Finding Ulysses

Call them the dueling dollars.

Those of you who have been into the NAPA auto parts store will recall the fake money that is displayed there, with anti-Clinton messages on them. As I remember it, there’s one fake bill for Hillary Clinton and one fake bill for Bill.

Well, now there is a fake money counter attack coming from a certain segment of the anti-Bush crowd. One Deception Fraudulent Event Notes, designed to look like dollar bills but with the numbers 9-11 in the corners, are supposed to be from the Uninformed State of Denial. This currency is now being handed out in Trumansburg. I was handed a bill from a guy passing on the sidewalk while I was mowing my lawn over the weekend.

There’s an impeachment component to these bills, with a red “Impeach the Terrorists” scrawled near Bush’s scowling face. That’s what leads the notes into an area where I choose not to follow. There are links printed all over the fake money, leading to September 11, 2001 conspiracy web sites. The explanation page for one of these sites reads, “For those visitors new to this subject, 9/11 skeptics are citizens who do not believe the official “caught-by-surprise,” “intelligence failure” or “incompetence” explanations for the tragic events of September 11, 2001″.

You know, there just may be some secret plot within the American government that planned and created the September 11, 2001 attacks, but I haven’t seen any evidence of such a thing. On such matters, I go along with Carl Sagan, who wrote that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”.

I’m anti-Bush, but I don’t believe that Bush was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For those of you who are given these anti-Bush 9-11 conspiracy theory dollars, please keep in mind that most people who don’t like George W. Bush are more like me than like the producers of these “Deception Dollars”. There is enough real crime and abuse going on in the Bush White House. We don’t need outlandish conspiracy theories to make up new reasons to oppose Bush.

It’s not just the Free Press any more. Here at Finding Ulysses, I’ve done my little bit to assist in the sharing of ideas around the Village of Trumansburg and the Town of Ulysses. Sometimes, people have welcomed the information here, many times they haven’t, but I look upon both as a confirmation that I’m on the right track.

The good news is that we’re not alone. For those of us in Trumansburg, there’s now the Trumansburg News. They’ve got a lot of information that you just won’t find in the Trumansburg Free Press - especially information about what’s going on at the High School.

The editor over there is Ed Sutherland, and he describes the mission of the Trumansburg News site as follows:

“We’re professional journalists with over 20 years of experience bringing local and international news to readers both offline and on. As Trumansburg residents, we want to give back to the community.

Current news sources don’t cut it and we have created Trumansburg News as the alternative. We cannot substitute press releases for reporting and we cannot settle for remote control journalism. Trumansburg News provides the context needed to understand the importance of issues while also asking the not so obvious questions.”

There’s no need to worry about an overcrowding of information about Trumansburg online. The addition of Trumansburg News is all for the better. Having multiple ways for people to get information and communicate about what’s going on in our community benefits us all.

Dave Vieser, who works for WHCU, the local radio station that runs right wing talk show personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, left a message on Finding Ulysses over the weekend, talking about Water District 5 and the way that the recent meeting was managed by Supervisor Doug Austic.

One comment made by Mr. Vieser was particularly thought-provoking. He wrote: “One thing I can assure you–more people will be living in the Town of Ulysses in 2036, and there will be a lot more commercial development in the town. That is reality, this area’s population is only growing, and Ulysses will not be left out of that expansion.”

Mr. Vieser is quite right to connect the proposal to develop Water District 5 with development. As Town Board member Roxanne Marino pointed out at last week’s meeting, studies have shown that development follows quite predictably after water district creation of the sort being proposed for much of Ulysses. To deny that there are some people who are looking forward eagerly to making money from this development is like entering a room in which a dead elephant is rotting and pretending that it just isn’t there.

What strikes me about Vieser’s comment on development is that he characterizes Ulysses as a helpless victim of inevitable development. He writes as if we, the people who live in Ulysses, will have no say in whether our town is filled up with new housing developments and businesses, transformed into a new, generic, congested, sprawl-filled mess like our neighbor across the lake, Lansing.

Is this true? Should we residents of Ulysses really expect to have no say in the future character of our own community? Should we just lie back and take it, and think of the Rongo?

Ram’s horns.

Fish bones

The fiery heart of a celeriac

Nature’s punks in black and white

Gimme Coffee

Kim Schrag

Unbound Art.

Stiff-arm. There’s no other, more pleasant, conciliatory phrase I can think of to describe what happened at the town-wide meeting about the current proposal to create a new water district here in Ulysses. The people of the Village of Trumansburg were stiff-armed by Doug Austic.

Before the meeting began, people were asked to fill out cards if they wanted to ask questions or to make comments. Then, at the beginning of the meeting, Mr. Austic announced that people who lived in the proposed Water District 5 would be given the chance to speak before any Ulysses residents who live outside of the water district could speak.

A few people from within the proposed water district who had filled out cards spoke, but then, Mr. Austic opened up the floor to more people from within the proposed water district, even if they had not filled out cards requesting to speak or ask questions. In the meantime, Ulysses residents from outside the proposed water district were made to wait, even if they had filled out cards requesting to speak beforehand.

Mr. Austic searched the audience over and over again for prospective Water District 5 residents to speak. After a while, it began to seem that he was practically begging for more people from that part of Ulysses to run out the clock, and they obliged.

So it was that Doug Austic allowed the residents of the proposed Water District to filibuster the meeting until almost 9:30 - two and half hours after the scheduled start of the meeting. By that time, two-thirds of the audience had left.

The instant that it was finally time for people outside of the proposed Water District 5 to speak, a groaning complaint came from Mr. Austic: “Do we really want to keep going?” Mr. Austic proposed that the meeting end right then and there, before Ulysses residents from outside the proposed water district had a chance to speak and ask questions about how the project would impact them.

It seemed that Mr. Austic did not want to hear from the rest of Ulysses. Nonetheless, shouts from the audience indicated that people wanted the chance to be heard at the public forum, and finally, Mr. Austic relented. Many people expressed the unfairness of the way that the forum was set up to exclude voices from Trumansburg and the rest of Ulysses outside of the proposed water district.

Mr. Austic responded that the people who would be paying for the infrastructure of the proposed new water district should be the ones to speak. At that point, a resident angrily reminded Mr. Austic that Trumansburg residents in fact will be paying for the infrastructure of the proposed water district, and that Trumansburg residents have already paid for present infrastructure outside of village limits that would make water district 5 possible.

That resident was right. Mr. Austic has designed the proposal for water district 5 in such a way that citizens of Trumansburg will be paying a significantly higher rate for their water so that residents of the new water district will be able to qualify for a special deal that will make the whole project financially attractive. In effect, residents of Trumansburg will be paying a huge amount of money year in and year out to pay for the development-enabling water infrastructure that Mr. Austic wants to thread through the countryside.

As Trumansburg Village Trustee John Hrubos pointed out, residents of the proposed water district will only make payments for the infrastructure for 30 years, and then their financial burden will be done with. Trumansburg residents, on the other hand, will be paying higher water bills forever, if Mr. Austic’s proposal is approved.

For Mr. Austic to expect Trumansburg residents to make such a large sacrifice, but then try to stop them from commenting on the project that creates the sacrifice, is not just bad government. It’s bad politics.

Last night, Doug Austic made a very unfavorable impression with many Trumansburg residents last night, and his antics were the talk of the village today.

I hope that, when the time comes for Mr. Austic to run for re-election, Trumansburg Democrats remember how they were stiff-armed by Doug Austic last night, and how their concerns were shoved off into the corner. This is not a Supervisor who merits the endorsement of both the Democratic and Republican parties. His ability to run for office unopposed has created an attitude of untouchability that we cannot afford in a small community like ours.

It is time for Ulysses Democrats to begin looking for someone else to endorse for Supervisor in the next election.

Post script: (Doug Austic’s defenders have said to me in the past that I just don’t know about everything that Mr. Austic has done for the town of Ulysses in the past. That’s true. But what I saw Doug Austic do to the town of Ulysses last night was enough for me to see quite clearly Ulysses needs a different kind of leadership.)

On Friday, June 10, the Trumansburg Board of Trustees sent out a letter to village residents. The trustees paid for the expense of printing and mailing the letter out of their own private funds.

In this letter, the Trumansburg Village Trustees expressed their opposition to the current proposal for a new water district in the town of Ulysses. The letter is printed below.

Thanks to you, trustees, for sending this letter out on this very important issue. It’s about time that reason cut through the hype that the proponents of the water district plan have worked so hard to create.

———————————–

To Village Residents and Water Users:

Mary Bouchard, David Filiberto, Rose Hilbert, John Hrubos and John Levine

No, this will not be one of those blog entries in which a person extols the plucky virtues of container gardening. The plants-in-pots collection next to the terrace outside my front door is almost completely an impromptu affair.

Every day that I plan to dig up the turf and lay down new soil, mulch and lime for an planned herb garden, it is dark and wet and dripping. Handling wet soil causes compaction, but I think that I if I could find a dry day off from work, I would gladly find a way to work extra organic material into the soil to work against problem. I have a feeling that it will be a long time before I find a truly dry day, and by then it may be boiling hot, which is not friendly for transplantation either.

As it is, the idea remains theoretical. The creeks are surging with vigorous depth, though Trumansburg Creek is not yet quite to the astonishing roar of last week.

The idea of an herb garden was spurred by the news last week of a 50% off perennial sale at a nursery where the primary operator just gave birth to twins and won’t be able to complete the season. Ordinarily, I would wait until fall to buy perennials. There are deep discounts at that time, as nobody is thinking about gardening, which is a shame, because it’s the best time to garden, with the challenging heat of summer behind, and the slow, preserving cold soon to come.

I’m not complaining about the rain, really. In a way, it feels comforting. I would rather have this amount of rain than what we had last summer, baked dry hot ground with grass so dead it crinkled underfoot. It’s wonderful growing weather. It’s just not the best weather for planting.

The positive side of these conditions are, of course, that any plant in a pot will do just fine, though it may become a bit root bound. The coolness of temperature and near constant moisture will keep the herbs safe for another day… perhaps in autumn.

Well who knew?

A few weeks ago, I wrote a short article about the mythical village of Trucktown as advertised on a billboard here in the town of Ulysses, New York. There is no such thing as Trucktown, of course, but that didn’t stop the owner of the car dealership in the unincorporated area on route 96 just south of Trumansburg where developers are hoping to create a suburban strip-mall economic zone where sprawl flows like water from declaring that Trucktown exists.

Well, yesterday I, along with every other resident of Ulysses, got a little packet of information about the plans for a new sprawl-enabling water district. Trucktown wasn’t on the map, but it turns out that another settlement is: The hamlet of Halseyville.

Take a look around now, and you don’t really see any hamlet where Halseyville is supposed to be. Sure, there’s the Halsey House, and a few other buildings, but if that makes the area a hamlet, then Cayuga Street is a highway.

It takes more than a name on a map and a few people living within walking distance to make a community. As radical changes to the nature of Ulysses and Trumansburg are being proposed by our Town Board, that’s something we residents would do well to keep in mind.

Losers in the new water district plan being promoted by Supervisor Doug Austic and Town Board Member Rod Ferrentino:

- People living in the Village of Trumansburg. If you live in Trumansburg, you can expect your water bill to increase by between 50 and 100 percent if the new water district plan is approved. That’s right - Trumansburg residents will be paying for this new water district, and paying big.
- People who don’t want Ulysses to look like the Triphammer Mall in Lansing. If you’re worried about uncontrolled sprawl, you ought to be worried about the new water district. It just so happens fo run right along that stretch of Route 96 south of Trumansburg developers have been looking at to place fast food malls and big box stores. So far, the Village has been able to thwart much of this sprawl by denying the developers extension of Village water services. Now, there will be no such restraint, and the Ulysses Town Board has not proved to be a reliable bulwark against sprawl. Is it a coincidence that the same people who have been making pro-sprawl arguments for the last few years are now fervently promoting the new water district?
- People living in the new water district who don’t want to pay for municipal water. Tough chips for them. They bought their homes knowing they had well water, and were fine with that. Now, they’re having a town board that wants to force them to pay for municipal water, whether they want it or not.
- Fiscal conservatives. Any way that you slice it, spending 5 million dollars on a project to benefit a few businesses and a few landowners in Ulysses is a big deal. There are some indications that companies bidding on the project are low-balling their estimates for what the project will cost, so it’s quite conceivable that the original 5 million dollars could rapidly grow to a much bigger number.

Winners in the new water district plan being promoted by Supervisor Doug Austic and Town Board Member Rod Ferrentino:

- Land owners in the new water district. These land owners include Doug Austic himself. There will be big bucks for a few people who can sell their land at new, higher prices to developers that want to fill up Ulysses with gas stations, corrugated metal chain stores, and fast food drive throughs.
- The Golf Club and the ShurSave. They may have the option of getting cheaper water from the new water district instead of Trumansburg water. While Trumansburg residents will be paying more for water, the Golf Club and ShurSave might end up paying less.
- 200 or so residents in the town who will get municipal water. Some of them want it. Some of them don’t. All of them knew what their water was like when they bought their homes. Now, they’re getting water improvements that are being subsidized by residents of the Village of Trumansburg. Their property values will rise as a result, and they’ll be able to make a bundle if they want to sell.