The man who isn't there
The continuing morass that is the governance of the Carthage Central School district got even muddier last night when the board was unable to select from within its ranks a new president. It was just one more example of how tenuous the system of local control over school districts can be, and how important every school board election really is.
The district is still recovering from the mostly disastrous tenure of the suddenly departed Carl Militello; his hits have kept on coming long after he decamped for Niagara Falls. This school year, the district was forced to settle a complaint from the school administrators' union to rectify questionable actions taken by Militello, a settlement that was short on budget impacts but long on embarrassment for the district.
The newest silliness centers around the only north country school board member who resides in Washington, D.C. Christopher Kamide has been a member of the school board for five years, but he has spent three of them completely out of the district, one in Kuwait and the last two in D.C. The Watertown Daily Times has routinely reported over that time that Kamide listened to the meetings by speaker-phone but could not participate in the votes.
How anyone in the district thinks that Kamide's presence on the board actually represents their interests is completely beyond me. Perhaps voters were sympathetic to Kamide's military position. Perhaps he was disingenuous with the voters – he did promise that his posting to the Pentagon would be six months, and it is now two years on and counting. Whatever the reasons, voters now find themselves with an absentee representative in a school district that needs to have everyone focused on the business at hand.
Monday night's inability to select a new board president is a glaring reminder of why this situation is untenable. According to the Times, Kamide has been asked by fellow board members to resign, but has refused. Other school districts have removed board members (consider the case of Peggy Mousaw and the Colton-Pierrepont Board of Education; Mousaw was being removed by state Education Department hearing when the action was dropped because she lost in the election) and Carthage officials should long ago have explored the possibility of removing Kamide. Many municipal boards impose attendance requirements, and it might behoove Carthage Central to do that forthwith.
With growing enrollment from Fort Drum, and the budget challenges that are facing every district in the state, Carthage Central cannot afford and should not put up with this kind of distraction. Kamide should either resign or be removed, and the district should move on with a new member and a full board that is ready and able to attend to business.
The joy of newspapers
If you read this blog with any regularity, you're probably aware that I love newspapers. I read them cover to cover, find them by turns informative, provocative, entertaining, even irritating. But I like newspapers in their totality because you can find great stuff on every page.
Take the classified advertising section. I was reading today's Watertown Daily Times classifieds, and almost at the end, under the classification GIVE AWAY, I read this:
"FREE TO a good home. An American Eskimo. Can't have due to allergies. Call xxx-xxx-xxxx for details."
I laughed so hard I cried. I wailed, I howled – and I almost became the victim of this headline we might have seen in the next day's paper: "Man badly injured in plunge from toilet seat".
Now, I know there are a lot of members of the Iroquois tribe in these parts – Mohawks, Senecas, Ondeidas, Onondagas – but I was unaware of any Native Americans from the far north. And I was certainly unaware there are allergy issues associated with, well, associating with them. So this was a real eye-opener.
A random thought shot past me: perhaps, now that she's unemployed, Sarah Palin is trying to shed some household help.
Anyway, it was a great laugh – sudden, unexpected, totally delightful. It started my day out better than most.
Not that the classifieds are a strange place for humor. I remember once that a large Watertown hospital that is not currently being sold at foreclosure advertised thusly:
Wanted: lobotomist. Day shifts, competitive pay."
My, I thought, isn't that field of neurological treatment largely out of favor now? Although if it isn't, being guaranteed a day shift certainly could be a significant benefit.
Of course, the hospital was looking for a phlebotomist, one who draws blood. That may have been the danger inherent in taking ads by phone.
And then there was this one, from a paper long ago and far away:
"WANTED: HANG-GLIDING expert to teach me how to stop sticking myself into the ground like a dart. Pay negotiable."
Maybe newspapers are on the ropes. But if you really read them, you'd be surprised how entertaining they can be. AND informative, and all those other good things.
The highway to nowhere
There's people out there turning pavement into gold.
Or so you would think, if you listened to the ceaseless chatter about how the northern Northeast needs a "rooftop highway." After pondering hundreds of axioms, old sayings and clichés, here's the best I can come up with: Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.
As a foolish idea, the rooftop highway isn't as old as the Edsel but it's a lot older than Milli Vanilli. At its most exorbitant, proponents would like an interstate that would link Watertown with, say, Presque Isle, Maine, across the top of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Its most avid proponents say this project, when completed, would promote commerce and industry, improve safety, make babies smarter and women more comely. It is, one can only assume, the real solution to the north country's stagnant economy.
Or not. America's love of big highways with lots of lanes where we can go really, really fast is unmatched anywhere in the world. It has simultaneously made us the most mobile society in the world – and the most disconnected. And despite its proponents lavish promises, economic security for rural areas such as ours is seldom, if ever, brought by the long, lonely ribbon of a four-lane interstate highway.
If you are saying to yourself "But how can he be saying this?", take a look at some of the examples of the impact of an interstate on its surrounding area:
Take the New York State Thruway: The thruway was one of the Eisenhower interstate system's earliest and most crowning achievements. Linking New York City with Buffalo, the road rips through the center of the state with mindless efficiency. And yet, while it has absolutely been an economic savior for many large urban areas – Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo – it hasn't been quite so kind to smaller, rural areas. Along the thruway's east-west wing, as an example, take a drive the length of Route 20. Once a major link between Albany and Western New York, Route 20 is now home to dilapidated motels, tumbled-down restaurants, dust-covered stores and mercantile attempts of years gone by. From Sharon Springs to Depew, most of the businesses that once relied on serving travelers have shriveled up and blown away, save for pockets in some of the busier small communities.
Or, closer to home, look at Route 11. Before I-81, from Cicero to Adams Center and from Tully to Glen Castle, small communities had commerce. Some of it even thrived by serving travelers. A trip down Route 11 now shows a very different face.
Certainly, some of the loss of commerce in small towns is because of the competition from places like Salmon Run Mall and Carousel Center – and Walmart and Target and Home Depot. But consider this: the interstate system has contributed as heavily as anything to that trend because it is nothing to jump on I-81 and go to Watertown or Syracuse to shop. When people with pockets full of money are intentionally bypassing your community, there's an almost certain chance they won't be spending any of it there.
A rooftop highway would likely benefit any urban centers along it. But if you look at the map, you're talking primarily about only Watertown and Plattsburgh. From Vermont to Maine – look at a Google satellite map of northern Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine – you might have to drive 75 miles to reach a crossroad that offers an exit, and you'd see a hell of a lot more moose than you would people. What in God's name could be the point of that? Even swinging the highway south as far as U.S. Route 2 in Vermont would send you through, not only Montpelier, but also East Cabot and Marshfield and Danville Center. Those are some hotbeds of industry that need to be linked by an interstate.
It is also likely that part of the area crying the loudest for this new road would be shocked at just how negatively it would be impacted. St. Lawrence County stands to gain very little from a rooftop highway; making the trip to Plattsburgh or Watertown shopping centers so much easier won't do anything to solve Potsdam's mercantile malaise or ease Massena's economic woes. If the trip from Gouverneur to Salmon Run Mall suddenly took 20 minutes instead of 45, who do you think will benefit – Pyramid Corp., or Gouverneur's independent merchants?
State Department of Transportation estimates go as high as a billion dollars for this boondoggle. That works out to $2,512.30 per person for the 398,040 residents of Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Franklin, Clinton and Essex counties that might be touched by this proposal. That money would be spent on a region that accounts for 2 percent of New York state's population.
On the other hand, a billion dollars would be an enormous benefit to crumbling county and state highways within the region, fixing deteriorating bridges and rebuilding sections of roads that people actually live on that are dangerously out of shape right now. If you ask me whether I'd rather see safe, drivable local roads or a Highway to Nowhere, I'll take safe roads and bridges every time.
An awful lot of people in rural New York rely on local stores and businesses for their income. I'm vehemently opposed to any plan that takes money out of their pockets so that it can be transferred to megamoguls like Wilmorite or Bob Congel. I want to see stores and service businesses in Adams and Gouverneur and Potsdam and Malone and every small town in between make a go of it. A rooftop highway isn't going to make that happen.
Government as it shouldn't be
To call the New York state Senate dysfunctional is to insult people with mental defects everywhere. This group of narcissists is showing the world that party politics and representative government in this state has devolved to a virtually unmanageable system symbolizing pettiness and self-interest.
The defection of two, then one, Democrats to the Republican minority, creating a house with 31 Democrats on one side of the aisle and 31 Republicans and a turncoat on the other has thrown the chamber into chaos. The work of the Senate has come to a standstill while the two sides present a tragic parody of how government is supposed to work.
Nothing is being achieved in the Senate while the snarky comments and self-serving statements fly back and forth like so much playground smack-down. Important home rule legislation, including several bills vital to the north country, has been set aside while the bickering goes on and on and on. And with a caretaker governor sans power or influence, there is no end in sight.
Neither side can claim the high road. Both Democrats and Republicans have made variously conflicting and hypocritical statements blaming the other side for this legislative morass, all the while refusing to try to achieve a workable compromise so that the Senate can get back to work.
The will of the people is being completely ignored as this Greek tragedy unfolds. What we’d all like to see is a government that functions. What we have is a school-yard pissing match of name-calling and senseless invective. You could take the top two students from any 31 elementary schools in Northern New York and put together a group more willing and able to run state government than these bozos.
No one in the Senate is exempt from criticism. Their behavior has actually made Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver appear to be the voice of reason, a task so daunting as to be unthinkable for nearly everyone else. New York now has a bicameral government in which only one legislative house is capable of functioning, rendering all of state government paralyzed while they posture and pose.
I hope everyone remembers this in 18 months when the Senate is up for election. Unless its members can get it together and start doing what they were elected to do, every one of them should be tossed out on their ears. Anything would be better than what we have today.
Shooting the messenger
It's never been an easy job, but it appears that being a municipal assessor in the north country is a particularly onerous task right now. Just about any assessor who has tried, in the past couple of years, to keep up with property valuation has met a firestorm of opposition from property owners over changing values.
Unfortunately, nearly all the arguments that are de rigeur in revaluation protests fail to hold up to scrutiny.
First, anyone who starts their argument against a revaluation by saying "My taxes are already high enough!" is comparing apples to ground beef. Just because your assessment increases, your taxes do not automatically increase. Tax levies are based on MUNICIPAL SPENDING. Not on property valuation. Property valuation merely sets the rate of taxation, by mathematical formula. Here's the reality: if your town has a tax levy of $500,000 one year, and it goes to $750,000 the next, your taxes are going up by about 50 percent – no matter what your assessment is. The only thing a municipality or school district can do to ease that is to apply unspent funds from previous years to buy down the tax levy.
Next, let's trash the argument "How can you raise our assessments when the newspaper and television are reporting that property values are going down?" If you live in Phoenix or Las Vegas or most of California or many cities in the South, that is a valid argument. Property values there, grossly inflated by predatory lending practices and insatiable demand, have come back to earth. Here, however, statistics don't back up the claim that property values are falling. In the monthly check the Watertown Daily Times does of economic conditions, individual monthly year-over-year results have shown a mixture of rising and falling median single-home values. Taken cumulatively, it shows very little fluctuation after a rapid jump in values a couple of years ago.
Many assessors – Hounsfield, Macomb, Gouverneur, city of Watertown – realize their assessments have not kept up with either the manifest or the subtle changes in valuation that occur on a regular basis. And, of course, many assessors in the north country also have to deal with a phenomenon that does not occur in may places across New York: the number of waterfront and seasonal properties here make uniform assessing incredibly complex. Take, for example, Henderson: two otherwise identical houses, one on the waterfront in Henderson Harbor and one on the main drag in Henderson, have wildly diverse values. This makes accurate assessment doubly difficult because it casts out the assessor's best measure of value: like sales. To a homeowner, his 1,600-square-foot, three-bedroom home on an average lot should be valued the same as an equally maintained house of the same size that's only a mile away. But in Henderson, it isn't. While that home in Henderson will probably sell for $125,000, the house on the harbor with lake frontage and a dock will probably sell for $350,000. So the values are not equal, all things considered.
Thus it is with residential versus recreational or vacation property across the region. The balancing act is difficult and some assessors do it better than others. Nearly all recognize, however, this essential fact: once you let assessments fall behind the market, catching up is hard and opens the assessing practice to a world of criticism – much of it based on emotion rather than fact.
This is compounded by municipal boards that use rising values to mask significant tax increases. If total assessed valuation doubles, that should theoretically cut the tax rate in half. Yet in town after town this fall, local officials used those rising assessments to mask significant spending and levy increases. It's a shell game; because assessments doubled, the town tax rate increase actually goes down because the increased spending or levy or both is hidden by the math. If the town assessment doubles and the levy increases by 25 percent, the tax rate can go down by 25 percent yet the actual tax bill goes up by the levy increase. And then the town or village or school district can blame the assessor for their profligacy.
Don't shoot the messenger. If you don't like your tax bill, take it to your municipal board. They're the ones that determine what your tax bill will be.
A memo to Darrel
Memo to: Darrel Aubertine
From: Kentsboss
Re: John McHugh's seat
It has come to my attention that you are considering running for John McHugh's soon-to-be-vacant 23rd Congressional District seat. I saw you on TV today, waffling about studying this and looking into that and yadayadayada. Politicians only do that when they've already made up their minds, or they're jockeying for a quid pro quo in exchange for doing or not doing something.
So add this to your study session: running for Congress is the biggest mistake you could possibly make and it probably would finish you as a politician.
Consider: you have already bounced up from county Legislature to state Assembly to state Senate. This has all happened in a relatively short period of time, and it sure could go to somebody's head to have that happen. If you were thinking that you were on a rocket ship to the political firmament, however, you should quickly disabuse yourself of that notion.
Yes, you've led a charmed political life. Through a quirk of politics that nobody involved still entirely understands, you became a legislative chairman from the extremely minority party. Then you won your Assembly seat, taking it Democratic for the first time since – well, who can remember? Then when Jim Wright inexplicably resigned midterm and failed to truly anoint his chosen successor, you won a wild and wooly race for the 48th District Senate seat, taking it Democratic for the first time since see above.
None of these events could be duplicated at random. You were, in reality, in the right place at the right time, playing on a stage of modest repute. State government, however, is to Congress what Double-A baseball is to the bigs. The stage becomes huge, the stakes increase and your political base expands exponentially. And there, for you, is the rub.
You represent essentially 2½ counties in a fairly tight geographic weave you might call the Seaway Trail district. John McHugh represents all or parts of 10 counties, ranging from Tully south of Syracuse to the farthest reaches of Clinton County on the Canadian border. Your name recognition, no matter how high you think it is in your existing world, drops off rapidly south of Fulton and east of Massena. The traction you would pull in, say, Plattsburg, is probably equivalent to racing slicks on ice.
And yes, I know that you're trying to emulate John McHugh's track to Congress. But you are no John McHugh.
I like you Darrel, and I think you're probably a pretty good Senator. Your position on the Ag Committee is important to us, and despite the current kerfuffle in Albany, you are an important part of the Democratic caucus and that helps us. But you should pay close heed to the Peter Principle of Politics, which says that most will rise to their level of incompetence. In the state Senate, you're relevant. In Washington, you'd be beer foam – something that gets pretty well ignored if it's not just swept off the top of the glass.
So do your district a favor and stay in Albany. You won't regret it; a larger fish in a smaller pond always eats better than a minnow in the ocean. And you won't have to look out for sharks.
Ah, to be in Henderson...
Anyone who follows the machinations of public bodies in Jefferson County is aware that one of the most persistently dysfunctional Town Councils in the county is in Henderson, where disputations behavior is the norm and meetings often drag on for four hours as minutiae is disputed deep into the night.
The latest goofiness in Henderson is the council’s decision that it, not its appointed assessor, has the authority to set the town’s tax roll. The council sent a letter to the assessor and the county Office of Real Property telling the assessor she was to drop the 2009 values back to 2008 levels across the board, unless a new structure was erected on a lot or a structure was removed.
The council, sadly, didn’t bother to seek any legal advice on this preposterous decision before they made it. If town councils are given authority over individual assessments, no assessor in the state could possibly do the job.
Fortunately, county real property director Paul Warneck has effectively told the town “Ain’t gonna happen.” As he should; the law is very clear that only the Board of Assessment Review or the courts have the authority to alter the assessment roll once it has been filed. And, as he noted in a story in the Watertown Daily Times, the BAR cannot unilaterally alter assessments – it can only act on legitimate requests by property owners.
The council justifies its improper meddling by saying a higher total town value will give the county and the school district a reason to raise taxes. This is an inane subterfuge that fails to disguise the board’s real reason for its determination is that it has taken heat from people whose assessments have gone up. I suspect a little digging might show these folks are among the wealthy and politically connected – there are a lot of expensive shoreline homes in Henderson.
Council members are going to learn that in a world of laws, they do not have the authority to do whatever they want, whenever they want. They have to follow the same rules as every other municipality in the state. And they should also consider this: assessments only set the value of properties in the town. It is their budget that determines how much those assessments are going to cost taxpayers. The real burden of keeping taxes reasonable is on their shoulders – it’s not the responsibility of the assessor to keep taxes low. All this kerfuffle over assessments conveniently masks the real source of rising or falling taxes – the Town Council itself.
