Yesterday, with much fanfare, the late Board of Water Supply police officer John J. Quinlan was added to the State of New York Police Officers Memorial in Albany (and also the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C.) He is the "first officer responsible for protecting New York City’s water supply to ever be honored" in the memorial, according to a press release from the New York Department of Environmental Protection. From DEP Commissioner Cas Holloway's statement about Quinlan:

Policy watchdog Environmental Advocates of New York has flunked state senators John Bonacic and Bill Larkin on environmental issues, Adam Bosch of the Times Herald-Record reports. It's because they both voted to kill a bill that would've allowed people in other states to sue New York towns over environmental issues:

The bill passed the Assembly but died in the Senate, where Bonacic and Larkin, both Republicans, voted against it. "It's a trial lawyer's dream, but a taxpayer's nightmare," Bonacic said in a statement Tuesday. "The legislation in question would even allow out-of-state, tax-exempt groups to sue towns in the Hudson Valley and Catskills." Larkin didn't return calls seeking comment.

It has to take a particular kind of crazy to get yourself chased by the police, have your truck flip over, and then land on your wheels and keep going. And on Rte. 10 in the town of Summit, which, as its name implies, is on the top of a mountain. Elijah Jacobson, may tales of your (alleged) DWI exploits be passed down through the generations:

It started around 1:30 a.m. Monday when state troopers in Cobleskill saw the pickup truck swerving back and forth on Route 10 in the town of Summit. They followed it with lights and sirens on, but it sped up. Troopers say the pickup went off the road after about a half mile and rolled over. But it landed back on four tires and kept on going. Finally, the truck ended up in the swamp and police took 21-year-old Elijah Jacobson into custody.

Via WRGB.

The Daily Star has been doing some digging about the tragic Mothers' Day murder of 65-year-old Daisy Schultz in her apartment in a Walton house, and a picture of Richard Utter, her 74-year-old former boyfriend and alleged killer, is coming together. 

According to friends Betty and Neil Northrup, who went to social dances with Schultz and Utter, and who also happen to be related to Delaware County District Attorney Richard Northrup, Utter had a pacemaker and kidney problems. He lived in a trailer park in Norwich, and his wife died in 2009. And there were signs that something was amiss:

"He was very, very quiet," Neil Northrup said of Utter ... "He was the last person you would ever think would do something like this," Betty Northrup said. "But he also seemed very needy and when Daisy broke up with him for a while he wouldn't stop calling her or showing up at the dances looking for her."

Empire State Future's Peter B. Fleischer lays out the case against malignant sprawl in yesterday's Albany Times-Union.

Today's upstate sprawl extends considerably farther away from town and city centers; consists of larger homes built on larger lots (many of which demand more in services than they create in tax revenue); demands extension of increasingly costly municipal services to far-flung communities; and requires more infrastructure that is more difficult and expensive to build, operate and maintain. The associated cost and tax burden is borne by a shrinking and aging pool of taxpayers.

There is simply no reasonable expectation in most of upstate New York that population, home values or tax revenues can cover the costs of future decline and expansion of infrastructure.