Meetings of Interest in the Week Ahead

On Monday, June 25, there are two Common Council committee meetings. 

• The Fire Committee meets at 5:30 p.m. There is no agenda available for this meeting, but at the Common Council meeting on Tuesday, June 19, Dominic Merante (Fifth Ward), who chairs the committee, intimated that requests for additional funding for the Fire Department were in the offing. The meeting will be an opportunity to learn more about this.
• The Police Committee meets at 6:00 p.m. It is expected that Fourth Ward supervisor Linda Mussmann and others will be there to protest the deployment of the Shared Services Response Team in Hudson on June 5, which Mussmann has characterized as "a militarized raid on Hudson." The meeting is expected to be a continuation of the conversation started at the informal Common Council meeting on June 11 and pursued at the Board of Supervisors Public Safety Committee on June 20.

On Tuesday, June 26, there are two meetings of interest, both of which Gossips will miss because it is also the day of the Democratic Congressional primary, and I will be spending the day at the polls.

• At 12 noon, the Hudson Development Committee (HDC) board meets at 1 North Front Street. There are likely to be updates on the acquisition of property from CSX to give the Kaz site access to South Front Street and the financial review of the three developers that have submitted proposals for the Kaz site, and possibly the announcement of new board members and a progress report from the search committee tasked with finding a replacement for executive director Sheena Salvino, who will be leaving in early August.
• At 5:30 p.m., the Common Council Finance Committee will meet. There may be other things on the agenda, but the main business will be parceling out $20,000 to worthy festivals and events. This task used to be done in May by the Arts, Entertainment & Tourism Committee, but since that committee no longer exists, it has fallen to the Finance Committee, and it's being done at the end of June, after two of Hudson's major events—the Flag Day Parade and the OutHudson Pride Parade—have already happened. In past years, these two events have, between them, gotten more than a quarter of the money, so it will be interesting to see if they get any money this year for expenses already incurred.

On Wednesday, June 27, there are once again two meetings, back to back.

• At 6 p.m., there is a special meeting of the Common Council to discuss the budget amendment requested by the Youth Department.
• At 6:15 p.m., the Legal Committee is scheduled to meet, so either all the problems and questions surrounding the request for an additional $50,751.75 for the Youth Department have been worked out and answered behind the scenes and the special meeting will be over in fifteen minutes, or the Legal Committee meeting won't start until the special meeting of the Council is over. Stewart's Shops and its request for a zoning amendment to accommodate a desired expansion will likely once again to be on the agenda.

On Thursday, June 28, at 5:30 p.m., the Tourism Board, will meet for the first time. The law that established the 4 percent lodging tax in Hudson also created the Tourism Board, "empowered to take all reasonable steps it determines desirable, necessary and proper to market the City of Hudson as a destination for overnight and daytrip visitors by making use of the funds set aside by the City Treasurer." Those funds are a percentage of the revenue from the lodging tax: 50 percent of the first $250,000; 25 percent of the second $250,000; 10 percent of everything beyond $500,000, not to exceed $250,ooo a year. Alderman Rich Volo (Fourth Ward) chairs the board, which is made up of mayoral and Council appointees: Ted Gramkow, Chuck Rosenthal, Tambra Dillon, Kristen Keck, Jeff Hunt, David Brown, Ellen Thurston, and Jamie Smith Quinn.

COPYRIGHT 2018 CAROLE OSTERINK