Earlier this year Grace Schmidt, reclusive cat-woman of Spencer Road in Glenford, died after a long illness. A call came in from Lasher Funeral Home here in Woodstock to local attorney Jim Myers, who’d represented Grace pro bono for 30 years, requesting that he retrieve her ashes. Upon his doing so, Lasher’s director Ken Peterson was uncharacteristically flustered. “You’ll never guess what else I found — Clarence’s ashes! They’ve been here...32 years! You might as well take them, too...” In ...
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Next month, Mayor James Sottile will submit his proposed 2011 city budget. But members of the Common Council, which must sign off on a final spending plan, are already anticipating having to make wrenching decisions to stave off a major tax hike in an era of escalating costs and declining revenue. “I have nothing left to cut,” said Sottile. “Pension costs are going up, salaries are going up, medical costs are going up and we don’t have the resources.” That bleak assessment is based on a num...
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In the years since the Garlic Festival took off and John Hall moved across the Hudson River, the biggest thing to hit sleepy Saugerties has without doubt been the relocation from the Ellenville area of Horseshows-in-the-Sun, the equestrian phenomenon known more familiarly as HITS. This summer’s HITS season is ending with a bang: The largest equestrian show-jumping event in the history of the US, the Pfizer Grand Prix Horse Show, will be taking place at 1:30 p.m. this Sunday, September 12 at t...
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For now, fifth-graders in New Paltz will go without a DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program. School officials said last week that while they’re looking for a new anti-substance abuse program, they’ll rely on state standards for anti-drug curriculum. “We are no longer doing the DARE program,” Superintendent Maria Rice explained. “We’ll be writing our own curriculum … it won’t be taught the way it was before.” Rice said that until a new official program could be found, the schools ...
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A quality education and affordable property taxes: is there any way to have both? That, in a nutshell, was the question posed by assemblyman Pete Lopez, who has spent the past month holding meetings throughout his district in an effort to learn what reform measures have the broadest support. Some of the more mainstream ideas include reducing the number of school districts through consolidation to save administrative costs and shifting the burden of school funding away from property tax and to...
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