SamPratt.com

Quotable King

There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

— REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Full circle

A recent post (and one of the more eyeroll-worthy comments) at The Gossips of Rivertown brought to mind a drive down to Saugerties about 10 years ago, when I was on the board of Clearwater. Andy Mele was President, we went down to check on how repairs to the Sloop were going. When the boat-builder heard I was from Hudson he got a rueful look on his face.

“Hudson,” he said, with some bitterness. “Strange place. I wanted to move this business there some years ago, but it fell through.”

So what happened?

“I thought I had a deal to buy some land from the City on the south end of the riverfront. But the City’s lawyer kept delaying the sale, and at the last minute they turned around and sold it to someone else.”

Did he remember to whom Hudson sold the land instead?

“Yes, it was St. Lawrence Cement.”

In short, it would appear the City of Hudson is now going through all this mishigas just to get back acreage it already owned years ago... either the same land it sold to Holcim (then called SLC), or else adjacent to/overlapping with it.

Instead of a several huge controversies, Hudson could have had a traditional, high-end boat-building business on its waterfront—creating jobs, and apprenticeships, and educational opportunities.

The only people who make out in all this endless cycle of blunders are the lawyers. No wonder some of them have a “real love” for Hudson.

T-U: TCI heading north?

A reader points out an article in The Albany Times-Union (linked below) saying that embattled PCB handler TCI of NY may be looking for a new home to the north. The T-U quotes “local officials” as saying the company, whose Ghent facility was destroyed in an inferno last August, is working with the Rensselaer County IDA—and has scoped locations in East Greenbush, Rensselaer and Schodack:

http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/TCI-mulls-new-plant-4464861.php

Many Columbia County residents would heave a big sigh of relief, much as Ulster residents did in the 1980s, when fires at TCI’s original Newburgh plant drove the company up here.

Dust busters

Thanks to the vigilance of Riverkeeper—which filed a complaint about the facility at Cementon across the river from Germantown—Glens Falls Lehigh Cement has been fined $50,000 by the State for allowing leachate to seep into the Hudson River.

The Kingston Daily Freeman reports, however, that the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation will forgive 20% of the fine if Lehigh takes steps to correct the problem within three years. Riverkeeper’s complaint goes all the way back to 2007.

The Lehigh plant no longer manufactures cement from scratch, but rather blends portland cement produced elsewhere with imported slag, a waste from the iron industry. Residents banding together under the rubric of the Germantown Neighbors Association have challenged the facility’s permitting and management over the past decade.

Required public notice of political meeting

Country Matters

Country Living magazine has posted a list of 50 places they think are must-visits in the Hudson Valley at this link; their more detailed version is here.

Bruised Apples

Local Ocean accepts a $250,000 check from National Grid in 2011, as Congressman Chris Gibson looks on. PHOTO: Michael Farrell for The Albany Times-Union

Winner of the 2010 Crystal Apple Award from the Columbia County Chamber of Commerce just months after opening, Local Ocean recently lost its sweet PILOT (Payment In Lieu of Tax) deal with Columbia County.

Welcomed with great fanfare and largesse by local development agencies, and much-celebrated in the regional press, Local Ocean has been bedeviled by two patent lawsuits—and laggard in making payments to the County.

Local Ocean’s meteoric rise and fall from official favor is not a unique path. The tight-knit and often insular County development elite has a history of patting itself on the back, awarding its own most favored projects before they even get off the ground.

Beaten out by Local Ocean, another 2010 Crystal Apple nominee was the rebranded and renovated Historic Blue Stores Restaurant and Bar—reopened under new management just prior to their nomination, then went under again. (Today, it is back open under yet another set of managers, Darren and Tara Buffa, and appears likely to survive.) Passed over that year were the Columbia-Greene Dialysis Center, Catamount Adventure Park, Taconic Farms, and the BeLo3rd business coalition.

A longer look at the Crystal Apple award-winners over its history is instructive.

Among all award winners listed on the Chamber’s site from 1992-2013, more than one in five (20.5%) are out of business or have retrenched locally. For example, Kaz, Inc. won the award in 2002 and shared the award with Stageworks again in 2005. Dunn Builders, the Crystal Apple winner in 2004, closed its downtown Hudson location after a rash of employee thefts, then had its huge Greenport operation swallowed up by Herrington’s. The Old Chatham Sheepherding Inn (1996) closed, though farm operations continue.

A little less than another one in five (18%) have become mired in controversy, fallen out of favor with officialdom, or just fallen into disrepair—such as the once-vibrant St. Charles Hotel, which won the 1997 Crystal Apple but after several management changes no longer features a public restaurant or bar. Its private meeting room and large public event space, once highly-popular gathering spots, today are seldom used.

That renders nearly 40% of the 1992-2013 award winners either defunct, disappeared, or discredited.

This year’s award-winner, the Columbia Land Conservancy, tarnished its image last year by its coy, behind-the-scenes enabling of the City of Hudson’s heavyhanded seizure of the century-old Furgary Boat Club—using a black-suited SWAT team toting machine guns to subdue three older, sleeping men in their ancestral cabins.

Meanwhile, roughly two-in-five awards (38%) have been given to large, established companies and businesses which are closely embedded in the County development establishment, such as Herrington’s, Kaz or Columbia Memorial Hospital. The Chamber’s Board includes Paul Colarusso, whose company A. Colarusso & Sons was the 2009 winner. Other awardees have had seats or representatives over the years on many of the same boards (HDC, CEDC, local and County IDAs, the Chamber itself) which arrange corporate tax breaks, grants and other incentives. Such coziness—bordering on conflict-of-interest—makes the awarding of the Crystal Apple that much less prestigious.

Most laughable and conflicted of all, though, is the original Crystal Apple, awarded to The Columbia County Board of Supervisors for its “development” of Commerce Park. Considered a boondoggle from its very inception, Commerce Park took years to find tenants, and two decades later still is sparsely populated. With the Chamber of that era almost entirely controlled by political interests, today’s equivalent of the ’92 Crystal Apple Award would be like this site awarding itself a blue ribbon for Best Columbia County news source.

Smaller local businesses—such as the Kline’s multigenerational, family-owned Traditions, or the longest-running merchant on Warren Street, Arenskjold Antiques, here since the 1980s, or the rock-solid folks at Jimmy’s Auto Body in Livingston—rarely seem get invited to the Crystal ball.

This is not to say that the Award committee never finds its mark. 2003 winner FACE Stockholm continues to manufacture and maintain a storefront locally, even as it continues to thrive and expand internationally. Camphill Ghent, the 2012 winner, does spectacular work with its residents. The likeable director David Colby, who was brought over from the Berkshires several years ago, has cleared out cobwebs and freshened up the fusty, good-old-boy atmosphere which once pervaded the Chamber’s offices.

But these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Perhaps the trophy should be recast as a giant wooden acorn, and renamed The Blind Squirrel Award.

An unexpected apology from the Register-Star

In response to a recent post calling out The Register-Star for swiping a breaking news story and plagiarizing a sentence from this site, an apology has been received from Executive Editor Theresa Hyland for the “copying of your blog entry contents into our story.”

Writing that she was “upset” by the reporter’s actions, which Hyland said “do not meet our journalistic standards and we cannot tolerate such behavior,” she also noted that “we have let the offending reporter go.”

The intent of the post was to put a stop to the predatory use of local blogs as news-gathering sources without crediting them as sources, not to get anyone fired. Though plagiarism is indeed a cardinal sin of journalism—and this example was flagrant—it’s debatable whether it rose to a firing offense.

The apology was appreciated and appears to be sincere. Not knowing what other factors and history played into the paper’s decision, this site is not in a position to judge the full cause and appropriateness of their employment decision. 

(Interestingly enough, the reporter “let go” was himself a replacement for some of the staff lost in the paper’s controversial firing last winter of another Hudson beat reporter, which led to multiple resignations of other news staff.)

Interesting

SamPratt.com, Friday morning around 9:30 am, breaking the news that Lieutenant Richard Paolino is stepping down from the HPD:

“This comes on the heels of the recent retirement of Hudson Police chief Ellis Richardson, and appointment of Ed Moore as the new Chief.”

The Register-Star on Friday evening at 11:55 pm:

“Paolino’s retirement comes on the heels of the recent retirement of former Police Chief Ellis Richardson, the appointment of new Police Chief Edward Moore and ...”

Now, the Register routinely cribs breaking news tips from blogs such as my site and Carole Osterink’s without acknowledging the source. For example, when this site broke the story that Mid-Hudson Cable had returned a much-ballyhooed multimillion-dollar rural broadband grant to the Feds, the Register then reported the story without noting how it had come to light. 

Rarely, however, does the Hudson paper so flagrantly copy the specific phrasing of our items... At least try to paraphrase, y’all, when you’re mining other people’s sites to do the legwork of digging up breaking news.

Another domino falls?

Multiple (and credible) sources have told this site that longtime Hudson Police Lieutenant Richard Paolino has decided—others might say “agreed”—to step down. This comes on the heels of the recent retirement of Hudson Police chief Ellis Richardson, and appointment of Ed Moore as the new Chief.

McTeach your children well

Photo from The Rogovoy Report, by Fred Collins

Over at his must-read site, Seth Rogovoy has a good catch: a critique of the Hudson City School District’s apparent partnership with McDonald’s. An editor, writer, music critic, and fixture for years on the Berkshire media scene, Rogovoy moved to Hudson last year.