Lissa Harris
About us:
Lissa Harris is the founder and publisher of the Watershed Post.
Articles
May. 20, 2010
Steve Levy and Rick Lazio, the two pols jousting to run for governor on the Republican ticket, paid a visit yesterday to the Sullivan County GOP convention. From the Times Herald-Record:
Lazio, a former four-term Congressman, and Levy, the Suffolk... Read more
May. 20, 2010
The New York Times ventured as far north as Livingston Manor recently for one of their perennial second-home renovation features (a.k.a., "house porn").
The surprise? The homeowner, PR magnate Melanie Brandman, turned out to be more interesting than the... Read more
May. 12, 2010
Social-media maven (and Kingston Neighborhood Watcher) Claudia D'Arcy was a little steamed that an Ulster County conference on promoting local business via social media didn't bother to hire a local:
Now, this has absolutely nothing personal against... Read more
May. 10, 2010
The DEC is mulling some new regulations, in an attempt to crack down on the vastly idiotic, yet depressingly widespread, practice of leaving food out where bears can get it. From the Adirondack Daily Enterprise:
The new regulations would ban the feeding... Read more
May. 10, 2010
An AP story in the Daily Freeman announces with some fanfare that the state depertment of health and the DEC have just developed a new online, interactive map plotting the incidence of cancer and pollution sites.
That's fantastic. Way to put powerful... Read more
May. 10, 2010
According to the Mid-Hudson News, Sullivan County does not have equipment for monitoring either ozone or particulates in the air. And it's not alone:
In the Hudson Valley, most counties have ozone monitoring devices, but only Orange and Westchester have... Read more
May. 9, 2010
Surefire way to arouse the righteous ire of a newspaper type, in three easy steps:
1. Commit some mildly salacious act.
2. Make a ham-fisted attempt at covering it up.
3. When caught by a reporter, (a.) beg them not to write a story, and when that doesn'... Read more
May. 7, 2010
Never mind a movie theatre or a stoplight: The tiny Ulster County town of Denning is too small even to have a town park. That's about to change, thanks to local realtor Jennifer Grimes, who's looking for a few good dirt- and flower-wranglers to help put... Read more
May. 7, 2010
Truck, a three-day annual music fest that's been running in Britain since 1998, touched down on American soil last weekend for the first time. The venue: The Full Moon Resort in Big Indian.
Local music writer Tony Fletcher says he's "desperately hoping... Read more
May. 7, 2010
A Brooklyn postal worker recently headed for the hills with a trunk full of (allegedly) stolen mail and was caught red-handed, the New York Post reports.
Letter carrier Peter Ramsdal, 26, who works out of the Dyker Heights Post Office, had stashed the... Read more
May. 7, 2010
The Catskill Watershed Corporation just launched a new website that will, according to their press release, "promote the Catskill region as a place to visit, relocate and do business," "provide a "geographic, demographic and cultural overview of the... Read more
May. 7, 2010
A few weeks ago, Crossroads developer Dean Gitter was swearing up and down that state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli wasn't holding up a key 2007 Belleayre land deal because of the hefty price tag, never mind what the New York Post had to say about it.... Read more
May. 6, 2010
Today's Daily Yonder breaks open a shiny box of BEA statistics, and comes up with a neat map of income growth in rural areas between 2007 and 2008:
When you rank the nation’s 3,112 counties according to their growth in personal income between 2007 and... Read more
May. 6, 2010
The New York Court of Appeals has cleared the way for a class-action lawsuit targeting the state system of providing public defenders to poor defendants in criminal court. The New York Times reports:
New York’s highest court ruled on Thursday that a... Read more
May. 3, 2010
State Senator Malcolm Smith in a candid moment at the Democratic Rural Conference:
“With the Democrats in control of the State Senate, we are going to draw the lines so that Republicans will be in oblivion in the state of New York for the next 20 years... Read more
Apr. 30, 2010
In the Wall Street Journal today: a sharp look at the process of cementing oil wells in offshore drilling operations. Some experts think that faulty cementing could be behind the recent BP disaster that killed 11 and is spilling 5,000 barrels of oil a... Read more
Apr. 29, 2010
Sustainable Esopus dishes up some recent data from the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency, and concludes that Esopus's dismal recycling rate (18.7 percent, compared to a 40.7 percent recycling rate across the county) is costing it serious taxpayer... Read more
Apr. 29, 2010
If he runs for re-election, state senator John Bonacic will face at least two challengers this fall, in a race that is shaping up to be a referendum on natural-gas drilling in the region (which Bonacic emphatically supports).
Sullivan County legislator... Read more
Apr. 28, 2010
First the farmer's market got moved downtown. Now the village elders are moving the fireworks, too. Quoth village board president Vincent Seeley in the Freeman:
“There is a potential public safety issue with cramming upwards of 3,000 people down at the... Read more
Apr. 25, 2010
The Daily Yonder tipped us off to this: In Kentucky, poet and newspaper columnist Constance Alexander recently lampooned the state's perpetually tardy budgetmakers with a mocking bit of verse modeled after "Casey At The Bat." An excerpt:
The outlook isn'... Read more