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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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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