Ulster County is now signed on to a state law that allows it to levy a 2 percent tax on certain property sales to preserve aspects of community character. We’re talking about real money. One possible local use is to help protect open space.
Maybe badly buffeted Norwegian Air will experience a resurgence. Maybe it’ll thrive again. Maybe it’ll survive only in another form under another ownership. Maybe it’ll go bankrupt.
America has always been a society of joiners, and it was in that spirit that Ulster County executive Pat Ryan last Friday signed resolutions at the historic Volunteer Fireman’s Hall on Fair Street in Kingston to authorize up to $6.2 million in bonding for construction of a public safety training center on Ulster Landing Park in the Town of Ulster.
Two Kingston projects years in the making marked significant milestones this week, taking important steps toward their larger ambitions. In doing so, they provided clues about the new directions toward which the Ulster County economy is evolving. They are harbingers of change.
Ryan brings a different style to the county executive’s office and an excellent grasp of the local economy. This should be interesting.
The Empire Center plays a significant watchdog role bringing transparency to government. It combs through public information and makes it available to the public. Its information-gathering and analysis perform a vital role. Somebody has to do it.
Life after IBM.
Driving around Newburgh last August, New York Magazine writer Simone Kitchens got the sense that some kind of change was going on. Many newcomers, “drawn to the incredibly affordable, stately housing stock and growing creative communities,” were moving in, she said. Might Newburgh have the potential to become the next Hudson, “the onetime working-class town where antique lamps now go for $7000?”
State Sen. Jen Metzger has put forward a bill known as the Freedom From Fossil Fuels Act that would end the development of new fossil-fuel infrastructure in New York state and set a course for New York to shift to a clean energy economy. Nily Rozic is the Assembly co-sponsor.
A zest for blending wild nature’s unruliness with mankind’s desire for domestication is hardly a new experience for the Hudson Valley.
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