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TaconicArts.com Interior/Exterior House Painting by someone you can trust.
Brown Ink Commercial Printing
600 Horsepound Road, Kent Lakes, NY 10512
(845) 225-0177 Joe Greico's Out On A Limb All types of tree work, all aspects of lawn maintenance, snow plowing, lot clearing, excavation, retaining walls, stump grinding.
82 Hortontown Rd. Chuckie Goodnight Foundation To educate children on how to be good stewards of the earth. Hudson Valley Photo and Video Photography by Chris Casaburi (845) 531-2358 Town of Kent Conservation Advisory Committee Explore the outdoors in the Town of Kent, New York The BEST way to handle butter!
A Putnam County Owned Business Enterprise |
In yesterday’s edition of the New York Journal News they ran 5 full pages of incidences from police reports. Imagine how different our communities would be if they ran 5 full pages of the positive things we do, our successes? Graduations, accomplishments, births, projects completed… There is more to life than drunk drivers and wasteful small-time marijuana arrests. What good things have you done that should be in the news? [...] “The inequities in our economy are piling up: trillions for war, trillions for Wall Street and tens of billions for the insurance companies. Banks and other corporations are sitting on piles of cash of taxpayer’s money while firing workers, cutting pay and denying small businesses money to survive. “People are losing their homes, their jobs, their health, their investments, their retirement security; yet there is unlimited money for war, Wall Street and insurance companies, but very little money for jobs on Main Street. [...] Hall secures final approval for Lake Oscawana cleanup funds WASHINGTON – The U.S. House of Representatives voted Wednesday for final approval of $400,000 to improve the water quality of Lake Oscawana in Putnam Valley. Rep. John Hall (D-Dover) worked to insert the funding into the fiscal year 2010 Agriculture Appropriations Bill. Without federal funding, the Town of Putnam Valley would have had to pass along the entire cost of this equipment on to local taxpayers. The bill also provides funding for public health, food safety, supporting rural communities, and conservation efforts. The funding was passed by the House originally in July and has been included in the House-Senate conference report on Agriculture Appropriations. The House-Senate conference report passed the House by a vote of 263 to 162. The Senate is expected to pass the bill next week and then will be signed into law by President Obama. Oscawana’s water quality has been declining for the past 40 years, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation recently concluded that remedial measures need to be taken without delay. Federal funding will support the rehabilitation plan commissioned by the Lake Oscawana Civic Association. The plan calls for removing existing phosphate [...] Support Our Sponsors! Joe Greico’s Out On A Limb All types of tree work, all aspects of lawn maintenance, snow plowing, lot clearing, excavation, retaining walls, stump grinding. 82 Hortontown Rd. Kent Cliffs, NY 10512 greico@verizon.net T- (914)224-3049 F- (845)231-0815 TaconicArts.com Interior/Exterior House Painting by someone you can trust. (845) 225-2104 jeff@taconicarts.com Good Friday Morning, It was 34.3° here this morning and I could hear the jade plant and the orchids shivering outside. There is a call for rain later this afternoon and evening. Tomorrow is supposed to be windy and rainy for most of the day but you should still get outside. Along with the events listed below (and the many that I don’t even know about), if the weather does keep you in I still want you to get outside! To help with that, PBS has made their new series by Ken Burns on our National Parks available for free viewing at their website here. Use a fast ‘net connect. Using the economic downturn as an excuse, the NYSDEC [...] Beach ranking not kind to Myrtle Beach area By James Rosen Washington Bureau The quality of South Carolina’s beach waters and their maintenance fare poorly compared with those off the coasts of neighboring Georgia and North Carolina, a national environmental group said Wednesday. Among 30 states reviewed in the new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, South Carolina ranks 19th, with 8 percent of its beach-water samples failing to meet federal clean-water standards. North Carolina and Georgia tie at No. 4 on the list, with just 2 percent of their beach-water samples failing to pass muster. Louisiana has the dirtiest beach-waters, while Delaware, New Hampshire and Virginia have the cleanest, the study found. Nationwide, the total number of beach-closing days due to water pollution topped 20,000 in 2008 for the fourth straight year. “Pollution from dirty stormwater runoff and sewage overflows continues to make its way to our beaches,” said Nancy Stoner, a water analyst with the environmental group. “From contracting the flu or pink eye, to jeopardizing millions of jobs and billions of dollars that rely on clean coasts, there are serious costs to inaction.” In a separate ranking, none of South Carolina’s beaches made the dreaded [...] Steps toward a healthier lake There is little doubt about what needs to be done to restore the health of Putnam Valley’s Lake Oscawana, a scenic glacial lake so saturated with phosphorous that in February the state Department of Environmental Conservation declared it an “impaired water body,” meaning remediation is required. “For 29 years we have had an annual study,” Stephen Axinn, president of the Lake Oscawana Civic Association, told the Editorial Board. “It has been studied more than almost any lake in the Northeast.” The problem, as study after study has shown, is that phosphorous, an ingredient in lawn fertilizer as well as animal and human waste, washes into the lake with runoff from each rainfall. It promotes the growth of oxygen-depleting algae, which can choke the life – fish and all – out of a lake, leaving a foul-smelling, pea soup-like ecological dead zone in its place. Lake Oscawana is not alone, the phosphorous crisis is affecting bodies of water throughout the Lower Hudson Valley and beyond. The Ramapo River in [...] PlanPutnam: Now in our tenth year! “I think society puts young people in a box — people 15, 16, 17 — and does not expect them to do much but go to high school and play football and stuff like that. This just shows they can do a lot more with some strong ambition and desire. My [advice] is to get out there and do your thing with all you got.” - 17 year old Zack Sunderland, the youngest to ever to sail around the globe – solo. Good Monday Morning, This issue of News That Matters begins the 10th year of PlanPutnam! As of this morning we have near 500 readers who receive NtM directly by email and another several hundred who read it online each day. As the column is posted on several blog sites and is picked up by Google and other web crawlers, I have no idea how many others are reading. And, while this column is certainly not the most read media source in the county it has become the most influential and for that you should all be proud. You don’t know how many times I’ll be talking to [...] Good Friday Morning, As if you haven’t noticed it’s been raining for the past week or so. But it’s the perfect time to look at your streets and roads for signs of stormwater problems which will be evidenced by grit and sand spread out in ‘alluvial fans‘ across the pavement. While seemingly innocuous, that sand (which is carrying other pollutants) will end up in a lake or creek and have a negative effect on the quality of our recreational and drinking water supplies. So if you see a problem, call your town’s stormwater committee and let them know where it is. Take some photographs (like Brian’s in Wednesday’s column and again to the left) to document the problem and then let’s get them fixed. Tony Caravetta and the Kent highway guys have been out in western Kent these past few days sweeping the streets which has made a marked difference in the amount of silt and sand flowing into local streams. Has your highway department been out? If not, call them and ask them why. I’m in shape. Pear’s a shape, right? A friend of mine pointed me to an article about how the nation is [...] “Only single-payer national health insurance can make universal, comprehensive coverage affordable by saving the hundreds of billions we now waste on insurance overhead and bureaucracy.” Good Wednesday Morning, News That Matters welcomes County Legislator Dini LoBou as one of our newest readers. The second most read story at the blogsite is the one about the Town of Kent’s move to allow its supervisors to serve for four years rather than two. That story, which you can find here, surpassed the debate on the Tilly Foster Contract and almost anything about Peekskill Hollow Road and Putnam Valley. The term issue is not dead and will be discussed at a public hearing later this summer (August 17) but I’m curious to what your views are about that. Point your browsers here and weigh in. Starting on June 19th and running for about ten days, specialized training exercises at West Point will, as it does yearly, generate booming and shaking in the Hudson Valley. So those explosions you hear? No, it’s not Canadians finally getting back at us for invading them in 1812, it’s just our next generation of citizen soldiers in training. If it’s raining it must be [...] Good Wednesday Morning, On Monday evening the Eastern Putnam County Chapter of the League of Women Voters hosted their second annual conference on Stormwater at the Mahopac Library. In attendance were Supervisors from Carmel, Patterson and Kent, and a bevy of engineers and planners as well as a healthy audience. The highlight of the evening, and the only presentation to garner applause, was the showing of four public service announcements crafted by the Town of Kent’s stormwater committee. Those PSA’s can be viewed at the town’s website. Though the subject matter often causes people’s eyes to glaze over, the projects discussed affect each and every American – including you. Check out the videos and/or contact your town’s stormwater committee (each town should have one) to find out how you can be more involved in solving our non-point pollution issues. Hat’s off to the League for their work. To learn more about the LWV, contact Jennifer Maher at pclowv@gmail.com The Bigger (almost) Better Bottle Bill is not in effect as it was supposed to be on June 1st. A conspiracy of bottlers has blocked the bill from being implemented and have a court order that sets prohibition [...] |
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