This story was printed in two parts. The first part appeared in the issue of Nov. 24. CORNWALL — About two dozen people attended a revaluation workshop at Town Hall Saturday morning, Nov. 12. It was the second opportunity for Assessor Barbara Bigos to help people understand how their property is assigned a value to be taxed.One of Bigos’ self-assigned “homework” tasks is to send a survey to property buyers. It helps her get a handle on those anomalies that seem to be the norm right now. People are getting big bargains on properties that owners are desperate to sell. Recent sales have been mostly on unique second homes, where someone who can afford not to haggle and “must have” a piece of property will pay a high asking price.The surveys also offer a good picture of what makes a property desirable.Hilltops and bubbling brooksIn Cornwall, there are no real neighborhoods, so the perceived prestige (or lack of it) a neighborhood can confer on a house doesn’t really affect property values. But location plays an enormous part in property values here. A setting might be at the top of a hill, with privacy and astonishing views. One home could be at the edge of a busy road while the house next door might be set back behind a buffer of trees.The biggest influence on the value of most properties is the site factor. Each property is assigned a rating on a scale of one to 10. Factored in are desirable and undesirable traits. A good view can easily triple an assessment. But if getting to that view requires traveling up a treacherous driveway, the site value is diminished.The gray areas that come up are endless. Suppose a vacant lot is being assessed. A brook runs through it. Building a home on the lot will require avoiding wetlands and their buffer zone. The lot has less buildable area, lowering its value —even though having a brook might seem to be a huge selling point.But if the same piece of property already has a home on it (likely built before wetlands regulations were established by the state in 1970) then the assessment is quite different. Those wetlands are now a babbling brook that adds loads of charm to the property, and bumps up the value considerably.Bigos said it is very important for her to know if a property has a right-of-way or other easement over it. That can mean a big tax savings. On the other hand, property that is adjacent to conservation land will have a higher assessment. Using an overhead projector, Bigos did her best at the workshop to explain factors that ranged from fairly clear to completely baffling. Codes and abbreviations, for example. “BAS” refers to the main floor, not the basement; the basement is the “UBM.”For most homeowners, the easiest and probably most important thing to check on a field card — free copies are available in the assessor’s office — is the description on the back of the card.The number of bedrooms does not matter, but baths and half baths do. The style of the house also matters, because current market trends might be more favorable to contemporaries than cape-style buildings. Electric heat is less desirable and will bring down the value. Clapboard siding and wood roof shingles are more valuable.Simple drawings indicate building dimensions. The numbers are rounded off and determine the assessed square footage for each floor and any outbuildings. Those are easy and important numbers to check for accuracy.Homes are given a grade that has to do with quality of materials used and building details such as crown molding and granite countertops, and their condition. A question from the audience about crawl spaces led to a lot of information about how slabs, “nasty” old crawl spaces and basements, unfinished, semi-finished, finished or finished with a walkout, can make a big assessment difference.The starting point: acreageAssessing homes and the minimum lots prescribed by zoning starts with some solid numbers, called the site index, beginning with $84,000 for 1 acre and up to $117,500 for 5. Excess acreage is listed separately on the card. An acre is always valued at $10,000 to start, but a curve is used to decrease the price per acre for large properties, or where land is not developable.Under Connecticut law, properties are taxed at 70 percent of assessed value.Bigos said she welcomes discussion about any property, and is always glad to have a chance to educate people on how it all works, but she stressed that people should not compare their own property with other properties, and they should not try to bring in issues that are not relevant to the property itself.That said, there is another very important value indicator to consider. “If you don’t think your house will sell for the assessed value, that’s the time to question it. People who are not planning to sell don’t think about it, but it’s important to ask yourself, if I were to sell this house tomorrow, what would I ask for it?” Bigos said. “Maybe you don’t think the site index is correct. That’s an important discussion for us to have.”Audience members prompted a discussion about added value. Some saw it as being penalized for property upkeep. But there is no getting around the fact that a new roof or driveway increases value. “If you were to list your home, the first thing a realtor would put in the description would be ‘new roof,’” Bigos said.That said, “Cost does not equate with value.”In other words, what one pays for improvements does not equal the property value increase. It is usually less.“For instance, you may put $75,000 into an outdoor pool,” Bigos said, “but I may only assess it at $20,000 because you can’t use it for most of the year.”
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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 former partner, 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.”
This article has been changed to reflect that Hermans and Nelson were partners. A prior version states that they were married.
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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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