NORTH EAST — The anticipation building up to Grievance Day in the town of North East was laced with so much controversy and animosity that its actual arrival and execution was somewhat anticlimactic, according to members of the Board of Assessment Review (BAR). “We did not have a huge amount of people,” said Anne Veteran, a BAR member, noting her surprise considering “the enormous amount of flack” that Assessor Katherine Johnson received following the townwide reassessment project her office oversaw. “It was way better than we thought it was going to be and a lot less than what we heard about, and it went quite smoothly. Katherine was very organized and all the sessions went very well.”“It was nowhere near what it was built up to be. The big complainers at the meetings were not even there,” said BAR member John Crawford. “Anybody with a legitimate complaint was taken care of beforehand, as a rule. The real big-money guys, the multi-millionaires, showed up with very little substantiation, they just complained for the heck of it. “There was a very low percentage of grievances for a reval,” Crawford added. “My feeling is that Katherine Johnson did a heck of a job. She did a real good job.”The BAR, or grievance board as some refer to it, is a five-member board that hears complaints from property owners regarding their assessments. Those who do not want to go before the BAR had the option of conferring with Johnson or one of the consultants who worked on the reassessment project, in hopes of finding a resolution to their issues.A number of property owners, a majority of whom own farmland, complained to the Town Board that their property values doubled and tripled, or more. They also charged Johnson with having a bias against farmers for not paying their fair share of property taxes. It’s an accusation the assessor has denied. She has also stood by the reval project from the get go, and acknowledged while some errors have occurred, they are far and few between, and the majority of the assessment roll is accurate. She twice requested the Town Board rescind a resolution it passed requesting her to put this year’s roll aside and instead submit last year’s roll to the county. Both times the board has sidestepped the request, but so too has Johnson refused to file last year’s roll (as an elected official she is not under the Town Board’s rule).The numbersAccording to the assessor, 46 property owners appeared before the grievance board on Grievance Day, which was Wednesday, May 25; 47 property owners mailed in their complaints for the BAR to review, which is another way to go through the grievance process. In total 93 property owners in the town of North East appealed their cases before the Board of Assessment Review. Another 73 made appointments with Johnson to settle their complaints without going to the grievance board, bringing the total number of dissatisfied property owners to 166. That number is out of the town’s 1,896 total properties — that’s less than 10 percent. Johnson said statistics show typically between 20 to 30 percent of property owners are unhappy with new values after a revaluation. Considering that, she said her project went better than expected.“I was extremely happy, with the exception of people complaining,” she said, “which they have every right to do. But I think they made it sound worse than it was. I think the biggest outcry was heard at Town Board meetings, about agricultural parcels, but there were only 12 ag parcels that grieved.”That’s a dozen out of a total of 201 agricultural parcels townwide, and some of those complaints were from the same property owners with multiple parcels.“I was surprised, and really pleased with the way it went,” Veteran said. “It would have been OK if thousands came, but they didn’t. But with the way everyone was screaming beforehand I thought we were going to be bombarded.”“Everybody was complaining how much their assessments went up, but weren’t speaking about how far under-assessed they were,” Crawford said. “One guy was complaining his property went up 116 percent, but this guy had a house and 90 acres previously assessed around $300,000; it went up to $600,000-something. Now he’s trying to sell it for $1.2 million, so what is his complaint? And he never showed up to grieve.”“I think we really have to look at the big picture and get all the facts,” Johnson said. “You can see there wasn’t that big of an outcry, there were a select few that had legitimate complaints, and mistakes did happen and we corrected those. But they weren’t across the board, and that definitely shows with the amount of people who complained. “Most people were satisfied, or they were after they talked to me, with how their property was assessed, and they did not file complaints,” she added. “The whole process showed how things went and I think that was the most telling. I’m satisfied with how things turned out so that’s good enough for me.”
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Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.
“I was a library kid. I walked to the library after school,” she said.
For Sher, the library is as much about the people as it about the books.
“Part of the job I love so much is that running the library is such a community,” she said.
She treasures the relationships she has built, whether recommending books, celebrating accomplishments or helping patrons through difficult times.
“I am thankful that our community is so supportive of the library, unlike what is happening in some other places where librarians are villainized,” Sher said.
Sher takes pride in the Hunt Library’s reputation for being “open and welcoming to everyone. People come in and see things and get pulled into things they weren’t expecting. Our library is seen as a positive force.”
Sher came to Falls Village after being awarded a fellowship at Adamah Farm, then a program of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. She worked at pickling, in the greenhouse and later in the development office. She also worked as a nanny.
At the same time, “I was in the library all the time,” she recalled. “I’m a voracious reader. The library is where I met a lot of my first friends in Falls Village.”
She became assistant librarian at Hunt and worked in that position for almost a decade before becoming the executive director four years ago.
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino
Sher met her husband, Adam, while working at Adamah. They had their wedding there in 2012. He now emcees many events which she co-organizes with the Falls Village Recreation Commission.
Sher and her family live near the library.
“It’s an easy commute,” she said with a smile. “My kids run back and forth. I can go home to walk the dog if I need to.”
“My kids have grown up here.” Her oldest son, Eli, “loves volunteering. He helps with Augustfest and often helps set up chairs for ArtWall gatherings.” Her younger son, Noah, is often at events and was eager to taste cookies at last year’s holiday cookie swap.
When she is not at the library, Sher likes to hike with her family. Bella, their Portuguese water dog, often accompanies them.
Sher enjoys seeking out people to offer events at the library.
“I do a lot of different community programming. It is one of my favorite parts of the job.”
Augustfest, featuring food, music and an auction, is the library’s biggest fundraiser.
“This summer we had a record 152 attendees, which was pretty incredible.”
Yonah Sadeh, a filmmaker from Falls Village, inaugurated the VideoWall this year, Sher explained.
“I’ve known Yonah since he was two. It’s wonderful to work with him as an adult.”
The VideoWall complements the library’s ArtWall, which showcases a new artist each month. Sher praised the ArtWall committee for its work and highlighted December’s popular “12x12 Show,” featuring works by local artists, each measuring 12 by 12 inches and priced at $150.
Sher added that some of the artists who exhibit at the ArtWall offer workshops to students at Kellogg School, next door to the library. In September, artist Danielle Mailer worked with the children. Vincent Inconiglios taught a class last November.
Being next to the school, said Sher, is a great advantage.
“Kids are coming after school, to see friends, work on projects, find a great book. Kids that love the library end up using the library as grownups.”
This past year, in partnership with Adamah, the library and school created a garden, with excess produce made available at The Center on Main.
This year is Sher’s second year participating in the Troutbeck Symposium in Amenia with James King, director of the library at Salisbury School. The Troutbeck Symposium is “a gathering of a year of student historical inquiry across the region” in which students “uncover stories that have been overlooked, forgotten, or never recorded.”
Last year, Sher and King began a project with a group of students researching Irish immigrants in Falls Village, exploring ancestry and creating small magazines about their findings.
They continued this year, visiting St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery on Dublin Road, cleaning seven gravestones and even righting one with the help of stonemason and gravestone restoration expert Karl Munson. Paul Kozeazny, a representative of the Catholic archdiocese, helped secure access to the site.
A film documenting their activities will be shown at the symposium in spring 2027.
A full schedule of programs and events, ranging from tech help to ceramic mug-making, can be found on the library’s website.
Despite spending her days surrounded by books, and a busy schedule of programming, Sher still loves to settle in with a book at home.
For more information on library programs and events, visit huntlibrary.org
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Touré was born in northern Mali in 1981. His father, the renowned guitarist Ali Farka Touré, came from a family of soldiers and wanted his son to join the army. The younger Touré studied drums and the calabash and practiced guitar in secret. He earned his father’s blessing to pursue music shortly before Ali died in 2006, and they played two tracks together on Vieux’s debut album.
Touré is known for his deft, polyrhythmic playing, and his songs grow out of riffs that repeat and layer to hypnotic effect. He draws on rock, blues, Latin music and various African traditions. This distinctive blend builds on his father’s work adapting the sonic traditions of Mali’s arid north to the guitar.
Vieux’s album “Mon Pays” (“My Country,” 2013) honored Mali’s culture after Tuareg separatists and extremist groups seized the north in 2012. “Samba” (2017) was recorded before about 50 listeners in Woodstock, New York. In 2022 came “Les Racines” (“The Roots”), a return to his father’s desert blues, and “Ali,” on which he and the trio Khruangbin reworked eight of the elder Touré’s songs.
Touré leads the Ali Farka Touré Foundation, which focuses on cultural and educational work in Mali. Around the anniversary of Ali’s death, it holds a festival in Bamako, Mali’s capital. Bamako has been under blockade for much of the past year, besieged by JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Against this backdrop, Touré continues to carry the music of Mali to audiences abroad.
At the Nov. 5 concert, Touré’s desert blues will share the bill with Gnawa, the music LanGus plays, which developed in Morocco among West Africans who were brought north across the desert as enslaved people. Gnawa is religious music traditionally performed at all-night healing ceremonies called lila, intended to carry participants into trance.
Samir LanGusProvided
LanGus was born and raised outside Agadir, Morocco, and began learning Gnawa from its masters at age 8. He plays the sintir, a three-stringed bass lute made of wood and camel skin. The player strikes a low string with the thumb to create a deep, resonant pulse. Iron castanets clatter over the sintir’s bass line, and vocalists trade call-and-response refrains.
LanGus infuses the tradition with jazz and improvisation. In New York, he founded the ensemble Innov Gnawa. His first solo album, “Gnawa Love,” came out in February.
Touré and LanGus’s Nov. 5 concert is one of the last public events at Race Brook Lodge, which is for sale and ended full-service operations at the end of 2025. The lodge’s final scheduled event, on Nov. 6, is an evening of Rumi’s poetry with translator and vocalist Haleh Liza Gafori, cellist Isabel Castellvi and ceremonial bard James Bird.
For tickets, visit rblodge.com.
James FitzGerald is a student at Yale Law School, where he focuses on ecological restoration and international environmental cooperation. He splits his time between Lakeville and New Haven.
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