With one week to go until the primary vote, candidates for the Democratic nomination for Saugerties town justice are accusing one another of claiming endorsements that weren’t granted.
Saugerties volunteer activist Stan O’Dell is challenging two-term incumbent town justice Claudia Andreassen for the Democratic line in the June 23 primary.
Letters went out last week to New Paltz residents who have defaulted to receiving 100% of their electricity from renewable sources generated in New York. In it, recipients were provided information on tapping into community solar, another state energy initiative through which people without panels on their homes can buy electricity from a local solar farm and get a 10% discount off the price per kilowatt hour.
John Oleske no longer chairs the New Paltz village planning board, although he remains a member of that body. He laid out his reasons for stepping down over the course of an hour-long board meeting.
According to newly anointed New Paltz Police chief Rob Lucchesi, the department is seeing a decrease in DUIs and calls and arrests that might typically occur due to alcohol-related activity in and around the bar scene, which has been shut down since mid-March. On the flip side, the police have been seeing a noticeable increase in petty larceny in supermarkets and grocery stores, as well as car break-ins and person-to-person thefts, but a decrease in residential robberies.
The New Paltz town zoning board (ZBA) has scheduled a June 10 public hearing regarding a use variance for a proposed cellular tower at 60 Jansen Road. The applicant is Homeland Towers, LLC, along with Verizon Wireless. According to the paperwork available online, the relief requested is to site a tower outside the town’s existing wireless overlay district, which is largely along Route 299.
A long-established family business in Gardiner, Kimlin Energy Services, has run afoul of town officials by forging ahead with site expansions and improvements before obtaining permits to do so.
Woodstock officials are considering closing town-owned swimming holes amid concerns over the spread of Covid 19 as temperatures rise and out-of-towners seek an escape. “Do we want to have those open?” councilman Reggie Earls asked of the popular swimming holes Big Deep and Little Deep. “We will have a lot of people. It’s natural to want to get out of there [the city] and come up here. I think it’s going to be hard to have them safely open.”
Woodstock town coffers and employees will benefit from a state and federal program to provide unemployment assistance to municipal workers with reduced work hours due to Covid 19. Through a new program administered by the state Department of Labor, affected employees will receive regular pay for hours worked, about half their pay from unemployment benefits for hours not worked, plus $600 in weekly federal unemployment payments.
Several elected and other municipal officials in New Paltz discussed and took questions about transitioning from pandemic shutdown to whatever the new normal turns out to be via YouTube last Friday. While the multi-county region has hit five of seven metrics for beginning the four-phase reopening sequence laid out by the governor, the data points for hospitalizations and deaths have not decreased enough to begin that process.