ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT/PLANNING/PUBLICITY COMMITTEE
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Joseph Kelly, Chairperson
Robert Dedrick, Vice-Chairperson
Chairman Kelly called this Economic Development/Planning/Publicity Meeting to order at 10:30 a.m. with the following supervisors in attendance: Robert Ashline, Jeanne Ashworth, Thomas Both, George Canon, Daniel Connell, Robert Dedrick, Robert Dobie, Randy Douglas, Dale French, Anthony Glebus, Ron Jackson, Joseph Kelly, Noel Merrihew, Joyce Morency, Gerry Morrow, Cathy Moses, Thomas Scozzafava and Shirley Seney.
Department heads present were: Ron Ofner. Steve LaMere had been previously excused.
Also present were: Cliff Donaldson, Judy Garrison, Carol Calabrese, Barbara Brassard, Anita Deming, Margaret Gibbs, Alan Hipps and Sue Montgomery Corey.
New Media present were: Laurie Besanceney, Adirondack Enterprise and Lohr McKinstry, Plattsburgh Press Rep.
KELLY: I would like to call the Economic Development/Planning/Publicity Committee meeting to order. This morning we have a guest, Sue Montgomery Corey who is going to speak to us about power quality and reliability issues for communities in the National Grid Service Territory. I think this is important to all of us even those who are served by NYMO.
COREY: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to be with you today. I kind of wish I was talking about something that was a little bit more fun than power reliability and quality but hopefully we’ll learn a little bit about each other today through our discussion.
I’m the President of two corporations, one is called the Community Power Network of New York State which has been around for a couple of years now. CPN is a consulting business. It’s headquartered in Minerva, NY and I work Statewide on community energy issues particularly those that impact low income customers. I’ve been an advocate on behalf of low income customers before the State Public Service Commission and with NYSERDA, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority for about ten years now. Prior to my life with CPN I was the Executive Director of the Community Action Association of New York State and it was through there that I got involved with energy issues and communities.
The second corporation is a relatively new one. It’s a non profit. It’s called a WISH for New York which stands for A World Institute for Sustainable Humanity. I didn’t make that name up. We are affiliated with a global non profit which that is based out in Washington State and really what the mission of a WISH is, is we want to be in the business of helping families and communities develop a more sustainable approach to living in their communities and energy happens to be one of the areas that we are working on. Over the last year we’ve done a fair amount of probono work for the local fire departments and with the Town of Minerva and Joe is actually a board member of the WISH so I want to let you know that.
The energy reliability issue, prior to this last year I have spent a lot of time thinking about. I knew it was important as a resident and as a business owner every time the lights flickered in Minerva, which they frequently do, you know I would think about it but it wasn’t an issue that I was planning to take on in any major way. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, this fall the Town of Minerva, like many communities in the County had a series of experiences that kind of lead me to believe that it was time to take a look at the power of quality and the reliability issues had come. I don’t know about your communities but in Minerva between November 13 and December 13 we had six outages of three hours or more. Some parts of our community were out, we had one road that was out with one of the outages for seven or eight days. We’ve had others, one road was out several times during that period and in one case they reported their outage to the company over two days, six times and every time they called, they were told well, you are the first one to report it. Given that experience that we had the same time our town was also in the process of doing some pretty significant emergency preparedness planning and we have been working on our plan and starting to figure out how the town, the fire department, the EMS folks and our local Minerva Service Organization could all work together when there is an emergency in the town. One of the things that we had come to realize before all of the outages started was, of all the nineteen or so significant emergency situations that we thought that we might be likely to face, almost all of them involved the loss of power. So we started to have the issues in November and December we realized that we had an opportunity to begin to practice some of the plans that we had been talking about for the many months and we learned a lot. I’m pretty thankful in a significant, but relatively not so life threatening, situation we had the opportunity to practice some of the systems that we talked about having in place. At the same time I became very concerned about, not only were we out of power during the times but the response that we saw from our utility company both in terms of their response to individual customers and their response to the emergency services personnel and the response to our Town Supervisor who is the person as you all are, who is our Chief Executive and declares a State of Emergency when one needs to be declared in our town. As we started to look at this and I realize that energy reliability and power quality it impacts so many things, it impacts economic development and in the course of our outages this fall I heard from people that they lost appliances. I lost a photo copier at my business that miraculously was under warranty so another company paid for the outage that our utility company was facing so it was replaced. We had health and safety issues. Minerva is located about an hour from the nearest hospital. We have a senior population that is significant and many of our folks have medical equipment that requires electricity and so in a couple of cases we had folks who were down to their last hour or two of power for the equipment that they needed and that was a concern.
As we started to look at the power quality and reliability issues, I realized that there were a number of things that come into play there. It’s an issue of, does the power stay on in your community? When it goes off how often does that happen and then, what happens as a follow up with the company, and what is the discussion like? I think one of the concerns that I had was through the way that the current regulatory structure is set up in New York, when there is a series of sustained outages like that there is a lot of evaluation of what goes on with the company and what cost benefit issues are with them but there is not an obligation to factor in the economic impact on the communities and on the families and I think that we are at a point where some of that needs to be considered.
I think the reason we are at the place that we are right now with our utility company and potentially with others in the State is that a number of things have been happening. One is that there was a shift many years ago to performance based regulatory structure and then we also had changes in ownership with utility companies. In the case of our company Niagra Mohawk, they were bought out by a company called National Grid. One of the things about Niagra Mohawk that I always appreciated as an advocate is that they were a company while you may not always agreed with the decisions that they made, and you may be not always felt that they were doing exactly what you wanted them to do you could call them and talk to them and they were responsive to their customers. The folks you worked with at the company felt a tremendous amount of pride in the relationship that they maintained with their customers. I guess that, with the outages that Minerva experienced we weren’t really seeing that very much. Throughout the series of outages we’ve had individual customers had difficult getting the utility to respond. I know at one point I was assigned to call in a report from our fire company about the status of the roads in our community and we didn’t have the appropriate number for the company so I called their customer service line to get the number and they put me on hold and never came back. We had a series of experiences like that our Town Supervisor had great difficulty getting through to the company during the outages and I think that these are all part of a bigger dialog that as we resolve the initial outages we all need to start having with this company.
One of the factors that I think has also impacted what is going on with utility companies in New York is because of the fact that we are now in a performance based regulatory structure, the way that they are counting what happens in communities has changed over the years and so it’s a matter of when you call in or report for trouble if you are a customer, do you say the magic words that get you into the system so that you have to be counted as they do their recording to the State? Right now they’re basically three kinds of standards that all of the utilities have to face one is something called SAIFI, it is the System Average Interruption Frequency Index and that’s basically, they take a look at the number of customer interruptions and the duration of those divided by the number of the customers that they serve and so if an outage doesn’t show up in their system for example, in the case of the one that was reported six times, we had six times where someone was told it hadn’t been reported, so it didn’t show up until finally the sixth time and in that case the company responded because the customer threatened to take his own ladder out and pop the fuse back in which was the problem. In fact we’ve had a number of the outages that we’ve had, the one road in our town where it was out for seven or eight days, it was an issue of a fuse that somebody forgot to put back in. We’ve had several of those, so it’s the little things that become an issue over the long haul.
The second indicator that they have is something called System Average Interruption Frequency Index and that is where they take the average frequency of the interruptions so the first one was how long are you out? The next one is how many do you have? Then you divide that by the average number of customers and then they also have a customer satisfaction index and so you know when they go before the public service commission and they are evaluated how do those indexes’ look and how many things get into the index’s and how many don’t? I think that part of the discussion that has to happen is how do we make sure that the situations that are happening in our community how do they get documented and how do they count? We’ve found although I’m sure in the companies systems which is thirty-seven counties, what’s happening in our little part of the world probably didn’t show up as more than just a tiny little blip but I think it’s gotten to the point where we have definitely started to document that quite a bit. We found for example, just in the records of our fire company, over one two and a half year period which started before our region’s bout of outages, we had thirty-six tree and wire instances reported by our fire company. Those are times when the power goes out because a tree falls on a wire, thirty-six of those in two and a half years. We are averaging twelve outages a year and as I mentioned, we had six in one month at the end of the year, last year.
Our community is really looking at what we can do? We recognize that probably we are going to need to have to be better prepared to deal with our emergency situations and to prepare our residents for that because we anticipate that we are going to be seeing more outages over the next year. I don’t think our utility is necessarily alone. As we speak today, at this very moment, down in Albany the Public Service Commission is meeting and one of the things they are going to hear about is an investigation that is going on with consolidated in Edison Territory where a woman was walking her dog and was electrocuted as a result of that one incident which the company initial said was an isolated incident, they are checking two hundred fifty thousand fixtures in the city of New York and have found about one hundred twenty, one hundred thirty where they have straight voltage that is significant enough they would have found other injuries if they hadn’t caught them. The maintenance issues I think are becoming more and more problems everywhere. I read yesterday that vegetation related outages, about 20 to 40% of the outages that occur are caused by vegetation. In a rural place like this, we are likely to see more of that and as mills change ownerships, as maintenance policies change we are going to be probably seeing more issues related to that and certainly with the outages that we’ve had we’ve experienced some of that.
Looking at what you as Town Supervisors can do and then what a WISH for New York is hoping to do. I think like it or not you are going to be dealing with more power reliability and quality issues. There are several steps I think you can take. The first is to recognize that the dialog you have with the company one on one is very important and you should maintain it and try to develop it at the same time it’s important to realize that what’s happening in your community may in fact be happening in other communities so the discussions that you have with your peers is very important. One of the concerns that I’ve had and I’ve been following the media stories about what has been going on in the Tri-lakes area and what is going in our part of the world and I’m concerned about these instances being viewed at piecemeal situations. We need to recognize that there are systematic problems that have to be addressed and it can only be addressed if the communities and the company are working together to figure it out, so hopefully we can take some steps toward that. I would like to suggest that you encourage in your community, energy efficiency because that does two things one, is helping to reduce the drain on the existing transmission distribution system but the other part is that if the power does go out your ability to maintain facilities at a reasonable level is a little bit better. I would like to encourage you if you haven’t started doing emergency preparedness in your communities to do that. One of the things that got us through the outages that we had was the strength of the relationships that we had and the plans that we had in place for emergency preparedness. We started last fall a system where we check on the vulnerable households in our community every two hours to make sure they are okay, to make sure that they are warm, that they’ve got food. In one case we actually had a household that we encouraged the people to leave because we had concerns about carbon monoxide poisoning so we were able to advert hopefully, a tragedy in that situation. Emergency preparedness is very important it is also important to document the instances where you have power quality and reliability issues. We are now a WISH for NY, maintaining a spreadsheet for every time the lights flicker, every time the battery backup on the computer system goes on, every time the power goes out we document it and people are starting to call us with those situations. If there is a part of the town that goes out we’ve got it tracked, we know when, we know where, how long and eventually we will hopefully be using that information. The records of your fire departments are very important because as I mentioned in our case we’ve been able to see some staffing patterns we know for example, in the issue of vegetation outages we’ve got a couple of roads that are pretty serious consistent issues and that is one that we are going to have to be working with the company, the town and try to resolve.
Finally, in terms of what can a WISH for NY do? We are hoping to do several things over the coming months one of them is that we want to help people understand the existing complaint process the Public Service Commission has which has been in place for a while but it’s been revised over the last year or so. Potentially now when you make a complaint which you can do online or over the phone, the complaint is taken but they recommend first if you haven’t tried to work it through with the company you call the company. If they don’t hear back from you in about two weeks the case then ends up being closed because they assume that it has been resolved. I don’t know that a lot of consumers are aware of A, that the complaint process exists or B, that two-week window exists. We want to make sure that people understand and that they begin to report some of these things so that there is a record because in terms of the performance base regulation, one of the major pieces of information that gets used to evaluate is the complaint process that exists at the commission. That is one thing that we are hoping to do. Another thing we want to do is, we are planning to do a series of media articles over the coming months to help people understand power quality and reliability issues because most people don’t know how to file a report with the company in a way that is going to get the kind of response that they need. They don’t necessarily know what happens when they make those calls and we also want them to be safe when they run into an outage situation and some households are very good at understanding what they need to do, others may need some help and we want to make sure that they have that information and that it is accurate.
I mentioned that we are starting to document in our area, what is going on with outages and power disturbances. We also are hoping to begin a dialog that we hope will be a regional one, with the company and with the public service commission. As a first step toward that we documented the experience with the Town of Minerva had and were able to submit that during a public statement hearing that the commission had last December on Niagara Mohawk Security Deposit Proposals and so that testimony is available if anybody is interested.
I guess at this point I will wrap up and if anybody has questions I will be happy to answer them.
CANON: I don’t have a question exactly but Newcomb is on the end of the track and the power that serves my community comes from Old Forge and is apparently purchased from NYMO and delivered by NYSEG and anything that happens between Old Forge and Newcomb it impacts us so I can sympathize with the power outages. We have many, many, many as well. NYSEG is discussing at least, the possibility of hooking into the power that comes from Ticonderoga it is a 115,000 KB line somewhere around Tahawus Club and back feed into Newcomb which would provide power from either direction and maybe at some point in time some other communities might take advantage or have some benefit from that. The comment you made Sue, about keeping in communication with your provider is very important because we have a good relationship with NYSEG.
COREY: I’ve heard that with a lot of the NYSEG communities is that, although they also have been sold and reorganized so there has been a generally better level of communication between the company and the community and I think that used to be the case with Niagara Mohawk before their purchase by National Grid. They have been going through some major changes structurally and I think it has impacted their ability to be responsive to the communities.
FRENCH: Formally being in the power industry, it is going to get much worse in the next coming years. The infrastructure is worn out. The main line from Whitehall up, it goes across part of my property, they have attempted to change some of those big poles that are falling downs but that is just a drop in the bucket. The infrastructure across the State is in the same shape and at the same time I know many people that are retiring from Niagara Mohawk who have the experience, the line men, people that have been there for years are retiring and getting out of the company. The infrastructure is down and at the same time State wide there hasn’t been a new plant built in years. We are heading in the same way that California went a few years ago that is just over the horizon for us and it’s going to be even more exasperated for this territory because of our remoteness and probably their inability or unwillingness to upgrade these facilities that don’t return much on the dollar.
CONNELL: I appreciate Sue coming and share with us what she’s doing. I’m also on the end of the Niagara Mohawk line. I’m on the North end of their line. A few years ago NYSEG got a right of way and put a line across some of the Town property and there was an understanding at the time by many town officials that this line was going to be able to back feed Westport when NIMO went down. In fact when we had our last large outage I called NYSEG and they said no, when we get to the end of that line there is nothing left. In Westport there is no way to back feed when NIMO goes down and again Dale just talked about the main line coming up from Whitehall so anything happens to that main line Westport is out. Dale and I met with the new vice-president of NIMO two years ago and one of the questions we asked was what is the five, ten, fifteen year plan? There is none and if that line goes down it effects everybody on up through so this is a real important issue. All the things that Dale talked about with the retirements and what have you, the other thing I just want to mention is I called NIMO in an outage three times and every time they told me no one had called yet and the third time I said, well, I’m the same person this is my third call so I know you’ve had the calls. I think some of that is getting fixed now but there is some major problems there. There is a rep in Ticonderoga who is really good and really tries to work with you but at the corporate level there are some major problems as far as I’m concerned.
COREY: I think you are right about that. The folks that I worked with at the local level and even within the company at the State level, they are great people and I have the same concerns that you all have stressed about, the fact that so many folks are retiring and there is all this institutional knowledge that is going to be lost and talent on the low income side I know that part of the company probably the best, and they had some of the best low income advocates in the country on that staff and I worry about the fact that that talent and in other parts of the company is going to be lost if people retire.
BOTH: I was just going to say I’m grateful, we are in NYSEG country. I think they have the niftiest emergency reporting system. You call in and they tell you how many people are out, when the outage was first reported, and when you can expect the power to come back. We probably had about four or five outages last year none to any great extent and I’d say that they hit it on the money just about every time plus they have Bob Perkins the Director of Community and Relations who is the guy to call if you have any problem at all, he’s very, very responsive. I know they are part of Energy East now and there are some budget problems that the line men face but as far as service and recording NYSEG really has some great people.
COREY: I think they also as far as their relationship with the communities, because they were hit so hard with the ice storm a few years ago, they had the chance to replace a lot of things then and they also had a chance to really look at their systems and their relationships they had with the communities. Any utility company can have issues, they are big complicated organizations and they are doing an absolutely critical job that impacts every aspect of our lives. You know, energy is a pretty fundamental, basic thing that we all need. I think with the systems that they have in place are really important. It was great over the last couple of years to see some of the work that NYSEG has done.
SCOZZAFAVA: I’ve worked with both NYSEG and Niagara Mohawk in my trade as an electrician. I can tell you that Bill Johnston down in Ticonderoga, does an excellent job. As Mr. French pointed out, the infrastructure is antiquated. If you just take a ride around this county and take a look at some of the transformers on some of the poles that are providing service to houses and so on you can see that they haven’t been replaced in thirty years probably in some cases. There is a lot of isolated problems that I know of in our community and other communities where you have low voltage problems which is a big cause of bad neutrals and so on that is why the lights are flickering and so forth. The bottom line here is they just don’t have the man power. They had a shop in the Town of Moriah that they recently closed and moved to Ticonderoga which makes the reaction time during a power outage that much longer. It’s definitely a problem that we need to deal with. Outages are much more frequent as we all know right now than they were just a few years ago, there is a danger involved, generator sales have sky rocketed, you have a lot of do it yourselves out there that are hooking in generators and you know if it’s not done properly that can be catastrophic, with carbon monoxide, electrocution and so on. It certainly is a problem that we need to address. My question to you would be, should we be as town supervisors keeping track of all these outages? We had one recently in the fall of 2003 in the hamlet of Moriah where people were without power for two days and as Dan mentioned I can remember when they did the line that we were supposedly be able to back feed from NYSEG and a section of that line runs down through Mineville. I guess that doesn’t work because when we lose power we lose it. My question to you would be, do we need to be documenting this obviously and bringing our concerns to the Public
Service Commission?
COREY: I think again, there are a couple things, one is individually we should be documenting. If you want a format or a spreadsheet that I’m using I would be happy to email it to anybody to document that. The records of your fire company could be really helpful to you because they are supposed to be tracking what kind of calls they are going on and if they are going on calls that in our case we had thirty-six tree and wire incidents. That is a pretty clear indication of an issue that we are going to need to be dealing with. I think as a group though, it would be important, a WISH for NY would like to start a regional dialog and I think this group can be a very great place to start that where as a group, we would begin a dialog with National Grid and with the Public Service Commission I think you have to do both at the same time because I think both need to understand that what is going on here A, matters a lot to our economy, it matters a lot to the health and safety of our people but also that it’s not acceptable that it be dealt within a piece meal fashion. Every time I hear or I read in the paper that somebody was out or in the instance where they brought the generators up to Tupper Lake and the Saranac Lake area, and I hear well, this is an isolated problem within the system. Well, no it’s not. It’s patterned. That has got to be dealt with and one of the issues is because everything gets dealt with as individual incident it’s harder in the regulatory stream to see the patterns and to document those. I think those probably are going to need to be dealt with. While it’s still important to look at the performance measurers that the company has to respond to it’s also important that we create a space maybe outside that where we can talk about the patterns and I think you need both the Commission and the Company there to do that. We would certainly be willing to host something like that or to work with you on developing that.
MOSES: There are quite a few problems out there but in Schroon Lake for whatever reason we’ve been a little bit luckier it sounds like than the rest of the supervisors have. NYMO and the National Grid both have stayed in very close contact with me during power outages they even call my home and tell me what sections of the town are out, they call and give regular updates when the power is expected to come back on. I have worked closely with Bill Johnston over the last several years but I also met Alex Hall who is the rep down there and he emails me regularly. I feel little luckier, it sounds like and maybe it’s because I’m at the very southern end of the county but I’ve had, in defense of National Grid, I’ve had a little bit better luck.
JACKSON: I’ve got to echo Mr. Both’s comment, thank god Essex is with NYSEG because we’ve had very good luck with them. I’m in the fire department. I have perhaps more contact whether it be a car accident or a transformer fire. Going back to the day when Charlie Martin, Ronnie Bruno right through Mike Blanche and those guys, they would get there unbelievable fast, they do great jobs, keep you informed and are very responsive however, they have because of budget reasons, cut back on the brushing crews. For a few years there was none taking place at all unless there was a wire fire they did not cut any brush but I noticed in the last year they have had brushing crews out so maybe we are beyond that hump and things are going back. Certainly in the future the infrastructure of the power companies is going to effect everybody. It is old, there has not been any new plants on, nobody wants one in their back yard I guess but in the future I can see more problems coming as time goes on and as equipment gets older and older. I have to say that NYSEG has been very responsive at least to date and very cooperative and very helpful. I can’t complain about that aspect.
MORROW: I agree with Tom and Ron, since New York State deregulated the electrical companies and NYSEG has contained ownership of their main transmission lines and all their transmission lines they’ve kept very close contact with the Town of Chesterfield and Bob Perkins, as Tom Both said, is invaluable. He has been to my Town board meetings and kept us up to date on what their plans are for the future and what is going on and whenever there is a power outage in Chesterfield whether it’s Port Kent, Port Douglas or the highlands I can make a phone call right to the Plattsburgh number and talk to Bob Perkins and he can assure me what time the electricity will be back on and he has cut the time of what the power outage to be. Also very important, we did have in Chesterfield all last summer, a crew working there. NYSEG hired an out source company to trim power lines in the Town of Chesterfield all last summer and another thing we have that we are lucky with is our Highway Department when they are driving around and they see as we heard, trees blown down, vegetation, if they see a tree on a main transmission line or even a sub line they will call our office and we’ll call NYSEG before the electricity goes out and they are there within an hour or two taking that tree down or that limb down whatever the case may be, so we have been very fortunate with NYSEG in our town. We are very glad that they are there for us.
KELLY: You know, it’s good to hear that because it shows that it can be done. If NYSEG can do it then National Grid should be able to do it.
COREY: We’ve had again a very different experience. One of the most ironic moments of one of our last outages was we called the company because we had a tree on a wire and the tree was burning, it was on fire. The fire department said, call the company and get them out here. We called the company and they said we don’t know when we will come, we will come at some point. Well, that’s not very comforting when you have been out of power for many, many hours. As far as the emergency recording system and knowing when the power is going to come on, one of the problems that we’ve had with them is that when it goes to get recorded on their electronic phone system, it doesn’t seem to be overly accurate. One of the fireman in frustration, at the last outage said, you know we can handle just about anything if we were getting straight information from them. They told us we were going to be out for several days and it was only a few hours, thank goodness it was only a few hours but because of the location of our community when we get a report like that, we have to plan like we’re going to be out for several days that means we have to get somebody and a truck up to Elizabethtown and try to get some generators. It means we have to begin to set up an emergency shelter system. We are working now in trying to get a generator for our school because if the power goes out for any extended period of time and we have to get people into a safe warm place our fire station can’t handle 796 people our school can but they don’t have a generator. I’m batting some of your communities are in that very same boat and that is another area that potentially we need to be looking at.
DOUGLAS: Sue thank you for coming. I also want to say that the Town of Jay and my neighboring town in Clinton County, the Town of Black Brook and in the Town of Jay we have a tremendous relationship with NYSEG and they have been very good about our power outages. On the other hand, in Au Sable Forks the only thing that splits us is the river in Clinton County and Black Brook. Black Brook is on Niagara Mohawk and their power outages are a tremendous amount throughout the year. We are looking at a possibility of using one of our natural resources the Au Sable River for looking into a hydroelectric plant at the J & J Rogers old paper mill. Is that something you would be able to help me with, in looking into the feasibility of that Sue?
COREY: We could talk about that. I think there are some resources out there you might want to look into. That is another thing if you are looking at project energy efficiency projects in your community even some of the renewable things, if you check out NYSERDA’s website they typically will have on there the programs that are available. They have a couple of them and one is the get energy smart website and the other one is NYSERDA.org.
KELLY: Sue thank you for coming. We really appreciate your presentation. Sue is going be here because she is riding with me and she can’t leave so if you have any questions or want to get her card or her address please do. Thanks again, Sue.
Dale had asked me to ask all the department heads to get any legislative issues that they may have to him or Cathy or myself. We will be going to the National NACO conference on the 28th so if you could get those to Dale and if you can’t get in touch with him get in touch with Cathy or myself.
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Next on the agenda was the IDA department with Carol Calabrese reporting as follows:
CALABRESE: Good morning everyone. I do have a couple of requests for resolutions in my package today but before I get going on that I would like to ask if there are any questions in reference to the activity report that we submitted?
I believe you have some material in front of you outlining the request for resolutions. The first one that appears on the agenda for today is the Community Development Block Grant. The IDA and Housing, Alan Hipps and I have been working on putting an application together on behalf of Essex County. Essex County would be the applicant and the recipient of the grant funds. We did this collectively back in 2002. At this point, Alan would you like to come up and add anything to this? The maximum we can go after is $600,000. The IDA would like to apply underneath the Micro Enterprise which is the loan program, for $200,000 and Housing is down for $400,000.
RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING THE SUBMISSION OF A COMMUNITY
DEVELOPMENT BLOCK GRANT APPLICATION IN THE AMOUNT OF $600,000
TO THE STATE OF NEW YORK IN MARCH 2004.
This resolution was moved by Mrs. Moses and seconded by Mrs. Seney.
KELLY: Discussion? All in favor - opposed, carried.
HIPPS: The only requirement is there be two public hearings scheduled. I believe that is part of the resolution, but I think it is part of the process to establish those here at the meeting, such as this.
CONNELL: It’s in the resolution that we just passed.
KELLY: Oh okay. The resolution does read that, be it further resolved that this board has held public hearings on this grant application on February 23 and why don’t we set it at 9:45 a.m.
CONNELL: And on March 1st.
KELLY: And on March 1st at 9:45 a.m. thank you.
CALABRESE: Thank you.
There is a second resolution request in your package today. The Essex County IDA is also working on an application to submit the US Department of Agriculture underneath the RBEG. It’s the Rural Business Enterprise Grant Program. These funds would go 100% into our revolving loan fund. Your support in this would certainly help.
RESOLUTION AUTHORIZATION THE IDA TO SUBMIT A RURAL BUSINESS
ENTERPRISE GRANT TO THE US DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE,
RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE AMOUNT OF $90,000.
This resolution was moved by Mr. Morrow and seconded by Mr. Connell.
KELLY: Discussion? All in favor - opposed, carries.
CALABRESE: Thank you.
The last resolution you have in front of you is in reference to the 2002 CDBG Block Grant the County received and the IDA is administering those funds under the Micro Enterprise Program. We went through and did some house cleaning and we would like to submit a budget modification to Governor’s Office to handle these CDBG funds to reallocate, as you can see in front of you, there is about $20,000 in Program and Delivery and $12,500 in Administration Funds. We would like to reallocate and put into the loan fund.
RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING A BUDGET AMENDMENT OF $32,500 IN THE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT BLOCK GRANT PROJECT #382ME9-02 (MICRO-ENTERPRISE PROGRAM) OF $20,000 FROM PROGRAM DELIVERY AND $12,500
FROM ADMINISTRATION INTO LOAN FUNDS.
This resolution was moved by Mrs. Seney and seconded by Mr. Dedrick.
KELLY: Discussion?
JACKSON: Obviously this is money that you could have used for administration but you’ve operated efficiently enough to transfer over and I think your office should be commended for that. Get more bang for the buck as far as the loan program.
MOSES: I just want to add that this First Time Home Buyer Program is just an excellent program for our community. I commend you for moving forward and keeping that grant money coming forth so that we can take advantage of that program. It is a great program.
KELLY: I would like to comment on that myself because being in my past position as a loan officer and doing hundreds of mortgages there were so many times that people came through the door that you just couldn’t help based on the normal rules that banks have. In working in cooperation with Alan and also with the ECHO program, the town a couple years ago was about a hundred and sixty something between the two of them and it’s probably gone up considerable since then.
HIPPS: Thank you very much. It is money we’ve committed to quite a few resources and fortunately for us Clinton County asked us to come up and operate the same program which they started about a month ago. Thank you very much.
KELLY: All in favor - opposed, carried.
Any other questions for Carol? Thank you very much Carol.
CALABRESE: Thank you.
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Next on the agenda was the Planning Department with Ron Ofner reporting as follows:
OFNER: Good morning everybody, before we start, I just want to pass on regards from your County Planner, Bill Johnston he is down to averaging one day a week of work although those of you that have worked with him in the past knows that he crams an awful lot into one day. He wanted me to pass along to you folks that he highly recommends semi-retirement. It is working out very nicely. He wanted me to pass that along to you.
Similar to Housing and IDA, our office is in the process of putting together HUD Grant Applications. We are up to seven right now, realistically we are not going to get all of those but that does not be a reflection of the effort put into these seven requests but more of a function of how many dollars are available out there to receive. We are in the process of working on seven applications right now.
We’ve received $25,000 from the Governor’s Office of Small Cities for the County Plan and the contractors are in the process of being reimbursed.
I wanted to also mention Visitors Bureau wise, we have an issue with the 2003 budget and contract that needs to be resolved. I think there was a difference in interpretation of the contract as far as what the gross amount or net amount due to the Visitors Bureau should be and that is being addressed with the County Attorney as well as the Treasurer’s office. The amount that the Bureau had budgeted for an approved budget for 2003, and again prior to myself being involved with this issue was $1,150,000, that was the net after the 5% was taken out by the County for admin purposes. I think there has been some discussion in the Finance committee, if any of you have questions on that. It’s obviously an issue for the Visitors Bureau because their budget was based upon the $1,150,000 net to them, from the occupancy tax last year.
Also Visitors’ Bureau wise, I sent a memo out several weeks ago to all of you indicating the need to get event dates and times, locations, to Carol Joanette at the Visitors’ Bureau by Friday of this week if you have not done so I encourage you to contact her you can give them to me if you want but I can get you her phone number and email address. That memo went out several weeks ago, this is to make sure that your communities’ events are included in the I Love New York publications and programs for the fall and winter of this year.
A couple other things bureau related, some good news for us in general not just Essex County but the Adirondacks if you will, between the movie Miracle, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue which comes out today and NASA’s designation of the Adirondack Rock formation our whole region is getting incredible play throughout this country. I know just on the movie Miracle the Bureau has fielded information requests on the area from as far away as Los Angles, Austin and El Paso Texas, Baltimore, Montreal and even as close as Schenectady. I think publicity in all three of those issues if you will, this, Sports Illustrated and the Mars designation that we can’t buy. It is not Essex County specific it’s for the most part Adirondacks but I think it’s going to help all of us out.
KELLY: Does that mean I can buy the swimsuit issue to reinforce this position here?
OFNER: I would say yes. I guess there was some filming that took place in the Tupper Lake area.
KELLY: It was in the Press Republican this morning, I think there was an article on it.
OFNER: That is good news for us. I indicated to you in the past that I have been working with Mr. Meyer’s office, myself and Linda Wolfe, we have been working on the Bureau contract for 2004 and we will be building in performance measures and indicators as I think most of you know Linda has spent an awful lot of time with the auditor team out of Albany reviewing the Bureau’s financial picture. She is very up to speed on the budget as well as the marketing plan and I think as we go forward she’s going to be very key and instrumental in keeping an eye on what’s going on with the Bureau budget and any recommendations, making sure that all of the funds are tracked appropriately. I just really wanted to thank Linda for her efforts in this. She is putting in a lot of extra time into this with things she didn’t do in the past. I’m very happy to have her involved.
I also noticed from the discussion at the last board meeting, and there was some further discussion, on why the phones aren’t ringing. There are obviously a lot of reasons for that one issue. I just wanted to bring this to your attention, this is this past Monday’s Wall Street Journal and it’s talking about the top ten trends of ten industries and travel being one of those industries that they are looking at. I just want to quote them a little, “US travelers will continue to flock online, leisure and business travelers are expected to drive online travel revenue up to fifty-one billion in 2004 up 19% from last year.” The point being made is the internet is the way things are being done. I’m traveling next week with my daughters on a little vacation, I booked airfare, car rental, hotel and a couple of attractions if you will, and never talked to anybody it was all done online. I was one of those people who kind of came kicking and screaming to use the internet. That is how it is working now a days. The internet is how people are learning about various destinations and actually booking online, working directly with properties, etc. so there are reasons. Technology is changing. The way people communicate and make reservations is changing, not that the Journal is the Bible on things but it certainly points out that trend is certainly going to continue and increase.
ASHWORTH: I thought the picture of the Adirondack rock was absolutely amazing. I saw just the position of the Whiteface Mtn. and the Adirondack rock and it was clear that NASA named it Whiteface or Adirondack clearly knew and was familiar with the area. It does look like a little pyramid.
I wanted to say also that Ron and I are going to meet and try to look at some of the problems that we are having in Wilmington and look at where we can go with marketing. We are going to look at our website and see if there is something that we can do there. I noticed a couple of things that we didn’t have anything on our website about what’s going on Whiteface and I thought that was a huge missing piece of information if somebody was going to go to the Whiteface region and they want to find out about skiing there is nothing on our website. We are going to look at the way the phones work and perhaps make some suggestions about that. Thanks Ron.
JACKSON: Ron I’m just curious, I haven’t checked it and I probably should have, on the Lake Placid Visitors site if the internet is in fact becoming more and more critical, more and more important, more and more the way people are doing business, do they have links to the Visitors Bureau website to the regions, to the various Bed & Breakfasts and if that is so is a linkage there? If somebody goes to the Visitors Bureau website they will be able to connect a B&B in Wilmington?
OFNER: Most definitely, if those B&B’s etc. have websites, not all of them do.
JACKSON: Right, but if they do that gets them into the loop, that way?
OFNER: Yes.
JACKSON: Thank you.
SCOZZAFAVA: That mars rock was actually a chunk of iron ore out of Mineville.
I’m a little bit confused as what your role is to the Visitors Bureau? Are you a liaison between the Visitors Bureau and this board?
OFNER: That is correct.
SCOZZAFAVA: That is why you do the monthly reports?
OFNER: Yes.
SCOZZAFAVA: Is any of his salary, does that come out of the $1,150,000?
OFNER: No.
SCOZZAFAVA: Can I ask why not?
SENEY: I can answer that.
KELLY: Go ahead Shirley.
SENEY: Because the salary as Nadine told you last week, the salary that he is paid comes from the private membership of the Lake Placid Chamber of Commerce.
SCOZZAFAVA: Just Jim McKenna’s salary, there is other salaries that come from tax dollars that we collect from the occupancy tax?
SENEY: Yes. Nadine gave you I think, all of that information last week?
SCOZZAFAVA: Yes, she did.
SENEY: So you should have that already.
SCOZZAFAVA: I do have it but I’m talking about Mr. Ofner’s salary.
SENEY: Mr. Ofner’s salary is paid by the Essex County Board of Supervisors.
SCOZZAFAVA: Paid by the Essex County taxpayers.
SENEY: Yes.
SCOZZAFAVA: I understand that. My question is if he is spending all this time with the Visitors Bureau whom we have a contract with, why doesn’t a portion of his salary come from the occupancy tax monies?
CONNELL: If I could comment on that, because I chaired this committee last year when all this happened. No responsibilities were taken away from Mr. Ofner. He was given these additional responsibilities at no change in salary. When he was first hired, this was not part of his job. We assigned this to him last year but did not take anything away and did not make any salary adjustments. I think you need to know that is part of the history.
SCOZZAFAVA: Thank you. I’m not arguing that point. The point that I’m trying to make is that if his job description, if part of his duties and responsibilities are to help promote the county and act as a conduit between the County and the Visitors Bureau. I would think that a portion of that salary that he receives, should be coming from the occupancy tax. That is the only point that I want to make.
KELLY: Thank you.
DONALDSON: We receive a certain percentage as outlined in the Local Law for administration charges. Those expenses are used to offset correct me if I’m wrong Joyce, expenses incurred by the Treasurer’s office in keeping the records of the bed tax money, all of that which was last year, somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 I don’t have all the figures in front of me, go to offset expenses in the County Treasurer’s office with the keeping of the records for the bed tax money. We use all of that administration money that comes to us in the Treasurers’ office.
SCOZZAFAVA: Which is commendable but my point being if Mr. Ofner is spending a portion of his time on County tourism and the Visitors Bureau and so on, and another portion on planning then I think a portion of his salary should come from the occupancy tax monies that we collect.
DONALDSON: From the administration fee?
SCOZZAFAVA: He’s not getting that.
DONALDSON: Neither is Linda Wolfe in my office.
SCOZZAFAVA: He’s being paid, you are telling me from that money?
DONALDSON: I didn’t say that. What I said was is all of the money that we collect from the administration fee that we are allowed to collect of the bed tax, goes to offset the expenses in the County Treasurer’s office. When the board gave Mr. Ofner these additional duties all of that money was already accounted for. That is the amount that we are allowed to take off of the bed tax money for administration.
SCOZZAFAVA: Okay, thank you. My next concern would be, we have a contract with the Visitors Bureau in the amount of $1,150,000 which may increase do to the way the legislation is written is my understanding. Don’t you think they should have a representative here, at this meeting and every meeting throughout the month? Why would they not have a representative?
KELLY: I think what we did Tom.
SCOZZAFAVA: I don’t want to talk to Ron Ofner. I want to talk to the people that we are paying $1,150,000 a year to.
KELLY: Tom, I think the decision was made to make more efficiency, there is absolutely no reason that Jim McKenna cannot be here to report to us.
SCOZZAFAVA: Thank you.
KELLY: There is no reason at all. When we had our problems with getting the bed tax committee operating the way that we felt it should, we thought we needed the liaison using Ron Ofner to make it more efficient. We would be more than glad to have Jim McKenna here to answer any questions, any time.
SENEY: And he would be happy to come.
SCOZZAFAVA: Thank you.
JACKSON: In relation to that when we restructured it last year, I know you were not here, but none of the other contract agencies come and report to the board they all report to department heads who report to the board. When it was restructured, we put the Visitors Bureau under Ron Ofner and he was the one that represented but as with anything else, if Ron or anybody else thinks there is a particular issue that they would care to address to Mr. McKenna then certainly he indicated and I know he would be willing to come. It was just making it the way the rest of the County is set up, all these contract agencies like St. Joseph’s reports to Linda Lazzari who reports to us they don’t come here unless we ask them to then they are certainly more than willing to it’s the same with Jim McKenna, it’s just set up now like the rest of these contract agencies.
KELLY: Ron we do have exceptions because we do contract with Housing, IDA and Cooperative Extension and they do make reports to us.
JACKSON: True.
MORENCY: I think Tommy brings up a good point. We don’t have all the reasons here but he is right if say Ron or Linda are spending time working on this issue which they both are, then somehow the County should have a portion of their salary paid out of that 5%. The 5% obviously isn’t enough because it’s all going to the Treasurer’s office. I’m not sure if we have a really good handle on that, if that 5% that they get is actually the time that they spend and that we don’t know but at any rate. The next question is the additional 5% of what we are going to get over the 1.5 million in that contract? I think it is a good question and might be looked at on budgeting and stuff as a way to give back to the taxpayers a portion of both their salaries. They are all doing their jobs but it’s a good point.
MORROW: I agree with Tom and I wondered why Jim McKenna wasn’t on the schedule any more because I thought the position as liaison that Ron Ofner took over wasn’t liaison between the Visitors Bureau and us it was liaison for the Advisory committee for the bed tax. That he would come here and report as a liaison for the bed tax committee.
KELLY: What we discussed was we would have the Visitors Bureau report to Ron and Ron would report to us but at the same time we did say from time to time we would ask Jim McKenna to come if we felt we needed him. If the board feels that they want him here or the committee wants him here for every committee, we will have him here for every committee.
MORROW: If I may continue, I thought that is what it was when we reorganized the bed tax advisory committee Ron Ofner was going to be the liaison for them to us.
KELLY: That is true.
MORROW: And Jim McKenna should still be coming here.
KELLY: At the time we did discuss Jim McKenna would report to Ron Ofner and Ron Ofner would report to us but that is easily changed. Any further questions on this topic?
DOUGLAS: I just want to go a little bit further here and see where we are at with this whole bed tax advisory committee?
KELLY: We want to meet today.
DOUGLAS: Okay.
KELLY: I’m going to ask for an Executive Session towards the end of this meeting so we can discuss it because I really want to bring it forward to the full board and make a recommendation out of here today.
DOUGLAS: First of all I would like to reiterate, I think Jim McKenna needs to be here. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a lot of controversy surrounding this whole bed tax advisory board committee and I think Jim McKenna needs to be here. I think nothing that Ron is doing is wrong but Jim McKenna is the one that is responsible for over that million dollars and we need him here to explain all of the questions that we all have the salaries, the marketing plan, the whole works of the whole thing. I think it is in our best interest to have Jim McKenna here. When it comes to the marketing plan, I voted last week to pass it because I felt there was any benefit at this time in the ball game of 2004 to not pass it but I also do have a lot of concerns with the marketing plan and I think the best way to address this is to have Jim come and answer our questions and yes, the internet is taking away from some of the phone calls. Dale had a good idea, keeping funding in the towns where the revenue is spent by tourists but it’s our responsibility as Essex County, as a whole, to market all of Essex County. If we aren’t going to do it through with the bed tax then we need to come up with another plan. We are all suffering. We need to come up with a plan.
KELLY: My thought on that Randy is, I agree I would like to have Jim McKenna here, that is fine but for Jim McKenna to work for eighteen different bosses is pretty tricky. I’m not saying anyone shouldn’t have their input but I think it should first be addressed to Ron Ofner and then Ron Ofner puts together all of the concerns and talks to the Visitors Bureau. I can see Jim just looking behind his back constantly wondering what is going to happen next and I really want him out there peddling this County.
SCOZZAFAVA: The only point that I would like to make and I said it at the prior meeting, if in fact we are going to have Ron Ofner as a liaison or a conduit and I will be right up front here, it is a lot of money we are talking about. I think we need to take a look at the legislation as it was approved by the State of New York, possibly make some changes, and I feel that this advertising for this County should not be locked into just one vendor. I think we should be going to bid for this and I just think it is something that we really need to take a look at.
KELLY: I think that you will probably find that there is a lot of people here that would agree that we don’t necessarily have to be locked into the Lake Placid Essex County Visitors Bureau. The thing is when you look at bidding we better not just be looking at the low bid because I can come in at the low bid and I could put us in a pretty bad position.
SCOZZAFAVA: I’m not suggesting that, from what I’ve been told, I left office the last time just before this legislation was passed by the legislature and I haven’t really seen the bill at this point but from what I’ve been told is that the Home Rule Legislation that allows us to collect the occupancy tax, that we are in fact locked into the Essex County Visitors Bureau and I think that is something that we legally, somehow need to address.
KELLY: Wasn’t the County Attorney going to look into that?
CANON: I think there is an out in the legislation if in fact, you can show or prove that the Visitors Bureau is somehow remiss in their duties I believe that the County does have an option out of that. I have listened to this for quite a while, the bottom line here is fourteen or fifteen million dollars that this County collects in sales tax that’s the primary purpose of promoting your Town and Lake Placid is the golden goose that lays the egg. I’m not sure, you know it would be nice to have Newcomb promote it with my three B&B’s and all the other towns in the County but the bottom line is of that fourteen million it is collected mostly in Lake Placid.
SCOZZAFAVA: I don’t want to dispute that today. Lake Placid is the golden goose there is no question about that but I would think that Ticonderoga generates quite a bit of sales tax with the Walmart down there. I would think with the car dealers right here throughout Essex County right here in Elizabethtown, that they generate quite a bit of sales tax and it would be very interesting to get a hold of those numbers and take a good look at them. This isn’t a sales tax issue. I’m talking about occupancy tax and the reason why this board voted to go to the occupancy tax.
BOTH: I think back when we decided we’d like this to be self funding we went to the occupancy tax. We decided that 95% should be promoting the County and I wouldn’t want to see that changed at all. We can take this 5% and divide it out however we want. Ron was asked to kind of be the liaison which he has been. I think Jim should probably be here as well. Following on to what George had to say, I would love to get a pile of money but let’s face it people think of Lake Placid, the Olympics and so on that is what gets people here. We don’t have that much going on in our town. What are we going to promote? We have a few little events that go on during the year, we do fine with that and I agree, Lake Placid is why people come to our area and some of us thrive a little bit off of that. We have people stay in our B&B’s and so on but there isn’t any place comparable to that in the North country which is going to attract large groups of people.
MORROW: I just want the record to reflect that when Randy said he supported the budget and the marketing plan that I did support that, although I read I didn’t in the paper, I did support it. I agree with Tom I’d like to get a big windfall of money from the occupancy tax the only problem is, and they did do a study on it and we did receive, all of our towns received a statement of what each town took in for occupancy tax. The problem is my big wind fall of money was only like $354.00 in two years.
KELLY: That is quite large to Minerva.
CANON: When I first came to this board we were just starting to whittle down one million dollars and I think Mr. Scozzafava was on the board at the time, that the taxpayers of this County provided to Lew Patnode and the tourism committee. I don’t remember the controversy over what was promoted and what wasn’t promoted the difference between now and then is a million dollars out of the taxpayer’s pocket.
SCOZZAFAVA: I totally agree.
ASHWORTH: I would just like to say in Wilmington we collected $39,000 worth of bed tax last year, the year before, 2002 it was down $3,000, in 2003 we had a steady increase from $2000 up to $39,000 so we do have a tourism market in Wilmington but that is only 20% of our rooms are filled with that $39,000 that we collected last year so we have a great potential in Wilmington. I think that we need to work on places like Wilmington and Jay that do have facilities and do have attractions. We have something that could bring more into the County if we are able to promote them and that is why I want to work with Ron and I did talk to Jim McKenna about trying to brainstorm what we can do here because we are in serious trouble in Wilmington.
SCOZZAFAVA: I’m not sure how much Moriah generated, I don’t imagine that it was a whole lot because the problem is we don’t have enough beds in Moriah. The Lake Champlain region, I believe if we spent a little more money advertising the eastern portion of the Lake Champlain region of this County we probably would see an increase in tourism.
The other point I wanted to make, I’m not criticizing the Lake Placid Visitors Bureau. They do a good job. I’m certain that they do a good job. I’m just saying that I think it’s good business and there are other vendors out there that can provide this service. How do we know what they can provide for us at what price if we don’t go out and try?
MORENCY: I just want to go back in history because I do remember when Essex County was spending a million dollars for tourism advertising budget and I was Chairwoman of the committee back then, right up stairs. There were outrageous dollars spent on outrageous things and that’s when the board at that time and the board ever since has stopped that. The bed tax is one of the best things that ever happened to Essex County. I don’t care that it comes from North Elba, or Lake Placid or my town no matter where it comes from it’s supposed to benefit Essex County that is what we are doing.
OFNER: Something to keep in mind and I will throw this out there with the risk of getting my head blown off but we are not different from most other counties. They have agencies either internally or contracted out to promote their county as a destination point. I don’t care which county you go to in any part of New York State or the country, but places that do well are those that participate in programs that those particular organizations are offering and more importantly do their own advertising. If people are just sitting back waiting for someone to show up at their property or their attraction without advertising you can’t blame that on any ad agency or promotional organization. I think the number of private properties that advertise their services outside of some properties in Lake Placid, but around the county, very few people spend any of their own dollars to advertising their product. I think that is an issue that needs to be faced. A lot of these folks are complaining do something for me, do something for me and it’s not the goal of any Visitors Bureau or Chamber of Commerce to put people in a particular property or go to a particular attraction. It is to raise the awareness of the general area as a destination point. Those properties themselves have to step up to the plate like any other business. Think of any retail location, a lot of these properties think that they can just open their door and people are going to walk in. It doesn’t work that way. Advertising is very key that is how things work in this country. That is why corporations put hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising their product for service. I’m not saying that we need to do that but I think those properties that don’t advertise and are just waiting for someone else to do something for them, they are the ones who need to reevaluate their marketing plan and their game plan and figure out where their markets are and advertise in those appropriate publications or internet sites or whatever the case may be. You cannot leave all of the business side of things up to an ad agency or a bureau or a chamber that is not what they’re designed to do. They are designed to raise the level of awareness of a given destination point. It’s up to the private sectors to take over and promote themselves and make people aware of their services, their entities, and their features and if they do a good job then people are going to go to that property, they are going to go to that attraction, they are going to take that guide service or whatever the case may be. I think you would see a big difference if you did a survey to those attractions or properties who also advertise verses those who don’t put a penny into anything. I think we wouldn’t have to go very far to figure out who is generating a profit and who isn’t.
CONNELL: Last year a number of people talked to me about possibly having discussions increasing the occupancy tax by a half of percent or a percent and taking those dollars and earmarking them for development of specific areas within the County. We want people to come to our towns there has to be something to do once they get there. In Westport we’ve got the golf course, we’ve got the Marina. In the winter time we don’t have a heck of a lot for people to come to. Tom has got the ice fishing in the winter time but I think a lot of the discussion that we are having about marketing is what is it that we are marketing? I think that is what some of these other people are saying. We need to really take a look by town, by region, by whatever what is it that we have that is going to attract people into our individual regions? I think we have to market the entire County as we are doing it and when we want people to come into our individual regions we’ve got to do some work on that. Maybe some additional bed tax money that is designated for three or four years to an area might work but I think we really need to look at each area in the county and what is it that we are going to do to draw people there? Are we attractive? Are our bed and breakfasts, hotels, what have you, are they the kind of places that will attract people when they get there? It’s a whole planning process. It’s a whole looking at our self that I think we need to do. We keep having this same discussion but I think we have to back up one step and decide what is it that each of us have that we can market.
BOTH: I agree with Dan. I think we have a basic infrastructure problem in probably seventeen or eighteen towns in this county maybe Ticonderoga being excluded. In trying to promote the fairgrounds one of the problems we have when I call up people and try to stage events is how many beds do you have in the area? We don’t have them. This is true for a large part of our County. There seems to be a big trend for the more upscale accommodations and I think the only place that you are going to find upscale is in Lake Placid not in the rest of our towns. I think we all have a challenge within our communities to upgrade what we have and seek investments working with the IDA and build some more hotels, and motels and attractions that are going to get people here and distribute them throughout the county. A lot of people stay in Placid and they drive over to a hike in Keene and go on our little tours and so on but if you want a great place to stay they are probably going to go to Lake Placid.
SENEY: I commend you Ron for what you just said. It is true that if we want something we all have to put forth a little bit of effort to reap the profits perhaps what would be best is have North Elba/ Lake Placid secede from the County and then let you do what needs to be done.
CANON: Let’s take a vote.
DEDRICK: I’m not sure that we should be using the marketing plan of 2003 as a yard stick for measuring how well the Visitors Bureau has done. I was down in Colonial, Williamsburg and they were down 40% and this was at the end of the summer. I went to several of the museums and they were down 15-20%. Fort Ticonderoga, and they do a tremendous amount of advertising on their own to promote Fort Ticonderoga they were down 12%. We were very late last year approving the marketing plan so I’m not so sure we should be using the 2003 marketing plan as a yard stick for the future.
I’m glad we approved the marketing plan. I’m very anxious to see what happens in 2004. I think the economy has gotten a lot better. I totally agree with you Ron, I think it’s time for the towns to step up and advertise some of their own. I spent thousands and thousands of dollars in our town to promote fishing tournaments in Ticonderoga. I’ve got twelve major tournaments coming again this year. Fort Ticonderoga spends thousands of thousands of dollars to promote Fort Ticonderoga and if we just leave it to the Visitors Bureau then shame on us. They should be advertising certainly the entire county and it was based upon regions and yes, there is some money going down to the regions and maybe not enough that’s why maybe the marketing plan in itself isn’t as efficient as it could be. There should be more money coming to the regions however, I think the Town should be stepping up and again I don’t think we should be using the 2003 results as a yard stick for measuring what’s going to be happening here in the near future.
FRENCH: I’ve looked at it as a business person, the return on the investment and you can advertise my town till the cows come home, we have ten rooms. You aren’t going to advertise something where it doesn’t fit. We don’t have rooms in the eastern part of the county. We just don’t have places for people to stay, and that’s unfortunate. You can build them first or are people going to come? We aren’t going to get the investment together either so I think the notion that we can advertise and get the people to come to our towns where are they going to spend their money? Throw it out the window when they drive through? There just isn’t the place to spend the money over there.
SENEY: You’ve got a great bait shop.
KELLY: There was a trend through the mid eighties and into the nineties where the Lake front properties that formally had been hotels were turned into condos and the owners of these hotels found that they could sell them and sell their property and make more money than if they ran their own business so unfortunately a lot of these entities lost rooms that doesn’t address not filling them but just a comment.
SCOZZAFAVA: I don’t want to disagree with my neighbor in Crown Point but contrary to your statements we do have a lot to offer. The problem is we don’t have the rooms and I agree with you. Port Henry we have two campgrounds, we have the marina, fishing is a big money maker very good for the economy and these are some of the areas that I think we should be emphasizing more on.
CANON: You have enough shanties out there in the west channel.
KELLY: I discussed this with Ron briefly and my thought on a marketing plan is not a twelve month marketing plan. I think we are shooting ourselves in the foot. We are not going to see any trends or be able to understand if the program is actually efficient. I think we have to look longer term and that’s something that we will bring before the committee within the next eight or nine months hopefully.
OFNER: One more thing, back to this article in the Wall Street Journal it’s a good indication of what will be going on here. This is nation wide. It is not looking into New York State or Essex County or towns but nation wide. Travel spending in the United States bottomed out for 2002. I think for obvious reasons, after 9/11at the end of 2001, people curtailed things in 2002. If you look at our sales tax numbers, if you look at our occupancy tax numbers, 2002 was our high point so something was going right. They are projecting now that through 2005, there is going to be a steady increase in travel spending and I think more importantly again, for our destination it shows a rather dramatic increase going forward to 2005 in leisure trips. That is what we specialize in here, are leisure trips. The country in general did bottom out with tourism travel if you will, in 2002 that was our strongest year. If you want to go back and look at the numbers we did incredibly well that year we sort of bucked the trend if you will. Based on these projects we bottomed out, we should be going up no doubt about it.
There were two referrals for the Planning Board this month, one from Ticonderoga involving the Ticonderoga VFW. There had been some initial concerns with that. There is a lot of county property along that road a new road was put in, but those issues have been addressed so certainly the Ticonderoga VFW referral I would recommend there was no impact to the County. I ran this by Fred Buck, and we are all set there. I would recommend no county impact. As well as the Town of Westport application for the greenhouse, no county impact. This is a real fascinating opportunity I think for our area in general this particular request is to increase greenhouse space on their property. What this couple is going to do and I know Carol has been involved with them at the IDA and some other organizations, they are going to raise a fish called Tilapia. It’s not a sport fishing fish it originates in the Nile. They are going to raise Tilapia obviously hydroponically if you will, in water, use that waste water to in turn, feed basil plants hydroponically in effect taking care of all the waste that is generated by the fish and sort of recycling it into in this particular instance basil and potential some other herbs down the road. It has the potential I think to be a leader in this type of very environmental strong food production. We could find ourselves in a little nitch here in Essex County. I would certainly recommend going forward with their request and there is no real impact to the county.
ACTION OF THE ESSEX COUNTY PLANNING BOARD
ON REFERRALS RECEIVED FROM THE TOWN OF WESTPORT
AND TICONDEROGA
The following motion was made by Supervisor Dedrick.
Where, the Essex County Planning Board has considered the following GML 239 referrals at its regular meeting on February 11, 2004.
REFERRAL PROPOSED ACTION
Westport - Roger Bigelow Special permit and project/building permit - Proposed green house
Ticonderoga - Fort Ticonderoga Site Plan Review - addition
VFW #146
Whereas, none of the referred, proposed actions directly impacts a county road or county property.
Be It adopted by the Essex County Planning Board that no recommendation or comment on the said referrals shall be or hereby is made, and the respective referring bodies may take such final action as they deem appropriate.
This motion was seconded by Supervisor Connell and passed on a vote of 9 in favor.
KELLY: Discussion - opposed, all in favor, carries. Ron, I’m going to call an Executive session to address the bed tax committee at the end of this committee. Thank you Ron.
You all have been provided a report from Steve LaMere. He hurt his back. He wanted to be here. I guess you can just read it or I can read it into the record.
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Next on the agenda was the Fisheries Department. Steve LaMere had been previously excused.
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Next on the agenda was the Essex County EDZ with Barbara Brassard reporting as follows:
BRASSARD: I will be brief. My resolution of support that I brought before you Jody and I worked on it. We hit the main points of the proposed changes so that is what you have in front of you.
RESOLUTION SUPPORTING THE EMPIRE ZONE
REPORT PROGRAM FOR 2004
This resolution was moved by Mrs. Seney and seconded by Mr. Morrow.
KELLY: Discussion? All in favor, opposed, carries.
BRASSARD: Thank you very much. I’ve already talked to George and Tom about the March meetings that I have in my report stressing how important it is for us to send five delegates that we are allotted. One other brief thing, my board requested that I attempt to reestablish contact with
an ADHOC group of Zone coordinators who were assigned to work for the zones program so other than the Economic Development Council, there is really nobody out there but this ADHOC group. Jody and I had a phone conversation with a lady that is ahead of that. We kind of reactivated interest in it and we’re going to be working with them to see what we can do to promote the zones’ program for 2004.
I don’t want to steal your thunder Bob but the Open House at Old Adirondack tomorrow, were you going to mention it or me? Okay, since this is a Zone Certified business, I wanted to point out this is a super interesting company Old Adirondack, located on 7 Station Road in Willsboro. They will be hosting the Lake Placid/Essex County Visitors’ Bureau, North Country Chamber of Commerce after hours from 5:30 to 7:00. The admission is $2.00. You don’t need reservations. They are giving away door prizes, great furniture and like I said they are a zone certified business so if you would like to go and support them that would be great.
KELLY: When will that be?
BRASSARD: Tomorrow night from 5:30 to 7:00.
KELLY: Thank you. Any questions for Barbara?
BRASSARD: Thank you.
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Next on the agenda was the Historian, Margaret Gibbs reporting as follows:
GIBBS: Good morning. I wanted to give an update on the paintings. As I reported before the two paintings that are currently at the Preservation Office in Albany are completed and in December they were appraised. They are ready to be returned and when they come back we will send down two more paintings. We will send down the Augustus Hand painting which had to be taken off the wall because the frame was in such terrible shape. They won’t be able to begin work for a few months but that one I know, everyone has been anxious to see that be repaired. We will also send George Simm. This is George here. Those will be the two next to go.
I just wanted to mention briefly, about our program through the NYS Archives to locate, identify and create record descriptions for the Iron industry in Essex County. This program has started. We’ve hired an archivist. Marcy Neville has been working as the Project Coordinator for this program. So far the archivist has been to the Sherman Free Library and the Iron Center, Moriah Historical Society and now he’s working at the former Republic Steel Offices’ in Mineville. He’s been finding some fascinating things so we should have a really good inventory of what is available for researchers or anyone who is interested in the iron industry here in Essex County. He will also be going to Newcomb. We’ve met with Mr. Canon. We are working on getting access to additional records that are in Newcomb. This program will be continuing for the next few months and we hope to have it completed by the end of June. The New York State Archives put these records online, at least the publically owned records so that people will have access and see what is available.
I wanted to announce the awards that were made through our Opportunity Grants Program for November applicants. There were three awards, there was one to the Paradox Community Center in Schroon and their conducting a fund raiser to try and restore the Paradox School House. There was an award to the Whiteface Preservation Resource Association in Wilmington and they are preserving historical aerial photographs and preparing them for display. There was an award to the Town of Essex and they are developing auto/visual displays and exhibits to document the history of Essex for their bicentennial so those were the three awards in the November round. There will be another opportunity to apply May 1st for these awards. The grant amounts generally range from about $200 to $1,000. If you know anyone, we also have our forms now on our website so you can either contact us to receive forms or you get them from our website which is adkhistorycenter.org. That is all that I have today.
KELLY: Any questions for Margaret?
DOUGLAS: I have just one question Margaret. I wasn’t here when you sent out the paintings. Are they coming here to do the work on the paintings?
GIBBS: They are being sent down to the State Office of Historic Preservation and Treatment Laboratories and so far we’ve sent four.
DOUGLAS: Can you give me the name of the contact person or whom you spoke to? The reason why I’m saying this Mr. Kelly, is we have a lot of people that have contacted my office of some work that Arto Monaco has done both in Clinton County, Essex County, Jay and in Plattsburgh. There are some things that are deteriorating and they have asked questions of where they can send the things to get fixed or if the people would come here and replace them. There are some murals that Arto did throughout both counties that we would like to preserve now and if you could give me some information I would really appreciate it.
GIBBS: I have a list of preservers. In this case, the State is doing it because they are County owned paintings. They wouldn’t be able to do private work.
DOUGLAS: They might know somebody that does?
GIBBS: Yes, and I have a whole list of possible preservers that I could give you.
DOUGLAS: Thank you.
KELLY: Any other questions for Margaret? Thank you very much.
GIBBS: Thank you.
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Next on the agenda was the Housing Department with Alan Hipps reporting as follows:
HIPPS: It will please you to know that I don’t have a report today. The only request that I had was for the resolution which was passed during the industrial development section.
SENEY: I would like to take a minute to thank Alan for all he does for each town in this county. I’ve yet to call him that he hasn’t been responsive and been able to help us in some way and most always is productive. I just want to on behalf of the Town of North Elba, thank you for all that you have done for us.
KELLY: I think we all could say that.
HIPPS: Thank you.
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Next on the agenda was the Cooperative Extension department with Anita Deming reporting as follows:
DEMING: This will be your fastest report ever. I did hand out a piece of paper that looks like this. Just a couple of real quick things, Dan Connell told me to keep it to one page with bullets, so there you’ve got it. One side, one page with bullets so we’re trying it this time.
We have completed our 4-year plan of work process. We thank you all for all your input.
The Adirondack Harvest Committee has adopted a set of by laws and reorganized our board so that our membership is a little more defined. We have a new committee structure for that. Agriculture, if you look there, there is a whole list of classes that are going on the next four weeks. Horticulture has a real exciting program that they are working on, training for horticultural business. They have forty-five registered for that class already and we are real excited about that. The horticulture business is working with Amy to develop training if they want for their employees so they become better at explaining the issues to their clientele. Natural resources, we have some interesting programs coming up. We are sort of the leader in biological control of milfoil now in the State of New York and Vermont. We are having a big conference on February 27th for that. 4-H has taken a lead in developing a class for activities for youth to do during the week that they are off in February. We are in a little bit of a shock. We have eighty kids signed up for the trip to ECHO in Burlington. We are trying to decide how we are going to move all of that but that is better than people not participating. Finally, out nutrition people have a new program they are doing with St. Joseph’s today on diet for sobriety. I thought that was an interesting class that they are teaching today. They said that they had one of their best experiences last week with a special Ed. Class at BOCES. They had the children there that are actually redoing the recalls, where they go back and they ask them to evaluate what they learned and things like that. They are actually scoring better, the special ed. Class at BOCES was scoring better than most of their clients that they deal with on a daily basis. They were really pleased with that. Are there any questions?
KELLY: Thank you very much.
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Next on the agenda was Soil and Water. Robert Bisig was not present therefore no report was given.
KELLY: I would like to have a motion to go into an Executive Session and discuss Bed Tax Committee appointments.
CONNELL: I will make that motion.
KELLY: Do we have a second?
BOTH: I will second that.
SENEY: Can I just say something before we do that? The movie Miracle is out now and for those of you who haven’t seen it or if it comes to your local theaters or if you want to drive to Lake Placid, it’s one of the best films that’s ever, promotional wise as far as our north country with what it has done. The film is absolutely, for those of us who may saw the actual game in 1980 it’s tremendous.
KELLY: It did 19 million on it’s first weekend and it was second for box office receipts so I think it did very well.
SENEY: The hockey world is certainly in favor of it. They say it’s the best film that has ever been done on the sport of hockey. So if you have an opportunity go see it because you will enjoy every single minute of it.
KELLY: Thank you Shirley.
SCOZZAFAVA: Can we take a five minute recess?
KELLY: Yes, absolutely. All in favor - opposed, we will take a five minute recess then move into an Executive Session to discuss bed tax committee appointments.
AT THIS POINT THE COMMITTEE TOOK A FIVE MINUTE RECESS.
AT 12:10 P.M. THE COMMITTEE MOVED INTO EXECUTIVE SESSION TO DISCUSS BED TAX COMMITTEE APPOINTMENTS. WE RETURNED TO OPEN SESSION AT 12:40 P.M.
KELLY: Do we have a motion to move back into open session?
FRENCH: I will move that.
KELLY: Do we have a second?
BOTH: I will second that.
KELLY: All in favor, opposed.
CONNELL: I’d like to move the following recommendations of people for the bed tax advisory committee - Debra Malaney for a three-year term, Bert Yost for a three-year term, Rick Dodge for a three-year term, Heidi Holderied for a three-year term, Cristina Lussi for a two-year term, Naj Wikoff for a one year term and Bob Lilly for a one year term.
RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING APPOINTMENTS TO THE BED TAX ADVISORY COMMITTEE AS FOLLOWS: DEBRA MALANEY, BERT YOST, RICK DODGE AND HEIDI HOLDRIED FOR A THREE YEAR TERM; CRISTINA LUSSI FOR A TWO YEAR TERM AND
NAJ WIKOFF AND BOB LILLY FOR A ONE YEAR TERM.
This resolution was moved by Mr. Connell and seconded by Mr. French and Mrs. Seney.
KELLY: Any further discussion? All in favor - opposed.
DOUGLAS: Opposed.
KELLY: Anything further to come before this meeting?
GLEBUS: It sounds like everyone just voted on this. Isn’t this only supposed to be a committee vote?
KELLY: Yes, just a committee vote. All right the meeting is adjourned.
As there was no further discussion to come before this Economic Development/Planning/Publicity Committee it was adjourned at 12:42 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Judy Garrison, Deputy
Clerk of the Board