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His son will ride a
This ought to raise some serious questions
about Towne’s fitness for his particular city office. As accounts commissioner
he is in charge of real estate assessments. As a member of the city council
Towne frequently has to vote on city development issues. As an employee of
a leading realtor, can he maintain his independence and objectivity?
Just after Towne went on the Roohan payroll,
Roohan withdrew his lawsuit against the city for a reduction in the assessment
on his Broadway building (where Putnam Market is located). Otherwise, the
lawsuit would have left Towne in the awkward position of having to defend
the city against the company he works for. Roohan’s building at 433 Broadway
was originally assessed at $2.5 million. He was granted a $500,000 reduction
by an appeals board in 2002. The lawsuit was seeking an additional $500,000
reduction. Meanwhile, we hear that commissioner Towne has still not attended
classes for assessment certification, as required by law. Now that his commute
time has been reduced, he may be able to fit that into his schedule.
Lenz has been on the wrong side of land-use
issues. He voted against the purchase of the Ramsdill boat launch property
on Lake Lonely under the city’s new Open Space acquisitions program. He pretended
to be in favor of the Open Space bond act until the time came to sign his
name to a newspaper ad endorsing the measure, when he made himself scarce.
Lenz has taken a position against
the city opting out of the county’s unfair sales tax formula, despite the
evidence that for years the county had been sucking money out of the city
like a Hoover vacuum. Why has Lenz taken so many patently indefensible
positions against the city’s interest? The answer is simple: he does whatever
the county bosses tell him to do.
This facility will be finished just as the
US enters a long period of chronic oil shortages and disruptions that will
spell the end of suburban-style way of doing things. We will be living in
a world of greatly reduced driving (and parking). The investment in athletic
fields is redundant inasmuch as the nearby high school already has a full
complement of fields, in addition to the East and West Side Rec fields.
It will be difficult for kids to walk or ride
their bikes to this location. We believe this proposed facility will be obsolete
before it even opens.
In recent years, the Universal Baptist Congregation
made its home there, but found the enormous structure too great a challenge
to maintain. Now, in a unique partnership between a church congregation and
a new nonprofit organization, the building will become the Saratoga Springs
Universal Preservation Hall, and will house both the congregation and a performing
arts center.
We believe this project will turn out to be
one of Saratoga's most important restoration projects, as it will return a
magnificent downtown building to public use while reactivating the currently
moribund Washington Street.
Rumor central says that developer Scott Trefillo
has run into a nasty problem with his proposed six-story condo building on
Henry Street between Phila and Spring Streets — a project we support, by the
way.
Apparently a building that size needs to be
connected to high pressure natural gas lines, but the only lines in the old
“Gut” district are low pressure. The high pressure junction is way over on
the other side of Broadway.
It would be in the city’s interest — getting
a high revenue luxury condo building on the tax rolls — to support Trefillo
in his negotiations with the Niagara-Mohawk company. Specifically, we urge
the mayor to take an active role in jawboning with the utility company. The
project was originally scheduled to begin construction this spring.
The future will require us to live more locally.
We will have to live closer to work, grow more food near where we live, and
take care of our sick and injured closer to home. In other words, the Cambridge
hospital is closing just at the time when we should be moving in the direction
of re-localizing. We will discover that it’s not so easy to restart an institution
once it is locked and shuttered.
The Adirondack Trust was recently prevented
from bulldozing the Hub building at Church St and Railroad Place when the
Preservation Foundation stepped in to stop it using the legal tools at its
disposal. The site of a once-popular Skidmore college gin-mill has stood by
itself in a strip of vacant lots for decades. Last year, it was sold to the
bank, which announced its intention to put up another building on the site.
Trouble was, the bank had not yet proposed
or received approvals for any new building — and there was no sign of when
they might get going on such a project. In the meantime, the bank felt it
could lower the property tax by a few thousand dollars by razing the building.
The Preservation Foundation felt that such
a move would leave Church Street looking like a bombed-out wasteland. Anyway,
the move to halt the bulldozers left bank president Charles Wait furious at
Preservation Foundation director Carrie Woernor, with tremors roiling the
usually-placid philanthropic sector of the community.
There is general agreement that the old building
was not worth saving. We think Woerner did the right thing, though. The street
would have been a horrendous eyesore for God-knows how long. Maybe now the
bank will be inspired to hire an architect and get on with the job.
We tend to view local events and issues through
the lens of the world oil situation. It now seems clear that the global peak
oil production phenomenon occurred in 2000-2001. This means that annual production
will never again be higher than it was then, no matter what happens on the
demand side — and by the way, demand has only kept growing. What’s more, from
now on annual worldwide oil production will only decrease.
2003 is already off to a bad start, with Iraq
out of commission, and Venezuela and Nigeria hobbled by civil unrest. The
ramifications of this are enormous. Among other things, it means that industrial
economies can no longer depend on 2 to 5 percent rates of annual growth. It
means that suburbia is obsolete. It means the end of WalMart. The oil peak
phenomenon will change everything.