Today, the Watershed Post is rolling out our new Olive town page, a news and community website for the town of Olive in Ulster County. Reporter Cindy Johansen will be our Olive town government reporter. She attended two town meetings in Olive this week and filed the following report. Johansen will also be contributing video coverage of all Olive Town Board meetings, which you can see on the Olive town page along with town documents, Olive event listings, free local classifieds, and community announcements.
Get involved! Any registered user of the Watershed Post can post classified ads, calendar events, and local announcements to the Olive page -- all for free. We're also looking for town columnists. If you are interested in writing about Olive, email us at editor@watershedpost.com. - Julia Reischel and Lissa Harris, the Watershed Post team.
We live in the Great Catskill Mountains, where legend has it Rip Van Winkle slept for 20 years only to return to many changes. That story came to mind this week when roughly 160 Town of Olive residents flooded the Town Hall on Monday, August 8, to express their displeasure about new comprehensive plan for the town.
It was standing-room only on Monday night during a special public meeting to discuss the plan. For two hours, Olive residents said what was on their minds: that the new comprehensive plan seems to have been largely composed and directed by town officials without much public input. Residents expressed confusion about whether the Town Board or the town Planning Board were responsible for the new comprehensive plan, as well as what information was being collected in the process. No matter who was responsible, residents were upset that the process had the appearance of being kept in the dark.
Sentiments carried over to the regular Town Board Meeting on Tuesday evening -- where a handfull of residents made the trip for the second night in a row to continue the dialogue.
According to Resolution #1 of 2010, which was passed by the Olive Town Board in January 2010, the Town Board is responsible for the new comprehensive plan's preparation. (You can read that resolution below.) The resolution also called for the formation of a “Technical Input Advisory Group” and for citizen participation in the new plan. It also specified that the preparations for the new plan will be funded by a $50,000 Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) grant from the Catskill Watershed Corporation., which would pay for a consultant.
According to Olive Town Clerk Sylvia Rozzelle, the town began preparing the new comprehensive plan in May 2010. According to a published draft of the comprehensive plan, which you can read below in its entirety, the town held a public planning workshop about the new plan last October.
Rozzelle told the crowd that the town did everything right to publicize its plans for the new comprehensive plan. Legal notices were printed and notices had been posted in many places around town. But apparently that was not enough for a town where many residents no longer subscribe to the Daily Freeman, the newspaper the town uses as its “official” paper. Residents also don’t seem to frequent places the town chose to hang notices in.
Many suggestions were made, with the least costly being a network of e-mail addresses. Rozzelle commented that her hard drive had crashed, so all her e-mail addresses had been lost. She asked that residents send her their e-mail addresses so that a network can be re-established. (If you send your e-mail address to olivetownclerk@hvc.rr.com, you will be notified about the next public hearing.)
Although the first draft of the new comprehensive plan is incomplete, most of the $50,000 grant to fund it has already been spent on the services of consultants from Matthew D. Rudikoff Associates out of Beacon, NY. (Rudikoff Associates has published a draft of the comprehensive plan, which you can read below.)
At the town's regular board meeting on Tuesday, town supervisor Berndt Leifield disclosed that he had made a mistake at the Monday public meeting regarding how much of the CWC's grant had been spent.
“There’s one big mistake I made last night,” Leifield said. “I told you that we spent between $15,000 and $20,000. Actually, and I checked with CWC, that figure is $47,000 and change.”
Leifeld was unsure what other money might be available to complete the plan; he said that he would have to start looking around. He admitted that he had not realized how much money had been spent since he was seeing small bills cross his desk and had not kept track of the total.
Several people in the audience suggested that consultants usually are a waste of time with these types of projects. Since the basis for what the town needs is already in place, why not just continue without them? Leifeld responded to those concerns by saying that starting over with a new consultant would cost the town more.
On Tuesday night, Leifield said that he felt it was unnecessary to send town residents a survey to gather suggestions for the new comprehensive plan. He said that surveys were taken during the compilation of the previous comprehensive plan (which was completed over 15 years ago), and that he didn’t feel things had changed that much since then.
However, the town of Olive is welcoming comments from residents about the comprehensive plan. You have the right to send your ideas, your visions, your comments and concerns directly to the Town of Olive - via regular mail, at PO Box 96, West Shokan, NY 12494 or to Supervisor Leifeld by e-mail at olivesupervisor@hvc.rr.com.
All comments, suggestions and recommendations must be received by August 26, 2011, so please make your voices heard.
