If you happened to be in downtown Woodstock around midday last Saturday, you will have noticed many small posses of people — mostly teenagers — wearing bright reflective vests and carrying trash bags, out doing good for their community. Earth Day weekend is the traditional time for a spring cleanup of public spaces as well as informational fairs on environmental topics, and this year’s was the first time that these two efforts in Woodstock were coordinated.
“This was our first year of collaborating together: the youth center and the environmental commission,” said Woodstock Youth Center director Patrick Acker. “For the cleanup, about 50 people signed in, and we had about 100 total turnout.” Crews of volunteers were dispatched to pick up trash for an hour or two at various heavily used sites, including the Youth Center/Mescal Hornbeck Community Center complex and Andy Lee Field; the Mountain View Studios, Tannery Brook and municipal parking lots; several shopping plazas; and the lower Comeau property.
This was the third year in a row that the Youth Center had organized a townwide cleanup. The project was launched in 2019, Acker noted, but went dormant in April 2020, when the facility had to close for 13 months due to COVID. The cleanup was revived in 2022. Meanwhile, the Woodstock Environmental Commission (WEC) has been hosting Earth Day fairs for the past five years, although the 2021 event was postponed until July due to ongoing concerns about social distancing. This year, said WEC vice-chair Erin Moran, “I bumped into Patrick and we decided to combine the events.”
After the cleanup, a reception was held for the volunteers at the Hornbeck Center, where the Earth Day Fair was already in progress, with sandwiches, snacks and drinks donated by event sponsors Woodstock Meats, Sunflower Market and CVS. The drugstore chain had gone all-out, bringing a carload of bottled water and granola bars to donate to the youth center as well as wrangling a litter-picker team of three store managers and three district leaders from a region stretching from Albany to Mahopac. “We were cleaning up around the CVS building and the street behind it, by Pearl Moon,” reported Antonio Regalbuto, manager of the Fishkill CVS store. “We filled up four bags.” Paper, bottles, cans, diapers and “lots of cigarette butts” were the team’s most frequent finds.
As the cleanup crews trickled in, a Town of Woodstock pickup truck slowly filled with their gleanings, but Acker pointed out that previous years’ efforts had yielded as many as four truckloads. “The first year there was a lot; each year there’s less and less garbage.” Some of the most challenging locations in the beginning were sites that homeless people had used for years as encampments and then abandoned, he added.
Though the need is less these days, “We’re definitely looking to continue doing this every year,” he said. “The kids are a huge part of the cleanup. This event is an opportunity to get the kids connected to the community, so they can see these kids in a positive light.”
Raising the public image of the Youth Center as a community resource is much on Acker’s mind these days, as the Woodstock Youth Center Task Force proceeds with its campaign to develop a comprehensive plan for a major renovation of the building and grounds, the adjacent Hornbeck Center and athletic fields. At the reception following the cleanup, task force chair Ben Schachter called the project “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine this campus” for intergenerational use. He said that the task force had been spending recent months surveying the community about its priorities for future use of the complex, and that the next step would be to “hire a master planning firm” to scope out the project and design a preliminary site plan.
Many other speakers took turns addressing the crowd, including representatives of several organizations who had set up tables at the Earth fair. Town supervisor Bill McKenna gave brief welcoming remarks, but otherwise busied himself with the grunt work of setup and breakdown. Woodstock Historical Society volunteer Terry Lover reminded the crowd that the land on which they all stood “wasn’t always our land” and urged a return to the stewardship relationship with the Earth that was the way of life of Woodstock’s Indigenous people.
There’s nothing like a townwide cleanup event to remind folks, firsthand, of how ubiquitous single-use plastic pollution has become in our lives. The group Citizens Concerned about Plastic Pollution (CCAPP), a local affiliate of Beyond Plastics, had a major presence at the Earth fair, selling metal straws and tiffins and urging attendees to write or call New York State Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly speaker Carl Heastie to expedite passage of the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act. This proposed legislation — which would be “the strongest EPR rule in the country,” establishing a ten-year plan to reduce plastic manufacture, according to CCAPP volunteer Jo Schwartz — has been voted out of committee in the Senate but is currently bottled up in the Assembly’s Codes Committee.
Other speakers at the Earth Day event included Anula Courtis, chair of the Woodstock Bear Task Force, advocating for a local law to require the use of bear-resistant trash cans. Richard Kurtz of the Ulster County Beekeepers’ Association offered plenty of tips for keeping one’s yard friendly to native bee species that often burrow in the ground, such as avoiding the use of plastic mulch and saving mowing chores for cloudy days or early evening. Also on hand with informational tables were Caroline Ritchey of Repair Café, which will host its next Woodstock event on May 11 at the Hornbeck Center, and volunteers from Gabi Madden’s state Assembly campaign, who were handing out free jack pine saplings for spring planting.
The event was well-attended and the crowd enthusiastic. As Patrick Acker observed, praising all the volunteers and sponsors who made the day a success, “It takes a village.”
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