St. Lawrence County legislators want the state Legislature to allow them to nearly double the county mortgage tax rate, to provide the general fund with up to a million dollars from a tax that sneaks up and bites you at a time when you're thinking about almost everything else. By boosting the tax from 0.75 percent to 1.25 percent, and keeping all of the increase for the county, legislators hope to see an additional million dollars in revenue.

This kind of request is handled through home-rule legislation, wherein sympathetic state legislators in both houses introduce a local-interest bill that, nearly all the time, skates through the Assembly and Senate, gets a quick sign by the governor and becomes law. At any rate, that's how local lawmakers think it should work.

But state Sen. Darrel Aubertine has not, over the course of his career in state government, been a rubber stamp for his counties. Twice, while in the Assembly, he refused to sign off on a Jefferson County sales tax increase, and changed his vote only when he and then-Sen. James Wright got the county to drop its 2 percent tax on home heating fuel. The Jefferson County Legislature grumbled, but the taxpayers definitely benefited in the process.

Now, Darrel is asking St. Lawrence County officials to show a united face in favor of this tax increase. This is vintage Darrel. And the Legislature has shown its unanimity in the request, but there is a little sticking point. County Clerk Patricia Ritchie, who collects the tax, is on the record opposing it. She sent Darrel a story in the Nov. 7 Watertown Daily Times to show him her position. In that article, she said, "I, like many other people, don't support raising any taxes and fees if possible….It's up to the Legislature if they decide to raise the mortgage tax, but I can't personally support it."

Now, members of the county Legislature are accusing Darrel of playing politics, because Patty Ritchie is almost certainly going to run against him in the next election. I find that position to be politically naïve, at very best. From this vantage point, it looks as though Ritchie is working very hard to stake her conservative Republican claim to the nomination. And while the Legislature is damning Darrel for dragging his feet, few of them are publicly castigating Ritchie for making them look like profligate wastrels while she is angling to come off as the white knight of the local right.

There are many who feel that a sitting state legislator should listen to his constituent counties and offer home rule legislation when it is requested. Offering the bill does not, after all, commit that legislator to vote for it. And Darrel may have enough evidence with the unanimity of the county Legislator to offer it. I suspect he will do so, when all is said and done.

But the county Legislature should be pointing their fingers at their own county clerk if they're going to claim political grandstanding. Patty Ritchie has been coyly inching toward a challenge against Darrel since her highly publicized but marginally important Internet campaign against, of all things, new license plates. Her not-so-subtle playing of politics is no longer cute – it's now just cold and calculating. And, obviously, if her county's financial health has to sacrifice in order for her to advance her political career – well, she's OK with that.

The state Senate Republican leadership had a "press availability" in Watertown to trash Gov. David Paterson's budget proposal, and to take a swipe at their local Democratic colleague, Sen. Darrel Aubertine. During their blitzkrieg, they suggested Paterson's version of fiscal discipline is not the solution to the budget deficit. Rather, they proposed, drastic reductions in taxes and fees would have New York up and running on all eight cylinders right quick.

While there was truth in what they said about New York being unfriendly to business, they failed to acknowledge that the real problem with the New York state Legislature is that it simply can't stop its own spending. The pork-barrel money that flows out of Albany continues unstanched, and only a significant amount of fiscal restraint by the Senate and Assembly will ever make tax and fee breaks possible.

Will that happen? No, not in the immediate future, and not in my lifetime absent a major voter revolt. Alas, that is unlikely when the legislators best at returning state money to their districts are frequently the best protected.

Of course, many small towns would be sunk without infrastructure grants and loans. Among state programs, the Clean Water Revolving Fund has brought potable water to thousands of households statewide. State highway funding is vital to our transportation network. Aid to cities like Ogdensburg is a vital element of local budgets. And there are many other important programs the state helps municipalities with.

On the other side of the coin, however, there are many programs, especially ones that send federal aid through state agencies, that leave me shaking my head. One of the most glaring is the federal transportation grants that have poured millions of dollars into the north country for walking trails. It's almost like the default award, the "parting gift for our guest", that towns and villages are grabbing at.

From Sackets Harbor to Massena, about $7 million in trail grants have been applied for in the past three years, according to Times archives. The cost of these trail projects range from $1.3 million a mile in Alexandria Bay, to $61,300 a mile for the Thousand Islands Land Trust. (Turns out they know how to get the most out of their grant money, by a long shot; the federal government will get their trail for $48,000 per mile in U.S. funds.)

What to me is the most bizarre grant application – one that has miraculously, to date, been denied – is a Clayton committee's request for $9.2 million to add biking/hiking lanes to 6 miles of Route 12E. I drove that route last fall and passed seven hikers and one biker in that section – without one penny being spent to "facilitate" their journey.

I agree that walking trails are a quality-of-life benefit. The problem is, many of the "trails" are proposed to utilize existing paths and sidewalks. The Alexandria Bay mile long trail, which will cost a dizzying $1.3 million, will use existing streets and sidewalks for well more than half its length.

I live in a village, and my wife and I walk frequently. We have used our car to mark out routes of various length, and if we want to walk two miles, we have a couple routes we can take, and a couple for a mile and a half, and so on. All of these routes utilize quiet village streets and sidewalks. I don't WANT my village to ask for money to do what I can do for myself.

The reality is, outside of a couple of streets in Watertown which, blissfully, have not been proposed as walking routes, there are no hamlets or villages in the north country that don't offer miles of varied routes for walkers because the roads and streets aren't so crowded that walkers are by and large in danger.

So, while our local elected officials hold their hands out for a few million in "trails" funding, our state slides toward bankruptcy and our Legislature continues its broken, dysfunctional ways. And everything stays the same, in good times and bad.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked you to help me try to make the Times a paper you're more interested in reading. My column ran both here on my blog, and in the pages of the paper. And you responded. I have to date responded to about 50 replies, and they're still trickling in. So to those of you who took the time to engage in a conversation with me about the paper, thank you.

There are some frequent themes in your replies. Most of you, though not all, think the Times is a pretty good newspaper overall. You compared us favorably to newspapers in Syracuse, Albany, Utica, Buffalo and Rochester, many noting the comprehensive national and world coverage we provide that has been slipping in many other daily newspapers. And many of you lauded our local coverage, with some telling me the Times is and should continue to be the "go to" site for news of Northern New York.

In other areas, however, you were brutally frank about your relationship with the Times. Several took issue with the paper's editorial pages, for various reasons. Many of you are unhappy that we reduced the opinion section by a page. One reader wrote "I miss the op-ed page. Here we have the opinions, whether you agree or not, of some of the best thinkers in this country and others and [now] you just do not have room." Another said "Now, the paper does not have the opinion page, limited editorial comments by local residents (and when there are editorials by local residents the editorials are dominated by a select few)." And a few of you criticized the newspaper's owners for their viewpoints. One reader wrote "I'm very disappointed in the paper's becoming such an obvious vehicle to spread Mr. Johnson's personal anti-wind power venom."

Many of you, though no one that I could discern who was under the age of 40, lamented the digitization of news and the move to instant gratification offered by the Internet. There is obviously a keen awareness among our readers of the challenge we face. One reader wrote "What I want to know is, if all the newspapers and network news fold, who will be paying the reporters then? If no one pays them and there are no more reporters, where are all these on-line news sources going to get their 'free' news in the future?"

Hard to hit the nail any more squarely on the head than that.

We learned a lot from your comments. A lot of you are unhappy with the new television listings and want us to go back to the old TV listings insert. Some of you don't like the three-section Saturday and Monday papers and want us to go back to the standard four sections. Some of you love our coverage of crime and police news, some of you hate it. As I noted above, many requested the return of the op-ed page.

And many of you offered creative suggestions. One reader suggested a monthly photography contest for readers, with the submissions run in the paper and on-line. One suggested the dedication of space to a weekly "green" section, with news focusing on the environment and how we can be more kind to it. Another was so pleased that I had asked for comments that he suggested we do that more regularly. And there were many other ideas that we are considering.

While management at the paper is reviewing all the letters, there are some things I think I can address that will not please everyone. A lot of you suggested we go back to an afternoon publication because the morning paper's news is "stale." This is a widely held perception that simply isn't true. Consider: you now receive your paper with events of the previous day and night (and the "and night" is important) at 6 a.m. Under the old schedule, we began printing the paper at 1 p.m. or thereabouts. That means that when you got it at about 5 p.m., news from the previous night's local meetings and events was nearly 12 hours older than when you're getting it now. As for national news, we would legitimately advance the stories by a mere six hours – from the time you get the morning paper, to noon when the paper was being put to bed. Not a lot happens in that period, meaning that rather than having national news that is perhaps 18 hours old, you were frequently getting news well more than a day old. Indeed, throughout the industry, the trend to morning publication has been driven by an effort to keep the news fresher and more competitive with television. That is largely lost by the Internet-driven news cycles of today.

I also have to say that returning to larger sections and restoring things like the TV section are unlikely to happen. To remain profitable, newspapers have had to do a lot of rethinking of how we do business. The cost of newsprint has well more than doubled since I started in this industry in 1972. The Times, like every other paper still going, has worked very hard to reduce this hard-copy cost. You might recall that the width of the paper – know as the web size in the industry – has been reduced noticeably from a few years ago. That has resulted in a significant cut in paper use with a minimal impact on news content. But more was needed. Reducing the number of pages we print is the most effective way to do that. The difficulty is to do that with the minimum impact on our readers, and I can testify that some of the decisions that have been made in regard to that have been extremely difficult for the paper's owners.

It was interesting to note, as well, that while I received immediate responses to the first publication of my request to you on my blog, the vast majority of the responses were generated after my column appeared in print. Clearly, there are a lot of devoted newspaper readers who are worried about the fate of newspapers in general, and this paper in particular. (One reader wrote "Basically I don't like the newspaper but keep getting it." I have no idea how to respond to that.) That so many responses came from the print edition says we have a lot of loyal readers. But nearly every one of you made a reference to the pressure we are feeling from the Internet.

Unlike the doomsayers, most of whom are found only on the Internet, I don't believe newspapers are dead. We will suffer retrenchment, we will suffer losses, but eventually, the perils of relying solely on the Internet to bring you the news are going to be more obvious to everyone. And I believe that the "information should be free" creed of the Internet is going to bump up against the reality that there is a cost to providing accurate information, and someone is going to have to pay that cost. Valid news organizations are going to exist, because they must. One of the most reasonable forms of that type of organization is newspapers. Offering our product both on the newsstand and online will eventually make us stronger. And when major information sources go behind a pay wall on the Internet, as the New York Times has announced it will do and as the Wall Street Journal already does, the Times will likely follow. And that trend could level off the abandonment of the printed newspaper, which would be good for everyone.

Meanwhile, I'll keep trying to do my part to bring you the best Watertown Daily Times we can produce. Now that you've engaged in a conversation with me, I invite you to continue it. Keep those cards and letters – and e-mails – coming; my mailbox is always open to you, and I'll respond to you all. And thanks for checking in.

The Jefferson County Industrial Development Agency has decided to play a game of political chicken with the county Legislature, essentially refusing to consider any of the requests made by legislators who are unhappy with JCIDA’s proposed Galloo Island Wind Farm payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement.

Members of the agency might want to hope this doesn’t turn into a game of Russian roulette. It’s a certainty, in a showdown between JCIDA and the Legislature, that the chamber with the bullet in it is pointed at the agency’s head.

By their response to questions and requests raised by legislators, it’s apparent the JCIDA board is unwilling to suggest any changes in the unusual PILOT agreement it has proposed for the wind farm’s developers. It remains at 20 years, a third longer than the standard 15-year term, it continues to offer a full sales tax exemption that will send ripples far beyond the three taxing jurisdictions affected by the PILOT and it continues the non-standard distribution of payments.

Many members of the Legislature are concerned that by offering the Galloo Island project a customized PILOT, it is inviting other developers of wind farms and other projects to demand special favorable terms for future projects. In fact, when the Legislature put the development of the wind farm PILOTs in JCIDA’s hands, it was expressly done to avoid agreements that may be all over the lot in terms of benefits to companies at the expense of taxpayers.

And make no mistake -- a PILOT agreement is corporate welfare paid for by local taxpayers. Some legislators have suggested spreading the PILOT’s payments out to other affected municipalities, as though such an arrangement would somehow share the wealth. All that would in fact do is deepen the pain for the host community. Under these terms, there is no host community benefit; there is only the ability of the host community to subsidize the developers already being subsidized by state and federal taxpayers.

As Legislator Scott Gray has pointed out, a recent offer by the Galloo Island Wind Farm developer to shorten the PILOT by two years indicates the county, town and school district will be leaving money on the table if the current proposal is adopted. Yet, JCIDA didn’t seem to get that. And it is obvious by its memo of explanation to the Legislature that it either doesn’t get, or chooses to disregard, the desire of many legislators to have a uniform PILOT agreement that can be applied to all future proposed wind farm developments.

JCIDA seems to be deeply influenced by Upstate New York Power Corp.’s constant message of urgency. The implied threat from the company is that without an immediate and favorable PILOT, it will go away, and the agency has almost turned itself inside out to accommodate the company’s request. This allows the supplicant to set the agenda, and puts the JCIDA and the taxing jurisdictions at a distinct disadvantage. The dissatisfaction with the PILOT largely is the result of that.

Now, the agency will force the Legislature to vote on a PILOT agreement that many members are not all that happy with. It has created a confrontation where none was necessary. Even if the measure passes, JCIDA will lose because it will have created ill will with a number of legislators. If it does not pass, the agency will look foolish. For JCIDA, this is truly a case of heads I lose, tails you win.

Massena, in recent years, has taken on the look of an aging boxer showing signs of too many blows to the face, a sort of punch-drunk demeanor that comes from having far too many disappointments and far too few successes. With the growing realization that the GM plant is almost certainly going to have to come down, the town has taken one more shot to the face that sends it once again staggering toward the ropes.

To be sure, there was no guarantee that the GM property would have found a willing tenant who could have restored some of the jobs lost in the past decade at GM and Alcoa. The hulking 800,000-square-foot plant is 50 years old, which is not perhaps old for a home, but is well up there in years for a manufacturing facility. It has subsurface pollution from a variety of sources, any number of which can kill you. And the best way to send goods manufactured there south into the U.S. is to go north into Canada, because the nearest limited access highway is Canadian 401. All of these things militate against finding a company to restore the 1,200 or so jobs GM was providing a decade or so ago.

When the building is demolished – I don't think if even applies any more – the real problems for the property really begin. With petroleum and PCBs permeating the soil beneath the plant, a cleanup will take years to accomplish. Alcoa, for instance, is 20 years on in its environmental cleanup. The process, for a site this large, takes years just to develop an acceptable remediation plan, years of testing and studies and modeling and applications to state and federal agencies that will oversee the process.

Take some examples from St. Lawrence County. The Jones & Loughlin site has been idle for decades, and a combination of no money and no remaining responsible parties has kept any measurable progress at all from being made there. Or look to Ogdensburg, where several riverside sites, such as Diamond International, have lain fallow for years because of the difficulty of putting will and money together in one place to get environmental cleanup done. Judging by these markers, even if the GM plant is blown up this week, it will be decades before the site is clean enough to develop.

Unlike the Jones & Laughlin site, where owners have long since ceased to exist, the GM property has a putative responsible party. But because of the federal bailout of the carmaker, the responsible party is really just a shell company, supported by U.S. taxpayers. GM, with the blessings of the federal government, left just enough money in Motors Liquidation Co. to be able to present the impression it could clean up its messes. It cannot. The cleanup of the Massena site (and while this is my prediction not yet backed up with hard facts) could be more costly than the assets provided to the liquidation company to clean up ALL of the abandoned GM sites. GM has closed 21 U.S. factories in the past 10 years.

Meanwhile, Massena and St. Lawrence County take the double hits of hundreds of lost jobs and a precipitous decline in tax revenue. While the plant is now assessed at $12 million, it's highly unlikely the company would not have been successful in its ongoing attempt to get the property's assessment down to $3.75 million. If the plant is responsible for 75 percent of the total assessment, that means that what is really at risk in the near future are the taxes on $2.8 million, not $9 million. Still, the blow to the town, school district and county will be severe, at any assessment level.

Massena is discovering that low-cost power, while a powerful incentive to business, is not the be-all and end-all lure to industry. In a nation where manufacturing continues to be a smaller and smaller component of the economy, sites like GM continue to fade in appeal. Add to that the problem of location, and you begin to see the size of the hill local industrial development artisans have to climb.

Massena will go on. Alcoa has recently signed a commitment to stay put and to upgrade its facility there, and in fact, the example GM is presenting might make the aluminum maker even more resolved to keep its operations going, given the cost of shutting them down and paying for the cleanup of the mess that is left behind. Curran Renewable Energy may be pointing the way to future business ventures, relying as it does on green energy and locally produced raw materials to manufacture its end product. And maybe, if the world economy continues to improve (and the U.S. dollar remains weak against Canada's currency), some Canadian firms will decide a plant just across the river makes business sense.

But for now, things aren't improving much if they can be said to be improving at all. The demolition of the GM plant will, in the end, be largely a symbol of Massena's hardscrabble life, but it won't have the effect that it might have, given the plant's condition and the assessment appeal GM was already undertaking. Still, when old-time Massena residents drive by the old plant, the gaping maw that is left when the plant is torn down is going to tear a hole in their hearts. And that kind of symbolism is bad for the soul.

Thanks to a tip from a Henderson resident, Times reporter Sarah Haase on Monday discovered that the state comptroller's office was about to force the new Henderson Town Council into an illegal executive session. With some digging, the Times found out that the comptroller's Bureau of Audit and Control does this regularly, all across the state.

An auditor from the state agency was to meet with the council in executive session to go over the recently completed audit of town finances. However, such a topic is not even remotely close to any of the permitted reasons for a closed meeting that are delineated under the section of Public Officers Law known as the open meetings law. The topic of discussion of such meetings is a financial review of town practices, essentially a critique of how a municipality collects, budgets and spends taxpayer money. If any subject should be open to public view, it is that.

It is true that sometimes, audits find fault with the actions of individuals. However, that fault is found in the performance of their public jobs and does not deal with the areas of personnel that are protected by law. Here is what the law allows government bodies to discuss under that topic:

Section 105 1-f. 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;

The comptroller's office is charged with protecting state taxpayers and with being a watchdog, if you will, of government action. Yet, according to Robert Freeman, executive director of the Committee on Open Government, state auditors not only encourage municipalities to violate state law, they virtually compel it. Auditors who are rebuffed when they request that a meeting be closed pack up their adding machines and leave without discussing their business.

The Henderson meeting didn't happen, according to town officials, because the efforts of the Times to cover the meeting made the auditor take the matter to a higher level for discussion. Now it's time for those at the higher level to do the right thing.

It's long past time for the comptroller to put an end to this nonsense. An audit is designed to expose municipal financial practices to the light of day. That can't very well be done under the cloak of night.

The new Henderson Town Council officially took the reins of town government Monday night, and found that the old board had left them a parting gift: It improperly hired an attorney to appeal an Appellate Court decision affirming the ruling granting the Mark Hopkins Performing Arts Center property to the Henderson Harbor Performing Arts Association.

What the old board did – led by former Supervisor Clyde Moore – was contract for the appeal and get it filed a week before the resolution to approve the appeal was given to the council for a vote. The agreement with attorney David P. Antonucci was improper, because it committed the expenditure of at least $5,500 in taxpayer funds without a vote authorizing the expense. It was backroom politics at its very worst.

The fact that three members of the council – Mr. Moore, David Perry and Carol Hall, who have formed a nearly insurmountable voting bloc for the past two years – subsequently pushed the resolution authorizing the appeal through only makes matters worse; it served notice on Henderson residents that the democratic process in their town was broken. But, I suspect, most of the town already knew this, since both Mr. Moore and Mr. Perry were handily voted out of office in November.

New Supervisor Raymond Walker quickly righted this situation. Acting with the new board, and without the presence of Mrs. Hall, the decision to appeal was rescinded. As it should have been. The issue of who owns the Mark Hopkins property was resoundingly resolved in not one, but two, levels of state Supreme Court. To further appeal, and pay the costs attendant to that action, was little more than paddling upstream in a flood. And it would have needlessly prolonged an issue that deserved to be closed.

There are still issues with the Mark Hopkins property. The building must come down, because no one in Henderson with deep enough pockets to renovate the dilapidated building will provide the funds to do that. Now, the performing arts group is going to have to get the building down, no inexpensive endeavor by any means. If they don't, the town can have it done and put a lien on the property for the cost, insuring it will be indemnified for its expense. The arts group has left itself in no enviable position despite winning its court case.

More importantly, at least judging by the new council's first official action, it appears that democracy may have returned to Henderson. As long as the new council keeps its actions transparent, and continues to vote with the best interests of the citizens at the forefront, a bright new day will have dawned in Henderson. And not a moment too soon.

It's a new year, leaving in the past a year that many would as soon forget as not. With the beginning of 2010 (twenty-ten? Two-thousand ten? 'Ten?), a lot of us have made resolutions, promises to ourselves to stop saying and doing the things we've always said and done.

My resolution, however, has nothing to do with personal goals. It is this: I resolve to help bring you a better Watertown Daily Times every day. My only dilemma is how to deliver on that promise.

I am at a loss to say, for example, what it is that is driving our readership (and, in fact, the readership of almost every newspaper in this country) downward. I don't know what it is that has made the Watertown Daily Times more marginal in the eyes of north country residents.

I don't think it's our effort to bring you the news. As city editor, my job is to oversee the daily local news report every day, editing all the local stories and finding a spot for them within the paper, and to oversee the wire editor, who selects and places news of the state, nation and world. If I were to do a year-end review, here's what I'd see:

The local report has seldom been stronger. We routinely present in excess of 30 local news stories a day, including those that go on page A1 and those presented in Currents. You'd be hard pressed to show me any daily newspaper of this size, or even much larger, that can match that. All of these stories are more comprehensive, with more facts, than the same stories presented on radio or television.

Likewise the wire section, where the most important stories of the day from the state, nation and world will be found, is more complete than almost any daily paper of our size, and much larger.

So what am I missing? Are you no longer picking up the paper because you don't think we have any news? Are you passing us by on the news rack because our cover just isn't that interesting? Are the stories too centered on government and not focused enough on people? Too many stories on sewer district #4 and not enough on that really interesting guy down the street that has a great story to tell or be told? I have considered all these things, and more, but I can't come up with an answer.

So to have even a remote chance of accomplishing my New Year's resolution, I need your help. Below this blog is a link to leave a comment. If you're bashful, under that all-too-jolly picture of the Santa look-alike is a link to send me an e-mail. Please avail yourself of this opportunity to let me know just what it is about the Times that makes you not so into us anymore. Just try to keep the language fit for a family audience. I'll respond to all the e-mails, and at some point I'll follow this up with a response to the comments.

It's your turn. Let me know what ails us. Help me make the Times better meet your needs.

Another wind tower has collapsed, this one in the Madison County Wind Farm in the town of Fenner. The nine-year-old tower collapsed Saturday night, apparently when power was lost to the tower. This is the second such collapse in upstate New York this year; in March, a tower collapsed in Altona, Franklin County, when it, too, lost power. Clearly, this issue is one that needs further study and one that should be giving pause to towns in the north country that are rushing to get permissive laws on the books for commercial wind farm development.

These two collapses are far from the only ones, however. In Denmark in 2008, a tower collapsed when the braking system failed and the blades spun out of control, eventually shattering the nacelle and sending debris well beyond the collapse range of one and a half times the tower height. In Oldenburg, Germany, a tower collapsed in November 2006 when a rotor shattered, bringing the entire tower down; large chunks of blade debris landed more than 200 meters – 660 feet – from the tower.

Wind farm advocates, especially in Cape Vincent, Clayton and Hammond, have blasted those urging tighter control of wind farm development for what they say is unreasonable setbacks from wind farms for other structures and for infrastructure such as roads and power lines. Yet, experience is beginning to show that in terms of safety, it is likely far better to err on the side of caution.

The Altona tower collapsed across an access road. Fortunately, no one was on that road at the time. And there was some good fortune in that the nacelle and the rotor bases landed in heavy woods, reducing the debris field.

The loss of power issue is one that should be of special concern to planning boards trying to develop wind farm regulations. When the power goes out, it appears, some of the built-in safeguards for windmills can be lost. As a result, it would not be unwise for municipalities to require backup power at windmill sites to make sure this doesn't happen here.

And any town that thinks a simple setback of minimal distance is adequate, consider this: if there is blade shear in a densely constructed area of windmills, the flying blades could hit other towers and result in more than one tower failure from a single incident. It is the domino theory of tower collapse.

Take heed, folks in Clayton and Cape Vincent and Hammond. The potential danger of tower failure in terms of human life and ruined infrastructure is far more real than the wind farm developers are telling you. This truly could be a case, in terms of setbacks at least, of less is far less – and completely inadequate.

School board presidents and school superintendents all over the state spent much of last week bad-mouthing Gov. David Paterson's decision to delay aid payments to schools to keep the state from running out of money while the state Legislature screws around with a budgets whose revenues don't come close to meeting its expenditures. Hands were wrung. Suits were filed. Dire predictions were made. Visions of barefoot pupils trudging through the snow were called up.

Oddly enough, few if any of these school officials measured the delayed aid against the often large federal lagniappes they received as part of the economic stimulus package. Take Watertown City Schools, for example, which won't immediately see $252,000 of its 2009-10 aid package. It has received $3.3 million in stimulus money, however, leaving it a mere $3 million ahead of what it had budgeted back in June.

Since the federal boost to schools was designed to ease any drop in state aid because of fiscal crises at that level, you'd immediately think to yourself, "Good idea. That plan worked." In fact, the federal government presumed state aid to schools might suffer for more than just this year, so the added aid was meant to cover a couple of bad years. As a result, many districts might have been able to stem the problems of decreased state aid through a couple of budgets.

Doesn't look good for that, though. A fairly comprehensive survey of how districts are using the federal stimulus Monday that appeared in Sunday's Times indicates the primary use of the stimulus money has been to create jobs. Indian River Central School leads the "let's take one-shot aid and create long-term positions" pack, hiring 17 new people with its $2 million in stimulus aid.

What? Are you KIDDING ME? New York already leads the nation in dollar spent per pupil, and its property taxes are already almost at the top, in a ranking where number 1 is not a good thing. Despite this, New York has no more to show for its public education than many states that spend far, far less. And yet, many districts out there are adding employees with this one-time aid, even though they have been warned repeatedly that the state is in truly dire economic shape and will not immediately rebound.

While the Legislature has shown over the past 20 years that it is loath to cut education aid, the state has probably reached the end of its financial tether. Like the homeowner who has refinanced and refinanced and suddenly found the cupboard bare and the mortgage payment missing, the state has spent and borrowed and used-one shot budget Bandaids as long as it can. Now the reckoning is upon us. And school aid is part of that reckoning.

The STAR program, for example, may come under the knife. While this was a direct rebate to property owners to soften the blow of school tax payments, it has had the net effect of allowing school districts to sneak added costs and personnel into budgets because the full effect of those increases hasn't been felt. Homeowners should consider just where their taxes would be if that rebate program is ended. I'll give you an example: I paid $1,.878.41 in school taxes in 2009; without the STAR rebate, I would have paid $2,267.65. That would equate to a shocking increase in 2010 if STAR has to be dropped.

So, really, is this the time districts should be adding teachers? Outside of districts affected by Fort Drum, enrollments are in decline. Test scores are neither in decline nor ascendancy. Schools that have been put on the "in need of improvement" lists are not prevalent here. More graduates go on to college than the national average. The statewide student-teacher ratio is 13.3 to 1 – ranking the state in a tie for eighth with Wyoming, in a nation with an average ratio of 15.5 to 1.

Given all this, are students going to benefit with additional hiring in our schools? Is anyone sitting back and saying "Is this the kind of spending that we can really afford to sustain?" The problem with creating new positions in the public sector is that once created, these jobs become the very devil to eliminate. Think, if you will, of the budget turmoil the controversial COPS program brought; it resulted in the hiring of thousands of police officers nationwide, almost all of whom stayed on the payrolls when the grant funding ran out in two or three years.

For those who survive on state aid, times are tough and getting tougher. Retrenchment and reinvention should be the byword for agencies and municipalities and school districts. New hiring and "spend it if you've got it" are not appropriate decisions, especially now. Unfortunately, a lot of north country school districts are ignoring that reality – and it is the taxpayers who will end up paying for that bad judgment.

Gov. David Paterson has finally given up on the state Legislature, realizing that the politicians so beholding to special interests are unable to function in times of fiscal crisis, and he has delayed payment of state aid to schools and municipalities that was due today. In doing that, he has gored the oxen of many special interests, and brought outraged threats of lawsuits from the state’s Association of School Boards and various teacher and public employee unions.

And that threat reveals exactly what state leaders are facing if they try to rein in runaway spending. The special interests that hold so much sway with the Legislature – many use the term “stranglehold” when they talk about the situation – are largely the reason the state has slowly sagged into a morass of fiscal quicksand. The more the politicians posture and preen, the deeper the state sinks into the swamp.

When people think of special interest groups, they often turn to business and industry – the tobacco industry, the drug industry. But groups in New York that hold some of the heaviest sway with both the governor and the legislature are the powerful teachers unions and the associations of school boards and school superintendents. While it might appear there are forces at cross purposes here, the reality is that these natural adversaries (think of negotiations for new teacher contracts) are a united front when it comes to how and what the state doles out in state aid to schools.

According to a Monday Bloomberg News Service story, “Aid to New York’s school districts, set at $21.9 billion in the beginning of the year, is the largest segment of the $133.2 billion state budget. New York schools spent $15,981 per pupil in 2007, the most of any state and 65 percent more than average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.”

It is within this reality that Paterson is trying to stave off bankruptcy for the state. Paterson is largely acting alone; to date, only Assembly Majority Leader Sheldon Silver has given Paterson any support, and that was couched with a veiled promise that withholding the aid is only a temporary measure – even though Paterson has said it might have to become permanent.

The issue of school spending deserves a major treatise of its own. What I want to point out here, however, is how Paterson, our unelected, underappreciated governor, is the only state political leader responding in any positive way to a crisis brought on by years of unrealistic spending and a suddenly dire economy that is not pumping scads of corporate and individual tax money into the state’s bank accounts.

In Sunday’s speech and press conference, Paterson pointed out that in the past two decades, the state has come to rely on Wall Street and the New York City financial industry that complements and supports it for its windfall income tax receipts. He sagely said that sound fiscal planning cannot rely on that to carry future revenue, noting the reforms that loom from the federal government and reports that the largest investment houses are planning to pay bonuses in the form of stock – a decision that will not result in any taxes for the state for many years.

Paterson, whose approval numbers have been far, far more dismal than his performance has warranted, is right now the only political leader in New York who is remotely willing to make structural changes in how the state operates. The Democratic party leadership, both statewide and in the Senate and Assembly, has a very, very short time to understand what they risk by continuing their head-in-the-sand routine. The Democrats in the Senate, who have a hard won, slender majority, are begging to make that majority last a mere two years. While their majority in the Assembly is too large to be threatened, a lot of incumbents could fall in the next election.

New York state is in dire straits, and only David Paterson appears to be willing to deal with it in any meaningful way. He is, as one of my colleagues noted, the only practicing adult in state politics. He understands that something has to give. His political colleagues in the Legislature, however, are unwilling or unable to break the ties to special interests to which they are so obviously beholden. And the only victims are the millions of taxpayers in New York.

By 11:05 a.m. on Jan. 28, the final chapter on Paul Lyndaker's dream of owning a major NASCAR-sanctioned auto racing track in New Bremen may have been written. At 11 a.m. on that day, there will be a sheriff's sale of the Adirondack International Speedway and surrounding property to satisfy a judgment in favor of Empire State Development Corp. Mr. Lyndaker, if the track is sold, ultimately will have lost his dream to one of the many, many arms of government that he so diligently solicited for money to fund his folly.

The track's history is written in two volumes – one dedicated to racing, one to business. The volume on racing shows a series of modest successes, as Mr. Lyndaker was in fact able to attract NASCAR races – small ones, and not often, but still – to his venue. The business story, however, is much more complex and in many ways, offers cautionary tales to those who go begging for corporate welfare, and those who dole public money out to private enterprise.

Let's start with the final chapter, assuming Mr. Lyndaker doesn't miraculously come up with the more than $400,000 it will take to save his ownership. The track is being auctioned because Mr. Lyndaker sought and received a $300,000 ESD job creation grant in 2002. To retain that money, the track had to build employment to 33 positions in two years. By 2006, when ESD started demanding a refund of its grant because Mr. Lyndaker defaulted on its terms, the track had eight employees. That is, according to Times records, the same number it opened with when it ran its first race in 2001. Now, that $300,000 is long since spent, the track has essentially no employees because Mr. Lyndaker cancelled the 2010 racing season a couple of weeks ago, and the track will be sold.

This isn't the only government lien against the property, however. Lewis County holds a $342,725 security position in the track that must be called if the property ceases to be used as a tourism destination. That lien stems from a disastrous adventure in 2003 in which Lewis County legislators, save two, did everything but form themselves into pretzels to get a $500,000 infrastructure repayment grant into the hands of the track. The scheme they hatched was so convoluted that Bruce Krug, the West Leyden legislator who is no longer in office, said at the time "This is nothing more than a political version of money laundering."

And it turns out he was right; a comptroller's office audit in 2005 said the money shoveled into Mr. Lyndaker's pockets was in violation of the state Constitution and forced the county to recover the $120,000 or so that hadn't been spent, and $40,000 from Mr. Lyndaker that had.

It is indeed ironic that Mr. Lyndaker's pending loss of his dream came not from this feat of financial legerdemain, but from a prior legal and unheralded grant given out by a state agency that many have long considered out of control. The ESD grant was perfectly legal, if ill advised. Yet the subsequent illegal payment provided him with almost $350,000 that was never recovered by either the state or Lewis County.

And Mr. Lyndaker, for his part, acted as a spoiled child, pouting and taking his toys home when anyone had the temerity to criticize him. In 2003, for example, he cancelled racing until the media and the county Legislature stopped picking on him. The media shrugged, but the Legislature responded by passing, 8-2, a meaningless and fawning resolution in support of Mr. Lyndaker and his track. And he said a couple weeks ago that he was cancelling the 2010 season because of high taxes and (he implied) unreasonable state Department of Health mandates. How boorish.

Mr. Lyndaker also managed to funnel a total of $17,500 into the campaign accounts of Gov. George E. Pataki and Assemblyman Ray Meier. His political machinations were exposed by Times columnist John Golden at the height of the illegal grant controversy, and the column was met by a scathing letter from Mr. Lyndaker impugning the writing but not offering any corrections of fact. It was a protest damned by its lack of refutation.

The Adirondack International Speedway history should be read by every state and local official who wants to promote the unfettered giveaway of taxpayer money to almost any scheme that wanders through the door. According to one former Lewis County official, Mr. Lyndaker sought and received about $2 million in public money to pour into his dream. And he got it with a business plan that any bank commercial lending officer would look at and say "You want to do WHAT?"

Now, the track will sit idle unless someone comes along with almost half a million dollars to clean up the state lien. The track also has property tax problems that will have to be addressed before the title is clear, including $85,985.89 from the past two years on the main parcel that will have to be paid by February to avoid foreclosure by the county.

In effect, this enterprise has been a financial disaster since its inception. Without the infusions of public capital, it isn't likely the track would even have been built. But that money has not served to save the business, nor to enrich Lewis County. A deeply flawed study of sales tax impacts was done in 2002 that brashly claimed that a major race at the track provided the county with $50,000 in sales tax revenues. That would have required, at a 3 percent local sales tax rate, that 8,500 spectators would have had to spend $1,666,667 in Lewis County – or $195 per person. And that included Lewis County and other north country residents who attended the race, and more than likely did NOT spend an additional $195 per person to attend the event. (That the Lewis County Planning Department put its name behind that study stands as a monument to self-serving political expediency.)

In reality, pouring public money into this venture was no more reasonable than funding a major league ballpark in Constableville or an aerodrome for dirigibles in Watson. If you build it, they probably won't come. Or at least not enough of them to make it pay. As long as public economic development decisions can include pipe dreams like this one, taxpayers are not going to get the kind of return on their dollar that they deserve. It’s a waste of money, and there is no longer enough money around to waste.

Everyone out there who EVER expects to see a nearly billion dollar entertainment complex in Brasher, raise your hands.

The project made headlines again Friday when we reported that the parcels that make up the proposed site are $35,000 in tax arrears for two years and will go through tax foreclosure and sale in less than five months.

The proposal has been out there for three years. While it has slightly changed shape, Johnson Newspapers writer Bob Beckstead reported this:

Mr. Dawson had also noted in September that officials were scaling plans back slightly. But the projected complex still called for a number of amenities including a 3/4-mile racing facility, a 1/4-mile sanctioned drag strip and a harness racing track with the possibility of paramutual betting and video slot machines onsite.

Mr. Dawson said they're also planning an 18-hole championship golf course with a skeet and trap shooting range, four or five upscale hotels and some "high-end retail shopping facilities."

One hotel could contain a water fun park that will be open 12 months a year, and they were also talking about an 8,500-seat hockey arena that could double as a convention center.

A year and a half ago, Times staff writer Chris Garifo reported this: According to an economic impact study, the project, to be developed over six years in three phases, will generate $195 million in direct and indirect spending during the entire construction period. The complex also will inject $165 million annually into the region's economy, create a net 3,480 jobs and result in estimated tax payments of $18.7 million at all levels of government.

Wow – the new Yankee Stadium developers didn't promise anything like that. In terms of dazzlement, at least in Northern New York, there isn't anything that dazzles more than 3,480 new jobs and an injection of $165 million into the local economy. (Well, maybe the 12,000-job pipe dream of building wind turbine parts in the old Massena GM factory. But we know that plan has no financial backing.) And the dangling of $18.7 million in tax payments will glaze over elected officials' eyes in less time than it takes to say the number out loud.

But, at what point does reality set in? Five hotels in Brasher? At a complex accessible on local highways? A championship golf course? In an economic climate in which golf courses all over the country are in severe financial distress? A hockey arena and convention center in a location that is a hundred miles from the two nearest cities of at least 100,000 population (and they're in Canada) and a three and a half hour trip from Syracuse, the nearest major U.S. airport?

And yet, Brasher officials refuse to admit that this tax foreclosure dims the prospects of what was always a dim proposal. Supervisor James J. Dawson Jr. has never publicly expressed any skepticism about this proposal. And indeed, he follows a long line of elected officials who have eagerly embraced every development proposal that has come down the pike.

If you look at the minor successes the area has scored in economic development, you see projects that seem to play on the region's assets, and don't ignore its deficits. Stream International and the chicken hatchery in Watertown had every chance to be successful because the city offers two things those businesses were seeking: a moderately priced and trainable pool of employees and a relatively low real estate cost. The major expansion of the Adams Great Lakes Cheese plant was possible because of the proximity of raw material – milk – and the willingness of the state to play a financial role. In St. Lawrence County, Clarkson University's high-tech initiative has yielded modest but measurable gains because the college helps to provide the technological assistance that companies it may draw will require and Newton Falls Fine Paper has found a niche market that it can use an existing facility and already-trained labor to fill.

Note the overarching theme here: Things that play to our assets are possible. Things that ignore our rural location, our transportation deficits (the nearest airport to Northway Island's property flies nine-seat airplanes in and out three times a day – there's your convention possibility) and our low population density don't tend to be successful.

I'm not sure of the solution. We can't, and probably don't want to, ban dreamers from our midst. On the other hand, it would be nice if we took a little more sanguine look at the dreams before we start full-fledged endorsements of them. In fact, it would be a great idea for north country officials to have a one-size-fits-all question to throw at people who come in here with grand or not-so-grand development ideas: Show me the money!

It's a little ironic that the village of Potsdam seems to be the cutting edge in the north country in studying the effects of dissolving the village and consolidating government into a single level. Ironic because it is one of the villages for which some argument can be made against dissolution, and ironic because there may not be a place in the region where the village and town governments have had so little in common.

For the past two years, village officials have castigated town government, primarily over efforts to secure new town offices. The confrontation has been embarrassingly public, with harsh words directed from the mayor toward the supervisor and town board, and general rancor distributed at will. Into this minimaelstrom step two village trustees – Stephen J. Warr, elected two weeks ago on a promise he'd force a serious study of dissolution, and Stephen Yurgartis. Both are ready to move the village into a position from which a public vote on the issue could become a reality, not just an idea.

There are a number of studies of dissolution recently completed or still going on across the state. One of note has been conducted in Seneca Falls, where village taxes have reached almost $17 per thousand assessed while town taxes outside the village do not exist because of the Seneca Meadows Landfill, which provides all the town-outside revenue the town needs. That study suggests dissolution, with police and highway services picked up by the town and no immediate reduction in municipal employment, would lower village taxes by about 50 percent and raise town taxes by a quite reasonable $4.50 per thousand. Town taxes could also be mitigated by state consolidation aid. (The village tax rate will be gone; the $8 per thousand figure comes from the town tax rate of $4.50 plus special district charges for lights, water, sewer and fire protection that now do not exist for village property owners.)

Potsdam is certainly a village where property taxes have become onerous. Its tax rate is similar to that of Seneca Falls, and when added to town, county and school district taxes, makes owning property in the village a very costly decision to make. For that reason, Yurgartis and Warr would do a great service if they moved the village to a serious dissolution study.

The dissolution of Potsdam would at first blush seem to be less important than, say the dissolution of Herrings or Deferiet or Rensselaer Falls – tiny villages that offer few services but still incur extra tax costs. Potsdam, after all, has a police department, the better to deal with issues created by the colleges and the size of the village itself. So the study by Seneca Falls is informative; it suggests consolidation of a village very similar to Potsdam would result in combined savings to taxpayers of more than $500,000 each year. And that presumes preserving almost all existing village jobs.

It's hard to predict what a dissolution study will show in Potsdam. While the state is pushing consolidation, the statewide organization of mayors is, unsurprisingly, quite opposed. You get the sense of the pet oxen that stand to be gored here; mayors and village trustees, absent your Yurgartis and Warr types, tend to fight against dissolution because, satrap-wise, it would eviscerate their political power. Taxpayers, on the other hand, are becoming more and more vocal about opposition to the status quo. The higher the local tax rate, the more vocal the opposition.

As of March, the rules of the game are changing for those taxpayers. At that point, a new law takes effect that will allow a petition of 10 percent of the electors of a village to trigger a villagewide referendum. If the referendum passes, the village has 180 days to develop a dissolution plan, which is subject to a public hearing and to a permissive referendum which would be triggered by another petition of 25 percent of the electors. With the new law in effect, village boards would be hard pressed to block dissolution efforts.

Potsdam will, in reality, be ahead of the curve if they quickly appoint a dissolution committee and commission a dissolution study. With such a group in place, the village could likely forestall a triggering petition at least until the study is complete. And with a study in hand, village residents would have concrete numbers before them to help them make up their minds.

Under the new laws, many villages are suddenly at risk – a reality for which the average taxpayer should thank his state senator or assembly representative. The ones that will avoid major political battles are the ones like Potsdam, which appears poised to get ahead of the new law with an independent study of the issue. The ones that will suffer are those that will be forced into a sudden dissolution plan and that will potentially be riven by not one, but two, referenda on an often emotional issue. Potsdam is acting like it is willing to go far the better route.

Rep. Bill Owens got a huge boost for his re-election campaign yesterday from an unexpected source – political foe Doug Hoffman, who put out a letter charging election fraud on the part of, well, the little demons running around inside that somewhat goofy looking head of his.

Hoffman's letter, seeking money from conservatives to enable him to challenge the results of the election he conceded to losing only two weeks ago, charged the Democratic Party, the liberal organization Acorn and, presumably, the Oswego County Board of Elections, with election fraud. He did this without a shred, not an iota, of proof.

In reality, the only acorns in Oswego County are produced by oak trees. And the Oswego County Board of Elections, like every other such body in New York state, is run equally by Democrats and Republicans, and has nothing to gain in an 11-county congressional district by cheating, or allowing others to do so.

Leveling criminal accusations against political opponents – and in Hoffman's case, even against political allies – is a serious action. You ought not do it unless you have some proof. When pressed on that issue by Times reporter Jude Seymour, a Hoffman aide rapidly distanced himself from the allegation and offered not a shred of evidence, even a hint of a third-party rumor, that the ballot process was tampered with.

A lot of conservatives are still frothing at the mouth over Hoffman's defeat, and making plans to turn that election around next year, in the regular election. Unfortunately for them, they've backed a candidate that has shown, and now, in defeat, continues to show, he is spectacularly unqualified to be in Congress.

In politics, as in bar fights, you'd better be prepared to back up whatever silliness comes out of your mouth. Hoffman's paranoid rant about Acorn and the little men who weren't there in the Oswego County elections office is going to be impossible to back up. And it will show him to be the small-minded, confused man that came out during the last campaign.

The conservatives probably ought to quietly take the saddle off Hoffman, brush him down, put him out to pasture and start looking for a new horse to ride next year.

With yesterday's counting of absentee ballots that pushed Urban Hirschey ahead of five-term incumbent Thomas Rienbeck, the three towns where commercial wind-development policy became something of a local referendum have sent a loud and clear message to wind farm developers and their rabid supporters: wind politics is local.

In Hammond, an incumbent who had served for 18 years and who was strongly in favor of wind farm development, Janie Hollister, lost by 50 votes to Ronald Bertram, a newcomer who promised to look at all sides of the local wind debate. In the Town Council race, two candidates running on Bertram's platform defeated two men who have urged a quick adoption of a permissive wind energy law that would open much of the town up to windmill development. Douglas Delosh and James Tague will join Bertram on the council.

In Cape Vincent, Mr. Hirschey won in a town riven by the wind debate. He is joined by incoming councilman Brooks Bragdon, putting two members of the Wind Power Ethics Group, the Cape's wind farm opposition group, on the Town Council.

In Henderson, the results are more subtle but the message was clear: people in that town are opposed to wind farm development. A new supervisor leading a reconstituted town board without question heard that message.

To put these elections purely in the context of pro-wind or anti-wind is a simplistic view, however. In both Hammond and Cape Vincent, residents spoke to the concern over conflicts of interest on the part of public officials, the speed with which wind ordinances were proposed and the lack of heed the elected officials accorded to wind-power opponents. If you don't think this interaction is a vital component of the dynamic between elected representative and voters, look at Orleans and Clayton, where there was no backlash vote and where, not coincidentally, the town councils have made sure the public has been involved in the process with community based committees formed to advise on wind-power decisions.

Hammond resident Brooke Stark assessed the town election and why the incumbent board was rejected in the Nov. 4 story in the Times: "They really have done a lot," she said. "But I think they got complacent and were not interested in educating the community about something they'd already made up their minds about. They wanted the wind law to go forward and that was that. People got fed up with that, and every time we felt that our voices were being shut down, it provided more impetus to get active."

Caveat emptor! While the wind power issue was at the core of this election, the arrogance of power was the nail that sealed the coffins of the defeated incumbents. To take it a tad further, Henderson voters, while vocal about not endorsing wind power projects in the town, were probably more sick of the chaos that reigned over the Henderson Town Council; out-of-control meetings that lasted four hours, a deputy supervisor who frequently appeared to be in charge, petty bickering over nearly every matter to come before the board and a supervisor locked in a legal battle with his own town over what is probably an illegal junkyard all made Henderson voters simply unwilling to endorse the status quo.

Now comes the challenge for the victors: you all have to find a way to respond to the voters' mandate. In Cape Vincent, a Town Council unable, theoretically, to even vote on any wind-power-related issues has nevertheless bent over backward to ease the path for two wind developers. Actions taken by the lame-duck board between now and Jan. 1 will set the tone for the incoming council. Mr. Rienbeck appears determined to ram a wind-power zoning law through in the next six weeks, even though three of his fellow councilmen have acknowledged conflicts of interest because of existing agreements with wind-farm developers. The only way a zoning law can be enacted is if at least two of those three violate ethics codes to vote on an issue they have promised not to vote on.

If that happens, it is almost inevitable the town will be taken to court, the attorney general will be asked to undertake an investigation of how the law got forced through and Mr. Hirschey and his board will have to figure out how – and in fact whether – to defend the town against the actions. It's going to be a mess and it's going to be expensive. And it's needless.

In Hammond, the new council would do well to immediately return its wind policy to a legitimate, inclusive citizens committee with the promise to take their recommendations seriously. If those recommendations and subsequent public hearings end up severely restricting wind-farm development in Hammond, well, the people will have spoken – just as it should be.

And in Henderson, where the looming battle is over the transmission lines from a wind project that the town has absolutely no control over because it's in Hounsfield, the challenge will be to refocus the council so that it has the wherewithal and political resolve to respond in the way its citizens demand. A focused and rational governing body would be such an improvement in Henderson that an unsuccessful but well-waged battle against the transmission lines would no doubt be a huge relief to most Henderson residents.

This election sent a powerful message about the relationship between the elected and the electorate. It would be good if everyone was listening.

(Thanks to updated information provided by Paul Warneck, director of the Jefferson County Real Property Tax Office, I have updated this blog post.)

At a public hearing on the Galloo Island Wind Farm payment in lieu of taxes deal, no one from the town of Hounsfield raised a voice in support of or in opposition to a plan that will bring $2.14 million annually to the county, town, Sackets Harbor Central School and Jefferson County IDA. You have to wonder why.

The deal, after all, will give the wind farm a 45 percent break on taxes that would be due without the PILOT. On an assessment of $400 million (the project will cost at least $500 million to build), from a total property tax bill of $4.8 million, the school district alone would receive $2 million a year. The district's budget for this school year is $7,900,835. Hmmm. Is someone giving away the farm?

Likewise, the county would receive $2.5 million and the town $245,700 if full taxes were paid. Under the terms of the PILOT, the county will receive $750,000. Only the town gains; it will receive $321,000 under the PILOT but would get only $245,700 under full taxation. And the town gains only because the school district agreed to concessions in its share of the pilot.

There is, however, a caveat: If the town were receiving full taxation, the additional taxable assessed value created by the wind farm would lower the tax rate for everyone by 58 percent -- from $2.56 per thousand to $1.08 per thousand. On a house assessed at $125,000, the town tax would drop from $320 to $138 -- a savings of $185. Similarly, for Hounsfield property in the Sackets Harbor Central School District, the tax would drop from $22.28 per thousand to $8.94 per thousand. Taxpayers won't realize those savings, however, because under the PILOT, the property is assessed but not counted toward the tax levy.

Then, of course, if you're starting to ponder the full cost of corporate welfare, you can add this into your philosophical equation: by being certified by the IDA, which will take title to the wind farm for the duration of the PILOT in order to grant these benefits, the developers will avoid paying almost $23 million in sales and mortgage taxes. Almost half of that would have gone to the town and county. While that is concentrated over the initial year or years of the project, it's still a chunk of money.

And don't forget the 30 percent of project costs the federal government will subsidize the project if it gets in under the wire for stimulus funding (which is the reason this is all being rushed to get done), and an accelerated depreciation schedule from the IRS that will allow a 40 percent depreciation in the first year, and full depreciation over five years.

Add it all up, and you can see just how much this "private sector" developer will rely on federal, state and local taxpayers to permit him to make profits. Especially galling is the extent to which local officials, especially the IDA, are doling out hard-won tax dollars to bring, at best, a handful of jobs to the region, and a short-lived flurry of construction money. And with the employees of this project likely living on an island miles out in Lake Ontario, it's not as though they're going to be pouring their wages back into Sackets Harbor or Dexter or Watertown. It would be interesting, indeed, if the IDA were called upon to tell us the cost per job for this project: could it reach $1 million?

Most PILOT agreements give a graduated tax break that never exceeds 75 percent and which drops over time to zero. This agreement keeps the break, although adjusted for inflation, throughout its 20 year lifetime. And there is no host community component to this; at least if Hounsfield were getting a landfill, it would receive compensation unique to the siting. As it is, the town is going to be the red-headed stepchild of this agreement. And Jefferson County won't be far ahead of the town.

If this is the model for future wind farms in Jefferson County, we're in big, big trouble. If the marketplace plus controlled federal subsidies can't sustain wind development, it should not be the obligation of local and state taxpayers to foot the bill for the developers' profit margins. We all seem to be forgetting this: this is not an industry we're courting to come here. It's coming here because here is where the wind is. It's not as though we're competing with a

site in central Ohio for this.

Next time there's a public hearing on a wind farm PILOT agreement, it wouldn't hurt if those of you who think this model is broken and should be tossed out would show up and speak your mind.

Lost in the noise of last week's election was a release from the office of U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer that called for stiffer penalties for domestic abuse, and more money to support programs that fight those crimes.

In his release, he noted that Jefferson County had the third highest rate of domestic violence reports of counties outside of New York City, at just a little over 14 incidents per thousand people. At that rate, almost 1,700 cases of domestic violence are reported to police each year. And this is the number of cases that are reported – it's difficult to estimate how many remain untold. Estimates of unreported domestic violence range from 50 percent to as high as 90 percent, when emotional abuse is factored in. But at a rate of 50 percent reported cases, that means there could be almost 3,500 incidents of serious domestic violence in Jefferson County each year.

Today, as you read this, a man is in the Metro Jefferson Public Safety Building, awaiting further action on a murder charge stemming from the death of his former girlfriend, Annette Vazquez. Ramon Robles-Ruiz is charged with strangling her and dumping her body beside a remote road in Theresa. And this is just the most visible incidence of domestic abuse; not a day goes by, it seems, without some arrest on a domestic incident reported in this paper.

The problem appears most acute in Jefferson County. In St. Lawrence County, the rate, at 5.58 cases per thousand, is 60 percent lower, and Lewis County's rate is only 6.42 incidents per thousand, more than 50 percent less. That raises one question: why is Jefferson County so violent?

It would be extremely easy to attribute it all to Fort Drum; blame it on the soldiers. That, however, is a straw man argument. It allows local officials to sweep the whole issue under the rug, lay the blame at the Army's door and move on. That is a huge mistake.

Mental health experts generally agree, based on all the data that has been presented, that one in three women worldwide will suffer violence at the hands of an intimate partner in her lifetime. When you see one region where the numbers bulge outside of the curve, like Jefferson County, you have to start wondering why.

While Fort Drum presents unique challenges – soldiers returning from long wartime deployments frequently find coming home difficult in more ways than one – it is only a part of the overarching problem. You can't avoid wondering if the problem in Jefferson County is somehow made worse by public policy – or a lack thereof. Is the district attorney's office diligently prosecuting these cases? If so, are local judges consistently meting out punishment? And are police adequately answering these calls, which is to say, are they following the law and making required arrests?

Of those three, it's most likely that the police are, in fact, doing their job. If they weren't, it's unlikely the Jefferson County numbers would be so high. The DA and the courts, however, are a lot harder to judge.

One of the problems with the fragmented court system in this state – scores of local courts with dozens of local justices, meting out justice with widely varied backgrounds and prejudices and less than comprehensive legal training, in some cases – is that there are many, many serious misdemeanors, including many domestic violence cases, which are prosecuted in local court. Hence, justice and punishment can be all over the lot. A judge in, say, Adams, might treat domestic violence cases completely differently than a judge in Alexandria. In fact, two judges in the same town might have different views of domestic violence.

If you think I'm making this up, consider how long it was considered something less than a crime if a man had to, from time to time, give his wife an "attitude adjustment." As barbaric as the concept is, many misogynists out there still advocate that "right."

And this issue can't be addressed unless the district attorney's office is called into question. Cindy Intschert has not gained a reputation as a particularly aggressive prosecutor. It appears, based on anecdotal evidence, this district attorney's office is often ready to wheel and deal with defendants, which might be OK on a case by case basis but probably shouldn't be the rule with the truly dangerous misdemeanors, such as domestic violence and driving while intoxicated.

Family Counseling Service of Northern New York and the Victims Assistance Center of Jefferson County see the effects of domestic violence every day. For Family Counseling, it revolves around trying to end domestic violence by changing patterns of behavior. For the Victims Assistance Center, it’s a matter of immediately removing victims from harm's way. There has to be an in-between here, a consistent platform between rescue and reform. That has to be the courts.

As long as the fractured court system of this state remains as it is, local judges need to get on the same page when it comes to meting out justice in domestic violence cases. No one should be in danger from family members in their home, and judges need to do whatever within the law it takes to end that danger – whether it's mandatory counseling, or a combination of counseling and jail. And the district attorney's office has to shepherd these cases through the court system with vigorous prosecutions, to insure the law is complied with and justice is served.

Domestic violence should not continue as our dirty little secret. We should all be demanding action that will reduce its prevalence – and thus keep families safe within their homes.

It's morning in the north country. It almost feels like we should have a hangover from this acrid, acrimonious political binge we've been more or less forced on. But if you're like me, you feel refreshed and relieved – the campaign is over, the parade of national politicians, pundits and panjandrums has melted away and we return, once again, to the relative obscurity of being a rural region in the far northern reaches of the state.

And not a moment too soon. I am sick to death of hearing about the 23rd Congressional District of New York every time I change from one TV news station to another. In the past 10 days, the attention has become circus-like. And just about every report about the district suggested that its residents were living in some kind of petri dish of modern political experimentation, that our congressional election was, in fact, a referendum on both President Obama's leadership AND on whether the Republican Party should capitulate to the strident demands of its far right fringe.

I'm proud to say the district's voters made a resounding statement with its vote – leave us the hell alone and let us elect our own representatives. Politics, Dick Armey not withstanding, is local. Even if we end up electing an idiot, he's OUR idiot. In the case of yesterday's congressional election, I'm pretty happy to say we didn't elect an idiot – Bill Owens is an intelligent nondemagogue who will do a fine job representing us in Congress. Against all odds, in a large congressional district with a widely varied population, he became the first Democrat in a century and a half to win in Northern New York.

And the incredible, irrefutable irony is this: if the right wing Republicans and the nattering conservative pundits and the self-righteous single-issue religious groups had kept their meddling hands out of the pie, we would be sending yet another Republican to Washington. Without the assault from the right, in a race that contained only our own DeDe Scozzafava and Bill Owens, DeDe would have preserved the seat for the GOP. Last night's results prove that the core northern counties – Jefferson, St. Lawrence and Lewis – are the mortar that holds the district together, and those counties are Scozzafava Country. In an Owens-Scozzafava election, she would have won handily in those three counties and in heavily Republican Oswego and Madison, and a far more gentlemanly race would have ended up DeDe 56 percent, Owens 44 percent.

So the 23rd district election did send a message to the Republican Party, though not the one intended by those who urged Doug Hoffman to buck the local committees and launch a third-party campaign. No, the message is this: let local politics remain local. As Don Rumsfeld would probably tell them, you have to run with the candidate you have, not the candidate you might hope or want to have. Without the outside meddling, the makeup of Congress wouldn't have been changed with this election. But the neocons and the bizarre Palin Wing of the GOP couldn't keep their hands to home, as my grandmother would say, and now the state's congressional Republican caucus is down to just two.

Thank you, voters of the 23rd. And to those who forced this ridiculous situation, I say this: What a bunch of maroons!

There was a time, not so long ago, when town officials both elected and appointed felt a necessity to comport themselves with dignity, to try to uphold their oaths of office, to set an example through word and deed for their constituents. It was sort of what we expected from the people we put in office, and the people that they appointed to unpaid, volunteer posts.

But somewhere along the line, all that stopped. Somewhere, local officials got it into their heads that a town post was a good path to take for personal enrichment. And I have to admit, the sudden proliferation of proposed wind farms has brought this out in spades.

In October, Oswegatchie Councilman Kenneth Wilson let people know he is unashamed of using his vote to cash in on the, er, windfall. The Times reported recently: "What's the big deal?" Mr. Wilson asked when contacted Thursday. "These things are coming and you're involved. I have nothing to hide and no intention of recusing myself from voting, unless there's a legal issue, at which time I would seek advice from our legal counsel."

Huh? Ken doesn't see any problem voting in favor of the wind farm that's going to line his pockets. Wow. Way to go, Ken — at least you're up front about it. Most people give at least a passing effort to hide that from the voters.

Now, in Hammond, a Planning Board member, Crayton Buck, has distinguished his office by tearing down a political sign in favor of an anti-wind-farm slate of candidates and, well, urinating on it. Crayton is 78, and if I were him, I'd seriously consider using an arteriosclerosis defense.

Crayton was captured in the act on one of those nifty trail cameras that are primarily used to get candid shots of wildlife afield. In this case, the Buck was caught red-handed. Or, you know, red-some-other-body-parted. When the property owner looked at his pictures, he called the cops. And Crayton was (I'm sorry) outed — and ticketed.

You might expect this kind of behavior from someone in their teens. Kids, after all, will be kids. Crayton is well beyond that excuse. He oughta know better, as they say around the kitchen table.

The whole sordid incident points out just how divisive the wind power issue is. It has become the new landfill-siting fight of the 21st century. Unfortunately, the wind power brouhaha is tinged with the greed factor, as landowners who might host wind towers see nothing more than dollar signs. And whether intentionally or by facilitous accident, it has been complicated as wind-farm developers have started cutting checks for public officials.

In Hammond, as in Cape Vincent and Lyme and Orleans and Henderson and Clayton, there is significant blowback against wind-farm proposals. A lot of people, especially those along the lake or the river, don't want the visual pollution attendant to these 400-foot-tall behemoths, and the flicker and the noise and the radio-signal interference. They have legitimate concerns that town officials should objectively consider. It's hard to be objective when you've got a $5,000 check burning a hole in your pocket.

Meanwhile, Crayton Buck will head to court Thursday, to answer his charge. And no matter how you feel about his action in light of his position on the Planning Board, he will always have this: he is the 2009 poster boy for prostate health.

I just hung up on my 307th political "robo-call", this one from some downstate or out of state Republican campaign organization that didn't ask me to support their candidate – it told me what a pair of bozos Doug Hoffman and Bill Owens are.

This election to replace the departed John McHugh has morphed from a relatively innocuous upstate congressional race into what some people are apparently seeing as a referendum on Democratic leadership in Washington. Both the Republican and Democratic congressional campaign committees have poured outrageous amounts of money into the battle, usually without any consultation with their candidates.

And the race is also becoming a mini-referendum on factions within the Republican Party; the far right wing of the GOP, stung by recent repudiations at the polls, can try to reclaim control of the party if only Hoffman can beat DeDe Scozzafava. Imagine – an election within an election. Sounds like a Spike Jonze movie plot.

Unfortunately, the voters across the 23rd District end up being the losers. No one is really talking issues – they're too busy spewing party-line fooferaw, signing inane pledges and ducking the press who are trying, God bless 'em, to get the candidates positions on record. Might as well try to lasso a barn swallow.

"Politics as usual, the people be damned" could be the theme of this election, and while it would be nice to think this is an anomaly, you only have to cast back to either of the elections that put Darrel Aubertine in the Senate, and kept him there, to realize that partisan politics has grown far larger than the people the parties putatively represent.

And it's galling that serious efforts by journalists – I'm thinking immediately of Jude Seymour's Times story that pretty much supported Bill Owens's job creation claims – are being turned on their ear by party hacks who use headlines without any context to claim this or that egregiously incorrect position about their candidate, or about their opponent.

I don't care who wins this election. I'll probably break down in the voting, er, station, and vote for one of them. But I won't like it. I will come out of there knowing exactly why I register no party affiliation – I don't like rubbing elbows with a bunch of slimy, unscrupulous characters.

This week has been a real bad day for Dede Scozzafava.

It started a couple nights ago, when police were called to, of all places, the annual Lewis County Republican Dinner, a spot not necessarily on a par with, say, moe.down for suspicious activity. They were called by candidate Scozzafava’s husband, who wanted police to remove an obnoxious reporter from the vicinity of his wife. (No, it wasn’t Steve Virkler.)

Then on Wednesday, candidate Scozzafava marched down to the Doug Hoffman headquarters to give a sort of Twitterized press conference, and when the film hit the nightly news, there was Dede in a tasteful, muted salmon suit absolutely surrounded by a sea of bright red Hoffman for Congress posters. I don’t know what she was saying; all I could do was stare, mouth open in amazement, at this visual. I’m certain that about half the people who saw it thought she was quitting the campaign and throwing her support to the Conservative Party candidate, because that was certainly the image that lingers.

Any moderately competent political campaign manager will agree that on the campaign, you have to control your environment. It just doesn’t appear that the folks in charge of Dede’s run for John McHugh’s 23rd district congressional seat have constructively learned this. At the dinner, they obviously took the concept of control to its most absurd level. Even if a reporter is a complete dirtbag, it is seriously bad form for a candidate’s spouse to try to have him arrested. If Dede had taken this ambush journalist head on and answered his questions or demurred, it would have been an inside-politics blog post the next day. Calling the cops let the entire cadre of right wingnuts and all the Democrats start chattering about Dede’s disassociation from the First Amendment.

On Wednesday, geez, what was anyone thinking? The huge potentials for disaster with a photo op at the opponent’s headquarters had to be obvious to SOMEONE in the Scozzafava camp, didn’t it? No? Are you kidding me?

It appears that, as a congressional candidate, Dede is a fine assemblywoman. There is a very good possibility that her popularity will fade from first, when the first poll came out, to third on Nov. 3. She could be beaten by both Hoffman and Bill Owens, the Democrat. Owens may win simply because he has been astute enough to keep the campaign blood spatters off him.

Dede is a legitimate candidate. She is smart, she has heretofore always shown principle, she has shown she can be electable. But the difference between being a qualified candidate, and an effective campaigner, is as big as the drive between the two furthest removed points in the 23rd district. No part of her campaign has satisfied her supporters or frustrated her opponents. She is quietly sinking like an autumn leaf in a quiet pond, and she has precious little time to invigorate her campaign and turn this all around.

I took a spin out the just-opened County Route 202 this morning, just hours after Jefferson County took the wrapper off, and I have to say, it has to be one of the finest four-lane highways in the north country. And when I drove over it, it still had that new-road smell.

County Route 202, you may remember, was designed to ease some of the traffic congestion on Route 3/Arsenal Street; it connects to Route 12F west of Salmon Run Mall’s Coffeen Street entrance. While highway engineers designed it to act as a traffic safety valve from Watertown’s busiest commercial corridor, town officials see it as The Next Big Thing for development west of the city.

And I have to say, it opens up acres and acres of scrub fields and woodlands to development. Right now, of course, it’s just empty land full of birds and other wildlife. But Watertown Supervisor Joel Bartlett and his Town Council see it as yet another tax cash cow for the town that already has no local tax rate, full of businesses and commercial enterprise that will further stuff the town’s bank accounts.

And boy, it’s a nice road. Four lanes of brand new pavement, not even a memorial cross in sight. And while it isn’t level, it sure is straight! In fact, if it doesn’t develop, it could become an unofficial county drag strip.

While the town has figured out how to spin flax into gold with this road, the city and the county might be less sure. If county finances go dark ages, I suppose it could put tollbooths at each end and charge a small fee, like the Thousand Island Bridge Authority. Or it could wait for Bartlett’s development and just sit back and collect property tax.

The city, on the other hand, must sigh every time someone brings up Route 202. Any development will want to hook to the city’s sewer system, of course, but right now, there is no room at the end of the road, near Route 3, where initial development is most likely. The Arsenal Street line has a “no vacancy” sign on it, and without some help from either a generous state or the town of Watertown, that isn’t likely to change any time soon. Meanwhile, the city’s own Arsenal-Coffeen connector, the grandiosely named Western Boulevard, seems farther away than it did two years ago when the city was so enthusiastic about building it. Who knew?

You should go check out Route 202 before they put up the tollbooths. It’s a dandy ride, if a tad short. And you can look at the trees and brush and envision The Next Big Thing.

While Washington does battle over health care reform, it’s instructive to look at the issue a little closer to home.

For the past 10 years or a little more, Dr. Richard Muller has been my physician. If you have a vision in your mind of the old-time country doctor, Rich Muller is probably the picture you’ll come up with. Never mind that he practices out of a less than elegant modular building that’s a clone of the kind popular in expanding school districts in the early ‘70s. Outside of the ambiance, of which there was none, his office was a throwback to the days when medicine was delivered by folks you called by their first names.

I have Type II diabetes, which requires a lot of vigilance and quarterly doctor visits. I was a regular in Rich Muller’s tawdry waiting room, but that is not to say I spent any time there to speak of. I never waited more than 10 minutes to be served, and I think that the total amount of time I was kept waiting, in 10 years, was less than four hours. That’s remarkable in this day and age.

And it wasn’t because the doctor had nurses do all the grunt work, flew in for two minutes and sailed out to the next patient. When I had questions, Rich Muller answered them to my satisfaction. We had many, many fairly long discussions about my ailment, new discoveries in the field of diabetes research and treatment and how that all related to me. And we also hit on politics, golf, families, what was happening around town and in the area. I always looked forward to my doctor appointments.

Rich Muller, however, has moved on, gone to work in a larger clinic in Virginia. He and his wife had had enough of the north country’s short summers, of the biting cold, of the snow and inconvenience of the long, long winter. Even in leaving, though, Rich went the extra mile, finding doctors for his patients that he thought might match both their medical needs and their unique personalities.

So with considerable trepidation, I had my first visit with my new doctor today. I will call this person simply Doc, because I’m not going to give any hint as to whom it might be. So don’t try to figure it out. Doc works in a practice with several other physicians, in a modern office with a dedicated lab. The reception area has a sliding glass partition that is closed (Rich had a sliding glass panel that had been perpetually open for so long I don’t think it could be closed), a waiting room with a television and a boatload of chairs. My first wait in my new Doc’s office was 46 minutes. My second wait in my new Doc’s office was 15 minutes. I quickly figured out that I had spent about four years of Muller waiting time on my first visit.

I think I’ll like my new Doc. Doc is sharp, has a sense of humor and to some degree, is willing to talk to patients. But I get the feeling that Doc likes, well, procedures. I’m going for an ultrasound exam tomorrow (Doc didn’t laugh all that loud when I said “Oh, great, I’ll be able to see the baby’s head!”) for something that Rich and I had discussed, and ultimately rejected. But I’ll cut Doc some slack, because I’m new and it isn’t entirely unreasonable to want to be cautious to the extreme at first.

But at some point, I suspect Doc and I are going to clash about some procedure. And it is the medical society’s proclivity for extra tests and expensive procedures that are in large part driving up the cost of medicine for you and me.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. But I can’t help but wonder if, perhaps, the totality of care offered by a Rich Muller -- care based not only on medical observations, but on a keen understanding of the emotional and mental state of the patient being treated, a knowledge born of observation and interaction -- isn’t being lost in the health care behemoth of modern America.

The march of medicine must go on. Research into disease provides miracle cures, and more importantly, provides the smaller steps that vastly improve the quality of life for millions suffering from long-term diseases. But depersonalizing the delivery of medical care must, in the long run, increase its cost and decrease its efficacy. When the patient becomes a number on a chart, and not the stepfather of Sarah and Megan and Chris who loves golf and likes nothing more than a lazy day on the lake, something infinitely valuable is lost.

As I was walking up the road I met an angry man.

Even at some distance on the quiet country lane, I could see he wasn't happy. His gait was something of a stomp, and as he neared, his countenance was dark and forbidding. Nevertheless, I hailed him.

"Hello, sir," I said. "Is everything all right?"

"No, everything is not all right!" he snorted. "Nothing is at all."

So I asked him what was troubling him, and he proceeded to tell me.

"This country is sliding downhill on a greased sled," he said. He railed against a left-wing Congress bent on creating a socialist state, against an administration doing everything in its power to make government so big it controlled everything. He said the gutless Democrats in power were getting ready to abandon Afghanistan and would let foreign terrorists overrun this country. He was mad about health-care reform, the federal bailout of the banks and the auto industry. Nothing, he said, was going right.

"It's gotten so I can't sleep, I'm so disgusted with everything," he said.

I wanted to talk to this man, discuss some of his issues. But we were so far apart in our beliefs, and he was so agitated, that I decided against it. I told him I hoped he found some peace, and went on my way.

I had walked less than a mile when I met another angry man. His look, too, was black as storm clouds and as he strode toward me, the dust flew from beneath his feet.

"Hello, sir," I said. "Is everything all right?"

"Nothing is right!" he replied, and given my last encounter, I wasn't going to ask the cause of his angst. But he launched unbidden into an explanation.

"The Democrats are driving me nuts," he said. "Here they are with the biggest mandate they'll have for years, maybe decades, and they're just letting it slip away!"

He was unhappy that health care reform was coming to a vote in such a watered-down version that it left out a public option. He was angry that after a year, Guantanamo still held uncharged and untried prisoners. He was furious at the drawn-out withdrawal from Iraq, and he was livid that President Obama was even considering a massive escalation of the eight-year war in Afghanistan. He couldn't believe Congress was still dragging its heels on climate-change legislation and that there has been little progress in moving environmental legislation forward.

"This is making me crazy. The American people give the Democrats the authority to make powerful, positive changes, and they dither and dawdle and squander this chance!" he said.

I wanted to talk to him, tell him that while I agreed with many of his positions, he had to give the system a chance to work. But before I spoke, I saw a look in his eye that warned me off. I wished him well and took my leave.

As I walked along, I thought of the two angry men. And it began to bother me more, and more. After a bit, I realized I was stomping down the road, scowling. I am, I thought, just another angry man. And that made me sad.

What happened, I thought, to civil discourse? When, exactly, did the political process become so polarized that shrill, personal charges and invective became the currency of political campaigns? When did we stop looking for honest debate over public policy, in favor of bizarre litmus-test pontification of allegiance to the right or the left? What has happened to the Americans who could be socially progressive but fiscally conservative, or those who identified with a party for many reasons but felt comfortable taking every issue on its merits, rather than infusing it with ideology and running it up one flag pole or the other? When – and why – did politics become the moral equivalent of cage fighting?

I had no answers, as I walked the quiet rural road. But I did have another question: If this doesn't change, what is to become of us?

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