Hugh Reynolds: Party business

Jeremy Wilber. (Photo: Dan Barton)

Perhaps the fault lies with the school system, certainly with the community’s parents. Perhaps future curriculum should include an intensive period (at least a week) devoted to local history. Then, perhaps, future generations will have a better sense of the place they call home.

Taking a licking

I think the Freeman editor may have had it right when I asked him for his version of why Assemblyman Kevin Cahill hasn’t spoken to the local daily since 2007. He took the high road. “It was six years ago,” he said. “I don’t choose to go back into the archaeology. I leave the field to the assemblyman.”

The assemblyman denies that it was the editorial calling him a “lickspittle” that led to what might be a permanent boycott of the paper on his part, but the handling of a story around the same time of an illegal meeting of the Ulster town board which had listed him as a participant in violation of state open-meetings laws.

“I wasn’t there,” Cahill explained a few days ago. “I told them [the Freeman] I wasn’t there, but they wouldn’t issue a retraction,” Cahill said a few days ago. Rubbing salt into the wound, the paper’s editorial writers had blasted Cahill for attending an illegal meeting.

As it was, there must have been at least three eyewitnesses (a town-board quorum) as to who attended the meeting and who did not. I solicited the memory of Councilman Joel Brink, a Republican and a man of impeccable integrity, who was on the town board at the time. “I do not recall ever sitting down at a town board meeting with the assemblyman,” he told me after giving it some thought.

For what it’s worth, this should satisfy Cahill. It’s been six years. There ought to be some kind of statute of limitations on petulance, which is by no means unique to Cahill among public officials.

If at first …

The Kingston school board did a sharp reversal on its plan to sell the long-vacated 28,000-square-foot TillsonSchool and eight acres of land for only $100,000. The dirt was worth that much. School officials blamed disputes over property title and such. More likely they were influenced by all those folks with pitchforks and torches surrounding district headquarters on Crown Street.

Some say that this was by any fair measure one of the worst hands ever dealt taxpayers by their own elected officials. We’ll see whether the bids next time around bring a higher price. I think they will.

The winner of the bidding process will probably be decided prior to the special district referendum to borrow some $137.5 million for high-school renovations.

Unhappy days

Ulster County Executive Mike Hein pronounced himself “furious” — furious, I tell you — after he learned that a New York City Department of Environmental Protection filtration avoidance application to federal officials would not include the remediation of damage to the lower Esopus Creek caused by water releases from the Ashokan Reservoir.

A spokesman for DEP — they always have an answer — said the issue wasn’t muddy water released in torrents into the Esopus from the reservoir, but the quality of water coming out of taps in Gotham. Either way, Hein wins the battle of local opinion.

Meanwhile, Hein, who doesn’t talk to us mere mortals, phoned our publisher last Friday to express anger at last week’s column that speculated about the sheriff’s road patrol. Not a shred of truth to it, the executive fumed. “He made it all up,” Hein said. “Pure fantasy.”

“He totally made it up,” he repeated in another phone call early Tuesday morning, and a third Tuesday afternoon? “Are you allowed to do that? Is that journalism?”

That’s what the man said.

Look it up, In last week’s column, I prefaced my speculation with, “Here’s how I read the handwriting on the wall.” Hein runs the most secretive operation I’ve seen in some 40 years of covering local politics, in itself an enigma wrapped in secrecy. As such, he has to expect that people will speculate about his motives and strategies, for better or worse. For reference, I remind readers how he handled the sale of the county nursing home in Kingston.

Let’s see how this one plays out. Meanwhile, you can be assured, dear reader, that I will continue to share with you how I read the handwriting on the wall.

Numbers, please

A few weeks ago, the State Comptroller’s Office notified UlsterCounty officials it would be conducting a routine audit of the county over the next six to nine months. The comptroller did special audits on the Resource Recovery Agency (last year) and on equipment in 2010. Albany would not say when the last general audit of the county was conducted.

The number-crunching Hein administration should have little to fear, since regular independent audits are conducted every year. But the Albany bean counters always find something.

Fortunately or not for CountyComptrollerElliott Auerbach, results of this audit won’t be known until well after the November elections. Auerbach, of course, has done numerous audits on county operations — his red flags on the RRA aroused the state. But nobody catches absolutely everything.