Bruce Krug’s lawsuit against Lewis County over its failure to comply with the state’s Freedom of Information Act has joined the pantheon of successful actions against the county, and it might be time to wonder if the county needs better legal representation, better leadership or both.

In the most recent action, state Supreme Court Judge Hugh A. Gilbert agreed with nearly every point alleged by Mr. Krug, who acted pro se, or on his own behalf, in the Article 78 lawsuit. The term refers to Article 78 of the state’s Civil Practice Law & Rules and it provides relief from improper or arbitrary and capricious acts of government. In this case, Mr. Krug claimed that the county violated the portion of Public Officers Law known as the Freedom of Information Act by failing to provide him with copies of documents that were, by law, matters of public record.

In going up against the legal legerdemain of county Attorney Richard Graham, Mr. Krug argued that Graham, as county records officer, acted improperly in denying his requests for records of the county’s collection of its bed tax, for a copy of a “permit” for a special all-terrain-vehicle event the county was purported to have issued and for the amount of money the county has collected in ATV fees and how much it has spent on ATV trails. He also asked that the county be required to reimburse his fees and costs of taking the action, and that the county be forced to undergo training by the state’s Committee on Open Government staff.

Here’s what he got from the judge: everything but the training class. Judge Gilbert ordered the county to provide all of the documents sought, and the county to reimburse the former legislator for his court costs. It was a pretty thorough whuppin’ of Lewis County and it has to raise questions of just how the county is being run.

Thus far, the county has lost pretty much every action brought against its ATV trails system, at least as far as opening public roads to ATV traffic. Two more are pending, and while the one brought by Rose Petit may falter, since she was representing herself but died after being injured in a fire late last year, the other one has a lot of precedent behind it and against the county’s weak justification of road openings. It says something that most of the plaintiffs aren’t even “lawyering up” to take action against the county.

The Krug case should put the county on notice it better stop playing fast and loose with the Freedom of Information Act. Mr. Graham cavalierly fails to respond to requests — I know this from experience — and County Legislature Chairman Jack T. Bush, the person to whom appeals of FOI rulings must be sent, did not respond to Mr. Krug’s appeal and has not responded to two appeals I have made in the past. That can only make me surmise Mr. Bush doesn’t take too seriously his responsibility to be part of the county’s FOI response team. (Pause for uncontrollable laughter here...)

The whole of the cases present another, perhaps bigger question: if the county keeps losing these lawsuits, where is it getting the advice that puts it in the position where it is getting sued?

Clearly, Mr. Graham failed to grasp the meaning of Public Officers Law when he denied Mr. Krug’s request. As Judge Gilbert noted, Mr. Krug wasn’t seeking the tax information of certain individuals — he was seeking to ascertain whether the county is fulfilling its fiduciary duty to its citizens in administering and collecting a lawful tax.

Similarly, Mr. Krug, in seeking ATV registration data and costs of ATV trails and some “trail” of an outside funding source, was trying to determine if the county is diligently collecting its ATV registration fees, since it has a third party involved in the process, and what that money is going toward.

Lewis County, you will recall, does not have all that great a track record with respect to handling money. Remember the half-million it gave to Paul Lyndaker for Adirondack Speedway, only to be told “get that back!” by the state? Come to think of it, where was the county’s legal counsel when that debacle was happening?

The county is going to have to pay Bruce Krug a few hundred dollars for its willful violation of the Freedom of Information Act. You can’t help but wonder, though, when the Legislature is going to get some bad legal advice that causes it to make a really bad decision — one that will cost thousands, or millions, of dollars when it is challenged and loses in court. When that happens, they won’t be able to point to Mr. Krug and call him a “troublemaker” or some of the less polite names he’s been called; they can look in the mirror to see who to blame for that one.

Half of the world’s population has been born since Jerry Koepsell came to work at the Watertown Daily Times.

And since that day in 1972, he has been in the thick of wars, presidential elections, presidential disgrace, natural disasters, political upheaval, human tragedies and triumphs of every ilk and the mundane, perpetual day-to-day flow of life on earth. Jerry has been the wire editor at the Times since shortly after he arrived here and in that time, he has given readers of the Times a steady, even-handed presentation of what has been happening in our state, our nation and our world.

And now, Jerry is stepping aside. Saturday is his last day here, and then he will retire and pass the reins of the wire section along to someone else. Times readers will, we hope, not miss a beat in the transition. But we will have lost one of the most capable, professional and consistent editors I have ever had the privilege to know and work with.

Being the wire editor for any newspaper that has a commitment to provide its readership with the most complete possible report of news outside the range of its own news staff is a daunting task. The Times subscribes to a nearly complete range of wire services, from the Associated Press to the Washington Post, and there is a vast sea of news stories that flash past the eyes of the wire editor.

I suspect that Jerry has read several billion words in his time here. Each day (or, in the past decade, each night) he “trolls the wire” looking not only for the best and most important news of the day, but the most comprehensively written and most accurate versions of each of those stories.

He has never been content to just pick one version or another of a particular story; I have watched him as he has taken a story about some important issue or another from McClatchy News Service and interwoven it with a story on the same subject from the New York Times in order to provide Times readers with the most comprehensive, inclusive and nuanced story available. Jerry’s treatment of news stories incorporates the hands of a surgeon and the mind of a professor, and he has displayed those unique skills day in and day out for almost 40 years without, in the eyes of his colleagues, ever breaking a sweat.

And if his skills are titanic, his calm, steady demeanor has made the newsroom a far, far better place to work. No matter the crisis — impossibly late breaking stories, impossibly frustrating system crashes, unbelievably inadequate news coverage — Jerry has met them with stoic ease. His presence has had a steadying influence on everyone, especially me. Through it all, he has maintained a sharp sense of humor that has made this place a better place to work.

The day etched in my mind — in the minds of everyone at the Times who worked through it, I suspect — was a midweek morning in September 2001, when someone rushed in telling us “Turn on the television! Turn on the television!”, and when we did we saw, live, the stupefying, horrific attacks on the World Trade Center.

While the entire newsroom was filled with horror and rage and unimaginable sorrow, Jerry and Bert Gault marshalled the troops; Jerry led us through tearing up everything we had done and reassembling a very special wire section that provided our readers that afternoon with comprehensive and accurate accounts and photos of one of the most important news events in the history of the Times. Everyone was hurting terribly that day, in ways public and private, but our pages portrayed not our tears, but the tears of the entire nation. It was a stunning and courageous performance I’ll never forget.

The A section of the Times as it exists today is, really, Jerry’s creation. He has created and fine-tuned a page A2 that is, in reality, an extension of the broad, far ranging nature of his intellect. From stories about supernovas to genetic breakthroughs, from the latest news of medicine to the quirkiest news you can imagine (there ARE alligators in New York City sewers!), A2 has become the home of some of the most interesting and engaging wire stories presented to newspaper readers anywhere.

Through his career, Jerry has toiled in the anonymity of the copy desk. While his signature is writ large upon the newspaper you have read every day, his face is unknown to all but his circle of friends and colleagues. While my face, and Bob Gorman’s and Jeffrey Savitskie’s, appear on columns that showcase our opinions, Jerry’s byline never appears anywhere. Yet what he has provided you over the past 40 years dwarfs anything we could offer.

Jerry Koepsell is the epitome of the newspaper professional. He has done what he has done, he told the newsroom at a retirement gathering this week, because he loves it. “I can’t imagine having done anything else,” he told us, and when I shook his hand at the end of our last shift together last night, he told me he has been blessed to have been able to do what he loves with so many wonderful people.

Jerry, it is we who have been blessed. You are one of a dying breed: you are a true newspaperman. I, and we, salute you.

You will learn in Monday’s Times that Massena Central School Superintendent Roger B. Clough II suddenly has grown an extremely thin epidermal layer, as he hired an attorney to threaten legal action against a Massena taxpayer who dared to stand up and ask questions at a recent school board meeting.

When Robin M. Wolpin stood up last week to speak to the board, she suggested that there is an atmosphere of fear among district teachers, and asked questions about the transfer of an employee and the hiring of an additional attorney by the board. In her questions, she did say the word “impropriety.” There is no record from our reporter on the scene, however, that she accused anyone of breaking the law or being a criminal.

And yet, Mr. Clough has seen fit to retain counsel, and direct that a warning letter be sent to Ms. Wolpin that included the threat of a lawsuit for slander. And here is his foundation for this action, according to attorney D. Jeffrey Gosch: “Ms. Wolpin, at a public Board of Education meeting, reportedly spoke slanderously of Superintendent Clough claiming he had engaged in ‘unlawful’ and/or ‘illegal’ activities. Mr. Clough has no idea what Ms. Wolpin is referencing and adamantly denies having engaged in anything unlawful or illegal as superintendent.”

So I have a couple of questions I’d like to pose to Mr. Clough, and the Board of Education. The first is, does the board really want the district superintendent threatening lawsuits against taxpayers exercising their constitutional free-speech rights? The superintendent is very much a public figure under the law, and while that standard is applied more to libel cases than to slander, in the spirit of democracy, public officials should be very, very judicious about alleging slander.

One absolute standard for slander, for example, is that it must clearly identify the slandered party and it must be made with malice and an intent to diminish the victim’s reputation. It would take a long stretch for someone standing up to a Board of Education to apply her first amendment rights by asking questions to be judged as slanderous. Simply asking about improprieties is so amorphous that it’s hard to see how anyone could decide that some individual has been accused of committing a crime. And a school district cannot sue for slander; it is a public agency and as such a ripe target for public criticism.

Ms. Wolpin says that she thinks this may be an attempt to stifle her First Amendment rights. I couldn’t agree more. Absent Ms. Wolpin pointing dramatically at the superintendent and accusing him of a heinous crime, the likelihood that asking questions about unknown or alleged events would actually point a damaging finger at a public figure is practically nil. So if this threat has virtually no chance of ending in success, what could it be other than a thinly veiled attempt to silence her?

School superintendents get paid plenty of money to take a little heat. That money comes from the folks who may wish to stand up in public and challenge their official actions. It is, after all, their dime. Mr. Clough ought to recognize that, and let them spend it as they will. It’s been my experience that the truth almost always comes out, so if Mr. Clough’s actions are as pure as he asserts, he bears little danger of being damaged.

The only real potential for damage here is to the First Amendment.

Not so long ago, and not at all far away, a rural school district went through a torturous period of turmoil and bad feelings when its superintendent, who reveled in keeping everything that had anything to do with the district double-secret, made a double-secret contract deal with a district administrator, outside the normal channels of operation.

The double-secret deal caused such an uproar that, with the other problems caused by the administrator’s tendency to hide things, he assessed the situation and did a quick Fagan to a district in the far western part of the state.

When that happened, Carthage Central School District residents pretty much cleaned house with the sitting Board of Education, bringing in a number of people who promised a new way of doing things. One of those insurgents was Michael Chevier, who promised he would open up the district to the public and press and do the people’s business out in the open. Mr. Chevier now leads the Board of Education, giving him a great pulpit from which to keep his promise to the voters.

Fast forward to today. In the past two months, a member of the Board of Education resigned because of back-room deals being cut by some members of the board, and the superintendent who replaced the departed Carl Militello, Joseph Catanzaro, resigned a day later.

As the letter from the departing board member, Terry Freeman put it: “While the board President professes to be open and transparent, it has become obvious that information is not shared with all members of the board, personal agendas are promoted outside the boardroom, confidentiality is non-existent despite repeated admonitions and educational programming is at the bottom of the priority list.”

As The Who once sang, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss — we won’t get fooled again.”

Sadly, however, it appears the district has been fooled again. The tipping point for both Mr. Catanzaro and Mr. Freeman was an apparent double-secret deal some board members cut in private with one faculty member. Sound familiar? The deal is murky still, because a lot of people who know a lot of the details are reluctant to risk the wrath of this school board by speaking the truth in public. But if the pieces are ever completely assembled, I’ve been assured they will involve the words “tenure” and “resignation” and “broken promises.” Sadly, the exact details are not as important as their effect: a good superintendent and a good school board member are gone, and the remaining board members have circled the wagons to reduce the sting of what many in the district consider richly deserved criticism.

There is a cautionary tale here. It involves the effect of winning, of gaining the power denied the outsider. When someone comes along and promises to be more open and forthright and honorable, you should probably ask how the candidate is going to do that. Get it in writing. And then hold the winning candidate to it. If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, the cost of being asleep at the switch is usually a train wreck. It’s going to take Carthage Central School awhile to clear the tracks from this one.

While the state Legislature acted last year to make dissolution of village governments a whole lot easier, and put much of the power to begin working on dissolution in the hands of village residents, at least two dissolution studies going on now in St. Lawrence County are showing just how much of the devil is in the details.

In Potsdam, it seems pretty clear that public sentiment is moving away from dissolution, although residents there will be able to make their own choice at the polls. In Waddington, what appeared to be a promising start to a dissolution movement came to an abrupt halt when a majority of the Board of Trustees suddenly tabled the entire process — effectively killing any vote on the proposal this year.

Ironically, both these movements originated with village officials. The public did not petition for these studies, although some members of the public from both communities have been vital participants in the process. Yet despite these encouraging facts, it appears likely both villages will remain as separate taxing entities, at least for the near future.

In Potsdam, where there will be a vote and where the results could still surprise, the main stumbling block appears to be police coverage, and the failure of the Town Council to rubber-stamp the study’s conclusions. Potsdam poses a problem for any dissolution effort, because it is larger than most rural villages and is home to not one but two four-year colleges. That makes the village police force considerably more active than the force in, say, Adams, where crime is low and tickets can probably be ordered by the gross rather than by the thousand. An active police force gives the residents a sense of greater security, and a local police force in a college town can offer a much quicker response time than sheriff or state police road patrols.

The question of police coverage is of itself enough to sway a significant number of votes. Another premise of the study — indeed, what appears to be on the way to being a uniform premise of dissolution studies — is that the town will hire all the village’s employees. Waddington’s study presumes the same end result. And it is here that all studies begin to fall apart.

Where, exactly, is it written that public-sector jobs are sacrosanct? Not in St. Lawrence County, where county budget officials are lopping almost 100 jobs from the county payroll. Not in any school district in the north country, where upwards of 500 teaching jobs have been excised in the past year. And not in the state of New York, where thousands of jobs have been eliminated and state employees have agreed to unpaid furloughs days to cut state spending.

And yet — village dissolution studies almost unanimously propose that all village jobs will be absorbed by the town. This, when many towns have not recently conducted studies to see if their payrolls are bloated by too many employees.

The Potsdam Town Council is absolutely correct in refusing to enter into any memorandum of understanding about taking over village departments, and thus employees. First, no town board should cavalierly encumber future boards. More importantly, however, no town board should promise to hire people, and create positions, that it cannot say for sure will be necessary. This is true in towns like Potsdam, and it is equally true in towns like Waddington. This part of the Potsdam study is a major reason that taxes would rise to the predicted level in the town outside of the current village.

The fact is, losing the presumption of guaranteed employment in dissolution studies will make every dissolution study more attractive. It will lower the impact of the dissolution on the town tax rate, and that will have a positive effect on all taxpayers; it will make the new rate the former village taxpayers face even lower, and it will make the new town rate not go up as much. The taxpayers win when payrolls are a legitimate and objective part of these studies.

I have read the tortured logic in the Potsdam study that supports keeping full village employment at the town level. Village administration is supported, for example, when there is no village to administer. Likewise, the transfer of public works employees to the town Highway Department is assured. Right now, the town Highway Department is smaller than the DPW. It appears likely the town highway chief might like to try to take over the necessary village duties without more than doubling his staff. And he might want to drop some village services entirely as being excessive.

As long as dissolution studies have the effect of being Full Employment Acts rather than efforts to trim government and make it more efficient, the numbers are never going to add up and only the most disgruntled — or overtaxed — village residents are going to force any changes at the voting booth. And in Waddington, even that slender opportunity has been taken away. It makes you wonder: will the people ever decide to take the power away from the officials who are so jealously guarding it?

The last time I wrote for this spot, it was nearly half a year ago and I was writing about the end of days. This led a regular reader to inquire whether I had, in fact, been swept up in my own personal rapture. Nothing, sadly, could be further from the reality. In fact, I was swept up in this company's conversion to a completely new newspaper and website production system, a process that has been a little like the conversion from sail to steam in the shipping industry. Only without the ocean breezes.

I won't bother to bore you with the minutiae. Suffice to say, it took four and a half months of meetings, training, in-house setup, more intensive training, more frantic in-house setup and final, frenetic preparation before we “went live” with the system. As readers of the Times know, that first week was difficult and the subsequent month has been no picnic, either. Fortunately for my sanity, I was able to get a desperately needed vacation once the system was up and running (or perhaps “up and limping along” would be a more accurate description).

On the cusp of returning to work, I have spent a few days pondering this entire process. The staff at the Times has been through a lot in the past six months, not much of it all that pleasant. While the paper has moved through major changes in production — not that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, the paper was being produced on linotype machines with galleys of metal type — most of our changes have been phased in. But not since the conversion from “hot” to “cold” type have we changed nearly every element of our production, from basic typesetting system to the page production program to the way our pages are sent to the pressroom and every aspect of our electronic publishing process. So everyone is trying to learn everything all at once — a daunting and difficult task.

Just so you know, everything you read in the Times and on the Times website and in the Times electronic edition is no longer really produced in Watertown — it's really produced on servers in Atlanta by the crew in Watertown (and, for our northern papers, by the folks up north) and beamed back and forth through the magic of the Internet. It's called cloud computing, and if the term cloud evokes pictures of dense impenetrability for you — well, stay with that image.

The change is one that the Times has had to make to stay current with new technology. It is the reality of the newspaper business in the breaking years of the 21st century that those that don't change — those that cannot marry the “ink on paper” delivery of the news with the digital, Internet-driven delivery of the news — will likely not survive. Times management understands the need for this paper to be more than just newsprint, and has undertaken this radical upheaval to allow the paper to improve it's digital edition and to bring such exciting new products as an e-edition, an electronic version of the paper that can be read on such devices as iPads and smart phones and e-readers.

But throughout this conversion, one startling fact has been clear to me. The new technology makes our main product — the Watertown Daily Times newspaper — something of an afterthought. Much of the computer program that we are now using to produce the newspaper is designed without any real consideration for newspaper production. I'm certain that many of you, for example, have noticed an unfortunate number of spelling errors in headlines. As you may imagine, this drives us crazier than it does you. In our old system, we could minimize these errors by running spell-check on both individual stories and on the entire page before it was sent to press. Under the new system, it is a multi-step process, no matter how you do it, to spell-check all the elements in an individual story, from headline through the caption. And from a practical standpoint, it is no longer possible to run spell-check on full pages. So we are devising new, more time consuming procedures, to get around this loss of functionality.

And this is only one example of design that fails the needs of newspapers. There are many others. In total, the entire editing process is more difficult than it was with the old system. Making the editing process harder makes producing a good newspaper incrementally more difficult. And frankly, we're struggling to overcome this problem.

The irony is, very few if any newspapers have figured out how to survive without maintaining the old ink-on-paper foundation for their news-gathering operation. No matter how you slice it, all things still flow from the newspaper before they get to the website, even for papers that are “Web-first” publications (meaning their stories mostly go online before they are published in the paper). Until publishers and readers figure out how to pay the costs of news gathering for digital editions, newspapers will be the financial footing for the news.

And newspapers can only survive if they produce a quality product. This requires professional reporting and it requires professional editing and production. When any of those processes are hindered by poor design of the tools the reporters and editors use, quality suffers. And readers get upset, and upset readers might stop buying newspapers, and ... well, you can see where this is heading.

We're doing our best to work our way back to where we were before we introduced the new system. It has been a bumpy, uphill climb. So stick with us as we refine our processes, and grant us a little grace if you notice things you think are not up to Times standards. We'll get there, probably sooner rather than later.

As I write this, we may have only hours to live. According to the Academy of Foil Hats, the long-awaited and frequently predicted Rapture will occur sometime on Saturday, and believers will be whisked into heaven while cynics, skeptics and a large number of bankers and stock brokers will go, well, elsewhere.

To be more precise about this, Saturday is Judgment Day. On that day, true believers will be swept into heaven in the Rapture. Then, on Oct. 21, God will destroy the Earth in a great, all-encompassing fire. So normal commerce can continue at least until almost Halloween.

How do we know the Rapture will be May 21, 2011? Using math that only the truly gifted could possibly understand, May 21 coincides with “the 17th day of the 2nd month of the calendar aligned with Noah’s lifespan,” according to some who have a LOT of time on their hands. Then five months later, God shuts the door on this human experiment of his. And an apparently failed experiment it was, lasting a mere 7,000 years (their math, not mine) in God’s infinite lifetime. You have to think we were a major disappointment to him (or her — who’s to say?), if he can only tolerate us for what amounts to a tiny fraction of a nanosecond in the great scheme of things.

The problem with Rapture Phrophecy, of course, is that it turns itself inside out trying to parse a document — the Bible — that cannot be parsed. Scholars have for two milennia worked on decoding the words of authors who, in truth, may not yet be known to us. And at the Academy of Foil Hats, they now do this using 21st century interpretations of first century foreign language that was translated into English in the 17th century. How literal do you think THAT could be?

I like most of the Bible. I find it full of love and brotherhood, and a foundation for faith. But the Rapture comes from Revelations, and the interpretation of its arrival on Saturday comes from Genesis. Neither of these books are particularly loving — many view them as, perhaps, even harsh. And, of course, billions of people who are non-Christians view the whole mish-mash as silly.

So count me as one of those unlikely to make any special Judgment Day plans for Saturday — although I might listen to Steve Winwood’s song of the same name. If you wake up Sunday and the ground is strewn with the bodies of the dead who are nonbelievers, I got all of this wrong.

New York is supposed to be a home rule state. Essentially, that means the cities, counties, towns and villages of the state have considerable leeway in running their own operations, as long as they stay within the confines of the state constitution and state laws. The state's Municipal Home Rule law says: “In addition to powers granted in the constitution, the statute of local governments or in any other law, (i) every local government shall have power to adopt and amend local laws not inconsistent with the provisions of the constitution or not inconsistent with any general law relating to its property, affairs or government;”.

One of the provisions of state law that was designed by the Legislature to give counties more control over their own fiscal affairs was including them in the power to share in the sales tax levy. And every county in the state now does that, at rates varying from 3 percent local share (these five are counties north of the Thruway — Hamilton, St. Lawrence, Saratoga, Warren and Washington) to 4.875 percent in New York City.

A flawed quirk in the legislation requires that counties that want to raise their sales tax rate beyond the initial authorized rate must go back to the Legislature for reauthorization of that rate every two years. In the past, this has been mostly a nuisance; the counties pass a resolution authorizing the rate and then seek local state legislators to introduce a home-rule bill in both houses of the Legislature authorizing the rate for two years.

While this used to be a simple process, it has become a galling political football. Activist legislators, mostly but not exclusively Republicans, use the request to either strong-arm their counties into doing something as a quid pro quo — “I'll offer your bill if you do this or that” — or as a bully pulpit to pontificate the party's ridiculous “no new taxes” mantra, or to appear to be, at no cost to themselves, looking out for Joe Sixpack.

Right now, Jefferson County's loyal-Republican-dominated Legislature needs to have 0.75 percent of the 3.75 percent local share reauthorized. And while Democratic Assemblywoman Addie Jennie Russell is drafting legislation to do that, newly minted Republican state Sen. Patty Ritchie has apparently decided to make the county jump through a few hoops before telling them whether or not she will carry this home-rule bill to the Senate. Never mind that this is not a new tax. And never mind that it is her fellow Republicans who have decided the county needs this revenue. And never mind that 51 of the state's 66 sales tax districts (including several cities) have local tax rates of 4 percent or above. For Pattie Ritchie, this is about Pattie Ritchie — it is NOT about her constituents, or serving her colleagues in county government.

Ms. Ritchie, and legislators like her, are subverting the concept of home rule. For Ritchie, it is particularly hypocritical — as St. Lawrence County Clerk, she made a lot of noise about how the state should stop interfering with such things as motor vehicle licensing and registration and as both candidate and senator, she has railed against unfunded mandates. Yet her refusal to submit this home rule legislation for Jefferson County is the broadest unfunded mandate of them all — she wants Jefferson County to pay for all the many things the state requires it to provide, but she won't let the county's elected officials determine how best to do so. And in doing that, she is really just driving up the already untenable property tax.

If New York is going to be a home-rule state, the Legislature has to play along. For one thing, its members should remember where they came from, since most of them moved up from some local government job. For another, it members should presume that counties, for example, know at least as much about running their own affairs as the Legislature does. I hope Pattie Ritchie is listening.

At this week's Clayton Town Council meeting, the developers of the proposed Horse Creek Wind Farm must have thought they were watching a replay of the 1929 Rose Bowl wherein University of California, Berkeley, center Roy Riegels scooped up a fumble and ran 65 yards in the wrong direction against Georgia Tech. At Wednesday night's meeting, Supervisor Justin A. Taylor, after nearly relentless support of commercial wind projects, suddenly offered a series of amendments to the town's zoning law regarding wind projects that surely must have flummoxed wind power advocates everywhere.

The amendments, if accepted, will probably send the Horse Creek project back to the drawing board or beyond. Atlantic Wind LLC, a subsidiary of Spanish energy giant Iberdrola, has submitted a draft environmental impact statement to the Clayton Planning Board and review of that document has begun. But the amendments proposed by Mr. Taylor appear, at least on the surface, to throw a serious monkey wrench into Atlantic Wind's plans.

The most significant physical changes would restructure the setback requirements in a big way, changing setbacks for nonparticipating properties from 1,250 feet from the residence to 1,250 feet from the property boundary. Thus, a property owner with a large parcel could find his residence removed by several thousand feet or more from the nearest tower – rather than 1,250 feet. And it would remove a significant amount of property from Atlantic Wind's available acreage. Adding to this, the proposal would also remove the ability of the developer to "buy" smaller setbacks from a neighboring property; the law would be uniformly enforced with no opt-out provision.

There is little doubt those two changes will affect the proposed footprint of the Horse Creek project. That will mean a significant amendment to the draft environmental impact statement may well be required – if developers choose to move forward at all.

If this weren't enough, the supervisor's proposed amendments would also require wind farm developers to make whole owners in the wind overlay district who cannot sell their property for at least its assessed value. A variant of this provision is cropping up in a lot of municipalities to address fears of dropping property values, and there is little doubt that it will be challenged in court somewhere by some wind-farm developer, or resident seeking wind-farm revenue. But for now, such provisions are an enormous wild card that many energy companies won't want to have played against them – including Iberdrola, which has already informed the town of Hammond that its interest in developing there will be withdrawn if such a codicil becomes part of town law.

The proposal also would require that 75 percent of wind project employees be hired from Northern New York, and that 75 percent of wind turbine products be manufactured in the U.S. Let's look at Maple Ridge Wind Farm in Lewis County to gauge the likelihood of this: The primary contractors for that job were D.H. Blattner and Sons, Minnesota; Alliant Energy, Wisconsin; and The Vestas Group, Denmark. Subcontractors included Delaney Construction of Mayfield and Tetra Tech of Saratoga Springs. Clearly, erecting wind towers is a highly specialized project that Billy the local electrician is not likely to be qualified for.

And a review of top 10 turbine parts manufacturers include only one from this country – General Electric, at number three – with the top five also including Vestas, Denmark, Sinovel and Goldwing, both of China, and Enercon, Germany. This provision alone may stop wind-farm development because the requisite parts simply may not be available from U.S. firms at any given moment.

Finally, the amendments contain a provision that might have implications for Clayton taxpayers who, Mr. Taylor may not have considered, pay more in school taxes than they do in town and county taxes combined. The amendment would require that 40 percent of any payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement or host community benefit go to the town. This would require either the county or the school district, or both, to agree to a grossly reduced share of these payments. Using 2010 figures, since the 2011 school tax figure is not yet available, the town of Clayton takes 7.7 percent of the taxes paid by town property owners, the county receives 38.5 percent and the school district's share is 53.8 percent. Clearly, if the town demands 40 percent of any PILOT, somebody else is going to have to give up their due.

The Horse Creek draft environmental impact statement projects a PILOT worth $768,000 annually. For the Galloo Island Wind Farm, should that project ever be built, the PILOT begins at $2.14 million per year and gets bigger with certain performance benefits and an annual 2.5 percent escalation. For that PILOT, the taxing jurisdictions agreed to 50 percent for Sackets Harbor Central School, 35 percent for Jefferson County and 15 percent for the town – and this deal subsidized the town at the school district's expense. In Clayton, if the town demands its 40 percent, the school district could see a significant diminishment of tax revenue from a project that the developers promise is going to lift all boats. How ironic it would be if the Clayton taxpayers who now pay a town tax rate of $1.30 per thousand and a school tax rate of $9.13 per thousand saw their town taxes fall to nothing – but concurrently had a school tax increase of $3 or $4 per thousand.

Mr. Taylor's bolt from the blue has elated antiwind forces and almost certainly dismayed Atlantic Wind and the people with whom the company has lease agreements. The setback change is rational and an important protection for nonparticipating property owners; the attempt to compensate for dropping property values is a fair-minded concept. The other provisions, on the other hand, seem destined to remove Clayton from consideration as a site by wind-farm developers. The town certainly has that right, and the majority of taxpayers may endorse this. If they do, this could be a stunning turnaround in Clayton's wind-farm future.

But for developers, it must seem like Mr. Taylor, like Roy Riegels, suddenly has taken the ball and headed pall-mall in the wrong direction. "Wrong Way" Roy was tackled on the 1-yard line by his own quarterback, but the subsequent safety Cal-Berkeley gave up yielded an 8-7 win for Georgia Tech. If nobody tackles Mr. Taylor's proposal on its way to the end zone, the same fate may befall wind farms in Clayton. And Mr. Taylor will have instantly changed from being a staunch supporter of wind power to the hero of the antiwind folks.

Twice in the past week, school district boards of education entered into illegal executive sessions to deliberate difficult budgets. Twice in the past week, taxpayers in two north country school districts have been betrayed by their elected school officials and their highly paid school administrations.

In Massena, the board entered into executive session to discuss budget deliberations that included painful cuts in both programs and personnel. Their rationale: “personnel” was the topic of discussion. Unfortunately, state law does not actually permit the broad rubric of personnel as a legitimate topic of an executive session – it must be limited to “the medical, financial, credit or employment history of a particular person or corporation, or matters leading to the appointment, employment, promotion, demotion, discipline, suspension, dismissal or removal of a particular person or corporation.”

In budget deliberations, boards of education are not dealing with the issues of individuals, although the final impact of a position cut is extremely personal. The boards should be cutting positions based on class sizes, program needs and overall, districtwide considerations. If they are actually making decisions based on “matters leading to…removal of a particular person”, they are pretty clearly not trimming the budget, they are getting rid of someone they no longer want as a district employee, and violating both state tenure laws and union contracts. If they are indeed making position cuts based on programming and educational needs, then they are not discussing removal of a particular person.

Beyond that, while the board and administrator were discussing position cuts, they were also discussing general budget matters, and there is nothing that is more the public’s business than a school district’s annual spending plan. It is absolutely essential that discussions on public budgets be made in public. By hiding behind the spurious cloak of personnel matters, the board shut the public out of arguably the most important, and most important to be public, matter the board will discuss in any given year.

In Brasher Falls, St. Lawrence Central School’s board entered into executive session to discuss a budget that is even more dire than Massena’s. Included in that budget, in addition to the loss of 18 positions, was a tax levy hike of 14.3 percent, meaning a tax-bill hike of $200 for the owner of a property assessed at $70,000. This is an enormous increase, unmatched this year across the north country. Yet none of the public heard the deliberations among board members on this dire spending plan because, it’s superintendent told a Johnson Newspapers reporter, the board would be discussing “personnel.”

Elected officials in our towns, villages and school districts need to recognize this: when they were selected to represent us in these positions, we expected them to act in the interests of their constituents, and we expected them to do this under the laws that govern their behavior. When municipal and school boards treat the open meetings law with casual contempt, they treat the people who elected them with contempt. We actually expect them to follow the law.

While decisions they make may not be politically expedient or universally popular, the decisions and the deliberations on them should be open to the public. It’s one way, for example, that we can be sure they’re acting in our best interests and making decisions based on the public good, not their individual gratification.

As members of the press, we have an obligation to challenge violations of the open meetings and freedom of information laws. As members of the public, so do you. Don’t let your elected officials get away with shutting you out of the public business. As exemplified by events in Brasher Falls, the stakes are too high.

Hug a teacher today.

Why? Because teachers are probably the best bargain in public employment, although you wouldn't know this if you've been following the unfolding farce in Wisconsin or listening to the drumbeat on Fox news.

The rap against teachers is that they are feeding high on the public trough, with (allegedly) exorbitant salaries and outrageous benefits. And they only work nine months out of the year!

The fable far exceeds the reality, however. In statistics from the state Education Department from 2008, the average salary range for all north country school districts was from $43,000 to $55,000. With a few notable exceptions (Indian River sort of stands out), the schools with higher average salaries were generally those with more long-term teachers, and those with lower averages tended to have younger staffs.

However, since New York requires teachers to obtain masters degrees, the average college schooling of all NNY school teachers averages above five years. So when a young teacher starts out with his or her $30,000-something salary, they are facing repayment for whatever they had to borrow for their $45,000 four-year degree and their $12,000 masters (and that is if they got their degrees through the SUNY system; private and out-of-state degrees can be double that, or more). If they borrowed a third of the cost of their education, their debt, before they draw a paycheck, is around $20,000.

So ask yourself – how many private sector jobs that require masters degrees pay on average less than $50,000? To put it another way, how many people with masters degrees expect, at midcareer, to be making $48,000 to $50,000? If you said damned few, you would be guessing high.

In the Wisconsin state house and on Fox News, the claim is that teachers need to be beaten back in salary and benefits because their averages exceed those of the "common" residents of the states in which they work. Not only is this not necessarily true, when measured against education levels, it is demonstrably false. Other than in the area of health insurance, teachers are well behind the pay for their level of education. And teachers can hardly be blamed for their pension costs, because they are in the state retirement system and their benefits are similar to those of county maintenance men and state Department of Health inspectors and the sprawling public employment spectrum across New York.

If there is one area where teachers may deserve at least some of the whipping they've been getting is in health insurance benefits, where they enjoy the highest benefits at the lowest personal cost, when compared to their private sector counterparts. In the private sector, health insurance has become so expensive that there are virtually no companies who have not responded by lowering benefits and increasing worker costs. In the public schools, teachers' unions have fought hammer and tong to limit worker costs of health care, in many cases avoiding entirely employee contributions to policy costs and keeping co-pays far lower than the private sector. And frankly, this has hurt public perceptions of teachers.

Teachers would do well to agree to concessions on health care, at least until the country as a whole wakes up and decides to do something about that issue. And the state would do well to rethink its retirement system, because across the board that cost is nearly out of control. The former will require that teachers understand that in some cases, the decision to compromise does far more good than it costs. And for the latter, it will require that a Legislature and governor man-up and tackle a difficult task, rather than giving it lip service and then burying it under a political rug.

That aside, however, it is impossible to deny that our children are in good hands with our teacher corps, and the cost of that corps is far from unreasonable. The job isn't easy, its rewards can be fleeting and dealing with the unfair criticisms must be enervating. So give your child's teacher a clap on the back and a big smile. The job is tough enough as it is.

With little more than a ripple of opposition, the St. Lawrence County Legislature has approved spending $20,000 to help pay for the selling of the long-dreamed-of Rooftop Highway.

And indeed, if you read the most recent piece of propaganda that was distributed, it is SO much more than “your grandfather’s rooftop highway”! There will be, if you can believe the literature, a railroad running between the northbound and southbound (or is it eastbound and westbound?) lanes. There will be a parallel “multipurpose recreational trail” created so that snowmobilers and ATV enthusiasts can ride gaily from Watertown to Plattsburgh. And the new plan is to “utilize the corridor to connect the open access telecom networks in Watertown and Plattsburgh in order to achieve true system redundancy...” This latter must be something of a shock to the Development Authority of the North Country and SLIC Network Solutions, who are using federal money to do that right now, long before any pipe dream I-98 can even be approved.

The claim by the Northern Corridor Transportation Group is that the new interstate will cure just about every economic ill of the north country, defend motherhood and apple pie and offer up thick, juicy steaks cooked just the way you like ‘em! And it will do this by...creating a high-speed, limited access highway that will allow people to cut an hour off the time it takes to drive from Plattsburgh to Watertown by bypassing every village on Route 11 — and bypassing their gas stations and restaurants and commercial districts that now might at least attract some passersby.

Let’s take the most recent example of a completely new interstate in New York. In 1970, I-88 was created on paper, linking Binghamton with Rotterdam along the Route 7 corridor. It took 19 years of political activity and construction before the road was open from end to end, and it has now been a part of the landscape for 22 years. What has it done for the region between Binghamton and the Capital District?

Arguably, not much. This is a simplistic response, because the few manufacturing centers along its path — Sidney, Oneonta, Cobleskill — have business that are happier now than they were 25 years ago. But it has not exactly been a factory magnet for any of those places. Other towns along the way have barely maintained the status quo. Little places like Afton, Schenevus, Delanson and Duanesburg probably can’t point to any financial gains directly related to I-88. Lots of empty storefronts and closed motels dot Route 7’s smaller burgs and villages, and the population in the counties along the superhighway have remained stagnant through the two Census periods since the road opened.

So what is to suggest that Route 11 communities will benefit from any great influx of business? The citizens of any hamlets so unfortunate as to not have an interchange will be able to gather at the fence that guards the highway and watch big rigs and family vans and small sedans buzz by at high speed. The places that may benefit to the extent that existing business may become more likely to stay — Canton, and Potsdam and Malone — are unlikely to find a boom in new manufacturing facilities, for the same reason they don’t feel that surge now. No matter how you look at it, Northern New York is a hell of a long way from anything resembling a large market.

Consider this: if you were thinking of building a widget factory in this state (and why you would be considering that to begin with is beyond me), are you likely to say “Boy, with that I-98 built, we ought to put this in Malone!” How many widgets are you going to sell within 200 miles of Malone? Now move that widget plant to Schenectady, or Pittsfield, or Poughkeepsie — how many widgets are you going to sell within 200 miles of any of those places (think a factor of several times)?

The Northern Corridor group isn’t going to offer any of these points to consider. In fact, they have wallpapered Lewis County with brochures trying to get support for an interstate highway that almost certainly will be a minimum of 30 miles away from the county seat along Route 12. And a lot farther from, say, Croghan. While the I-98 proponents are saying the project includes a spur to Lowville and a spur to Massena, the chances of that are about the same as Mark McGwire getting into the Hall of Fame. Massena is too close to the proposed corridor, and Lowville is way too far away, for that to ever happen.

And none of this even considers the current political climate. Interstate highways are big government. They suck up tax dollars faster than the U.S. can print money. In this state, both the governor and legislature are cutting the money dedicated to existing highways — and education, and social services and aid to communities. Anybody really think they’re going to pour a few billion into a new interstate that will best accommodate the state’s only moose herd? When we talk about a new interstate, we are talking in the tens of billions of dollars. Would you rather have this highway — or have your kids educated? Because, in this decade of the 21st century, that is really your option.

Three clear-thinking St. Lawrence County legislators, Kevin D. Acres, R-Madrid, Mark H. Akins, R-Lisbon, and Daniel F. Parker, R-Potsdam, had the courage to vote against this complete waste of taxpayer money, even though they weren’t quite willing to come out against the concept. But they were wise enough to see that this particular expenditure would be better spent throwing a countywide hot-dog roast.

It’s unlikely there ever was a need for a rooftop highway. This region is what it is, and for it to succeed, it has to embrace that and build upon its strengths. It is a perfect place, for example, to try to attract Canadian businesses who can benefit in the trade game by having a U.S. manufacturing facility. Or to promote tourism (even its carp fishery, as bizarre as that may sound to the noncarp angler). Or to encourage firms that need only the Internet and a fast connection to locate here. It is, after all, the 21st century. And the 21st century isn’t about new interstates. It’s about new thinking.

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