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The Departed: John Flynn

Fifth entry in a series about people who have passed
away in the decade since The Plant was Stopped

Oddly enough, John Flynn and Charlie Butterworth both died last month, within a couple of weeks of each other. I say oddly, because John preceded Charlie as the engineer for the City of Hudson.

John was a Hudson native who graduated from St. Mary’s Academy in the 1940s before studying at Harvard. He later worked for General Electric in Schenectady, and on nuclear submarines. In the late 1960s, he negotiated with the remnants of the Lone Star Cement company for the City to buy its quarries on the east side of Newman Road, with the intention of them serving as a backup water supply.

The sale went through, but John was later chagrined that Charlie never hooked these up to the City water system. Every time there was a water alert in Hudson, John would remind me of this inaction by his successor—who he believed to have done work early in his career for the Colarusso gravel mine next door. His suspicions only deepened when then-Mayor Rick Scalera made a long-term lease-to-own deal with Colarusso to mine around the quarry lake, eliminating any realistic possibility of using it to keep the City wet.

His history of negotiating with Lone Star, as well as his memories of the dirty brown snow that would rain down from  that plant and the old Atlas, made John a skeptic about the St. Lawrence Cement proposal. (Butterworth, by contrast, made every effort to grease the skids for SLC, for example by making sure the Hudson Waterfront Committee took no action that would jeopardize the company’s plans.)

John also had no use for the company’s divide-and-conquer strategy of trying to pit neighbors against each other based on their backgrounds and lifestyles. He once commented at a public meeting about one of Holcim’s p.r. flacks, Phil Pepe, who was caught ghostwriting letters-to-the-editor in favor of his client, and the local newspaper which gullibly printed them:

The Swiss cement company has retained a propaganda outfit. Their representative is Pepi Le Pue—or that's what I call him, anyway. He writes these letters for others to sign. And there's a recurrent theme through the whole thing that these “newcomers” are the ones who oppose this wonderful plant. In quotation marks: these awful “newcomers.”

I was born here in 1931. My mother was born here in 1893, and my grandfather was born in Saugerties in 1853, eight years before the Civil War began. So we've been around for a while.

I leave my feathers at home, but I consider myself a native.

So who are the newcomers?

Certainly, a Swiss cement company.

And certainly, the present owners of the Register-Star, who support the Swiss cement company to the very best of their ability. They’re owned by the Johnson Publishing Company, which is in upper New York state near the Canadian border. So they're pretty safe.

John then expanded his critique to the bigger picture, of how a foreign-owned corporation proposed to exploit local residents’ health for their own profit:

The Swiss engage in one thing, and have one primary interest, and that is making money. That is what they propose to do here. All of those letters saying that, “Oh, we need the employment and we need this and we need that.” Of course, there will be no new employment.

The reason for the Swiss proposing to construct this plant is that it will be at least three-and-a-third times larger than the plant they have in Cementon with the same number of people.

So they will decrease their production costs by at least 70 percent. There will be 70 percent less work input per ton of cement produced. And if anyone considers that my categorizing the Swiss as being interested in money, well, this is history.

When the Nazis invaded Denmark they issued and edict that all Jews were to wear a Star of David on their clothing. The next day Christian X, the King of Denmark appeared in public with the Star of David on his coat and all the days followed suit. And Denmark, of all the occupied countries in Europe, the Jews survived the best.

Now when Jews fled Germany and came to the Swiss border, if they made it, if they didn't have enough money on them the Swiss turned them back. And those who were admitted to Switzerland land when their money ran out the Swiss sold them back to the Nazis to be exterminated.

These are the people who have our interest at heart and propose to operate in Columbia County. Thank you. 

As you can see, Mr. Flynn pulled no punches. That is not automatically a virtue, if such outspokenness is not combined with good sense. But combined with his long memory and fierce intelligence, it made John a valuable ally and sounding board. I miss seeing him with his pal Larry Marinelli, who videotaped many of the cement plant meetings, and was a great friend to John in his later years.

 

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ENDNOTE: Though Charlie Butterworth and I were often on opposite sides of local issues, our relationship always remained cordial and straightforward. We debated many topics intensely, but not bitterly.

When, for example, it was decided to have the City sidewalks redone (by Colarusso, natch), there was an uproar about all the mature black locust trees which would be uprooted from Warren Street. Almost all of these were lost, but a few residents were able to negotiate with him to save their tree.

In my case, I approached Charlie with a different idea, since the roots of the locusts in front of Curtiss House had pretty severely pushed up the existing sidewalks and could not be salvaged. I asked Charlie how much he intended to spend on the two replacement trees, which were going to be a generic form of flowering pear or the like—the type of tree one sees in mall parking lots.

When he gave the amount, I asked if Charlie would object if I spent that money plus some of my own on a different, more distinctive tree. He agreed, and I instead had two 10-foot-tall sycamore saplings installed by Windy Hill Nursery. I since sold 32 Warren, but the sycamores—a classic and stately New York tree, well-suited for urban environments—reamain, and have tripled their height. Arguments about one controversy did not prevent Charlie from being open to reasonable solutions to another.

The Departed: Mary Davidson

Mary Davidson, participating in the Stop the Plant polaroid project

June 21st, 2001, was an uncomfortable day by any standard. The temperature around Hudson reached 90 degrees, and humidity averaged 87%—running all the way up to 100% at its peak. The afternoon was punctuated by downpours and thunderstorms, literal and figurative.

This was also the day that an estimated 1,000 citizens turned out for a public hearing on the St. Lawrence Cement proposal. It began at 10 am in the gymnasium of Columbia-Greene Community College, which had no air conditioning. Administrative Law Judge Helene Goldberger finally closed the session nearly 15 hours later, at 12:40 am.

Concerned—correctly—that it would be outnumbered at the hearing, the cement company set up an operation to bus folks to its headquarters on Route 9, offering them a free meal and a t-shirt in exchange for appearing at the hearing. Many did not realize that they were expected to speak on the company’s behalf. Though they were also provided with magazines (labeled “property of St. Lawrence Cement”), most of those shanghaied to Columbia-Greene left long before their names were called.

Not so with plant opponents, many of whom waited all day for a chance to be heard. 

In the evening, one of the late speakers was Mary Davidson. She had signed up to speak at 3 o’clock, and waited through many sweltering hours to be called to the microphone. Unlike most of the attendees, Davidson was not a stranger to the venue: A professor at Columbia-Greene, her office was not far away. Here is what she said to Judge Goldberger:

MARY DAVIDSON: I'll be brief because much of what I was going to say has already been said by other people. I expected to talk about three this afternoon.

I am a taxpayer in the town of Claverack. I've lived here since 1977, and I'm on the faculty of this beloved institution for 24 years. But let me make my point clear. I do not speak for this institution, but I do speak as an educator on the faculty.

I teach social sciences, classes—psychology, sociology and social work. I'm currently teaching a social problems class focusing on the environment, which I’ve designed specifically around the areas of St. Lawrence Cement, Athens Generating and the dredging of the Hudson River.

As a concerned social scientist, I recognize the need that people have for well paying, quality jobs. Indeed, it pains me to look out amongst the audience today and see many friends and workers that I know in this community who are so desperate for decent employment that they are supporting this cement plant.

This company is not going to provide in the long run well-paying jobs for a number of people; not even in the short run.

But even if they were, why must it pay at the expense of our health in order for that to take place? If the local elected officials in this community were doing their job, we should be able to have decent employment without work ruining our health.

I’m a mother and also a grandmother and I would like my grandchildren to grow up to be healthy. What a choice we have, to be able to have well-paying jobs at the expense of our health, or be able to have good health at the expense of not having any jobs?

It’s time for this community to wake up. Are we not able to trust the testimony of our very own local hospital officials who have adamantly stated over and over and over that this plant is going to ruin the lives and health of all of us?

I’m going to cut it here, I think. I just wanted to go on record as saying I’m a opposed to this plant for the sake of the health and well-being of all of us and future generations to come. Thank you very much.

A native of Buffalo and graduate of SUNY New Paltz, Mary taught Human Services for 30 years at Columbia-Greene. Indeed, she was among the original faculty at the college when it opened in Greenport. At her memorial in 2011, her daughter noted that she “was an activist her whole life for woman’s rights and social justice.”

What I remembered most about Mary’s involvement in the cement battle was her tenaciousness. As the Polaroid photo above shows, she not just determined, but also confident, that justice would prevail. An email she sent in 2003 to a group of activists said: “The world needs more people who are willing to sacrifice to do the right thing.”

The Departed: Milt Meisner

First installment in a series

The phone rang one afternoon in 1999 at my makeshift Stop the Plant office—a third-floor walkup in the back, donated by realtor Steve Kingsley. On the other end was a gravelly, well-measured voice: “This is Milt Meisner. You got my wife all riled up at some meeting last weekend in Claverack. Meet me at the diner in Hudson at 8 am tomorrow.” Click. 

Image: Hudson Farmer’s Market

Oh jeez, I thought, here we go. Fearing the worst from the tone of his phone call, I braced myself for an earful of pro-SLC slogans, which were then saturating all local media: full-page print ads, radio ads, and hokey TV spots. (One of these featured a 1950s-style housewife removing a sheet of chocolate chip cookies from the oven, saying to her kids in a sing-song voice, “I just don’t know how anyone could be against it!”)

By now I was getting used to meetings where I’d have to shoot down a litany of company lines: about how “the plant” was supposedly going to create lots of new jobs, be squeaky-clean, and hidden from public view. Each claim was easily debunked with facts straight from SLC’s own application—except that the company’s misleading p.r. had firmly lodged these ideas deeply in many residents’ consciousness.

All I knew about Meisner at that point was that he had farmed in the area for a long time, had a farmstand on 9H&23 in Greenport, and that his wife Rosalyn  had been at a meeting that weekend in the home of Irma Brownfield and Frederick Rostock on Route 23B.

The 20 people crammed into the living room heard a presentation from me and Dr. Ira Marks—who had delivered a large percentage of the babies born in Columbia Memorial Hospital for several generations—about the health effects of the proposed coal-fired St. Lawrence Cement plant. The pollution, we’d noted, would largely move from west to east, directly over Claverack. 

So the next morning, we drank coffee in a booth the Columbia Diner, which was then run by a cook with the unusual nickname of Chewie. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Milt was already deeply skeptical of the cement company’s claims. “Roz” had relayed much of the content of the meeting in detail, and he simply wanted to hear some of the details firsthand, and quiz me in more depth. I learned, among other things, that at one point he had worked some of the scarce tillable land on Becraft Mountain adjoining the former Atlas Cement quarries—and that he was considered by many to have been the first organic farmer in the County.

According to his Register-Star obituary in 2010, Milt was actively involved in NOFA, Agway, the Cooperative Extension, the Dairy League, and helped found the Hudson Farmer’s Market. Born in Hudson in the 1920s, and a graduate of Hudson High, Milt wore a number of other hats besides farmer, including realtor, co-owner of a car dealership. His seemingly gruff demeanor—which usually included a well-worn baseball cap and tinted glasses, reflecting many hours spent outside in his fields—belied his warm commitment to his community, including involvement in both the Greenport synagogue and Meals on Wheels. 

Meeting Milt in this way reminded me to never judge a neighbor by their demeanor or demographic profile. People from all walks of life either already doubted the cement company, or could be convinced to abandon their support, if they could just get more accurate and balanced information than was available in the local media. He and Ros were steadfast supporters of our cause from start to finish, and their involvement gave many others the courage to get involved.

Note: My remembrance of Ira Marks, who himself died in 2011, can be found here.

 

Holcim-Lafarge deal firming back up

A reader in Claverack forwarded the news that (as predicted here last week) the rough patch in the proposed Lafarge/Holcim merger has proved to be more of a speed bump than a roadblock. Holcim’s posturing has indeed led to Lafarge making some concessions and the merger is said to be moving forward again. More at this link.

Holcim-Lafarge deal hits rocky patch

Image: Agg-net.com

According to the Wall Street Journal, the proposed megamerger of cement giants Holcim and Lafarge has hit a snag, with Holcim’s board rejecting proposed terms from Lafarge.

Lafarge operates a large cement plant on the Hudson River near Ravena and Coeymans, while Holcim appears to have sold its interests in its former Catskill plant, Greenport quarries, and Hudson waterfront properties to smaller construction materials businesses. (This site is not 100% confident that they have fully relinquished all future mining rights or other options on its former Hudson Valley holdings.)

Though the Journal characterizes this news as “cast[ing] serious doubt” on the merger, it seems more of a speedbump than a roadblock. Each company’s stock is down today, Lafarge’s substantially. The boards of these two massive industrial polluters have major incentives to see the merger through to completion, so Holcim’s move looks more like posturing to gain concessions than a deal-breaker.

UPDATE: The New York Times also weighs in on the development.

[h/t Peter Jung, Ken Dow]

Greenport on Ginsberg’s radar?

More than one confidential source is whispering that having been denied necessary permits by the Ghent Planning Board, Ginsberg’s Foods is searching for a new location in Columbia County—and has been focusing on the Town of Greenport.

The company still might go through the motions of a court challenge to the recent Ghent Planning Board denial on the off-chance they still can’t find another location in another 12-18 months.

That’s the likely timeframe for obtaining a judicical ruling. But such a process is lengthly, costly, and by no means guaranteed to provide the company’s preferred outcome. Courts tend to give deference to agency rulings, and at best a judge might send the matter back for further review at the Town level... Meaning another 6-8 months after that, before having a marginal chance of maybe getting a more favorable decision. Even so, such a “victory” would likely result in a much different facility by the time more mitigations and changes were made.

Given that uncertainty, such sources indicate that Ginsberg’s has shown interest in another Columbia County town with much less zoning: The Town of Greenport, which requires minimal site plan approvals, but notoriously has no actual zoning code.

The location reportedly being scoped by Ginsberg’s is somewhere in the Route 9 corridor between Flanders and Buckley’s Corners, just southeast of Hudson. This stretch includes the former Holcim/St. Lawrence Cement headquarters, currently home to the company’s toadies at the Columbia Economic Development Corporation; the former Local Ocean facility, which seems to have been acquired by a waste management/scrap recycling firm with no obvious connection to growing fish in vats; and several very large agricultural parcels which have been on the market for nearly a decade.

This is strictly at the rumor phase at the moment, but the reports come from well-placed by disparate sources. 

Greenport, 6 am

Caveat emptor

Two longtime residents say they believe it likely that buried gas or oil tanks may be found on the triangular piece of property at the gateway of Hudson and Greenport, whose sale was reported here yesterday. The property sold sold for $5,000 last week as part of Columbia County’s foreclosure auction.

Hudson gateway property sells at auction

An unknown buyer has purchased the triangle of land and abandoned building in Greenport which serves as the unofficial entrance to Hudson, at the dangerous intersection of Route 23B and Columbia Turnpike.

The price, according to Lisa Brightly of the County Attorney’s office, was the minimum bid set for last week’s auction of foreclosed properties: $5,000.

The goofy rendering above (created by Morris Associates) was circulated in April 2011 by a group of Hudson and Greenport politicos and developers, who proposed demolishing the dilapated building creating an “entry park.”

One Greenport insider speculated that the likely buyer might be accountant and County GOP ringleader Richard Koskey, who was listed as one of the proponents of the plan in this Register-Star article from the time. The other proponents were then-Mayor Richard Scalera, then-Mayor’s assistant Carmine Pierro and County engineer David Robinson,  gravel king Paul Colarusso, then-Greenport Supervisor Ed Nabozny, along with Guy Apicella, Mary Mazzacano, Daniel Kennealley, and Cathy Bucholsky of the Greenport Garden Club.

Local Ocean goes belly up

Sen. Chuck Schumer climbs aboard the good ship Local Ocean in ’09

Back in March, this site wrote about how Payment In Lieu Of Tax (PILOT) plans, grants, and the business awards in Columbia County often to newly-arrived and unproven businesses like Local Ocean:

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 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.

 

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand gets into Local Ocean’s fishy act as well

Local Ocean also benefited from a $250,000 incentive from National Grid, with Congressman Chris Gibson (R-Kinderhook) handing over the oversized check.

 

Now at last comes official word of the long-rumored news that Local Ocean is kaput. Their Greenport facility is closed, their workforce laid off, and the property scheduled for a public foreclosure auction. 

Local Ocean joins a long list of failed enterprises or no-shows ushered in by the various City and County development authorities. (In the 1990s, the most egregious examples were Cycletech and Wittcomm.) The history here is that those most eagerly welcomed in by such agencies and their affiliated booster organizations are often the first to fail. 

But old habits die hard. This June, a number of better-established businesses such as Basilica Hudson were passed over at another Chamber award ceremony—in favor of the latest new kid on the block, Phoenix Hudson Manufacturing. Like Local Ocean in 2009, Phoenix is the 2012-13 darling of the County development establishment. One can only hope that it will fare better than Local Ocean.

 

The Partnership’s Part

Olana has recently published Art Meets Art: Perspectives On and Beyond Olana, a collection of essays and images about the famous Church landscape. I was asked to contribute the following short piece about The Olana Partnership’s role in the nearly seven-year “stop the plant” battle against St. Lawrence Cement; my text appears below.

The new publication is available at the historic site’s bookshop, and also includes texts supplied by poet John Ashbery and TOP president Sara Griffen.

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Olana’s Role in the Cement Plant Battle

by Sam Pratt

“We are very concerned about the visual impacts on the Olana viewshed, and also about acid deposition from the plant's air emissions endangering its historic structures.” So said Margaret Davidson before an anxious throng of 1,000 attendees who packed a sweltering gymnasium on the campus of Columbia-Greene Community College on June 21st, 2001. 

That day marked the first major public hearing about the St. Lawrence Cement proposal for Hudson and Greenport. With Administrative Law Judge Helene Goldberger presiding, the hearing ran from 10 am until nearly 1 am the next day. The proceedings were punctuated by thunderstorms, both actual and metaphorical.

The comments of Davidson, like those of TOP president Sara Griffen and countless other Olana supporters, were prompted by a Swiss-owned company’s vast, coal-fired project, which centered around a forty-story smokestack and 1,400-acre mine, along with a sprawling waterfront barge facility. Citizen after citizen stepped forward to denounce the proposal, with Frederic Church’s home a constant theme of longtime Olana boosters such as Arthur Baker, Peter Jung, Ruth Piwonka, and many others.

A sign designed by illustrator (and Olana board member) R.O. Blechman for the Stop the Plant campaign

A key principle established during the nearly 7-year struggle was that this “250-acre landscape at the Center of the World” was intended to be experienced as a whole. Staff and experts argued successfully that Olana consists of much more than just its famous southwestern Hudson River view. After SLC claimed that Church never depicted the area where the main facility would be sited, Hudson resident Don Christensen identified sketches of Becraft Ridge in the Olana archives, proving the company wrong.

Davidson further noted that “the Olana Partnership is concerned that the plant and its plume would be a focal point in the viewshed on both the ridge road, the carriage trail closest to the house, and from Cozy Cottage, Church’s original family house,” which was only then beginning to be restored.

Like its two main allies in the fight, Friends of Hudson and the Hudson Valley Preservation Coalition, Olana likewise argued that there was a strong economic argument to be made against the plant. While the project would not create new jobs, due to the transfer of workers from another facility, it would have caused great harm to other economic engines in the area. 

When the project was finally turned down by Secretary of State Randy Daniels in April 2005, Griffen told The Independent’s Richard Roth that “the Hudson Valley’s aesthetics are important not just on historic but on economic grounds. They talk about places like Olana being strong economic drivers. In order to protect that, you have to protect the resources around it.... I hope [the cement plant ruling] can serve as a precedent for many other decisions around the country.”

 

Another TCI debacle: 1987 explosion ‘rocked’ Greenport, injured worker

Not mentioned so far during the debate about TCI’s two fires (and desire to remain) in Ghent isthe company’s brief stay in the Town of Greenport during the late 1980s, after being kicked out of Ulster County.

And, as happened before with its mismanagement in Newburgh and later in Ghent, TCI’s Greenport activities resulted in a major explosion.

A front-page article in the June 22nd, 1987 edition of The Register-Star reported that a transformer blast that day “rocked an area within a half-mile” of TCI’s facility on the Industrial Tract.

The “blast” threw worker Louis Smith of Stuyvesant 20 feet, and landing him in Columbia Memorial Hospital with undisclosed injuries:

The explosion was audible at the Greenport town hall, according to Greenport Officer-in-Charge John Hawks... Greenport firemen were called to the scene [along with] Columbia County Sheriff Paul Proper and Undersheriff James Bertram.

EnCon officials were expected to arrive on the scene later this morning. Some transformers contain levels of PCBs. It was unknown this morning whether the explosion caused any leakage of the suspected carcinogens.

Detail of a Robert Ragaini photo of emergency workers tending to an injured TCI worker on the Industrial Tract in Greenport

A search of seven months of the Register’s back issues found no follow-up report on the cause of the blast or investigation of environmental fallout.

By 1988, TCI was reëstablished on Falls Industrial Road in Ghent, the blast apparently not having given that Town’s planning board any cause for concern. In March 1989, a young TCI worker (also named Smith, but no known relation) died after being overcome by fumes at TCI’s new plant.

The search for this article was prompted by a brief mention in a 1989 report on the fatality, alluding to the earlier Greenport explosion, spotted by Patti Matheney of GhentCANN.

Why this earlier explosion has never come up is anyone’s guess. Perhaps the barrage of major news of 1987—the Wiley Gates trial, a massive October snowstorm, the televised testimony of Philmont native Ollie North, the death of Jackie Gleason?—somehow blotted this event from local memory.