Of Interest
The Times-Union has an article today about the growing second home owner population in Hudson and Columbia County: "Nobody home, for now." There's a slide show accompanying the article by Times-Union photographer John Carl D'Annibale which includes a picture of architect and urbanist Matthew Frederick, looking like a voice crying in the wilderness, and this picture of a tractor on Columbia Street, meant, presumably, to give the impression that farm tractors are a frequent sight on the streets of Hudson.
The article quotes Board of Supervisors chair Roy Brown talking about repopulation as though having second home owners paying property taxes for services they don't use--in particular, public schools--was not a good thing. What would be the impact on the Hudson City School District's $41.6 million annual budget if it were called upon to educate more than 2,000 students?
Acknowledgment: Gossips learned about this article from Don Moore, who learned about it from Mary Rembach at HDC.
Extremely superficial article. Very little meaningful analysis or information here. Almost no data.
ReplyDeleteReally second-rate journalism.
The economic issues in Columbia County are deeper and more complex than anything described here.
Of course second home owners make a huge contribution to CC (and Roy Brown knows that). I think Roy's comments were taken out of context and/or there was no decent interviewing going on. (I know Roy Brown.)
-- Jock Spivy
I agree with Jock—really second rate journalism, and chock-a-block with shallow comments...
ReplyDeleteMy own comments got overlong as I composed it here, so I turned it into a full post:
http://www.sampratt.com/sam/2011/05/divide-and-conquer.html
--Sam P.