WINSTED — After a two-hour-long budget hearing on Wednesday, April 13, the Board of Selectmen officially approved a total town budget of $30,732,523.The town side of the budget, as approved by the selectmen, stands at $11,402,127.The selectmen officially made many of the additions and cuts that they had suggested during their April 6 budget hearing.One cut that had not been discussed at previous hearings was $2,820,561 from the school budget.Selectman Karen Beadle made the motion for the cut and cited declining enrollment rates and problems obtaining information from the Board of Education.“For the last two years we have struggled with getting any firm numbers from the board,” Beadle said. “There are two grades going to another school where they are getting new books and the tuition went down. The [school] budget did not even have firm numbers for transportation.”With $2,820,561 cut, the proposed budget for the Board of Education stands at $18,600,000.“I think it should get them through,” Beadle said.Selectman Ken Fracasso agreed with Beadle and voted for the cut.“We have to realize that there’s only so much money that can be spent,” Fracasso said. “We have to lose the perception that throwing money at something is going to make it better. I think the Board of Education made a huge stride in moving the seventh and eighth grades to The Gilbert School. However, we have not heard any credible justification for increasing the school budget. I think in a time where we have to do more with less, [the originally proposed Board of Education budget] is just a spit in the face to taxpayers.”Mayor Candy Perez, along with fellow Democratic Selectman Michael Renzullo, were the only two selectmen who voted against the cut.“I am in the profession of education, and some people think there is a bias there. Maybe there is,” Perez said. “I agree both Gilbert and the Board of Education should have sharpened their pencils more. I do think the request is too high. But I don’t know how we can attract families to the town when we take this out of the school’s budget. They don’t have everything they need. They are still using blackboards in the schools.”Beadle disagreed with Perez and said the cut is justified.“Throwing money at [the board] has not improved problems,” Beadle said. “With a decrease in enrollment, we were supposed to save money. We never saw that.”“I just think from the Board of Education side they have put their worst foot forward,” Fracasso said. “Just tonight [Superintendent of Schools Blaise Salerno] sent us a letter requesting that [the town] reimburse [the district] $155,000 for items that he does not feel the Board of Education should be responsible for. He was instructed to do this at the meeting on March 8, but it’s taken him a month.”“I have no argument with the reasons [for the decrease],” Perez said. “My argument is with the fact that we are holding kids accountable for the actions of adults.”Selectman Glenn Albanesius disagreed with Perez and supported the cut to the education budget.“What we are trying to reallocate funds to the town side,” Albanesius said. “When I sat here listening to the department heads give their budget requests [at previous budget hearings], it became clear that we have slighted the townspeople for a long time. It’s high time that it stops. I don’t think this is at the expense of the kids. This is about adults making the right decisions. That’s what needs to start. This is a reaction to reality, nothing short of that.”During public comments at the beginning of the hearing, Gilbert School Corporation Chairman Steven Sedlack spoke against heavy school budget cuts.“I think when the whole concept of the seventh and eighth grades coming to Gilbert came up, people expected the savings would come back to the town,” Sedlack said. “The expectation was different for educators because they thought they could put the savings back into the education for our kids. I think it is a well-accepted fact that education in Winsted has been underfunded for quite some time now.”Winchester Taxpayer’s Association President David Lapointe disagreed with Sedlack.“Over the past 10 years, education spending has increased in Winsted while the student population has decreased,” Lapointe said. “Our school teachers have enjoyed pay increase after pay increase in this town. The average salary is close to $80,000 for a majority [of teachers] and they receive health benefits of $14,000 to $20,000. When you add it all up that’s close to $100,000 that taxpayers have to pay for teachers. The residents in this town cannot afford tax increases.”Resident Brian O’Heron agreed with Lapointe and asked the selectmen to cut at least $2,700,000 from the Board of Education’s budget.“We need a zero percent increase in taxes in these difficult times,” O’Heron said. “What we are trying to do is save costs and run a more efficient education [system]. The town should also assume the maintenance of school buildings. Let’s stop these maintenance catastrophes in these schools.”Resident Caroline Christensen asked the selectmen to keep the district’s children in mind when deliberating any cuts.“We have a lot of needy children in our school system that can’t be compared to other school systems,” Christensen said. “Please use care in reducing the budget and don’t use any emotion in reducing it. We don’t want the kids caught in the middle of this and hurt by your decisions.”During the Board of Selectmen meeting on Monday, April 18, Board of Education member Richard Dutton told the selectmen that he is disappointed with the cut.“For more than three months [in developing the education budget], we felt that we had produced an educationally sound budget for the future of the community,” Dutton said. “We are obviously very disappointed in the magnitude of the reductions in this budget. I disagree with many of the justifications that have been given in reducing this budget.”Dutton said the state addresses the risks of having municipalities cut too much from a town’s education budget by having a minimum budget requirement (MBR).However, Dutton admitted that the current status of the MBR is unclear at the present time.He added that the state Legislature is looking to enact and enforce the MBR by June.“I think that [the MBR] will set a minimum budget requirement that is substantially higher than what was voted on by the selectmen,” Dutton said.In response, Selectman Lisa Smith said she supports the budget.“I think it’s a good budget, although I don’t think it’s a perfect budget,” Smith said. “For many years we have not been able to put public safety at the forefront of this budget. In this budget, we have put money in for two police cars, we have funds for a new firetruck and we have allocated money back to the fire department. Those things are very important. We are putting public safety first. Also, if we don’t hold the Board of Education accountable, we will not be doing due diligence to the town.”Some of the additions to the town’s budget that the selectmen officially approved at the budget hearing include $15,000 to the Board of Selectmen’s contingency budget, $50,000 to the police department for the purchase of two new police cruisers, $18,450 to Planning and Zoning for an update to zoning regulations, $15,000 to the town manager’s budget to be used by the Economic Development Committee for marketing, $26,824 for a full-time fire marshal, along with $24,795 in medical benefits, and $55,000 to pay for crossing guards. Selectman George Closson was not present at the hearing.
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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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