WINSTED — Under a mandate to do so from the state, the Winchester Board of Selectmen still has not developed a plan to provide the minimum funding required for this year’s school budget.Selectmen did not vote on how to fund the 2011-12 minimum budget requirement (MBR) during their meeting on Monday, Feb. 6. Instead, the board authorized Town Manager Dale Martin to meet with Town Attorney Kevin Nelligan to discuss the issue.The vote on the measure was five to two and was along political party lines, with Democratic Mayor Maryann Welcome and selectmen George Closson, Michael Renzullo, Candy Perez and James DiVita all voting for the motion.Republican selectmen Ken Fracasso and Glenn Albanesius voted against the motion.History of the MBRThe approved action by the selectmen is just the latest on what has become a long-running saga on the approved town budget for fiscal 2011-2012.In late May, town voters approved a budget set forth by the selectmen that set education funding at $18,600,000, which is $1,358,149 below the state-mandated MBR.In August, Brian Mahoney, chief financial officer for the state Department of Education, told the town it was not compliant with the MBR and asked for the town to come up with the remaining funds.In late November, the newly elected democratic majority on the Board of Selectmen approved a motion by Perez to fully fund the MBR.However, Perez put in her motion that town officials would be required to meet with Board of Education members and state officials to make sure that the school district is using proper accounting procedures and to address any financial discrepancies.Perez made the addition to her motion due to the release in November of an audit of the school system’s 2009-2010 fiscal year.The audit showed that as much as $636,000 in spending was not properly documented by the school district.In early December at a Board of Education meeting, Superintendent of Schools Thomas Danehy said the school district could prove the funds were properly spent. Danehy said the money was part of $1.1 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds that the school spent on salary payments to employees.As of Monday, almost six months after Mahoney told the town they were not compliant with the MBR, and almost four months after the Board of Selectmen voted to fund the MBR, the selectmen still did not reach a decision on how to fund it.Discussion at meetingAt the meeting, Town Attorney Nelligan told the selectmen that he had not been authorized by the town to research the issue and consult with Town Manager Martin.“You have not made any formal motion to do this,” Nelligan told the selectmen. “Obviously, I have thought about it. It has been hanging over you for months and months.”“I was working under the impression that both you and Dale were working to understand how to go about this,” Mayor Welcome told Nelligan.As part of the proposal, Martin presented a draft funding plan that would amend the budget by taking funds from budget-line items to fund the MBR.The draft funding plan was not directly voted on by the selectmen, but rather was given to the board by Martin as a “framework” for a potential future plan.In Martin’s draft funding plan, the funds to meet the MBR would come from a contingency line from the town’s fund balance of $735,000 and various available funds from budget lines and town departments.Also, payments to agencies outside of the town would receive reduced funding, including Foothills Visiting Nurses, Camp Lark, the Youth Service Bureau, the Susan B. Anthony Project, The Chore Service and other several agencies.Despite this, Martin said the town would still come up $54,000 short of funding the MBR if the “framework” was approved as is.Selectman Fracasso then brought up the issue of the estimated $636,000 that was allegedly not properly documented by the school district in school year 2009-2010.“When our auditor was here a few weeks ago, she was asked that, if the school district misappropriated funds in 2009-2010, what are the chances that this also happened in 2010-2011,” Fracasso said. “She said that if it happened in 2009-2010, then it probably happened in 2010-2011. If we are looking at $1.3 million we cannot account for, will we have to pony all of it up? Does this mean we will have to issue a supplemental tax? If we take all of this money that we are talking about tonight, I don’t think we will have anything let in the town coffers.”“We are going to have to spend it,” Mayor Welcome said. “The previous board decided to underfund the MBR, which is why we are in the position that we are in now.”“No, the taxpayers are the ones who voted on the budget,” Fracasso said. “We just put the budget forward.”Fracasso asked Nelligan to research whether it was legal for the Board of Selectmen to overturn a town budget once residents have approved it.Nelligan said he would research the issue.
Latest News
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.
Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.
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.
Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.
