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SROs push families out
We write from Prospect Street in the heart of the Village of New Paltz, where a commitment to community has long existed among its residents. Like many streets in New Paltz, Prospect Street is home to a high percentage of neighbors who contribute to the Village’s quality of life immeasurably through their collective volunteer service. It is the character of a family neighborhood like this that our R-2 zoning code (residential, zoned for one- and two-family houses) is surely meant to protect.
Yet for the past two years, residents have been fighting the erosion of the district by a developer who’s been buying up houses and turning them into illegal rentals-by-the-room. The latest, a huge addition to the property at 7 Prospect Street that was previously a home and office, could become a nine-bedroom apartment building. Plans indicate that each bedroom will have its own bathroom and tenants will share a kitchen. This does not remotely resemble a one or two family home and is a clear violation of Village code.
Additionally, the owners of the property have been issued stop-work orders for violating the terms of their site plan in building too large a structure, violating a lot line, and for dumping landfill on the property without prior building department approval. Stop-work orders are still in effect.
The developer’s history as landlord is not stellar. Tenants have filed grievances with the Village for bad landlord practices. Neighbors adjacent to their buildings have filed complaints for poor property management and possible dangerous overcrowding of the rental units. Our community has one last chance, on Tuesday July 15, to make the case in front of the Village Planning Board that approval of this project should be denied.
As we’re all aware, there is a housing shortage in New Paltz, but to be clear, there is no shortage of transient rentals by the room. We need family homes, by any definition. Rental homes suitable for families, and especially families with children, are exceedingly scarce in the Village.
Community stability and engagement depend on such long-term residents to become involved in the many vital volunteer boards and committees that govern and guide our Village, ultimately saving taxpayers thousands of dollars. Single-room occupancy puts a drain on Village finances and raises rents for tenants who pay more and get less. Once renovated into more profitable rentals-by-the-room, such properties will likely never be true family homes again, furthering the strain on taxpayers. They make little fiscal sense for anyone except the profiteers.
What the Planning Board now seems poised to approve on July 15, the “addition” to that supposedly “single-family home” at 7 Prospect, is an egregious flouting of what any reasonable person would consider to be a legal interpretation of R-2 zoning.
We ask the Village Planning Board, all worthy volunteer stewards of our Village, to do the right thing and deny this application or clearly demand that the developers comply with the rules of the Village code.
Phyllis Chen,
Jennifer Cook and Chris Oden,
Stephen Cook,
Kristin V. Crawford,
Cari DeLong and Brent Smith,
Terry Dungan,
Mark Eisenhandler,
Aja Forgiè and Kavi Forgiè,
Julee Guillemot,
Riley and Beyza Keenan,
Christine Marmo,
Noelle Kimble McEntee and Dominic Volante,
Alison Nash,
June Wheeler
New Paltz
Fact and fiction
Does McKenna really expect us to believe what he wrote in the 6/18/25 HV1 Feedback section? He says, “There is one thing mentioned by several candidates that I agree with — it is time for a change. As supervisor, it has been my great frustration these last two years to have a majority of the board unwilling to do the work.”
Well, maybe. We definitely agree “it is time for a change” — no argument there. After years of bullying and top-down rule, we’ve had enough.
As for his claim that “a majority of the board [is] unwilling to do the work,” what exactly does he mean? Aside from his habit of punting decisions to committees — whose conclusions were rarely acted upon — what portion of his agenda was actually denied by the board? That’s the real question.
It’s one thing to claim obstruction. It’s another to show it happened.
Howard Harris
Woodstock
Don’t rezone Winston Farm
What I love about Saugerties is that it is a small town, with distinctive character and interesting small businesses. We have a thriving cultural and arts community that is vibrant and friendly and centered around a respect for the natural world.
If plans go unchallenged to rezone Winston Farm, Saugerties stands to lose a large portion (50 percent or more) of a flourishing intact ecosystem that supports biodiversity, habitat-rich forests, wetlands and grasslands, a safe corridor for wildlife, and all the numerous health benefits that nature provides for free.
It appears that the owners of Winston Farm want to rezone this undeveloped land as quickly as possible in order to flip it. In their words, ”The adoption of the PDD zoning will allow the project sponsor to market the site…”
The PDD wording relies heavily on platitudes but lacks feasibility. The DGEIS does not adequately address the potential overcrowding, pollution, noise, sewage runoff, protection to habitat, or water usage. Instead, it leans into grandiose talk because there are no actual concrete plans for a Planned District Development. Yes, there have been studies, but many of these contradict other studies.
The rezoning would allow the current owners to sell off parcels of land to the highest (non-local) bidders without accountability. It appears that the local owners have lost sight of the extraordinary natural history and biodiversity that has made Winston Farm and the Hudson Valley so special.
The current DGEIS is simply nowhere near a serious Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Instead, it uses business language like “capitalize on” and “the carrying capacity of the land” and “plant and animal resources”. Resources, simply put, are commodities.
The extensive PDD portion of the document is a combination of incomprehensible jargon that ranges into a mirage of grand empty statements that lack any concrete plans. A highly generic document in both scope and language, it proposes a frivolous and meaningless wish list.
To the Village and Town of Saugerties, this is our chance to speak out against environmental destruction, all manners of pollution, the inevitable tax increases, and suburban sprawl that a mega-development brings. The next public comments hearing will be held on July 16 at the village senior center, written public comments can be submitted to the town board at winstonfarmcomments@saugertiesny.gov until July 28. Now is not a time for apathy. It is a time to take action. Our town has the potential to save a large highly significant landscape.
Come to the next Winston Farm town board hearing and speak out in opposition to the rezoning currently under consideration, it is essential that our community express that at least 75 percent of Winston Farm be preserved as contiguous, unfragmented open space. This must be made firm, with no shifting goalposts. It must be finalized and planned.
Janell O’Rourke
Saugerties
Ghost mall, Kingston
(for Tim Scott. Jr.)
Here through the carless parking lot to see the ghost mall with its empty wings and long vacant corridors. Lights still burn, muzak drifts overhead, but there’s no one shopping here.
Just a few stores open. Most gated, padlocked. Signs that workers left in haste: coffee cups, tissue boxes, framed photos abandoned. The food court silent.
Once a hub of life and laughter. Not this obliteration. One lone janitor with his barrel moves can to can looking for rubbish that isn’t there.
Patrick Hammer,
Saugerties
The resistance is growing
Like so many of us, I am furious. My heart is breaking over the passage of Trump’s Big Ugly Bill, the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in the history of this country. And where else – besides the bank accounts of billionaires – will our hard-earned tax money go? Forty-five billion dollars of it will be spent on building new concentration camps for immigrants (and for whomever else Trump and his loyalists decide to call their enemies), plus an additional $30 billion on mass deportations, including the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents. And who will be applying for those jobs? The pardoned insurrectionists come to mind.
We are no longer sliding toward authoritarianism. We have crossed that threshold. And now that Trump’s personal Gestapo will be fully funded, what happened in Los Angeles during the protests is likely to get replicated and even ratcheted up in other cities where people exercise their First-Amendment right to protest against the unlawful and inhumane treatment of immigrants.
But we can’t allow fear or a sense of hopelessness to hold us back — that’s what authoritarians count on. Not if we want to win back our democracy.
The peaceful, pro-democracy resistance is growing. Last month, five million of us showed up for No Kings Day, one of the largest single protest days in American history. We need to keep showing up and speaking up against the corruption and the cruelty.
If not now, when?
Charlotte Adamis
Kingston
The world’s kneeling weight
There is a kind of weeping that arrives not from grief but from recognition — like a bell that sounds inside the chest when something sacred and nearly forgotten brushes past. It is not always loud. Sometimes it is only the tightening in the throat when truth speaks through another’s voice or the sudden ache behind the eyes when a story closes — not because it ended but because it touched something in us that is still unfinished.
Tears came to him in that way now. Not as they once had — in childhood when a scraped knee or a shouted word burst the dam — but now, unannounced and more honest, without needing a name. He had begun to notice them arriving not in sorrow but in beauty. In the shift of a voice, when kindness threaded itself into a sentence. In the glint of light on the edge of a falling leaf or in the old hands of a woman tying her apron with quiet dignity.
There were two landscapes that he walked, though few saw both. The first was the actual one — autumn hills softening into dusk outside his window, the scent of woodsmoke threading through the air like an ancestor’s whisper. The second lay beneath it, or perhaps behind it: a memoryscape where language had weight and wind carried the voices of the dead.
“For a tear is an intellectual thing,” wrote William Blake. “And a sigh is the sword of an angel king.”
In this second landscape, tears were messengers. Not the weak discharges of a broken spirit but the salted thresholds of knowing. They were not answers but invitations. When the policeman’s knee bore down on the breath of the black man whose name echoed across cities, the tear that slid down his cheek was not only his. It carried the grief of generations and the cry of mothers who will never hold justice in their arms. That tear joined an ocean — the one that lives beneath this land, fed by the unwept grief of centuries.
He realized that kindness is the most unexpected grief. When someone opens a door that no one else has seen or offers forgiveness when revenge would be easier, those moments, his chest breaks — not from weakness but from memory. The soul remembers what the mind forgets.
The word kenosis floated into view: emptiness as a holy offering. Tears were not just an emotion but a form of participation. They were how the inner world spills into the outer when the boundary between the two thins.
Sometimes, he thought, maybe we’re not crying. Perhaps the world is crying through us.
He remembered a time in the northern woods before this world of sirens and screens. A loon had called across the lake at twilight, its cry a wound stitched into silence. He had wept then, too, not because he was sad but because something in him had been pierced by that sound — something old, something true.
And now, here again, the weight of a knee on a man’s neck broke not only the man but also the illusion. There is no separation. No “them” and “us.” Tears teach that. They are borderless waters.
He walked back to his chair and sat without speaking. The room, like the heart, was full of unseen rivers.
Larry Winters
New Paltz
More graceful aging
Once upon a time, there was a way of knowing that many now call “just myth.” That little word “just” does the work of a chainsaw in the forest of old-growth wisdom where mythologizing was the way we told the stories that wove our human experience into a vast and sentient order. For centuries now, science has rejected the myths and folktales of previous cultures in favor of precise measurement and repeatable verification, an idea that comes from the Latin word for truth: Verification=Measurement=Truth.
If verification is the term for the many things we can reasonably take as true, then another word is needed for the felt sense of truths than cannot be measured or proven.
Validation is the best word I know for this, from the Latin word for “strength.” The sudden appearance of a hawk on my garden trellis was verifiable to the extent that I have pictures of it. But its impact upon me can only validated on the strength of my own
inklings. I recall the old maps that had the legend, “Beyond this point, there be dragons”. That point is where the verifiable world ends; the rest is, well, Mystery, my story, my myth.
Certain experiences I had as a young person kept me from placing too much faith in what can be tested and proven. I hold to the conviction that intuition and imagination are necessary paths to truths beyond the maps of reason. A hawk landed on my garden trellis not 15 feet from where I was sitting, and I felt the thrill of the uncanny. My thinking jumped its usual rails and into a tingling sense of portent.
When it comes to having faith in the unprovable, however, I can be left, as here, with anxiety. After all, “There be dragons.” Am I crazy? What do I trust? Who will validate my taking the appearance of this hawk as a visitation? Who will help me glimpse its portent? This can be a lonely enterprise in a culture that has reduced our sense of truth to what can be established by logic and reason.
My sense is that hawk affirms the truths of intuition and imagination. And in the context of my ending, the hawk reminds me that aging gracefully may offer me chances to be illuminated by experiences that deserve a different kind of intelligence. “Read the signs through the lens of myth,” says the hawk. “Give validation to yourself and honor those who can give you it as well.”
Graceful Aging is an open group that meets the first and third Wednesdays of the month from 10:30 to noon at the Elting Memorial Library. We welcome you; come see what we are up to.
Peter Pitzele
New Paltz
The bell shall Actoll for thee:
The Big “Beautiful” Bill is now law.
The cruelty and greed implicit in this legislation, indeed, in every major decision of this administration, defies the most agreed-upon boundaries of neighborliness and common sense. The bill slashes $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and children’s health programs. In other words, because their healthcare is being snatched away, people will see their children grow very ill, and perhaps die, if they themselves are not dead first. This is compounded by the inexplicably stupid undermining of vaccination, led by an unqualified man who takes his grandchildren swimming in a river polluted by shit.
Gone unnoticed during the focus on Big Ugly Bill was the administration’s June 30 decision not to release nearly $7 billion in education funding authorized by Congress, legislation Trump signed in March. This will decimate after-school and summer programs serving mainly low-income families in public schools. As you know, Trump famously said, “I love the uneducated.”
All successful people are educated, whether academically or otherwise. If you applaud the president’s statement, you prove yourself to be dangerously uneducated yourself.
American leaders, mainly Democrats, have defended the highest ideals of the American vision. FDR is most outstanding example. In promoting the equality of the working person to the tycoon, he gave the least of us a place at the table, with the self-respect that comes from this. Truman desegrated the armed forces. Eisenhower, the outstanding Republican exception, sent troops to Arkansas so black children could pursue an education. LBJ gave the nation the Voting Rights Act. Even dimwitted George W. Bush after 9/11 stated that “Islam is peace,” and cautioned Americans not to hold Muslim-Americans responsible for the September 11 attacks.
To understand which ideals the Trump-Vought-Russia administration upholds, you need to look at the decision’s subtexts.
Why is Trump attacking schools and colleges? It’s to impoverish the likeliest pools of people who will oppose his policies. And of course to increase the ranks of the uneducated, who will be more easily foxed.
Why the hullabaloo over immigrants, who contribute billions of dollars in taxes and trillions of dollars to the national economy, and who do the menial work the magas want nothing to do with? Draconian and cruel measures to expel immigrants, our new object of hatred, become a ready pretext for building a national security apparatus of computer databases and enforced by masked thugs masquerading as police.
Why is Trump shipping immigrants to countries like South Sudan, a place they’ve never been and an act certainly in contravention of the Eighth Amendment, which proscribes cruel and unusual punishment, which such deportations surely are? It’s to flaunt his flouting of the law and through this to instill fear.
Magas: These decisions will come to haunt you, indirectly and directly, as our society implodes. You need education, you need personal freedom, you need to live without fear. For whom does the bell toll? Sooner than you think, it shall toll for thee.
William Weinstein
New Paltz
Impact beyond its walls
The article with the heading, “Cultures in Conflict,” in the July 2, 2025, Hudson Valley One cites a new history of the Woodstock Reformed Church. I am a member of this church and the principal author of the new history. I would like to offer two corrections and a clarification to statements made in the HV1 article:
1. Rev. Clinton Clough was our pastor in 1912-13, but the quotes attributed to him in the article were in fact written by Clinton’s son, F. Gardner Clough, who was not a clergyman but a newspaperman. (See page 59 in the book.)
2. The article indicates that Rev. Cari Pattison “served in Woodstock for a decade and was the local church’s first female pastor from 2020 to this year.” Rev. Pattison served faithfully from 2020 to 2025, but she was not our first female pastor. Rev. Kathleen Edwards-Chase was our pastor from 1998 to 2006, and in the reflections she wrote for our history she makes clear the pride she feels as the first woman to be hired as pastor of the Woodstock Reformed Church. (See pages 145-147.)
3. Finally, the article assigns to Rev. Pattison alone an “unvarnished view” in quotations regarding the diminished influence churches like ours have on today’s culture, when the words were originally spoken by her Woodstock predecessor, Rev. Joshua Bode, in a sermon at Kingston’s Old Dutch Church in 2019. Rev. Pattison later referred to those thoughts in her sermon of Oct. 24, 2021, and credited them to Josh Bode. (See page 149.)
While the article could not be expected to summarize the contents of the book, I do regret that there is no reference to Rev. Pattison’s introduction, with its celebration of the church today, alive and vibrant with a congregation marked by a diversity of backgrounds and talents, including more than a few artists, striving to have some positive impact beyond its walls.
Wm. B. Rhoads
New Paltz
Get up, stand up, show up!
As the days before The Fourth of July slowly went by, there was a frenzy in our nation’s capital to pass Trump’s and Project 2025’s huge spending and tax-cut bill. As that week progressed, I found myself (surely like tens and tens of millions of Americans) feeling defeated and saddened, and — well, blue.
Well, if you feel that way, do you know what you have got to do? I say, do you know what you have got to do? I mean, do you know what you have got to do?
Do as Bob Marley sang fifty years ago, “Get up, Stand up, Stand up for your rights!”
The president signed the bill on July 4. On July 5th about 50 demonstrators lawfully lined Main Street of New Paltz for an hour with messages and signs for car occupants to see and read. You know what? There were a ton of people in their cars cheering and honking and smiling because those demonstrators showed up. The demonstrators showed up to express their displeasure with the current authoritarian direction in Washington, and they showed up to effect change, maybe just a little.
The fact is, if you do nothing, if you “just move on” without confronting your sadness, if you just stay seated and don’t get up and do something about the insanity coming out of Washington, you’re going to feel worse, and the country and you are going to be worse off in your weeks, months, and years ahead — because you didn’t join the millions of Americans who are peacefully and lawfully demonstrating against the deconstruction of our democracy.
If you don’t like what is going on, get up, stand up, show up! You’ll be glad you did.
Steve Bangert
Clintondale
Seeking Woodstock ’94 photo
I’m looking for a specific photo taken at Woodstock ’94 in Saugerties. It features me, my then-boyfriend (now husband) and our close friends in the foreground of a sea of concertgoers.
The image was last seen between fall ’94 and spring ’95, displayed at Rasher’s Café in Woodstock, alongside other framed photos from the festival available for purchase.
Over the years, I’ve spoken about this photograph many times, and its significance has only grown. If you know anything about the photographer, please contact me: sswinton@tquala.com.
Susan Swinton
Averill Park
Incredibly broad standards
On Wednesday, June 18, the Town of Saugerties held a public hearing, the first of two (the second will be on Wednesday, July 16) regarding a major rezoning of the 840-acre Winston Farm property into a Planned Development District.
The planned Development PDD concept is being sold to the public as being a more protective and respectful way to develop the property (supposedly more respectful of natural features, inclusion of certain aesthetic building standards, etc.) than what might occur under the current zoning.
However, as it turns out, this appears to be far from the case. While a PDD is meant generally to be tied to a Master Development Plan that lays out the details of a specific proposal — the only way a community can meaningfully assess the impact of what’s on the table — in this case the sponsors have asked the town to pass the zoning change without one.
The result is a laundry list of land uses, objectives, guidelines and thresholds that if taken as the new regulations allow for far more potential destructiveness and intensive development to the site than even the regular zoning.
The stated “purpose,” which is one standard by which the planning board will have to judge any proposed project, advocates for development “that positions the district as an economic center … with regional appeal”. Among permitted uses are amphitheaters, manufacturing, laboratories, conference centers, hospitals — and the list goes on. There is little to limit the number of buildings, amount of impervious surfaces, etc..
Truthfully, I’m barely touching on the smorgasbord of uses, but suffice to say, with language such as “multi-modal transportation” and “vibrant urban center,” the image is of significant development, quite in contrast to what many people might have imagined the mediating and balancing goal of a PDD to be.
The dilemma here is that in the absence of a Master Development Plan any pre-approved goals, land uses, etc., become the regulations that the planning board is obligated to judge a particular project on. The public will have little input on any specific project that is proposed, when it matters most, because the planning board will have to give it a pass if it adheres to these incredibly broad standards.
For those who believe there should be some development but are also genuinely concerned about inappropriate development, a PDD that really addresses the actual felt impacts and issues – i.e. the potential doubling of population, loss of natural habitat, open space, real consistency with aesthetic/historic character of a site and area, noise, climate, etc. — could be a preferred approach.
Unfortunately, the broad language required to provide flexibility that might be desired in specific cases is way too permissive here to fulfill any protective function. Quite the opposite. It has the potential to lead to exactly the kind of development that people are most concerned about.
The solution to this problem is pretty simple: Tell the town board not to approve a PDD in the absence of a Master Development Plan that shows us all what is actually intended for the site.
There is another public hearing on July 16, and written comments are being accepted now until, I believe, the 28th of July.
Michelle Aizenstat
Saugerties
Attacking Nagel
Nagel’s latest anti-Semitic diatribe was so apparent in his “starving the children” letter to the editor. Nagel has an obsession with Jews as well as with Zionists (who are mostly Jewish). This is again revealed in his fantasy paragraph where he states that our government sits around and spouts Israeli talking points while collecting their hundreds of thousands in bribes from Zionist billionaires.
My fantasy is thinking that if he had been present at the October 7, 2023 massacre at the Nova Music Festival he would support Israel’s aim of the war in Gaza, to wit to degrade Hamas.
Get a life, Nagel (and maybe see a psychiatrist).
Susan Puretz
Saugerties
Where the linear feet will go
The state’s contract was recently awarded and the anticipated schedule for the work in New Paltz will begin May 2026. In addition to sidewalks, the project includes 21 ADA-compliant ramps at ten intersections.
The 4389 linear feet (LF) project includes areas on N. Chestnut, S. Chestnut, S. Manheim and Main. It will augment the new 5808 LF DuBois bike/ped path and Prospect Street’s new 912 LF sidewalk. Additionally, we anticipate completing our 1,350 LF sidewalk project in 2025, which includes Prospect St, Church St. and Huguenot St. (470 LF of bluestone south of the monument past the burial ground east side).
Adults are encouraged to pursue at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week. Walking briskly for 30 minutes a day, five days a week, can meet this recommendation.
Mayor Tim Rogers
Village of New Paltz
Good trouble lives on!
On July 17, 2025, the fifth anniversary of representative John Lewis’s passing, we honor and celebrate his call to get in “good trouble.” We commit ourselves to justice, equality, love and community!
Ubuntu is a philosophy that teaches us to lean on each other, to lift each other, and to work together for what’s right! At the Center for Creative Education (CCE), we hold to the spirit of Ubuntu: “I am because we are!”. This is the truth that heroes Nelson Mandela and archbishop Desmond Tutu carried forward, through the darkest days of apartheid in South Africa. Fannie Lou Hamer once said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free!”
The CCE and Indivisible Ulster are co-sponsors of a July 17 nonviolent action. Indivisible Ulster is a pro-democracy grassroots movement that organizes locally to lessen the harm caused by anti-democratic attacks on the U.S. Constitution and our civil and human rights. We embrace progressive economic and social justice values of inclusion, respect, and fairness in all our actions.
For us, it is about people! Let’s show up for each other, speak up for justice, and keep the Good Trouble alive!
Join us on Thursday, July 17, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 10 Cedar Street, Kingston (near CCE) for great performers, speakers, food and new friends.
Drew Andrews
Center for Creative Education
Barbara Hill
Indivisible Ulster NY 18 &19
Examine the master plan
I am a Saugerties resident who is concerned about the proposed development at Winston Farm, and I attended the town board meeting on June 18 that was held to allow public comment on the recent new DGEIS, or Environmental Impact Statement.
Some proponents of development comment on those of us who question development as if we are outside the public and uncaring about residents who have spent their lives in Saugerties and wish to stay. Let me assure you that we are as much a part of the public as any other citizens here. Some of us are longstanding residents who intend to stay, and most importantly, we care very much about the well-being of everyone who lives here, including those who disagree with us.
For this reason many of us have carefully examined the new DGEIS, a document that is, as stated, narrower in scope with its purpose of rezoning. It requests a Planned Development District status with 50 percent open space and no Master Development Plan, opening the door for lifting protections over much more of the environmentally sensitive areas of Winston Farm.
While 50 percent might sound like a generous amount of open space, the percentage should be 73 percent open and contiguous space. Crucially, it is the number stated in the Winston Farm High Technology Feasibility Study and Master Plan from 10/30/2009. Further, the new DGEIS does not specify what “open space” means, and its vague and contradictory language in many areas was rightfully questioned by opponents.
I heartily encourage the entire public, including my friends and neighbors who support development, to please review it carefully.
Joanne Pagano Weber
Saugerties
Interior monologue
When I close my eyes, my TV becomes a radio.
Sparrow
Phoenicia
More housing options
The Town of New Paltz is actively working on our codes to increase housing options. We have already updated our previous accessory apartment code to become Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU). We are now looking into further ADU incentives as proposed by our local and county Housing Smart task force. And we are actively working on code to require a fixed per cent of any new residential projects be affordable.
I am now proposing that we look hard at our residential zoning that allows one primary single-family residence per lot. We currently have overlay options for multi-family units (RV), classic apartment buildings, and planned development units (PUD), mixed-use residential/commercial.
I propose that we create additional options for housing in the town – duplex and townhouse quadplex units. I also propose that we consider creating a new transitional zone for housing to bridge the abrupt change from the highly compacted density of the village to the minimum half-acre parcels in the town. This transitional zone would primarily focus on the corridors where town properties abut village boundaries.
At this moment, these are my visions. There will need to be much thoughtful assessment of the myriad details involved and much public input sought. I ask you to stay tuned and stay involved.
Amanda Gotto
Supervisor
Town of New Paltz
We’re in deep trouble
“The times they are a changing,” and not for the better. There is a political reason some of the severe changes in Medicaid are delayed in this ugly bill until after the midterm elections! The reaction of many MAGAs, especially down South and out West, will be through the roof when they realize the serious changes in Snap and Medicaid eligibility.
The rudderless Dems’ mantra of “tax breaks for the billionaires” was easily countered by the MAGA, partially true, “tax breaks for all” mantra.
How disappointing are our representatives from both sides. Many Republicans know in their heart this bill was not beautiful but detrimental to their constituency, but they bowed in political fear, without an ethical or moral concern! Our Democrats could have blasted the media with a proposal of permanent tax relief only for those under 100K instead of the boring, if true, non-stop blather about billionaires benefiting the most.
We are in trouble!
Ron Stonitsch
New Paltz
True Owners are happy
The True Owners of Yankeetown Pond wish to extend a heartfelt thank-you to the people who supported us by not voting for Erin Moran for town supervisor in the Woodstock Democratic primary. We look forward to a civil, transparent and ethical government that represents the entire Woodstock community.
Sandra Harris
(on behalf of the True Owners of Yankeetown Pond)
Woodstock
More good trouble
On Thursday, July 17, community members in Woodstock will join Americans at hundreds of events nationwide to honor the legacy of congressman John Lewis and fight back against the growing attacks on our civil and human rights. The local action on Woodstock Reformed Church’s village green is part of Good Trouble Lives On, a nationwide day of peaceful, nonviolent action rooted in the legacy of the civil-rights movement and inspired by John Lewis’ call to make “good trouble, necessary trouble.” Participants will gather at 8:30 p.m. for a candlelight vigil on the green to demand an end to the authoritarian attacks on our freedom to vote, protest, and organize — and to stand united against efforts to criminalize our communities, roll back our rights, and slash vital public programs.
Third Act Creatives invite press to attend, capture, and uplift the voices of those taking peaceful action in defense of democracy. Third Act Creatives invited faith leaders Rev. Matt Wright and Rabbi Karen Levine to share their thoughts and prayers during the vigil. Gilles Malkine, Barbara Pickhardt and Ars Choralis members will provide music. There will be a pre-event of postcarding, or writing to our legislators at 7:30 at The Mothership, 6 Richard Quinn Dr., Woodstock.
Laurie Felber
Woodstock
Warped logic
The anti-Semitic rantings of Fred Nagel have revealed his true stripes. He has found something he likes about the Nazis. He claims the Nazis had the virtue of feeling shame, a virtue the Jews are unable to express. He says this wonderful Nazi virtue led them to secretly bury millions because they knew right from wrong.
Of course if that were true we would never have known that they murdered six million Jews. In his warped logic he thinks he has shown that the Jews are worse than Nazis.
He goes on to repeat the age-old slander of money-bag Jews bribing governments to do their bidding. He can no longer hide his being against the Israeli government or being an anti-Zionist. His tiresome obsession is nothing more than plain old anti-Semitism.
What a tedious bore.
Francis McDonald
Saugerties
Join the family! 
