On a recent Monday evening in New Paltz, a quasi-governmental county agency, several of whose members were so new they hadn’t yet met each other, held a public hearing on a scaled-back $42-million project which still has a lot of loose ends. Of the 15 or so speakers, most were supportive of the package of standard IDA tax breaks for Wildberry Lodge. If anyone had expected a community eruption in New Paltz of the kind that had greeted the ill-fated Wilmorite student-housing proposal a few years ago, they were doomed to be disappointed. 

It’s not cheap to bring broadband to rural regions like the Catskills, but the state has decided this is a service to which all residents are entitled. We should know within a decade how well it will have paid off.

SUNY New Paltz has been extending its outreach within the Hudson Valley economy in new ways. The latest move came when its School of Business debuted a new program designed to strengthen the region’s start-up ecosystem early this month.

Ulster County may be an inflection point in terms of its economic relationship with New York City. Will it continue to be a nice place for city people to spend a restful weekend or a tourist’s visit? Or will it finally develop a sustainable economic base so that people with skills, locals and visitors alike, can earn a decent living here?

The elegant one-room show entitled “Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance,” on display in the New Studio at the Thomas Cole historic site in Catskill from now through November 4, breaks new ground.

What’s the ticket to upward mobility for America’s lowest-paid workers without much of an education? Economists have compiled a list of “opportunity occupations” that are attainable to persons without a college degree. Most of the upward moves are modest.

Even as their businesses are benefitting from a solid economy, Hudson Valley manufacturers have been having a hard time recruiting talent, especially young talent. Young people growing up in a gig economy don’t take easily to long training periods for what they perceive as repetitive and unchallenging work.

In case you didn’t know it, Tannersville on Greene County’s Mountaintop region now calls itself The Painted Village in the Sky. The transformation from an all-cash business locale which left Main Street a wreck every Sunday morning to a place where family businesses served the whole community was neither fast nor easy. It’s still not complete. But many locals, some of whom were once skeptical, are convinced the achievement is now within grasp.