Siding with Olive
Coalition of Watershed Towns agrees to seek change in Large Parcel law

by Paul Smart Woodstock Times  February 3. 2006

The Coalition of Watershed Towns Executive Committee decided at a special meeting on Monday, January 30, that despite legal opinions to the contrary, they consider it within their rights to get involved with the controversial large parcel issue and side with the towns of Olive and Neversink in seeking a wording change in state law that would remove all reservoirs from the act.
The meeting had been set to hear opinion from Coalition Attorney Jeff Baker and then decide whether issues such as large parcel, which pitted one town among the previously-consensus-driven Coalition against another, were approachable. Baker said he reviewed the group's mission statement and found a matter such as Large Parcel, "is not within the scope of what the Coalition was set up to do."
Only supervisor Bob Cross Jr. of Shandaken voted against considering the idea for action, echoing statements from Woodstock supervisor Jeremy Wilber that the law as it stands evens out school taxes in districts like Onteora, where Olive has been undertaxed for decades because New York City paid all its taxes directly to town instead of to the school district or county, as required by the new law.
Discussion centered around several Delaware County towns expressing their distaste for towns like Shandaken and Woodstock considering "doing something to another town that would cause taxes to jump by over 50 percent." They agreed that in their own readings of the CWT mission statement, the Coalition can get involved with any issues it wants to.
Committee Chair Patrick Meehan, while voting for involvement, said that the executive board's new interpretation of the Coalition's mission might open the floodgates for all sorts of special interest groups or individual municipalities seeking CWT support for a variety of causes.
The Coalition was set up in the early 1990s as an advocate of the watershed region, created solely to battle the New York City Department of Environmental Protection over its plans to severely regulate land use in the region
Wilber said later in the week that the Coalition's move on Olive's behalf represented a dangerous shift in the once vital organization's regional role.
"There's no guarantee that the New York State Legislature will do such a thing as they're asking. What is guaranteed is a serious cleft in the Coalition of Watershed Towns," he said. "For a possible action they're doing a definite harm."
The supervisor added that he had been "extremely distressed" to hear the way in which Olive councilman and CWT Executive Board member Bruce LaMonda "utterly maligned" the town of Woodstock for "stealing its assets" with no objections from fellow board members.
"I hope that if they do insist on addressing the Large Parcel issue that concomitant with that they also address the Large Mouth issue," Wilber added.
Olive supervisor Bert Leifeld, meanwhile, said that he was surprised at the near unanimity of the Coalition's vote to side with the proposal for aid he first took to them last autumn.
"I was very happy with the results," he said. "Now I hope the momentum keeps moving and they write the letter of support we requested. We'll see what happens..."
Last Spring, Olive anger over the Large Parcel issue forced a complete shift in Onteora School Board make-up. The new board, with three new and two older members from the town, voted last summer to rescind implementation of the law that forced Olive school and county taxes up approximately 50 percent for the one year it was in existence.

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