Finding Ulysses

Mary Ellen Salmon sent me a note this morning on behalf of the Trumansburg Chamber of Commerce, asking me to relay the following message:

The Trumansburg Chamber of Commerce is seeking photographs of the following subjects, for inclusion in a brochure:

- Grassroots photos
- Inside of Taughannock Farms or another dining experience (interior shot)
- Library with kids walking in or attending event
- Kids playing on the school playground or the community built village down town by the creek
- Farmer’s market w/ people with partial view of the sign
- Kids getting on the school bus
- 4H—or horses—local farms
- Concert at Taughannock incorporating the people and the lake
- Fireworks
- Parade
- Main Street shot (without cars)
- Sheldrake w/ catered event (could include lake and/or grapevines too)
- Historical society

If you want to contribute a photograph, it needs to be emailed to emailed to nicole@nicolesellsithaca.com by January 20, 2008.

There’s a new political web site up for people interested in politics here in the Town of Ulysses: Ulysses Progressives, over on Google’s Blogspot network. The two articles present on the site at the moment both discuss a serious problem in the community: The lack of political neutrality in Trumansburg’s newspaper of record, the Trumansburg Free Press.

The response of the people behind Ulysses Progressives is the one that makes the most sense. If the local newspaper shows itself to be consistently biased, create your own media. Here’s hoping that the Ulysses Progressives keep it up, and offer a lasting alternative source for community information.

One of the things that I love about living in Trumansburg is the way that I’ll often find my attention pulled back here even as I am looking for information on what seem to be completely unrelated matters. I had that experience yesterday, as I was scanning through information on human evolution and came upon the Becoming Human web site.

Becoming Human provides an online documentary about human evolution by the Institute of Human Origins, run by Donald Johansen, famous for his team’s discovery of the australopithecine fossil commonly known as Lucy. A part of the documentary that focuses on the anatomical structures of human ancestors features John Gurche, talking about the importance of working on fine details of soft-tissue reconstructions based on fossilized structures, in order to allow people who see the reconstructions to gain a holistic sense of the creature being represented.

John Gurche is living in Trumansburg now, working at the Paleontological Research Institution. John has good reason to be proud of his career, and we can be proud to be the sort of community that attracts many people of his caliber.

All that aside, I encourage you, especially if you’ve got kids of a sufficient age, to sit down and take a look at the Becoming Human online documentary. At a time when many fundamentalist religious groups, and even some presidential candidates, are trying to undermine education in the concepts of biological evolution, it’s good to have resources like these to provide a more reasoned cultural counterweight.

It was a weird experience reading the Trumansburg Free Press last week. Our village’s paper of record ran the top headline: Filiberto: Town Must Listen to the Village, with the subheader, “Trustee says that village does not need to coordinate with town on annexation”.

The article was by Stacey Silliman, someone I haven’t seen writing for the Free Press before. Maybe that explains the tremendous discrepancy between the article’s headline and subheader and the article’s content.

Of the thirteen paragraphs in the article, only the third paragraph discussed anything that Village Trustee David Filiberto said during the meeting of the Trumansburg Village Board of Trustees meeting earlier this month. In the other twelve paragraphs, Filiberto’s name was not mentioned even once. Nor were there any quotations in the article from people reacting to anything that David Filiberto said at the meeting, positively or negatively.

The second half of the article wasn’t even about the issue of annexation. It went on, in a disconnected fashion, to describe what people at the meeting had to say about “nonconforming concrete” in the Main Street Project construction. A more accurate headline for the article would have been Board Discusses Annexation and Concrete. I suppose that isn’t sensational enough to sell papers.

The only part of the article that related in any way to the headline and subheader of the article was that single paragraph, which read, “When asked about the need to coordinate annexation decisions with the Town of Ulysses, Trustee David Filiberto stated, ‘The town needs to hear what the the village says, not vice versa. The village is an entity in the town.’”

That’s it. Nowhere in the article was David Filiberto quoted as saying that the Town of Ulysses must listen to the village. Nowhere in the article was David Filiberto quoted as saying that Trumansburg does not need to coordinate with the town of Ulysses on the issue of annexation.

The top headline of the Trumansburg Free Press, and its subheader, were made completely without substantiation. Why did the Trumansburg Free Press choose to do that?

The plain fact is that David Filiberto said nothing like what the headline and subheader accuse him of saying. He never said that the Town of Ulysses has to listen to Trumansburg. He never said that the village of Trumansburg does not have to coordinate with the Town of Ulysses on the issue of annexation.

Even the one paragraph in the article about David Filiberto’s comment didn’t get the facts right. The quotation isn’t accurate, and Filiberto’s comment was absolutely not made “when asked about the need to coordinate annexation decisions with the Town of Ulysses”. The comment was made as part of a long discussion about whether to have a joint meeting with the town or separate but parallel meetings dealing with the issue of annexation. The selection of the quotation and the distortion of its context places Filiberto’s comment in a light that is not at all reflective of what was actually being discussed.

I know, because tonight I listened to an audio recording of that meeting of the Village Board of Trustees. The transcript of the part of the meeting that includes David Filiberto’s alleged snub to the Town of Ulysses is found below.

I wonder, did the reporters and editors at the Trumansburg Free Press bother to make an audio recording of what was said at the meeting, or to listen to the Village’s recording? Did they just work from memory and scribbles in a notebook? I’m no journalist myself, so maybe I’m not qualified to judge, but after reading the article in the Free Press last week and listening to the recording of what actually happened at the meeting, I’ve got a lot of questions about the accuracy of the other things that the Trumansburg Free Press tells us about what’s going on in Trumansburg and the Town of Ulysses.

If the staff at the Trumansburg Free Press has any professional integrity, they’ll examine this mistake and print a front page retraction. We all know what happens with newspaper headlines. People glancing at the Free Press in the grocery store or at the gas station in Jacksonville, and even many who get the paper in the mail, will only have looked at the headline and muttered something like, “Who the hell does that Filiberto guy think he is, saying that Trumansburg doesn’t need the town, and we need to listen to him?”

An appropriate headline for this week’s Trumansburg Free Press would be: We Got It Wrong About Filiberto or Filiberto Didn’t Say What We Said He Said.

Enough of my words. Go ahead and read for yourself what was actually said during that portion of the meeting of the Village Board of Trustees, and judge whether what the Trumansburg Free Press published was fair and accurate. I apologize for the difficulty in attributing statements to particular people other than Filiberto. The quality of the recording wasn’t great, and I wasn’t present at the meeting, so I can’t be certain of who is actually speaking at many points. Anyone who has heard David Filiberto speak, however, knows that he has a very distinctive voice that is unlike the voice of anyone else in Trumansburg’s village government, or anyone else in Trumansburg, for that matter. The statements I attribute to Filiberto are ones I am certain that he made.

Male voice: Okay, the eleventh, July eleventh, Wednesday.

Clerk: That’s two days after a board meeting, does that matter? That’s two meetings together.

Male voice: That’s a light week.

Male voice: That’s the way it goes.

Male voice: This is a public meeting?

Clerk: That’s my next question. Do we advertise it as a public hearing, as a public meeting? Are we still going to try to cooperate with the town to do a joint?

Male voice: All good questions.

Thomas(?): I think we should have a public meeting in the village. I think that the second joint meeting is really unnecessary, unless the public rises up and says this has to be a meeting of the joint boards and I don’t foresee that happening.

Clerk: Um, okay.

Filiberto: I would tend to agree with that.

Thomas(?): We’re making decisions now of[?] edited reports, and they heard the public at the joint meeting and we each are individual boards with their own constitutents at our meetings.

Filiberto: We’re all here in the village.

Thomas(?): That’s correct, and obviously, people from the town could come to our meeting and comment. Nothing prevents them from doing that.

Someone else: Well, we could, but, ha ha.

Filiberto: The main purpose of this meeting was to give the public [inaudible] from the village?

Thomas(?): Well, to give village residents a forum in the village to have [inaudible] should they…

Third Trustee Voice: Yes, to get us a lot of press, and to get, make sure that…

Thomas(?): [inaudible] should be having them as well.

Third Trustee Voice: They don’t have to, but…

Thomas(?): That was their stated intention.

Hart (?): Essentially we’re addressing the criticism that we didn’t give enough notice, even though we complied with the law.

[board members and clerk talking over each other]

Hart (?): And having the extra public meeting, which I think is necessary, absolutely necessary.

Petrovic (?): Is there an interest in having a joint, I mean Chris [Thomas] is suggesting not having a joint meeting with the town at that point. I mean, we could have another meeting at a further time.

Filiberto: I just don’t know what the whole purpose was in [inaudible] in village residents needed more time.

Hrubos (?): Notification was the big deal, which is why I don’t think that presence in front of the joint board was any more relevant than in front of the individual boards.

Petrovic (?): Okay, I’m going to take a public comment on this.

Other voice: You got ninety days, right?

Correct.

Other voice: [inaudible] and we’re kind of limited right now, summer [supper?] time. A lot of people are [inaudible].

Correct.

Other voice: The first meeting was a public meeting or a public hearing?

Clerk: Hearing.

Others: Hearing.

Other voice: But each one of the boards separately have to make a decision.

Others: Correct.

Other voice: So, [inaudible] is that each of the one of the boards have a public hearing which is an official meeting, and you’re hindered by the summer. That’s a bad thing, but you really, at this forum right here, [inaudible], needs to have that meeting.

Filiberto: Well, the town…

Other voice: Making decisions on a joint hearing.

Filiberto: We don’t even have…

Other trustee: We’re…

Unknown voice, not Filiberto: Other than a, other than a decision, we have to make a funds, we have to, we’re required to have one joint
public hearing,

Other trustee: Which we did.

Other: Right.

[inaudible, people talking over each other]

Other voice: All right, but I wouldn’t want to take that, and somebody that’s really disgruntled will take you to court, and that joint meeting is really not, is not what the law says.

[inaudible, people talking over each other]

Filiberto: Legally, we don’t, but…

[inaudible, people talking over each other]

Other voice: … in a court, sitting up there, [inaudible]

Clerk: Another meeting…

[inaudible, people talking over each other]

Female voice: …It’s my understanding as a citizen, attending the public hearing, that each board thought that it was going set its own individual public hearing, the village residents [inaudible] would be making a decision, and that he felt that the town board agreed that they would have their own public meeting, and they thought that the town…

Clerk: See, that’s not what my notes say at all.

[inaudible, people talking over each other]

Unknown male voice (Petrovic ?): Well, there was interest at the end to try to see if we could set a time of a joint meeting, but again, because we need to do individual decisions, we can set the course that we want to.

[inaudible, people talking over each other]

Filiberto: I think that we should have our own…Individuals, individuals in the town should be concerned with what the village has to say, I mean, and not vice versa. The village is a component of it. The town board is part of the village, the village as well. They should be interested in hearing what the village residents say. So, in that respect, I would say that there shouldn’t be a joint meeting. But I…

[Other female voice, inaudible]

Other male voice: Well, again, the attorneys and ten board members are probably going to…

Other male voice: I think it’s unrealistic and ultimately unnecessary, if we’re going to have, you know, a second public meeting, um, this
board…

Other male voice: At the town’s individual meeting, there was a lot of [inaudible], if the town wants to we can try to schedule one, but I’ve [inaudible] to hear public comment that we need to do it, I think there was sentiment that the public would love to see us working together, but in this case, the information and the decision is each individual [inaudible].

Other male voice: I think we are working together. I just think that we’re not seeing it from the same frame.

Filiberto: I disagree that we’re not going to hear what’s happening in the town.

Other male voice: I agree. I mean, that’s true. I’m not going to argue with that.

Filiberto: I think the main concern is that that there are going to be arguments from the town that we’re not going to know, and we’ll take them off the record, but at the same time, it’ll be just the sense that…

Other male voice: Well, we can attend [inaudible] too. There’s nothing preventing us from going to this other meeting [inaudible, people talking over each other] It’s not like we’re kept from that.

Other male voice: We should schedule a date that works for us to have a village hearing…

Tomorrow, Monday, June 4th, at 7:00 PM, there will be a joint public hearing of the Trumansburg Village Board and the Ulysses Town Board to discuss the proposed annexation of two lots owned by William Auble on Seneca Road, west of route 96, into the Village of Trumansburg.

You wouldn’t know this, though, by looking at the official governmental web sites of the Village of Trumansburg and the Town of Ulysses. There is nothing on either site that indicates that this meeting is taking place at all. The Village government calendar shows that there will be no public meetings on June 4. The Town of Ulysses web site shows nothing either.

There was an article in the Ithaca Journal which mentions the June 4th meeting, but there is nothing published about the meeting in the most recent issue of the Free Press, Trumansburg’s paper of record - not a calendar listing, and not a public notice.

I got word of tomorrow’s meeting through a phone call from another village resident, and from an email sent by another resident, Dorothy Vanderbilt. The body of that email reads,

Dear Fellow Trumansburg residents,
I just found out last night about an annexation meeting regarding development of property along route 96 just past the fire station (proposed strip mall from what I’ve been told). I have to admit I do not know many details but I plan to read the attached Annexation document (PDF) and attend the meeting next Monday, June 4, 7:00 PM in the H.S. auditorium. I hope you all can attend as well! It is my opinion–and I hope many of you agree– that this type of development will further degrade Trumansburg!

SPREAD THE WORD!

Attached to that email are two electronic documents: A Microsoft Word version of the legal notice you see below, and a PDF version of the petition submitted by William J. Auble. That petition shows that the document was submitted to both Tammy Morse, Trumansburg Village Clerk, and Marsha Georgia, Ulysses Town Clerk. Please look at the documents yourself.

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN, that a petition pursuant to General Municipal Law Article 17, has been received by the Town Board of the Town of Ulysses, Tompkins County, New York and the Board of Trustees of the Village of Trumansburg, Tompkins County, New York, for the annexation of the following described territory situated in the Town of Ulysses to the Village of Trumansburg: William J. Auble owner/petitioner Tax Parcel # 11.-2-7.1 consisting of 38.56 acres fronting in part on Route 96 and Tax Parcel # 11.-2-4 (Trailer Park) consisting of 59 acres, 4380 West Seneca Road.

NOTICE IS FURTHER GIVEN, that on the 4th day of JUNE 2007, at 7 p.m. of that day, a joint hearing upon such petition will be held by the Town Board of the Town of Ulysses and the Board of Trustees of the Village of Trumansburg, at the Trumansburg High School Auditorium, Main Street, Trumansburg, New York. At such time and place all persons interested in the matter may be heard. Objections based on any of the grounds set forth in General Municipal Law Section 705 (1) (a), (b), (c), or (d) shall, in addition to oral testimony thereon, be submitted in writing.

By Order of the Board of Trustees of the Village of Trumansburg
Village Clerk
Tammy Morse

Notice is hereby given? To who?

The Microsoft version of the document shows that the legal notice you see above was created on May 10, 2007 at 8:58 AM, and was printed out at the same time.

Where did Dorothy Vanderbilt get these documents? They’re not available for download on either the Trumansburg or Ulysses web sites.

Has there been a politically-motivated selective release of these documents by a member of the Ulysses Town Board or Trumansburg Village Board, or a member of the supporting staff? How come the Trumansburg Free Press didn’t get the legal notification in time to publish last week, but Dorothy Vanderbilt did? Why didn’t Tammy Morse or Marsha Georgia make the petition available to the public online?

I have many questions about the selective publicity for the annexation meeting tomorrow, and very few answers. One thing, however, is crystal clear: The interaction between the Town of Ulysses and the Village of Trumansburg on the one hand and the public and local media on the other hand is not functioning adequately. Maybe it’s the fault of the board members. Maybe it’s the fault of the clerks. Maybe it’s the fault of the media. Maybe we in the public just aren’t showing enough interest to provoke adequate notice of public meetings. I don’t know who’s to blame, but wherever the problem lies, it needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

The issue of the annexation of William Auble’s properties is too important to let these public hearings go without adequate publicity in time for residents to plan to attend. Personally, I won’t be able to attend, as I’ll be on business in Texas on Monday.

The annexation needs to be carefully considered partially because it’s being requested by Bill Auble, who, as I understand it, is no longer a Ulysses resident. Auble has also written some rather rude things about Trumansburg in a letter to the Free Press. Among other things, Mr. Auble claimed that people in Trumansburg don’t know each other or wave to each other on the street anymore. That’s a ridiculous claim, as I know scads of people already here in the village, and have only lived here two years. I wave to plenty of people on the street, and they almost always wave back, or stop and have a conversation. Trumansburg is a very friendly place, and how would Mr. Auble know otherwise, given that he doesn’t even live here any more?

Local legend has it that, when he didn’t get his way in the past, Mr. Auble spitefully set up a pig farm on the property he now wants to be annexed, with school buses buried in the ground, in order to create a literal stink in Trumansburg, along with an eyesore. I don’t know if this story is true, given that I didn’t live here at the time. If the story is true, Trumansburg ought to be very careful in dealing with such a person.

In his petition, William Auble says that the annexation of his property would enable “economic development” and “would allow for the creation of jobs and the availability of needed goods and services”. How? If Auble does not plan commercial development of the property, how would the annexation provide jobs and needed goods and services? I haven’t seen any proof that a strip mall is in the planning, but I can see how Dorothy Vanderbilt would come to suspect as much.

The proposed Water District 5 would be thwarted by the annexation deal, and that might be a good thing. Certainly, any Water District 5 proposal that depends upon the inclusion of people who already are receiving municipal water is not worthy of consideration.

However, members of the Village Board would do well to consider how this annexation will affect the balance of power in Trumansburg. How would the people living on Auble’s property vote in village elections? Would their votes be enough to change the political character of the village, and impact the lives of those currently living within village limits?

Before the annexation is accepted, all these questions should be asked, and answered, at Monday’s public hearing.

If you’re able to attend, leave your comments here and let me know how it goes.

Thanks to Sue Henninger over at Tompkins Weekly for getting it right. While the Trumansburg Free Press only gave coverage to three out of the five candidates for school board in the Trumansburg Central Schools election taking place tomorrow, Sue Henninger has provided short profiles of all the candidates.

Here’s what Tompkins Weekly has to say about Peter Cooke and Mark Finnigan, the two candidates that the Trumansburg Free Press ignored:

“Peter Cooke has worked as a contractor in Trumansburg for 28 years and states that his career as a small businessman, which constitutes ’survival in tough economic times and the constant escalation of taxes,’ gives him insight into how other residents in the district feel. He believes that taxes are always a struggle but he is ‘ready, willing and ablew to think about what has to be done and to make difficult decisions if need be.’

Noting that he has been involved with many school committees over the years, including the Citizens Advisory Committee, and the Facilities Committee, Cooke says that he has attended board meetings for the past six or seven years, sometimes asking questions that might have been ‘pesky.’ ‘Now it’s my turn to sit up in front and be pestered,’ he says. Cooke hopes to bring ideas and questions to the table that will make a difference to the board and the school community.”

“Mark Finnigan, director of information technology in the South Seneca School District, feels that he has an understanding of what happens inside a district, and that it is integral for students to have a good technical background when they leave public schoo. Stating that he is running for a seat on the board to offer his support, and that he has no special agenda other than his willingness to help, Finnigan would like the chance to ‘give back to the district what my kids have gotten out of it.’”

There are five candidates for the board of the Trumansburg Central Schools. Yet, only three had a profile in last week’s Trumansburg Free Press, the last newspaper published before the school board election, which will be held tomorrow. I couldn’t even find the names of the other school board candidates anywhere else in the newspaper.

I just talked to Peter Cooke, one of the neglected candidates, and he confirmed to me that the Trumansburg Free Press never got in touch with him - never invited him to get the free publicity given to Maureen Shallish, Scott Sherwood or Cynthia Farina. Mark Finnigan is also running for the school board, and was not mentioned. I don’t know whether the Trumansburg Free Press bothered to get in touch with him.

What’s the explanation for this huge oversight? Is this what the village of Trumansburg ought to expect from its paper of record?

To be honest, I feel a bit goofy taking part in the experiment in collective fiction and progressive political imagination that is the World Without Oil. For one thing, the scenario is quite exaggerated in its description of a developing oil crisis. The idea of riots in the streets and a covert American invasion of Canada just because the price of gasoline is over four dollars per barrel is just silly.

Still, I find value in the project in the way that it encourages people to use their imaginations to consider the impact of post-peak oil on their local communities instead of the United States of America in the large, abstract scale. Imagining how the Town of Ulysses might react to the disintegration of the fossil fuel economy is much more provocative a challenge than making pundit-worthy predictions about nationwide trends. Here, on the level of the town and village, we have more of the genuine human element at play, and less of the posturing creations of mass media interpreting that human element for our filtered pleasure.

So, I’m giving this fiction experiment a few more days to work itself out, and see what emerges. I’m inclined to think that Ulysses will fare better than many other communities.

PBS is working with a group of online organizations to sponsor a collective fiction project called World Without Oil. The idea is that the project organizers describe the broad parameters of a fictional oil shortage, and participants write about the events that take place as a result where they live. The purpose is to get people thinking about energy issues and the problem of dependence upon petroleum in relation to their local communities.

Each day in the project is a week in the fictional World Without Oil. The project started on April 30, so today is Week 8 in the fictional oil shortage. In this week of the alternative reality, the United States has made a small military incursion into Alberta in order to secure some oil fields, and the price of gasoline is an average of $4.79 per gallon in the United States. Would the USA really violate the sovereignty of Canada at just $4.79 per gallon? I’m not inclined to think so, but for the purposes of the project, that’s what’s going on.

Currently, there are about 1,220 people writing, most in the USA, but some in foreign countries, for the World Without Oil project. The closest places to us represented by someone writing for the I’ll be jumping into the project are State College, Pennsylvania, Budd Lake, New Jersey, and Troy, New York and College. Seeing that, I thought that the Finger Lakes in general, and the Town of Ulysses and the Village of Trumansburg in particular, ought to be seen as part of the fictional world. So, starting later today, I’ll be adding articles from Finding Ulysses to the World Without Oil alternative reality, writing about events here in Trumansburg, Ulysses, and Tompkins County.

I’ll mention businesses, institutions and groups, like the Village Board and Back to Democracy, as part of this fictional set of events, but I’ll do my best to avoid writing about real people who live here unless you get in touch with me and ask me to include you as a character. It seems unfair, in a small community like ours, to control the fictional events of people in such a public way.

Of course, I need not be the only local contributor to this collective fiction event. If you’d like to write for the World Without Oil project here at Finding Ulysses, just leave a comment with your email address, and I’ll get in touch with a password for you so that you can do so.

As always, feel free to leave comments at the bottom of each article, positive or negative.

To keep the distinction between reality and fantasy clear, and avoid people jumping over Taughannock Falls in a War Of The Worlds type of panic, every article I write here for the World Without Oil project will have the phrase World Without Oil in the title, the graphic that you see off to the right, and the disclaimer that you read below.

During the deepest part of winter, the Trumansburg Creek enters a state of denial, eager to fit in with its geological surroundings, a hard igneous crust holding cold molten liquid at its core, hidden, still falling, insulated, dark, under snow, its lost brother from above. We can see right through its rocky pretense. Our creek in springtime rediscovers its flow, angry that it settled down to become part of the land, and rages forward, resentfully grabbing at the land that has dared to confine it, picking up soil and pebble and rock, and hurling it all abusively, breaking it apart, washing away the land’s uncleanliness on top of what ought to be sea.

Puerto Rican writer and Gimme man Garik Charneco is among us, watching the personality of Trumansburg Creek. He says that enclosed water hypnotizes him. He’s writing about much more than what he’s writing about, of course.

Desire that is free is not nearly as appealing to us as desire that struggles for freedom. On the shores of greater bodies of water, we enjoy the waves, the places where the tranquil unity of the ocean recaptures something of its ancient memories of falling, when it ran through our village, so eager to be gone.

The creek is not the water in it. The water thaws, but the falling of the creek itself is always frozen, an eternal path that never takes the journey itself.

Garik writes, “Trapped water always has some land telling it where to go.”

In this line, I suspect Garik has expressed his reason for writing.

Keep at it, creek, Garik.

There has been, in response to an article that I wrote here yesterday, a hard, provocative, useful conversation. In that conversation, I see people pushing, defending, and finding the boundaries of themselves in the community.

To spark this kind of raucous discovery is the reason that I created Finding Ulysses. It’s not journalism. It’s not reporting what is. It is discovering what could be. It’s finding, pushing, falling, stumbling, fighting to get to the home where we want to be. It is a return to something that never was, and a recreation of it. It is the spirit of Ulysses.

Whenever I hear people use phrases like “retaining the character of Ulysses” in a conversation about local politics, I smile to myself. Most of the time we forget that Ulysses is not just a place, but also a character. It is a legend.

We should, living in Ulysses, never forget Ulysses. We should never forget that we are living, in a name, in a myth.

If you still aren’t following me, call it an Odyssey.