Town holds off on increased water regulations
A proposed local law on water resources in the town of Saugerties has been tabled following questions raised at a public hearing on April 25. Councilwoman Leeanne Thornton said the number of questions and criticisms of the proposed law raised at the hearing led the Conservation Advisory Committee to table it for further revision. At...
The invader
You grow up with adults telling you not to judge a book by its cover, not to make a decision about something until you understand its intentions. And it’s a truism, an unavoidable absolute that everyone has made at least one false judgment based on someone’s outlook or demeanor. Ninety percent of the time, though,...
Village to inoculate ash trees
Public comments made on the Saugerties Times website as well as phone calls and on-the-street encounters from folks asking that the village try “another approach” have convinced Building and Grounds Superintendent George Terpening to treat some village ash trees infested with emerald ash borer with an insecticide rather than cut them down. “There was a...
Emerald ash borer claims more Saugerties trees
An iridescent Asian beetle responsible for the death of millions of trees in the Midwest is consolidating its hold over Saugerties ash trees. The emerald ash borer, first spotted in Saugerties at a campground in 2010, is now present in trees throughout the town. With no practicable way to halt the spread of the beetle,...
Saugerties urged to acquire 165-acre park
Bristol Beach is one of the hidden treasures of Saugerties. It is 165 acres of undeveloped forest, stretching from Route 9W to the Hudson River. Although it’s a state park, there has been no development of internal roads, recreation or picnic areas, and no formal trails. The property once belonged to the town, but a...
Stewards of the Bend
When someone drove up Susan Bolitzer’s driveway back in 1999 to hand her a flyer about a piece of land coming up for auction, she probably could not have imagined the changes it would make in her life in the years to come. By 2003, she’d helped to form the Esopus Creek Conservancy (ECC) and...
Winter weather predictions
What will this winter bring? Will snow blanket the mountains and valleys in inconvenient beauty, or will mild temperatures and sweatshirt weather auger the inconvenient truth? While this sort of talk is idle speculation for most, best voiced between sips of black coffee while sitting on milk crates in the back of a general store,...
Whither go our refuse?
Ulster County has done a good job for the last 20 years of making the garbage go away. That’s all anyone wants, right, to make it disappear? And so it has — mainly, in recent years, to a landfill on the Waterloo-Seneca Falls border way out in central New York. But not here. There’s only...
Federal funds pried from FEMA
It took two weeks for fema to decide that Ulster County suffered enough damage for residents to be eligible for help. That’s a long time for residents whose homes were severely damaged by the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy. A furious Saugerties Village Mayor William Murphy said last week that it was unconscionable that FEMA...
Saugerties copes with storm aftermath
Residents of Lighthouse Drive spent the weekend cleaning out the lower floors of their homes, throwing out hundreds of pounds of wet insulation, sheetrock, waterlogged TVs, furniture and mattresses that were ruined when more than four feet of water swept up the Esopus Creek from the Hudson River during Hurricane Sandy. It was the combination...
Saugerties was ready for Sandy’s worst
The smell of motorboat fuel, a mixture of gas and oil, hung heavy over the Esopus Creek near the Hudson as residents of the roads that front the waterway returned home early Tuesday morning to find the area devastated by floodwaters that swept through the low-lying areas late Monday night. “It’s total devastation,” said one...
Inside Saugerties’ Sandy Command Center
Saugerties town supervisor Kelly Myers and village mayor William Murphy have declared a state of emergency for their respective communities beginning at 4 p.m. They are asking that all non-emergency service individuals be off the road at that time. For residents whose roads will be closed because of flooding and are concerned about going to...