Schuylerville School Superintendent

Schuylerville School Sign

It’s ridiculous that the Schuylerville School system pays its superintendent $169,487 per year plus $71,537 in benefits. It’s a small district with 1,862 students. It has one elementary school and one junior-senior high school. I hope that whoever negotiates the salary and benefits for the new superintendent thinks long and hard about the taxpayers in the Village of Schuylerville, Village of Victory, Town of Saratoga, Town of Easton, Town of Greenwich and the Town of Northumberland who have to pay the bills. I wonder how many taxpayers in the area actually know how much the superintendent is paid?

A Daily Gazette newspaper article on March 26, 2009, said that the outgoing superintendent, Leon Reed, “was listed as having  the largest compensation package of any public school superintendent in a survey of 91 school districts in an 11-county area, according to a Business Review report in September.” You can read the entire Daily Gazette article here.

You can go to the University of the State of New York’s State Education Department website (NYSED) and compare salaries of school superintendents across the state. It’s too bad the report doesn’t tell you the size of the school district.

Read an article by the chairman of the NYS Commission on Property Tax Relief, Thomas Suozzi. This article originally appeared in the Saratogian in January. It’s called, “Streamline Education Through Consolidation.”  It recommends consolidating the administration of small districts with less than 1000 students.  It’s well worth reading and it will take you less than ten minutes.

The actual report that the article references says: “Require consolidation of school districts with fewer than 1,000 students and grant the Commissioner of Education discretionary authority to order consolidation of school districts with fewer than 2,000 pupils to achieve economies of scale and to increase educational opportunities through expanded course offerings.”

It’s your money. Take some time and read the report by the New York State Commission on Property Tax Relief. It explains in detail the 32 recommendations mentioned in Thomas Suozzi’s article above.

You can also read an earlier post that I wrote called, “Why Are Property Taxes in New York So High?”

The times, they are a changin’. There must be a more cost efficient way to give our children an excellent education.

I would like to know what you think. Leave a comment or send me an email.

I’m Starting a Flea Market

I am turning my four acres of backyard into a flea market this spring. You can see an aerial view of the property by clicking here. You can see a map to the property by clicking here. The address is 42 Old Schuylerville Road, Greenwich New York. I am just across the Hudson River from Schuylerville.

My wife Mary Lynn and I  have a pole barn in the yard that we will build the market around. We can easily accommodate 50 vendors and still have plenty of parking for customers. The property is surrounded by other open fields and the Hudson River is across the street. The front part of the building on the first floor was a tavern for many years. We ran it as a tavern for less than a year after we bought the property. We are going to open the downstairs when the flea market is open to sell breakfast sandwiches, hamburgers, hot dogs, coffee, soda and water etc.

I am running an ad on Craigslist that says the following:

Vendors wanted for a New Flea / Antique Market across the Hudson River from Schuylerville. The outdoor market will be located at 42 Old Schuylerville Road, down the hill from the Washington County Fairgrounds. The days of operation are Saturday and Sunday, early May through the end of October. A 10 foot space is $20 either day, $35 for both days / 20 foot space is $30 either day, $50 for both days The first vendors to reserve space can setup under a pole barn. You don’t have to commit to a full season. You can sell on a week to week basis. Food & beverages will be available. Restroom facilities. Four acres with ample parking. Let me know if you need a table provided. Let me know what you plan to sell. I would like to hear from local farmers who would like to sell their produce here.

Feel free to drive by and see the field where the flea market will be located. Call me in advance and I will be happy to speak with you in person and show you around. Questions? For more information or to reserve space, call John Tedder at 695-4369 or send an email to jtedder@teddersrandomnotes.com Thank you. (end of Craigslist ad)

I’ve decided to open on Saturday May 2nd. There is a big antiques show at the Washington County Fairgrounds that weekend and it generates a lot of extra traffic on Route 29. My property can be seen from Route 29 and I’m just down the hill from the fairgrounds. If I have 20 or so vendors in the field, people driving by will notice it and stop and see what is going on. The antiques show is held twice a year at the fairgrounds and draws dealers and shoppers from all over New York and Vermont and probably parts of Massachusetts.

I’m going to put a sign at the intersection of Old Schuylerville Road and Route 29 where the bridge crosses the Hudson River. I’m also going to put one at the blinking light at the bottom of the hill and near the Route 4 bridge, for people who are coming south from the Fort Edward – Glens Falls area.

My property and the Schuylerville area have always reminded me of Lambertville, New Jersey. There is a flea market along the Delaware River just south of Lambertville that I have visited for years. It is called the  Golden Nugget. The towns seem similar to me because they are both next to a river and a canal. Lambertville is a much bigger town than Schuylerville, but Schuylerville has a lot of traffic going through it because Route 29, Route 4, and Route 32 all run through it for a small stretch.

Schuylerville is an historic area, just like Lambertville. George Washington crossed the Delaware River a few miles south of Lambertville to fight the Battle of Trenton. The Battle of Saratoga, which many historians call the turning point of the American Revolution, was fought in and around Schuylerville. Saratoga National Historical Park is located a few miles south of Schuylerville in Stillwater. I can see the top of the Saratoga Battle monument from my yard when the leaves are not on the trees. The battle monument and the Schuyler House just down the street are a part of Saratoga National Historical Park.

The flea market is 12 miles from Broadway in Saratoga Springs and 5 miles from Greenwich.

If you are a vendor and would like to reserve space, call me or send me an email. I will be happy to answer any questions you have.

Please note: I have closed the flea market.

It only lasted a few weeks in May. I was never able to get enough vendors to make it work and the price of insurance was prohibitive. I had to decide if I wanted to switch insurance companies. My existing insurance company wouldn’t insure me if I had a business on the property. Period. I checked with a couple of other insurance companies and it was just too expensive for me. If I required all of the vendors to have their own insurance it would have been cheaper, but that would have shut out all of the people who just wanted to sell some household stuff once in a while and weren’t really in the flea market business. There are also a lot of vendors out there that just don’t carry insurance. The insurance rates I was quoted were only for six months. The weather in this part of New York is too cold and snowy in the winter to continue much past October and I only would have been open May to October.

If you are reading this blog post, and need additional information, I will be happy to share any other knowledge I have about the flea market business with you. Just leave a comment and I will get back to you.

Spring In Washington County, New York

Today is the first day of spring here in beautiful Washington County, New York. I knew spring was on its way because the geese have been flying north over my house all week. I first noticed them on Sunday, March 8th and I grabbed my camera to take a few pictures. I live next to the Hudson River and it is a main migration path for the geese. I can see the Route 29 bridge over the Hudson and some of the river flowing under it, from where I am writing this.

There is a 15 acre field behind my house where the geese sometimes land. The field still has the remains of the corn stalks that were cut last fall. Some of the geese formations have been rather poor and lopsided this year. I don’t know why I judge them, but I do. How hard could it be to form a flying V? I don’t like it when one leg of the V is much longer than the other or it contains obvious gaps. Don’t they realize they are putting on a show for those of us on the ground? I wonder what they think of us as they look down from 200 feet in the air? I always enjoy watching and listening to the geese honking as they make their way north.

I also saw my first Robin of the spring this morning near my bird feeder. I only saw the one. I didn’t see any of his companions. I have a homemade bird feeder in my yard. It consists of two saw horses that a friend of mind donated to me when he moved to North Carolina and two boards that I had laying around. My cat likes to sit in the window and watch all the activity. He makes chirping noises while banging his tail against the wall. We (my cat and I) have had up to five squirrels around the feeder at one time.

My cat doesn’t go outside. I don’t want him killing the birds. I don’t want him being eaten by a coyote or a fox that strolls through my yard once in a while either. I don’t want him getting hit by a car or bus. He has already run into a car. That is how we got him. My wife was driving home from work and he ran across the road without looking. He was stunned by the accident, but not hurt too seriously. We took him to the vet and she fixed him up. We brought him home and he is now an inside cat. We named him Bumper.

There is still some snow on the ground around here. A lot of it has melted over the past two weeks. The temperature should be in the 50’s this weekend and that will probably melt the snow that remains.

I saw my first skunk cabbage of the year this week too. I was walking through an old pond on my property when I saw it. It has probably been there for a few weeks. They usually come out sometime in February. I usually end up with at least a dozen or so in the pond and alongside the stream that runs near it.

When the stream leaves my property, it flows through a culvert under the road. It comes out on the other side and meanders through some woods that are owned by the New York State Canal Corporation. If I walk through those woods at this time of year, I will see a dozen skunk cabbages poking through the ground. I can also be standing on the bank of the Hudson River in about a minute.

There is no boat traffic this time of year. The locks on the Champlain Canal don’t open until sometime in May. Shortly before the locks open, a big barge and a handful of men, set up all of the buoys and markers along the river. That is always a welcome sight here along the river and, even though I don’t have a boat, I look forward to seeing the buoys being put back in the river.

I live just south of Lock 5. I had never seen a real operating lock until I moved here four winters ago. The Hudson River in this area is very beautiful and amazing. If you get a chance, stop by and see Lock 5. You can also take a tour of the river on either of two boats operated by Champlain Canal Tour Boats. If you do, tell Captain Bob and Marie I said hello.

GlobalFoundries Chip Plant in Saratoga County, New York

GlobalFoundries is building a new $4.2 billion computer chip plant about 15 miles from my house. It will be the most modern chip plant in the world when it is completed in 2012. It will be built in the Luther Forest Technology Campus (LFTC) located on 1,414 acres in Malta and Stillwater New York. It will be just a mile or two from Saratoga Lake and a few more miles from the city of Saratoga Springs.

GlobalFoundries, based in Sunnyvale, California, is a new company created by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) of Abu Dhabi. AMD creates and designs computer chips for personal computers and servers. While Intel is AMD’s largest competitor, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation is GlobalFoundries biggest competitor. GlobalFoundries has an existing chip plant in Dresden, Germany. If you click on the link, it will show you a picture of the chip plant in Dresden. The new chip plant will look similar to the one in Germany.

ATIC is a company created by the government of Abu Dhabi. ATIC will own 56.6% and AMD will own 44.4% of the new company.

Luther Forest is just off exit 12 of the Adirondack Northway (I-87). The part of I-87 that runs from Albany, New York to the Canadian border near Montreal is known as the Adirondack Northway. I drove around Luther Forest the other day and I was surprised to see how many private homes were in the area and how close it was to Saratoga Lake. I am not complaining though. This area can use some good, high paying technical jobs. GlobalFoundries says that it will create 1,465 jobs at the chip plant when it is fully operational and that over 5000 other jobs will be created by outside vendors to service and support the chip plant. It should help the economy of this area for years to come.

A chip plant is also known as a Fab, short for fabrication plant. The new plant in Malta, NY will be known as Fab 2. The Dresden, Germany plant is Fab 1.

Hector Ruiz, the new chairman of GlobalFoundries said that the new chip plant is “by far the most significant high-tech investment made in this country in decades.”

I plan to write more about the building of the chip plant and its impact on the area in future posts.

Do you have a specific question about the chip plant that wasn’t answered here? Leave a comment and I will see if I can find the answer. I appreciate your comments.

Reforming Albany

There are 150 members of the New York State Assembly and 62 Senators. There are 19 million of us. They are seriously outnumbered.

How do you force the politicians in Albany to reform a rotten system that benefits them at the expense of the people of New York? The perception is that the government in New York state is corrupt, unethical, and dishonest, and that nothing can be done. That’s just the way it is and nobody can change it. It’s politics as usual.

I disagree. We can fix Albany. It is not an impossible task. A serious ethics law is the first step. No meaningful reform will come out of Albany until a real ethics law is passed. Everything else will flow from that. Here is how we can force them to enact a serious ethics law.

Common Cause or the League of Women Voters should write an ethics law for the New York Assembly and Senate. It should be written in plain English so that a fifth grader can read and understand it.

It should be published in all of the daily newspapers in New York state on the same day. That is important. It should take up the entire page. It should be published on their websites as well.   At the bottom of the document leave a space for every member of the Assembly and Senate to sign it.

It would be like the signatures on the Declaration of Independence. If the signature isn’t legible, print the name too. This will take ethics reform out of the State Capitol in Albany and put it in front of the public in plain view.

The newspapers should also publish the phone numbers, email, and postal addresses of each member of the legislature. The newspapers should ask each reader to contact their representatives and demand that they sign the new ethics law as published in the paper.

The League of Women Voters or Common Cause would be the main contact point for the legislators. They would have to send a letter saying that they supported the ethics law and to please sign their name to it so that their constituents could see it.

This document would be updated every day with the new signatures on the websites of the newspapers until there are enough signatures to make it a law. You would be able to see on a daily basis who supported it and who didn’t support it.

This should shame the politicians into doing the right thing, since they won’t do it themselves. Voters will be looking for the names of their representatives. If voters don’t see their names, they can call them and find out why. If not enough signatures are obtained after 30 days, proceed to step two.

Step 2 would be a daily protest at the State Capitol in Albany. A hundred people a day would do. This would go on every day while the legislature is in session.

If there are still not enough signatures and the legislature goes home, proceed to step three.

Step 3 would be several protesters following each individual legislator 24 hours a day until they sign the document. Everywhere the legislator went, there would be protestors with signs following them.

Eventually, there will be enough signatures. Someone will have to introduce a bill to make the ethics law a real, legal law that the Assembly and Senate must obey or face the consequences. The first person to step up and sign the ethics law in the newspaper should have the privilege of introducing the bill.

After the ethics bill becomes a law, the members of the Assembly and Senate should have to take an oath and proclaim that they have read it, understand it and will act accordingly.

There has got to be a way to reform the politicians in Albany. Business as usual is killing this state. The citizens of New York are being cheated everyday.

Paul Krugman, the Pulitzer Prize winning economist from Princeton University and a New York Times columnist, said on the Bill Maher show last September, “We need a better government than we’ve got.”

He was talking about the federal government in Washington, D.C., but you can apply it to New York state government just as easily.

We need a better government than we’ve got and we need it now.

Reforming Local Government In New York

According to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, our system of local government is broken. There are 10,521 units of government that duplicate services creating needless, wasteful bureaucracies. He is proposing legislation to empower citizens and local governments to consolidate or dissolve these redundant entities.

You can read all about it on the Attorney General’s website. On the same site, you can also watch a half-hour video of AG Andrew Cuomo giving a presentation on reforming local government.

In a December 2008 press release Cuomo said: “Despite New Yorkers drowning for decades in some of the nation’s highest taxes, local leaders have been blocked from reforming local government in an effort to cut government waste and reduce the tax burden. During this economic crisis, leaders have an historic opportunity to fundamentally reform this state’s patchwork quilt of local government entities. These layers upon layers of taxing entities have a chokehold on state residents, and antiquated and arcane laws governing them perpetuate government inefficiency. Our goal is to reform those laws so communities, where appropriate, can reduce local government burden and reduce the cost of living in this great state.”

He is right. There are too many levels of local government. This may have made sense years ago, but it doesn’t make sense today. It has to change.

Cuomo goes on to say that current laws make reform almost impossible. The laws are inconsistent and difficult to understand, even for lawyers working for the Attorney General! Cuomo is proposing new legislation to empower the average citizen with the ability to initiate the consolidation or dissolution process for all local government entities.

Governor David Paterson had this to say: “We need to help our working families by doing everything we can to lower the cost of government. We cannot achieve real, sustainable property tax relief without addressing local government efficiency…. I applaud Attorney General Cuomo for addressing the root cause of these inefficiencies; layers of bureaucracy that duplicate service and drive up costs to residents.”

New York State Senator Betty Little said: “The state fiscal crisis is forcing every level of government to look at ways to control spending and increase efficiency. As a result, more communities are now interested in examining dissolutions and consolidations as a way to avoid property tax increases.”

Cuomo says that consolidating or dissolving inefficient local governments can save New Yorker’s an estimated 5 to 22 percent on their property taxes, which are the highest in the nation. Even if it is only 5 percent, I’ll take it. When was the last time your property taxes went down?

The Attorney General’s office has been conducting investigations into waste, fraud and abuse at various levels of government. Those investigations have resulted in numerous settlements and convictions that have saved taxpayers millions of dollars.

I would like to see Cuomo join forces with Thomas Suozzi who was the chairman of the New York State Commission on Property Tax Relief.  I wrote about the Commission’s report in a previous post, “Why Are Property Taxes In New York So High“.

New York needs to get moving on consolidating local governments and school districts. Having the highest local property taxes in the nation makes New York an undesirable place to live or start a business.

The New York State Association of Counties (NYSAC) recently released a report called, “The Gathering Storm, The Challenges Confronting the Future of New York.” It was written by Jeff Osinski, Director of Research and Education, New York State Association of Counties. It is a publication of NYSAC and the Dennis A. Pelletier County Government Institute, Inc.

The title, “The Gathering Storm” was no accident. It is the title of the first book in Sir Winston Churchill’s six volume memoir, “The Second World War.”

In the Forward to the NYSAC report, Stephen J. Acquario,  Executive Director says, “There is no question that our state faces an important crossroad. We face two possible futures: one where we continue to lose people, businesses and jobs to other states; or one in which we leverage our strengths to rebuild our economy, foster innovation and attract people and businesses.

“It is time that the leaders in this state—state and local leaders—work together to turn this ship of state in a different direction. We need to examine our public policy habits that have caused decades of overspending, overtaxing, over-regulating and overmandating. If our counties and our communities are going to grow again, state leaders need to fundamentally change the way they do business in Albany.”

The Introduction to the report says, a recent study conducted by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania forecasts that 17 of the top 50 counties in population loss in the nation by the year 2020 will be New York counties.

The financial news network CNBC ranks New York State as the most expensive state in the nation in which to do business. Forbes ranks the state 49th in its business cost rankings. CEO Magazine ranks us 50th and the national Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council ranks New York State’s tax burden 44th.

New York also ranked 46th in costs of basic essentials, food, housing and energy. Only Alaska, New Jersey, California and Hawaii ranked higher in the costs for basic essentials.

New York ranked 49th in the quality of the workforce.

Is anybody in Albany listening?

What is it going to take for the New York State Assembly and Senate to stop being Democrats or Republicans and do what is best for the citizens of New York state?