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Letter to the Editor: A vote for the "bookends" plan for Onteora

Editor's note: The Onteora Central School District held a meeting last night in Boiceville at which Superintendent Phyllis Spiegel McGill said that she prefers the "bookend" plan, according to an article in the Daily Freeman. -- Julia Reischel

Dear Editor,

I'm writing in favor of the bookends plan for Onteora Central School District, which would turn Bennett into a 4-6 intermediate school and Phoenicia and Woodstock elementary schools into K-3 primary schools.

Full disclosure: my son attended Phoenicia elementary for the entirety of his elementary experience, and the class sizes were rarely more than 20 kids; my wife was the president of the PTA, and I frequently taught afterschool workshops both there and in Woodstock. We, as a family, feel lucky to live in the OCSD. Jack is currently thriving at Onteora middle school.

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Onteora Central School District

Letters to the Editor

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Court finds developers guilty of stormwater violations

NYSDEC issued a press release this week detailing the case against Fless 5 Development, Inc. and its CEO Shane Klein of Brooklyn, who stood accused of violating a court-ordered stipulation requiring the company to comply with stormwater permitting requirements.

The court found that the two defendants failed to complete seven site stabilization measures, failed to hire a qualified engineer to conduct site inspections, and failed to submit required stormwater retention pond evaluation plans by the deadlines agreed to in the court-ordered stipulation. The stormwater permitting violations occurred in the town of Hunter, Greene County.

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water

NYC Department of Environmental Protection

Department of Environmental Conservation

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Tonight it will snow, finally

Above: It wasn't a white Christmas this year in the Catskills. Photo of a Delaware County dairy farm on Christmas Eve this year by Mark Zilberman, via the Watershed Post Flickr Pool.

After an oddly snow-less winter so far, Mother Nature is going to make up for it tonight. The National Weather Service has issued a winter weather advisory for the entire Catskills region warning of a storm that will roll in this evening and dump up to 6 inches of snow on high elevations. Wet stuff will begin to fall around 8pm, and will last until morning.

Here are the warnings:

For Ulster, Schoharie and Greene counties:

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National Weather Service

snow

Fault lines in fracking opposition

Peter Applebome, the Our Towns columnist at the New York Times, has a nuanced article out this week about how the controversial issue of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has split the environmental movement down the middle, particularly in the Catskills.

Applebome explores the fact that mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club have not called for an outright ban on natural gas drilling in New York, and that a bunch of relatively scrappy, regional groups like Catskill Mountainkeeper, Frack Action and Catskills Citizens for Safe Energy have arisen to do so instead. Here's one of the most extreme anti-fracking points of view in the story:

Claire Sandberg was one of the two founders of Frack Action, which started up in 2010 largely because some antifracking activists worried that established environmentalists seemed resigned to living with gas drilling.

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New York Department of Environmental Conservation

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Did the New York Power Authority cause flooding in the Schoharie Valley?

Above: The New York Power Authority's Blenheim-Gilboa Pumped-Storage Power Project in the town of Blenheim in Schoharie County. Photo via the New York Power Authority's website.

At the year's first meeting of the Schoharie County Board of Supervisors last week, the county took the first step towards suing the New York Power Authority for playing a role in the flooding that devastated the Schoharie Valley during Hurricane Irene last August.

According to the Schoharie County Times-Journal, which covered the meeting, the Board of Supervisors hired the Albany law firm of Couch White, LLP to file a notice of claim against the NYPA, which will give the county a year to decide whether to take the next step of filing a lawsuit.

The Schoharie Board of Supervisors has been talking about suing the NYPA since December, when the county's director of emergency services brought up the topic at another meeting.

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Government

Water

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NYC Department of Environmental Protection

lawsuits

new york power authority

flood

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Irene

Schoharie County Board of Supervisors

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Benefit screening of horror film shot in Prattsville, "My Little Demon"

Auto accident in White Sulphur Springs leaves one woman dead

80-year-old Verna Hess of Callicoon died Sunday morning when her car hit a utility pole on Route 52 in White Sulphur Springs, the Times Herald-Record reports.

[Sullivan County sheriff's] deputies found Verna Hess inside of a 1991 Buick Century. The White Sulphur Springs Fire department then responded to the scene and got her out. She was the only occupant.

She was taken by Mobile Medic Ambulance to Catskill Regional Medical Center where she succumbed to her injuries, according to the sheriff’s office.

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The Catskills get their own DEC hydrofracking hearing - by doing it themselves

Above: Video coverage of Saturday's "people's hearing" by videographer Jessica Vecchione.

On Saturday, a coalition of anti-fracking groups organized a "people's hearing" to accept public comments about hydraulic fracturing from Catskills residents.

The hearing was planned to fill a gap: The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation didn't organize an official public comment meeting in Delaware, Schoharie or Otsego counties last November, when it held several public forums its draft Supplemental Generic Draft Impact Statement (SGEIS) on natural gas drilling. (The nearest official DEC meeting was held in Loch Sheldrake, in Sullivan County, about hours away for Delaware and Otsego residents.)

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New York Department of Environmental Conservation

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Energy

Water

Delaware County won't join Hein's feud with the DEP

While Ulster County executive Mike Hein is busy pouring lighter fluid on long-smoldering conflicts between New York City and its upstate watershed, Delaware County politician Jim Eisel is quick to distance himself from the feud.

Yesterday, Eisel, who chairs the Delaware County Board of Supervisors, sent a letter to New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg. In it, Eisel writes that -- contrary to Hein's accusations -- the relationship between Upstate and Downstate in Delaware County's part of the watershed is relatively cozy. An excerpt:

Many of us here in the watershed have a more balanced view of the relationship and understand that while we don’t always agree we have always achieved real results by working together and keeping the discourse professional.

The elected leaders of two of the five watershed counties have now weighed in on the feud. (How about it, Greene, Schoharie and Sullivan?)

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NYC Department of Environmental Protection

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New Cairo library projected to open in late spring

This map from the New York state education department depicts areas that are not served by public libraries. Many communities in Delaware, Greene, Schoharie, Sullivan and Ulster Counties remain underserved.

With roof trusses going up this week, construction on the new library in Cairo is reportedly progressing on schedule. Cairo's library has been sharing space in town hall with the court and offices since 1979 but, with the help of a $3 million loan and $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, its new location will allow the library room to grow. Additionally, Cairo was one of three municipalities in Greene County to receive a library construction grant -- $167,500 -- from New York state, for construction costs at the beginning of the building process.

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