According to the results of the survey devised by the Shandaken Short-Term Rental Committee, respondents are, as expected, divided on whether and how to regulate STRs in the town. At the committee’s June 10 meeting, town supervisor Rob Stanley said he will not be a member of the new committee that will be formed to draft regulations now that the survey has been completed.
In the communication between pharmacies and insurance companies, Pharmacy Benefits Managers, such as Caremark, OptumRx, and Express Scripts, are intended to help handle transactions, navigating through the tangle of insurance plans, regulations, and prescription options. But the Pharmacists’ Society of the State of New York says the system is being abused for the profit of Pharmacy Benefits Managers and the downfall of independent community pharmacies.
“I haven’t experienced freedom in so long, my biggest fear is to have that taken away,” said Woodstocker Ryland Koller, who has been partially released from prison after doing eight years for robbing a heroin dealer in 2011. “I wake up in a cold sweat, thinking some technicality will come up, and I’ll have to go back in. Sleep has been elusive.”
Owners of Shandaken businesses and short-term rentals (STRs) confronted town supervisor Rob Stanley at the June 3 town board meeting, objecting to the lack of an STR representative on the committee that has been considering regulations for such properties and alleging inadequate publicity for the survey designed to solicit opinions on the topic from town residents.
“We get flowers delivered. Why not a cake?” mused Rigdzin Drolma, the proprietor of Me3 Bakery, an online business providing gourmet, elaborately decorated cakes to Woodstock and the surrounding region.
In the hamlet of Big Indian in Shandaken, the former Rudrananda ashram, a gathering place for idealistic young hippies in the late 1960s, has been coming back to life as a spiritual center since half the property was donated to the Bodhivastu Foundation for Enlightened Activity in 2014.
The new clinic in Phoenicia currently has only one doctor, neurologist Paul Mullin of Medical Associates of the Hudson Valley (MAHV), but the practice is looking to take on additional practitioners in family medicine, internal medicine, and mental health. Mullin, whose office opened on May 20 at 9 Ava Maria Drive, as part of the Kingston-based group, is already booked with patients, virtually back-to-back, for two weeks.
The Weir, to be presented by Performing Arts of Woodstock (PAW) from May 30 through June 23 at Woodstock’s Mescal Hornbeck Community Center, takes its title from the word for a small dam constructed to divert the flow of water, symbolizing what happens in the play. Written by Conor McPherson and directed by Warren Kelder, the drama is set in a rural pub in Ireland in the 1990s.
Moses was clearly a Civil War veteran, but where did he live, where was he buried, and how did his headstone end up in the wrong place? Keepers of local history collaborated to ferret out bits of his story, including a connection to the displacement of Olive graves before the creation of the Ashokan Reservoir.
On the chalkboard at the door of Esopus Creel, the new fly fishing store at the Phoenicia Plaza on Route 28, the list of promising flies to fish today includes beadhead prince, blue-winged olive, and flashback pheasant tail. Even “creel,” the word for a wicker basket used to carry fish, has an elegant ring to it.
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