Hugh Reynolds: Paying up for bad behavior

Catskill Mountain Railroad’s Earl Pardini, singing a happier song last summer. (Photo by Phyllis McCabe)

There’s really not much Kingstonians can do except hope (against widespread perception) that the free-standing Benedictine Hospital (under the current realignment plan, Kingston will be closed, with perhaps 300 workers laid off) will be a competitive market alternative to its soon-to-be Ulster rival.

Kiss their caboose

It probably won’t amount to a bucket of warm spit, as the term has it, but the Rosendale town board’s recent protest of an all-but-done-deal rail-trail project at least showed some respect to Catskill Mountain Railroad volunteers who busted their collective asses trying to restore the line for over 20 years. County government seems to have dismissed these volunteers as mere impediments to a grand design.

The irony of the Rosendale rebellion is that County Executive Mike Hein sprang his now generally heralded rail-trail plan on an unsuspecting public last October in Rosendale.

The spit quote, by the way, was attributed to former vice president “Cactus Jack” Garner about his job. Some sources suggest that Cactus Jack, a salty type, might have been slightly misquoted by Depression-Era reporters sensitive to family values.

Meanwhile, the seldom active county board of ethics has ruled that two members of the recently appointed railroad advisory board have a conflict because of their status as officers of the Catskill Mountain Railroad, which the committee oversees. Well, duh. The legislature itself, when reviewing the credentials of potential board members, should have picked up this conflict. The members in question, Earl Pardini and Harry Jameson, had said previously to the ethics ruling that removal from the board was no big deal. They’ll attend meetings of the board, anyway. Those meetings have been thrice postponed in the last two months.

The legislature that can’t shoot straight seems to have made a hash out of this railroad business, first by avoiding appointment of a rail advisory board for over 18 months and then (unanimously) appointing people who shouldn’t have been considered.

They’re real runners

Given the way politicians hem and haw about their election intentions, lining up tickets for the November elections is pretty much a guessing game until the June nominating conventions. For real runners, we turn to this year’s chilly, windy annual Kiwanis Kingston Classic. A contingent of pols called Team Kingston featured three aldermen, the police chief and our new state senator. Leading the pack were aldermen Elisa Ball, Nate Horowitz and Matt Dunn, top cop Egidio Tinti, plus state Sen. Cecilia Tkaczyk and County Comptroller Elliott Auerbach. The lanky Dunn beat everybody by about 10 minutes. Horowitz, the local lone Republican, was assigned to carry Auerbach’s spare socks. Running separately as a “rogue,” jogger-talk for an independent, was Congressman Chris Gibson.

It’s sobering to think in the wake of the horror at the Boston Marathon the day after the Kingston Classic that the only security issue here was motorists trying to get around barriers erected on city streets to protect runners.

Praising Maurice

The Ulster County Democratic Committee and the Ashokan Center in Olivebridge will plant a group of sugar maple trees in honor of former congressman Maurice Hinchey at the center on Sunday, April 28 at 2 p.m.

Organizers called the trees a most fitting gift, predicting “these sugar maples will live as long and grow as strong as our love for Maurice.” Hyperbole aside, the timeline sounds about right. Hinchey, 74, was elected for 38 years to the Assembly and Congress before retiring last year. Information is available from [email protected].