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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Greg Fricke and James Boehmer, co-owners of Peggy Mercury in Kent, recently launched their first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts.”
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Fricke and Boehmer are not there to stock their shelves with the same products customers find at standard makeup retailers. They’re there to help customers find what works for them. That usually means asking customers about themselves and learning about their beauty habits, skin, style and the way they like to present themselves. Fricke and Boehmer believe it’s their job to help customers bring out the qualities that suit them and determine what works best for their look.
So much of the Peggy Mercury world is about emboldening people to become more creative, and possibly bolder, versions of themselves. Some of this comes through the store’s creative collaborations with artists, designers and stylists.
It’s part of an ethos that encourages them and their friends to use the shop as a kind of laboratory, trying out new creative experiments without knowing how they might turn out. Whether in fashion, painting, fiber arts or photography, the projects almost always turn out marvelously.
A line of sterling silver charms they sell started as a small project by their friend Nolan Percival. In the beginning, the pieces were for close friends and loved ones. But Boehmer and Fricke encouraged Percival to get a little more serious about the project and create a whole line for the store. Today, it’s one of their top-selling collections.
Classic styles, bold colors, and creative concerts make up the “Imaginary Concerts” line at Peggy Mercury.Provided
“Imaginary Concerts” has the duo taking their own advice.
The project started as a way for Boehmer to connect with his mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Taking old concert shirts from his own collection, Boehmer and his mother began cutting out the graphics with the idea that they would make a quilt together. Unfortunately, she died before they could complete the project in 2025. The pieces, which were ready for production, were put on the back burner as Boehmer and Fricke dealt with their loss and the whirlwind of projects that never seemed to cease at Peggy Mercury.
But the harsh winter of 2026 presented an opportunity to take some time and focus on themselves. Part of that meant revisiting and redefining the concert T-shirt project. This time, instead of looking to the warmth and comfort of a quilt, they turned to another passion — fashion.
Taking a page from their own book, they wanted to create something that felt comfortable to them. They took two disparate loves — one rooted in simple preppy style, with clean lines and classic silhouettes, and the other in the nitty gritty worlds of punk rock and pop — and blended them together to create something entirely new. Pulling from the staples of vintage Brooks Brothers and Charvet collections, they applied the graphic elements with bold stitching reminiscent of punk jackets of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but with a much more sophisticated air.
But the remixing isn’t just the pairing of prep and punk. The pieces are not canon. They take liberties with the realities of concert tours, combining one band’s dates with another band’s logos, mixing them all up until the reality is lost and imagination is the only truth.
Shirts from Peggy Mercury’s first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts,” hang on display.Provided
Adding to the mix is an element of perpetual creativity. Art can be messy, both figuratively and literally, and many of Fricke and Boehmer’s artist friends carry evidence of their work on them at all times. As a nod to these tireless creatives, the duo added haphazard splashes of bright color, giving the line an even more distinctive feel.
For them, “Imaginary Concerts” passes the “Peggy Test.” The mythical Peggy Mercury is a fictional figurehead for the company, a character who thrives on creativity and change. The name, much like the clothing line, is a mixture of interests: Mercury is a planet, a deity and an elusive, transformative element, while Peggy is the wonderfully stylish and boundary-pushing Peggy Guggenheim.
Everything Fricke and Boehmer put in their store has to pass this test: Would Peggy Mercury approve? For their first collection, the answer is a resounding yes.
Peggy Mercury is at 9 Maple St., Unit 2, Kent.
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