testing? Not really, said Dr. Carpenter, as certified labs are needed to do accurate testing.
If TCI doesn’t rebuild, will Ghent be left with a “brownfield”? Dr. Carpenter indicated that it was too early to know for sure.
If TCI rebuilds, what can be done to reassure the community that everything is safe? State and Federal agencies should do their job, Dr. Carpenter argued, for example by making sure that up-to-date safety measures are in place.
What role did sodium have in the TCI plant? Dr. Carpenter said that he does not know. [Editor’s note: Various corporate and government websites show that sodium, which can by highly explosive when exposed to moisture, is sometimes used to dechlorinate or “detoxify” PCB wastes. However, it does not appear that TCI or either of the two other companies occupying the building have obtained permits to do so in Ghent; indeed, the presence of two additional companies in the building, let alone sodium, seemingly was a surprise to officials.]
What limitations to PCBs should be required if TCI were to rebuild? Everything is potentially risky, Dr. Carpenter advised, suggesting that all regulations would need to be strictly enforced.
What was the potential impact to agriculture from the fire? Dr. Carpenter stressed the importance of keeping toxins out of the food supply to avoid health risks. While he reassured the audience that the possibility of PCBs being absorbed into plants and vegetables was low, that soot could land on these and they need to be washed. However, the risk of absorption into meats by animals eating contaminated grasses or feed was described as much more potentially serious.
Is the exposure to PCBs and dioxins worse for children? Yes, Dr. Carpenter answered.
Did the testing done by the State show the correct analysis? Dr. Carpenter still suspects that the testing was faulty. He again faulted the NYS Department of Health (DOH) for not testing for dioxins, calling that omission “inexcusable” and “half-assed.” [Editor’s note: Is that a scientific term?] He believes the labs used should still have the samples collected, and that it should still be possible for more testing to be done.
While noting that their committee has no direct enforcement power, the EMC indicated that it would make a recommendation to the Board of Supervisors to request more testing by the NYS DOH.
Dr. Carpenter also discussed a case in Louisiana in which two immigrant workers are suing a company similar to TCI, where they had worked for years with no training on how to handle toxic substances. Both now apparently have cancer. He mentioned as well that he is working with Barrett to obtain the necessary chromatograms.
Matheney further reports that members of the public askedquestions toward the end of Monday’s meeting, with most wanting to know how to go about getting more testing done. Downwind resident Mark Johnson mentioned that he had heard that the State Police burned their uniforms after the fire, but that local fireman have not. Johnson also alluded to the alleged use of “Mexican workers” at the facility.
Thursday through Sunday are the last four days to see Laetitia Hussain’s three-story elevator shaft installation, Sycamophology, at John Davis Gallery in Hudson (362 1/2 Warren Street) before it comes down—along with the rest of the excellent group show of which it is a part. The gallery is open from 11 am to 5 pm.
Six years ago this fall, PBS aired Two Square Miles, a one-hour documentary about Hudson in the tumultuous years around the turn of the 20th Century. The film is not readily available on DVD, nor found on Netflix, Hulu, etc.
But on Friday at 7 pm, Basilica Hudson will screen this film about how the Hudson of today was forged in the kiln of of the cement plant struggle. After appearing to have a “done deal” in place, Swiss-owned St. Lawrence Cement spent $60 million to impose its will on a small community, and failed.
Afterward, the Basilica folks have asked filmmakers Barbara Ettinger, Sven Huseby and yours truly to discuss the documentary and take questions.
For those who were not around during these endlessly trying times, the screening is a rare glimpse into the making of the Hudson of today, whose steady improvement is easy to take for granted. And with much pug mill water down the sluice since the fight ended in 2005, those who have seen it before may see some of the events and characters in a different light.
One sees former Alderman Quintin Cross in combative, charismatic and reflective modes—above saying “I dislike you, Sam”. (The local viewer now knows that Cross’s path of transformation was soon disrupted by a conviction for stealing from the City via credit card, and by a new arrest more recently for allegedly breaking into City Hall.) Red Dot owners Perry Cooney and Alana Hauptmann getting into it with 5th Ward Alderman Doc Donahue. Rick Scalera talks about his “sputtering political machine.” The Walthours talk movingly about their ambivalent family history with the Atlas cement company, which went out of business here in the 1970s.
And Linda Mussmann of TSL engages in what now looks an awful lot like situational ethics, taking her then-nemesis Scalera to task for accepting campaign support from the cement company while negotiating contracts with them. (Mussmann of course went on to lose her hard-won position as Democratic chair after negotiating in private with St. Lawrence to hand them the keys to the Waterfront, and eventually even to get married by Scalera himself.)
Basilica Hudson is located just south of the Amtrak Station near the Hudson waterfront on the east side of the tracks.
Found in a private Hudson collection, this fold-out poster appears to date from the late 1960s or early 1970s. Inviting visitors to “Come to Columbia County” (exclamation point — !), the poster divides the local terrain into six regions: The Hunt Country, The Highlands, The Lakelands, South Fruitlands, Centerland, and North Fruitlands.
I have never heard a single resident use any of these terms, except maybe an occasional real estate listing which references “Hunt Country” to give a property a more aristrocratic air. When walking out the door for a drive to Clermont, one doesn’t usually call out: See ’ya later, honey—I’m off to the South Fruitlands!
Every decade or so, a new effort is made to rebrand or “market” Columbia County to the outside world. In the City of Hudson, such efforts occur more on a five-year plan. And though these typically occur with much anticipatory excitement among those businesses which depend on visitors, they proceed with little if any real analysis of the previous campaign, or the current target audience.
Vivid but worthless anecdotal reports about visitor needs and complaints drive group conversation at first, as it is more fun and inflammatory to talk about the most extreme examples than to do in-depth demographic studies or figure out how to really match messages with audiences.
Over time, though, both the more extreme examples and the more creative edges get shorn off, resulting in a watered-down end product which neither offends nor appeals to much of anyone. Drab, or corny, or excessivly boosterish, the end product arrives almost as an afterthought in train stations, B&B lobbies, coffeeshop displays, and the like. Those involved feel a sense of accomplishment, and backslap each other endlessly on what a great job everyone did.
But it is not at all clear that these brochures, posters, maps, etc. have much impact. Visitors and house-hunters often pick tourist guides up without ever really reading them, due to a combination of crammed 7-point type and lack of graphic and editorial punch. When visiting a place, one feels reassured having these flyers in one's pocket, but as a practical matter it is happenstance, or word of mouth, or a personal recommendation, that really matter. Having a list of a zillion options can feel like having no options, if one does not know where to begin. Asking a local proprietor of an impressive store where you should have dinner is worth 1,000 listings or Yelp reviews.
So what does drive traffic to places like Columbia County? Having grown up in the neighboring Berkshires, and now in my 15th year of living on this side of the State line, I’d postulate the following:
(1) Friends with country places. Many people’s first experience of a provincial region like the Hudson Valley comes from spending a weekend with friends who have already taken the plunge—or hearing from those friends about how great it is Upstate. Some of these become homeowners themselves, or just repeat visitors to either their friends’ homes or area lodging. (As a corollary to this rule, some become familiar with the Hudson Valley’s appeal from buying produce from its growers in urban greenmarkets.)
Patti Smith at Basilica, May 2003
(2) Must-see events. Others discover a place because of some event they simply must attend. When I organized a benefit concert with Patti Smith in 2003 at the Basilica, with the help of Rudy Wurlitzer and Lynn Davis, it was astonishing to see what a loyal following Smith had all over the world... The concert hauled in reservations from all over the U.S. and Europe. A small number of events of this type already rope in visitors here, such as the NADA art fair, also held at the Basilica. However, it is not at all clear that the region’s ever-proliferating festivals and parades and walks necessarily have the same effect of expanding the market, as they often draw the bulk of their audiences from a static, existing pool of local residents and others already familiar with the area.
(3) Good times, bad times. Places like Columbia County which are situated within striking distance of a major city have a peculiar relationship to the fortunes of that city. In good times, people in the metro area have more cash, and are more likely to spend it on houses and vacations. In bad times, a certain percentage of the metropolis’ residents move (often cashing out of their real estate) and take their remaining income and savings to the provinces. In the run-up to 9/11, for example, the County was on a steady upswing; the terrorist attack of that day caused many to think that business would die on places like Warren Street. But the opposite happened, as many City residents sought out a place to Escape From New York either temporarily or permanently.
(4) Sustained media coverage. Whenever a feature article appears in a well-read, high-circulation publication, local businesses tend to see an immediate jump in visitors in the following weeks. Even better than a single prominent article is a sustained spate of publicity over a period of 6-12 months, such as that which occurred in 1998-1999. It’s not any one article that really puts a place on the map, but a series of good press. The third time someone reads about a destination, that’s when s/he says: Huh, I keep hearing about this place... Maybe it’s time to check it out.
(5) Infrastructure. Most crucially, the location, accessibility, and fundamental appeal of a place is what brings visitors, far more than marketing or branding. To convince someone to commit to a trip takes more than a single image or catchphrase. Columbia County’s accessibility via the Thruway, Amtrak, Taconic Parkway, and to a much lesser extent via the Albany airport, coupled with its remarkable terrain and building stock, are what keep people coming, not throwaway brochures or posters, or billboards, or Greyhound Getaway Specials.
Two out of five of the above are within a place’s control, while three of them really are not controllable. Residents and businesspoeple can encourage more must-see events, but these tend to happen more because of one couple’s connections than any group effort, as in the case of the Patti Smith concert.
It’s far more crucial to just get people here than to spend a lot of effort creating long inventories of every single thing they might possibly do once they arrive. People like to explore places for themselves, to follow their noses and make their own adventure, maybe at most relying on a tip from a shopkeeper or waiter or passer-by. This place is not so big and complicated that people won’t find good stuff on their own, especially with everyone carrying around handheld devices with more connectivity and power than a supercomputer from 20 years ago.
As far as courting more media, to my knowledge none of the many County and City business groups and development agencies has a complete file of all the remarkable publicity the area has received over the past 20 years, which in itself would be a strong marketing tool—because half the media does indeed repeat and copy itself routinely, liking nothing better than a proven story. The other half wants novel angles and stories, so effort there might best be devoted to developing a dozen “pitches” to reporters and editors—unusual new takes on a territory whose basic contours others have already covered to death.
Speaking of death and marketing, it’s always worth giving Bill Hicks the last word on those topics whenever they come up:
An article this morning by Tom Casey in The Register-Star reports that the City of Hudson is seeking funding “to create a marketing and development plan for several vacant buildings, including the L&B Furniture and McGuire properties, and to create a detailed plan to connect the separated portions of the waterfront from the North Bay to the South Bay.”
In point of fact, the L&B Furniture site (actually renamed LB Furniture before it closed) is hardly a “vacant building.”
The vast space houses plenty of renters, including the highly successful CNC fabrication business Digifab, a metal shop, a recycler, music practice spaces, and more. Indeed, The Register-Star itself published an article by Lindsay Suchow in November 2010 about the revival of the building, entitled “New life at old furniture warehouse.”
(Note: The above correction was submitted as an online comment to the paper’s website early this morning, but it has suppressed it. Apparently the Hudson “community paper” feels free to make obvious mistakes, but does not like them being pointed out.)
The focus of the article is to bemoan the seeming lack of interest in a Hudson grant application, reporting that “on Tuesday, there were no members of the public at the public hearing, which the group stressed needs to change to help take the ideas and proposals to improving and developing Hudson’s waterfront to the next step.” Casey quotes a development official as claiming that
“All the ideas you (the public) provided during the LWRP are now bearing some fruit... So much of that comes out of that public comment, you gave us the foundation, and now it’s step two.”
The official may be making that statement naïvely, or in hopes of changing the dynamic, but its whitewashing sentiment comes across as an affront to those who actually were around for the degraded Waterfront process.
The LWRP was a travesty of public input. One would be hard-pressed to make up a more textbook example of how to undermine public faith in public policy.
The sustained participation and comments of thousands of residents over many years—in public workshops, surveys, hearings, postcards, petitions, emails, letters and more—was cast aside for the South Bay in favor of the demands of a Swiss-owned multinational polluter and a Connecticut-based construction company. The former has racked up millions internationally in fines for environmental and anti-trust violations, and the latter is known for its role in the huge Rowland corruption scandal, and for an explosion at one of its projects that killed six workers.
The architects of the highly unpopular and unresponsive Waterfront plan were former Mayor Rick Scalera, Linda Mussmann of TSL and her real estate attorney, Cheryl Roberts, now a candidate for State Assembly, with the spine-free connivance of Council President Don Moore. Roberts erased records of two well-attended workshops and a 300-person survey from the LWRP narrative, because that input ran counter to her agenda—while incorporting virtually all of the demands of lawyers from Holcim and O&G. (This is what the leaders of the Columbia County Democratic Committee, such as Cyndy Hall and Victor Mendolia, shamelessly trumpet as Roberts’ “environmental sensitivity.”)
And Moore, having tried but failed to block public access to a key draft of the plan, refused to allow any of the 80 people who attended the final meeting about the plan to speak before the Council voted on it.
Meanwhile on the North Bay side, a huge outpouring of support for the Furgary Boat Club was again spurned by Roberts, Moore and the current mayor, Bill Hallenbeck. The Furgarians were evicted at gunpoint by a SWAT team, no less. A widespread local belief is that the eviction of Furgary after 100 years of peaceful stewardship of the North Bay was driven by a plan advanced by the Chatham-based Columbia Land Conservancy—which would be the beneficiary of some of this new Hudson grant funding, , according the The Register’s article.
No wonder then that no one showed up for these hearings. The public has gotten the firm message that their input does not matter, and would be a waste of a citizen’s breath. The current backers of these grant proposals no doubt are operating in better faith than their predecessors. But mix these recent and strong impressions of official disdain with a dearth of publicity about the weekday meeting (announced via obscure public notice), and you have a perfect recipe for the public to stay away, even though the topic is one of keen importance to the future of Hudson.
The public is interested—it just isn’t convinced that the City will listen. It’s up to its leaders to convince people otherwise, by making a serious outreach to groups and residents who have been burned multiple times before.
