A potential rift between the Mayor's Office and the Police/Court planning committee over the design process was apparently resolved in a shareholders' meeting Thursday, according to both Mayor William Hallenbeck Jr. and Alderman Nick Haddad, D-1st Ward. The mayor said the project's appearance before the Hudson Historic Preservation Commission would be an appropriate time for public comment.It should be noted that meeting referenced was a meeting of stakeholders not shareholders.
COPYRIGHT 2015 CAROLE OSTERINK
I heartily agree with Mr. Moore, and now we're learning that the NYS Department of State leans this way too:
ReplyDelete"One issue that divides the mayor and the council president is the so-called Furgary Boat Club shanties. While the mayor would like to see them removed as soon as possible, Moore said, 'I think the appropriate response is to create a substantial historical archive at the Hudson Public Library [sic], (to which) anyone with artwork, documentation, letters (could contribute,) possibly an oral archive.' He said he’d like to see grants pursued to create a serious archive."
Documentation of the camps begins in 1889, though they're surely much older. The state historical preservation office has done its research, and is well aware of the fact.
The mayor and others should resist obliterating those parts of local history they don't appreciate, and may even despise.
Politicians have a responsibility to past and future generations too, as suggested by Mr. Moore's appropriate response.
The band of angels, who can't "serve the public" Oakdale in winter, despise the ones who kept North Dock continuously open for the last 150 years?
ReplyDeleteNow we learn from the National Organization for Rivers, that removing fishermen from shore at gun point is a serious crime. As much as the mayor would like a different public, county duck hunters equally need less capricious "servants."
1 Riparian
i talked with some of the the boys today, we aren't dead yet, we really don't want a museum or to be on display in one, we'd just like our boathouses back so that we can fish, hunt, trap, and enjoy the river the way our fathers did, the way my son can learn.
ReplyDeleteKite's Nest can't teach little Eddie "captain Dad," and sloops isn't fighting for Joe Finn Jr's. right to fully employ his commercial fishing license, paid for at 520 Warren St! Those fishing shacks are but the byproduct of the continuous (pre)historic and LEGAL USE.
DeleteWe can have it all. A museum to commemorate a fishing culture that was already fading by the time most of us were born (think: Albany Beef), and an equipment shack and a dock to keep the tradition alive, which is a concern so paramount it is embedded in our state laws.
DeleteThe appointed attorney Cheryl Roberts was the greatest obstacle to striking a lease agreement for at least one shack, one at the very least. We had a Captain's license in the group, plus a commercial fishing license. We had clients from downstate during striper season if we wanted, but the landlubber attorney had no feeling for the above-mentioned laws, and now she's done her work and moved on.
On the other hand, one must be fair and admit that the North Dock Tin Boat Association lost its legal challenge at the Supreme Court level. I believe this was thanks in large measure to the mischief of city proprietor Cotton Gelston, which suggests there's more to this controversy than the obvious level which the newspaper, the council, and the mayor keep banging on about. To wit, did it never occur to any of them that the sewage treatment plant was a squatter too?
Instead there should be cause for compassion, and that's not even raising the issue of those properties south of Dock Street which, based on the same court decision, ought to have met the same fate as Furgary. Oops I mentioned it, so it must be time to feel some compassion.
But if the camps were lost fair and square, that's not what caused the bad feeling that won't fade (the city's massive double-standards notwithstanding).
Something can still be worked out if there's a will, but how do you excite good will out of this?
It's a muddle until enough people don't want it to be, but enough people aren't interested in, well ... anything!
NDTBA Inc was but one of 30 independent plaintiffs and its (outvoted) position has always been; no (city) one "owns" the land below the HWL, it belongs to everyone and we can't be denied use.
DeleteThe NOR states that; the city fencing it off is a (criminal) taking and a separate, equally dispirit issue.
1 Riparian
As to ownership, it turned out that the people of the State of New York owned the land beneath the high water line the whole time, and that the state was in its rights to convey it to the city.
DeleteI agree that access to enjoy our inviolable surface rights is a separate issue.
The NOR states that in all fifty states, a state can't now convey, what the federal government intended as public Navigation rights, long before their statehood.
DeletePublic and private "ownership" along a public watercourse ends at the HWL and neither city nor state has the right to restrict "fishing, fowling or recreational" use of the land below the HWL.
Where one draws the HWL is crucial. A corrupt municipality, will move the line in favor of more land (South Bay) to tax. Fosters, Craftech, the DPW building, the city pound, the treatment plant and the Riverloft property all restrict access for Navigation. The fishermen's wharf at North Dock is the only remaining property that promotes it.
The city, as the new riparian, is obligated to expand use of the wharf, to promote Navigation. That obligation includes use for the hundreds who were using it as well all new comers.
The issue here; how can city leaders meet their obligation to expand use by outlawing volunteer stewardship and bulldozing the byproduct of that historical use?
You're collapsing the matter of navigation rights and access to navigation into the same equation. They're different problems with different treatments under Common Law.
DeleteYou're right that no entity can trade in our navigational rights here, but access is a thornier issue.
The city will say that it's already drawing up plans to expand the kind of use you're calling for, though some of our politicians will stoop to citing safety issues as a reason for moving slowly on your request. (This would be despite the abundant evidence that public safety is the city's least concern in either bay.)
But when you correctly point out all of the private entities you listed that "restrict access for navigation," you glide over the question of ownership of those properties.
Why?
Do you concede this double standard: that Furgary must leave state lands whereas the private entities you listed may remain on state lands?
The city owns Furgary now, but the state still owns up to the high water mark of 1785, which is actually inland from Furgary and south of Dock Street.
You're the one who discovered this, so why aren't you telling this amazing story?!
You lose your best, most easily understood argument by getting hung up on arcane theories of ownership which you wrongly conflate with water access issues and which anyway defy Federalism.
The property belongs to everyone and we (fishermen, duck hunters and rec users) can't be denied the historical use.
DeleteThe issue here is the continuous historic use, for the Tin Boat Association and it's members, not ownership.
In fact, if you take it one step further, as a steward and "non-owner" the Corporation could never be sued for property it didn't own. Worked well for 150 years, until government intervention.
The North Dock Tin Boat Inc is a 100% member supported not for profit, robbed of its natural right, to meet each other down by the river, where the fish are biting and where the ducks are.
Those shacks are there there because they were once docks, placed below the HWL by fishermen. The shacks are there because of fishermen, not the other way around.
Politics is supposed to end at the water's edge. Politicians, moving the line always forward, increases landowner liability and now renders the North Dock (and Oakdale) useless.
History repeats; just like 350 years ago, the issue is not ownership but how to expand "free and easy use, that the King can't provide."
The North Dock Tin Boat Inc is a 100% member supported not for profit, robbed of its natural right, to meet each other down by the river, where the fish are biting and where the ducks are.
DeleteThose shacks are there there because they were once docks, placed below the HWL by fishermen. The shacks are there because of fishermen, not the other way around.
Politics is supposed to end at the water's edge. Politicians, moving the line always forward, increases landowner liability and now renders the North Dock (and Oakdale) useless.
History repeats; just like 350 years ago, the issue is not ownership but how to expand "free and easy use, that the King can't provide."
if North Dock and the treatment plant were formerly submerged and state land, is everything inside both bays are still state land? You could end up with a new zip code
DeleteConvey its obligation to "promote Navigation, for fishing, fowling and recreatio," precisely what NDTBA Inc was doing, a public service.
ReplyDeleteNow it's closed, just like Oakdale.