FALLS VILLAGE — State legislators from the Northwest Corner provided a grim picture of the state’s economic outlook and heard from constituents during a meeting at Housatonic Valley Regional High School Thursday, March 31.State Sen. Andrew Roraback (R-30) was the de facto host of the gathering. He was joined by state Representatives Roberta Willis (D-64) and John Rigby (R-63). The lawmakers each made brief introductory remarks. Roraback led off, noting that statistics from the state Office of Policy Management project deficits of about $3.187 billion for the 2012 fiscal year, and $2.953 for 2013. (Connecticut makes biennial budgets.)Gov. Dannel Malloy’s proposed budget makes up for these deficits with a combination of tax increases, spending reductions and anticipated concessions from state employees.This last item, Roraback said, makes up 30 percent of the governor’s deficit-closing proposal, and would amount to $22,000 per state employee per year, adding up to about $1 billion per year.(“Revenue changes” account for 58 percent of the governor’s proposal, and spending cuts 13 percent, according to the handout distributed at the meeting. Those numbers add up to 101 percent.)Roraback said at a lunch meeting earlier that day that Malloy “was guarded in his assesssment” of whether or not the concessions were obtainable.Roraback, the ranking minority member on the state Senate’s finance committee, said that from the revenue side, the combination of tax hikes and increases in fees would cost citizens $545 per capita in the first year and about $500 in the second year.Willis said the Legislature faces “an extraordinarily difficult task” and that some combination of higher taxes and spending cuts is inevitable.She emphasized the amount of money that goes to fund Medicaid services for the state’s aging population, noted that last year state workers agreed to $100 million in concessions, and cautioned that “if you eliminated every state employee tomorrow, we’d only be at a $2.2 billion deficit.”Willis also offered a bit of good news: a $158 million revenue surplus over projections as of last week. While it’s a modest amount in terms of the overall budget picture, she said it indicates that “people are getting back to work — the needle’s pointing in the right direction.”Rigby said he was concerned that Malloy’s proposal raises revenue first and then addresses spending cuts, and noted that the 2011 budget contained one-year infusions of cash from the federal government through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka “the stimulus”).And as if anticipating a suggestion that came later from the audience, Rigby said that the top 10 percent of Connecticut’s earners pay 59 percent of the state’s tax revenue, while the bottom 40 percent accounts for just 1 percent. The crowd of about 40 people made comments and suggestions that covered the partisan spectrum. They included: cutting the size of state government; cutting state government spending; creating a special billionaires’ tax; asking state employees to have an IRA or 401(k) rather than a pension, and to pay a greater percentage of their health insurance costs.Other suggestions included increasing taxes on cigarettes, both as a financial and public health measure; eliminating “pension padding”; putting a two-year “sunset” limit on any new taxes passed in this budget cycle; ensuring that government agencies run “efficiently.”One big problem with concessions from the state’s workforce is the current contract (with 19 bargaining units), which expires in 2017. Any attempt by the Legislature to get around that deal would almost certainly be challenged in court, Roraback said later in the meeting. Malloy’s only leverage is the threat of layoffs and any concessions will be voluntary, Roraback said.“Until we know the answer to the concession question the Legislature is at a loss. It’s 30 percent of the solution.”Referring to recent strife in Wisconsin between that state’s governor, legislature and state employee unions, Roraback said, “Look to New Haven, not Wisconsin,” where 3,000 people protested last week against a proposed privatization of custodial services in public schools.“Frankly I’m not convinced it is realistic to [hope to] get those concessions.”Rigby suggested rolling all state spending back to the 2008 level, for starters. “They will find a way to operate with what they’ve got.”And Willis noted that cash-strapped towns will still get their grants for roads and education in the governor’s proposal. That funding “is flat but it’s not cut.”Roraback wrapped the evening up: “It’s loud and clear that we’re all in this together.”
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his first wife, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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