Trash in/trash out

Yes, for sure, it is beastly hot. Could stay that way for a while. 

And people need to get cool and we have beautiful streams and pools in which to do it. 

But folks who are using our facilities, like Big Deep and Little Deep, have got to stop trashing the places. 

The town has wrestled with this problem for years. It is out-of-towners? Tourists? Airbnb renters? Woodstockers? (We’d hope that it isn’t locals, who know to treat their own town a bit better. Or who know where more private out of the way swimming spots exist and stay away from the guidebook places.) 

One of the proposed solutions was to require a free permit to use the swimming holes. The Town Board approved requiring permits as a way to curb a rampant trash and noise problem at the swimming holes after town maintenance employees spent several hours cleaning garbage earlier this year. But there is a problem with it. Once you begin to regulate the usage of such places, you then accept liability. With that comes the responsibility to provide safety measures, including requiring a lifeguard, and likely furnishing bathrooms. Those measures have great expense, money that can’t simply be collected from townspeople’s property taxes. So you’d have to have considerable fees associated with the permits for the facilities, not to mention administration the entire program. 

Running into those problems some years ago, the town simply closed the facilities. Posted them with ‘no swimming’ signs. But as years passed the town decided to try again, because people wanted to go there. 

But there are a lot more people staying in town these days. Short term rentals, like Airbnb, have increased the overnight and weekend, or weeklong population of the town. The Town Board is wrestling with those expansion pains, too.

The better solution for keeping open the swimming holes is for everyone who uses them to take your trash with you when you leave. Don’t start fires, don’t build anything, don’t clog the facilities, don’t stay all day. 

Respect Woodstock, Shandaken, Olive, West Hurley and the people who live here.