All the solar power you can use, for a buck. Sounds too good to be true, but that’s the deal offered by DCS Energy. Officials from 10 towns, one as far away as Wilton, left a workshop in Cornwall Town Hall April 13 with lots of questions answered, but still wondering if there is a catch. There is an edge to the whole process because decisions have to be made soon. The offer for this round of the DCS Energy Town and Not-for-Profit Solar Lease Program is tied in with federal stimulus incentives and is only good through November, or until funding and tax credits run out.With a PowerPoint presentation not working, Bob Oberle of DCS gave a short explanation and responded to lots of questions. Some town representatives, from Kent, North Canaan, Colebrook , Barkhamsted and beyond, were just getting the details. Others had read the contract ahead of time and researched potential related costs.The deal is this: for $1, due at the end of a five-year lease, a town or nonprofit can get a solar voltaic system installed on as many buildings as it owns. Each system would be either a 4kW or 9kW system; the energy produced can not exceed electricity use per meter. The systems are estimated to save $80 and $180 per month, respectively. Once the lease is paid, the building owner owns the system.Buildings that could qualify include town halls, schools, libraries, churches, firehouses, ambulance facilities, highway department garages, police stations, senior centers and bus garages.Oberle said DCS handles all the paperwork involved with the tax and energy credits. The credits are what they get out of it. There is also an anonymous investor. Oberle said he does not know who the investor is, only that it is someone who is hedging that renewable energy credits will increase in value.“You get free panels, free energy, and someone else does all the paperwork,” Oberle said. There were two potential installation-associated costs identified by people in the audience.Rooftop installations are a priority. Flat or pitched is fine. No metal, because it may become a conductivity issue; no tile or slate, which could be damaged. Oberle said his company will need assurances a roof can handle the added load. That will likely require an inspection by an engineer. Norfolk First Selectman Susan Dyer said she had already gotten a $500 quote. Where a roof cannot be used, a ground installation will be considered. Oberle said that could require a town or nonprofit to pay for trenching.Currently, 14 towns have signed on or have completed installations. Most are in the eastern part of the state, close to the South Glastonbury-based DCS Energy.News stories about a Lebanon, Conn., solar installation quote town officials there saying it did indeed end up being no cost to the town.Hartland Town Manager Richard Johnson said they started the process with DCS last fall and about three months ago, a system was installed on their firehouse roof. Structural determinations were made by experts in-house and there were no expenses.His advice was to read the contract carefully, ask questions and make any changes specific to a situation. Unlike grants, with their set-in-stone specifics towns are used to working with, Johnson said this works like a business contract.“We had the same first reaction, that it sounds too good to be true,” Johnson said. “But we spent the time working through it. We made sure the changes in the agreement were in writing before we signed the contract and it all worked out just fine.”Hartland has experience with other solar energy projects, including using Connecticut Clean Energy Fund grants and purchase power agreements, where they provide a location for an installation in return for discounted energy.Towns or nonprofits also have to supply proof of liability insurance. Existing policies may or may not cover a new solar panel installation, Oberle said. There is also a $100 interconnect fee charged by Connecticut Light & Power Co. for 9kW or smaller systems. Cornwall First Selectman Gordon Ridgway asked about applying for buildings planned for construction during the offer’s timeframe. Cornwall plans summer construction of a new storage garage at the highway department facility. Oberle told him to give it a try.Can the program be used to expand an existing solar energy system? It was a question Oberle said he had not heard before, “Which means to me there’s not enough solar out there.” Again, he advised towns to apply and see what happens.Oberle assured participants they use a qualified and insured contractor, Right Way Roofing, and that the panels are high quality. They stopped buying panels from a company in China and now use a Texas company that allows for tighter control on quality and local buying.Oberle urged town officials to contact him by email with further questions.
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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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