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The story of the model

Here’s some background on that scale model of the Hudson area, which according to an article by Jamie Larson in The Register-Star is now in a City garage looking for a home:

• The model cost about $5,000 to commission, and comes in two parts (each roughly 4 x 8 feet, making a square).

• It includes parts of Greenport, not just Hudson.

• It was built by William (Bill) Sweet of Northampton, Mass., a model-maker who works primarily for real estate developers, found by Richard Katzman who paid for the project. Both are pictured below with me in Bill’s studio, making corrections and additions to the unfinished model.

• In addition to topo maps and aerial photos, Sweet worked from stats and snapshots (gathered by yours truly) to add details and clarify layouts.

• To save time and cost, in some cases an estimated number of buildings-per-block were included rather than trying to build precise models of every major and minor building. So with the exception of prominent structures like Bliss Towers, The Opera House and the proposed SLC project, not every structure is necessarily to exact scale nor in precise locations. That said, there is a surprising amount of detail and the overall effect is highly accurate.

• The model came with armatures for stringing cotton plumes from the model of the proposed 406-foot St. Lawrence Cement plant stack; also, for public display, a plexiglass cover was created. Whether these still exist or not is not clear.

• It was unveiled at the July 6th, 2002 Friends of Hudson members picnic, which drew approximately 500 attendees, at the Federation of Polish Sportsmen, whose property would have been surrounded by the plant’s 1,200 acres of quarries.

Some additional photos of the model (in progress, at the unveiling, and completed) follow below.

Rudy can’t fail

Hudson’s Rudy Wurlitzer, who read last night with Will Oldham at the reinvigorated Basilica Industria, is profiled today in The Wall Street Journal.

Twilight in Hudson

Tonight (Thursday) Will Oldham reads from a book by local author/screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer at the Basilica at 7 pm, and restaurants all over town donate their evening proceeds to help fight AIDS.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

Dan Seward (the proprietor of John Doe Books & Records and the guiding force behind the band Bunny Brains) posted the above photo to his Facebook page—saying that this image was created by the engineering firm Morris Associates to show what the new "gateway" to Hudson might look like once a long-empty house on 23B is demolished. Normally I'd assume this was a Dan prank, but familiarity with Morris Associates' work suggests otherwise... and it's a little late for April Foolery.

It's hard to say what's more peculiar here: The blank wall reminiscent of Fascist architecture; the gesturing hitch-hiker in knee-length britches, trapped on a baseball diamond; the lumplike meteor nesting in metallic undergrowth to guide alien visitors; the unreadable yellow type on orange backgrounds to ensure illegibility; the muscle car high-tailing it out of town; or the Family Feud-style Xs on a trellis from Grossman's Bargain Outlet. Survey says: Go back to the drawing board.

MH Cable: Not tapping that grant after all

It’s hard to imagine any company turning up its nose at nearly $3,500,000 in free money... especially in this economy, and if that money would both expand the company’s customer base and also perform a vital community service.

But apparently, Mid-Hudson Cablevision is one such company.

As a result, potential rural customers in hard-to-reach “last mile” locations—including Yours Truly—are being told they’ll have to pony up thousands of dollars each just to get connected. Customers in densely-settled cities like Hudson or within 200 feet of existing lines typically pay no such fee.

During last year’s hotly-contested Congressional race between Scott Murphy and Chris Gibson, Murphy announced the award of a $3.5 million “rural broadband” grant to MH Cable. According to the then-U.S. rep’s August 2010 press release, the funds would come from the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Services programs.

Now, this funding was not forced upon Mid-Hudson. The company applied for, was awarded, and at the time celebrated the grant. MHC President James (Jim) Reynolds crowed last year that

We are very pleased to receive the news that we are being awarded this grant. These tax payer dollars will help us to continue the work we have been engaged in for 30 plus years. This government support will help make it possible to extend service to rural marketplaces that would otherwise be very difficult reach. We will be moving as quickly as possible to move forward with the outlined in our proposal and certainly appreciate all of the support and assistance that we received from Congressman Scott Murphy.

Murphy in turn gushed that the towns of Ashland, Cairo, Catskill, Coxsackie, Jewett, Lexington, New Baltimore and Windham in Greene County, plus Austerlitz, Copake, Claverack, Ghent, Chatham, Hillsdale and Taghkanic in Columbia County would benefit from this Federal program, stating that

Expanding rural broadband in our Upstate communities is key to building businesses and creating jobs. This is one of the most critical issues for our rural communities. This project will benefit everyone from farmers and small businesses looking to sell their products online, to volunteer firefighters needing high-speed Internet to keep the public safe. Broadband investments like this are a critical component of my Renew Upstate New York plan, and will help ensure the 20th District becomes a leader in the 21st century economy.

Yet according to Mid-Hudson engineer David Fingar, the company has since decided not to tap into these funds—at least for the moment.

Asked why (during a cordial visit to my property recently, after I'd placed multiple calls over the past three months to MHC about availability in my area), Fingar stated that there were “too many conditions attached” to the funding, but did not rule out accessing the funds later.

Until then, potential customers are being asked to come up with rather large lump sums—in my case $1,870 plus tax—for the privilege of then giving Mid-Hudson about $1,000-$2,000 each year in subscription fees, depending on what services one orders. (Fingar—a member of the local insurance clan, which includes County Republican chair Greg Fingar—did offer that if I ordered a significant enough package, they might be able to work out an installment plan on the hookup.) Others in my neighborhood have been quoted figures ranging from $2,000 to $2,600 for getting hooked up. Meanwhile, with an estimated 20,000 subscribers, MHC’s annual revenues are variously reported as between $20 and $50 million.

At the time that the Town of Taghkanic negotiated its franchise agreement with the company in 2007, MHC provided service to only 5.5 of Taghkanic’s approximately 49 miles of roads. Though most residents can opt for Dish network TV service, internet access is glaringly lacking, as many homes are eligible for neither cable modems nor DSL. Making do with either wifi hotspots, satellite internet from the likes of Hughes or Wild Blue, or even 1990s-grade dialup from AOL, many of the innovations of today’s dynamic, video-driven web are not feasible. Streaming movies from Netflix? Forget about it.

But this past fall and winter, Taghkanic residents’ anticipation mounted as MHC trucks were seen stringing heavy black wires in various parts of the Town. Here on County Route 27, activity was spotted to the immediate east and west of my property. But due to a fluke in how telephone poles are sited, a roughly quarter-mile chunk of 27 has no poles on the road, with phone and electricity lines routed through woods. This places homes in “line extension areas,” some of them a good deal more than the typical maximum of 200 feet from existing wires, and thus in the position of having to pay a large “contribution in aid of construction” (or CAC) to get hooked up. These are precisely the type of conditions meant to be addresses by Federal programs like the one to which MHC applied for funding it now has spurned.

The problem is compounded by many rural governments being woefully uninformed about their ability to negotiate better agreements from cable companies, in effect turning over rights worth hundreds of thousands or even millions without negotiating for more community services (such as public access channels, production facilities) or coverage. According to Metroland, 

State law requires cable service providers to set aside public-access channels for home-grown programming [and] also give municipalities the opportunity to enter into contracts known as franchise agreements with these companies, whereby the cable-service providers must give up to 5 percent of their revenues to local governments.

The Town of Taghkanic demanded neither a franchise fee from MHC in 2007, nor secured any free goodies—besides one standard installation each for the town's handful of public buildings. The City of Hudson similarly made few if any requests from Mid-Hudson when they last came before the Council for renewal, despite getting expert advice from Troy media advocate Steve Pierce. In much the same way that insurance policies only get cursory review, many small towns and cities fail to realize how much more they are entitled to, deferring instead to highly-profitable cable enterprises as if they were doing the municipality a giant favor just by showing up. The Town of Ashland, by contrast, would appear to have taken a somewhat more responsible approach, asking Reynolds to answer a host of common-sense questions prior to approving a franchise renewal.

Still the larger questions remains: Since nearly $3.5 million was sought, received and touted by MHC less than a year ago, why not use it to overcome the obstacles to (in Reynolds’ own words) “extend[ing] service to rural marketplaces that would otherwise be very difficult reach”?

What about the stated reason—an excess of onerous grant “conditions”? Recipients do have to fulfill normal, routine responsibilities like keeping payroll documentation and other records; but typically grants cover the costs of such administration. A longer list of conditions can be found here.

One theory is that the decision is somehow ideological—that Mid-Hudson’s generally conservative and politically-connected leadership didn’t want to appear, in the age of Tea Party fanaticism, to be suckling at a government teat... But if that were the case, why did they apply in the first place—and why did they accept and use a $5.3 million loan (arranged with help from Murphy’s predecessor, John Sweeney) for expanding rural broadband access in much the same way? Back in 2009—while acknowledging the lesser-known costs of maintaining rural broadband networks—Reynolds predicted that his company would indeed seek more Federal funding opportunities in the future:

Based on [the Sweeney-backed loan] success, Reynolds said Mid-Hudson is likely to apply for stimulus  funding ... While the earlier buildout was to areas with 20 to 25 homes per mile,  the remaining unserved areas in his footprint are in locales with 10 to  15 homes per mile, butting up against the threshold for making the endeavor cost-effective. 

Indeed, MHC cites this past Federal partnership in most of its applications to area towns and the State's Public Service Commission. Some thus speculate that the reversal may be in some way entangled with the Murphy-Gibson rivalry, i.e. that maybe a grant or loan from the new Republican Congressman would be treated differently.

Another theory—and the one I find more plausible—is that Mid-Hudson is simply testing the waters to see how many people they can get to shell out cash up front before dipping into the Federal pool to cover the rest. Once they've maxed out the folks who are willing to foot the bill themselves, they can in theory then start using the grant funds to hook up the rest, and thus get the most new customers possible at the lowest possible risk to the company. When I asked Fingar—who was quite amiable and forthcoming during our visit—whether those who agreed to pay now would get a refund if they used the grants later, he appeared bemused by the question.

According to a telecom legal expert I spoke with, they can probably get away with such temporizing, as the USDA rarely “claws back” such funding even when it doesn't get used as intended. The Federal government oversees about $5 billion in similar programs, and evidently making sure they get spent wisely is low on the list of priorities... Meanwhile, at least one publication, CC Scoop, has expressed skepticism about the grant programs, and The Columbia Paper is expected to publish an article on the topic as well shortly.

So for now, I've reluctantly extended my satellite internet deal, paying for commercial-grade (but still pokey) service at a steep cost. I’d vastly prefer to do business with a locally-owned company, and to not have to deal with the bandwidth limitations and service headaches common to satellite. But at about two grand to get started, it’s hard to justify at this point. If Mid-Hudson Cablevision waits too long, though, to access those funds and provide this community service, they may get left behind by the ever-increasing capabilities of cellular and other over-the-air networks.

NOTE: Calls to the USDA RUS department which handles the Mid-Hudson grant were not returned in time for publication.

Mr. Rodgers’ Neighborhood

There’s been some political chatter about the residency status of Timothy (Tim) Rodgers, who was recently endorsed by the Hudson Democrats to run for Alderman in the City’s 1st Ward.

One of his likely opponents, Geeta Cheddie of Warren Street, raised the question of where Rodgers lives in the context of his application to become a Commissioner of Deeds in Hudson—normally just a formality to help candidates overcome some of New York’s more arcane petitioning requirements.

In over a dozen years in these parts, I have never heard of any such application (including my own) being rejected. There are many, many Commissioners of Deeds on file with the County Clerk; the designation sounds like a lot bigger deal than it actually is. It’s kind of like becoming a Notary, only a lot less onerous—as there are few qualifications besides having a pulse and promising not to lie.

Naturally, an applicant needs to provide a valid address on their application. But anyone familiar with the shenanigans that mark each Hudson election cycle knows this unusual objection was purely political. It’s long been a local convention that all other differences get put aside when approving CoD applications, since they involve the fundamental right to get candidates on the ballot. As such, the objection is extraordinary, even if the grounds have some technical merit.

And indeed, my understanding is that Cheddie was engaged in a friendly dialogue with Rodgers—who’s prominent in the local hospital union, and who she may have imagined could help her electorally—right up to the moment she heard that he was running for a 1st Ward seat, at which point she went ballistic. (There are, by the way, two Alderman slots for each ward, and currently three likely candidates: Cheddie, Rodgers, and Larissa Parks.)

Now, I don’t have a dog in this fight, and have never met this Rodgers—though I’d be charmed to learn that he wears cardigans, speaks in a kindly voice, and sings helpful songs about getting along... But whether or not Tim Rodgers can become a Commissioner of Deeds right now is irrelevant to whether he can run for 1st Ward Alderman. Because as far as I can see New York State Election Law does not to require him to be a resident of Hudson’s 1st Ward in order to run for Alderman. It would only require that he become a 1st Ward resident before his term started next year.

The full election law can be downloaded here (as a PDF), but the relevant section seems to be this:

§ 6–122. Designation or nomination; eligibility, restrictions

A person shall not be designated or nominated for a public office or party position who (1) is not a citizen of the state of New York; (2) is ineligible to be elected to such office or position; or (3) who, if elected will not at the time of commencement of the term of such office or position, meet the constitutional or statutory qualifications thereof or, with respect to judicial office, who will not meet such qualifications within thirty days of the commencement of the term of such office.

Unless the City of Hudson has some local prohibition against petitions being circulated for Council candidates who do not yet live in that district (and I’m not even sure such a rule would be legal), it appears Rodgers could run for any City office—so long he is a resident of New York State at the time his petitions are circulated, and so long as he becomes a resident of the district in question by the time he was administered the oath of office.

Indeed, the Democrats of the 1st Ward could circulate petitions for Bill Clinton to be one of their 1st Ward reps, and if he got enough votes and moved to the ward by January 1st, he could assume office. (Just beware, Bubba; Hudson elections are in many ways tougher than national ones.)

If that Ward’s voters want to hold Rodgers’ residency against him—though he’ll surely find an apartment there soon if he’s serious about running—they can do so with their ballots. But as a practical matter, this early election year fracas is not about whether Rodgers will be able to run, it’s just a chance for Cheddie to try to throw a clod of Spring mud at her opponent, and see if any of it sticks.

P.S.: Some also may recall that former Congressman John Sweeney lived in Cohoes—outside of the 20th Congressional District—when he announced his candidacy for U.S. Representative. Sweeney only moved into the district shortly before the election, well after petitions were circulated on his behalf. His successor, Kirsten Gillibrand, likewise had a shaky claim to local residency. But it wasn’t an issue for either.

Cream soda and Dots

... are what Ricky Aldrich asked to be served at the reception for Rubi Rose’s project of photos of Rokeby’s abiding “peasant and patroon”—this Saturday from 3-5 pm at Bard’s Woods Gallery. The full invitation can be downloaded here as a PDF. (Among many other things, Ricky provided a number of pieces of rusty farm machinery to Laetitia Hussain’s Aurum show.)

Local angles

Above: Ellsworth Kelly of Spencertown

A walk through the upcoming Stair Galleries auction of modern and contemporary work (April 30th–May 1st) is not only a fun way to pass a half-hour. It also includes a bunch of artists from the Hudson Valley, plus a few pieces depicting regional scenes...

William Wegman of Ghent:

Lynn Davis of Hudson:

Annie Leibovitz of Rhinebeck (portrait of Tom Seaver):

Edward Avedisian (R.I.P.) of Hudson:



View of Stoney Creek by Margaret Bourke White:



The Albany State House, by Stephen Shore:



Pine Meadow Lake in Harriman State Park, by Robert Ketchum:

 

Girl in Canaan, Connecticut by Anton Bruehl:

 

Six years ago tonight...

... it was Marty Davidson's 60th birthday. Also, the Secretary of State issued a far-reaching decision to stop the plant, and the Hudson aldermen voted to reject the company’s “community host agreement” which Rick Scalera tried to railroad through the Council for a third time. Five days later, SLC abandoned the fight. As I said in a Rural Intelligence interview last year,

Randy Daniel’s ruling was far more sweeping than we expected. He went beyond saying, “You are not going to build your giant cement plant here,” he gave specific recommendations for how Hudson should rezone its waterfront.  He recognized that compromise—a mix of recreation and heavy industry— would not work.  And he had fourteen thousand signatures to convince him that the public favored conservation and recreation.  He stated clearly that the waterfront should be for the people’s enjoyment, for ecological rebirth, and for sensible economic development.

Six years on, the City still has not followed those "immediate" instructions...

Now that we're almost as far removed from that date as the fight itself took, this may be the last such reminiscence until the 10th anniversary. But there's still many great memories of that long struggle, and lots left to do to preserve and protect this area from such threats.

Pictured above, from that evening’s events at City Hall and subsequent celebrations: Bob Blechman, Dorothy Lynn, Alan Skerritt, Ardal Powell, Monica & Bob Mechling, Peter Jung, Moisha Blechman, Alan Hamilton, Claire Oravec, Wilson McLean, Carole Osterink, Sarah Sterling, Sven Huseby, Byrne Fone, Ian Nitschke, Roy Volkmann, Peter Meyer, Sam Pratt, Barbara Ettinger, Ellen Thurston, Nora Hancock-Snead, and Julia Doyle.

Read about the whole saga here (PDF) and here.

Food notes from all over

More culinary reports from around the region, following on the news of the Hudson diner's purchase:

• The Vanderbilt Inn in Philmont reopens tonight, Monday, with a serious chef and a farm-to-table ethos;

• Chopsticks in Catskill, located near the relatively new Beer World, offers Chinese, Japanese, and most of all Thai food — each of them simple but solid. (It remains a mystery why Columbia County has no Thai restaurant, while Greene has two...)

• Wunderbar in Hudson has changed hands, though Imre is still around for a few weeks for the transition;

• Also in Hudson, the former Hudson House gallery building (which briefly housed an outpost of Hammertown Barn) reportedly has been purchased by a Brooklyn bistro owner, but won't open for one or two years by various accounts;

• MOD's new Hudson digs got their beer and wine license.

• The Ramp Festival launches next weekend (April 30th) at the Basilica in Hudson on Saturday;

* Agriturismo in Pine Plains reopens on the 22nd.

Cold Spring Road

Livingston (NY).

Stock photo

Local sportsmen assist the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) with stocking the Taghkanic Creek with trout. (Photo: Water Street Road, Livingston)