Historical memory—even relatively recent memory—is not The Register-Star’s strong suit.
For example, a profile of Bill Hallenbeck this morning leads boosterishly with the claim that the new Hudson Mayor “has spent his entire professional career in public service, from his stint in law enforcement with the Hudson Police Department and Columbia County Sheriff’s Office to his two years as Third Ward Supervisor.”
Well, not entirely.
As noted on this site in November, Hallenbeck had at least one private-sector job: Doing public relations legwork for St. Lawrence Cement.
At the time, that Swiss-owned company was spending a small fortune to promote its massive, coal-fired cement project in Greenport and Hudson. By the end, they’d wasted just under $60 million, according to their annual financial reports. After their defeat SLC was subsumed into Holcim, which still has legal and regulatory business with the City, creating a potential conflict of interest (or at least potential bias) in City Hall.
So how do we know for sure that the Mayor had a private-sector job with t he cement company?
First, because many still recall Hallenbeck going door-to-door on Warren Street on SLC’s behalf. (He later blasted the street’s merchants as out-of-step with the community, a favorite divide-and-conquer tactic of the company’s hamhanded p.r. flacks, though one which eventually backfired. Many also still recall that the medical staff of Columbia Memorial Hospital concluded that the project would be likely to increase asthma among local children, cancer in adults, and heart attacks among the elderly, making the company’s us vs. them strategy all the more offensive.)
Second, because Hallenbeck publicly thanked SLC for hiring him in a 2001 letter published as a “My View” in... The Register-Star. Hallenbeck’s letter did not explain why he was “out of work for a while” and started working suddenly for a private company rather than in “law enforcement.” But that question could readily be answered by any reporter or editor willing to spend some time in his or her own paper’s archives.
Now, at the appalling pay rates of local papers, and the high turnover among its cub reporters, it would be unfair to blame beat writers for this lack of media memory. Or maybe the writer deemed stumping for SLC the unprofessional part of the Mayor’s career...
But the paper does have electronic archives going back a decade or more (which can be searched much more thoroughly at Columbia-Greene Comunity College Library than with The Register’s clunky web archives). And there are a few people associated with the paper who have been around long enough to know when a claim ought to be verified before rushed into print. Otherwise, journalism is reduced to stenography.
Anyway, it would be interesting to know the source of this “entire” claim, which neatly erases a key item n the Mayor’s resumé.
