Remember Ockawamick!

"Remember Ockawamick!" doesn't quite have the ring of "Remember the Alamo!" or "Remember the Maine!" but it'll  do.

Back in 2008, the Columbia County Board of Supervisors bought the former Ockawamick School building in the Town of Claverack for $1.5 million. The plan, lavishly researched and vigorously promoted, was to relocate the Department of Social Services to that location and ultimately make the building the centerpiece of a new county "campus" in the geographic center of the county . . . six miles from the county seat and, in the words of the inimitable Ellen Thurston, "in the middle of nowhere." The plan met with passionate protest, and eventually it was abandoned.

In 2014, the building was sold at auction for $502,500--about a third of what the Board of Supervisors had paid for it six years earlier.

Gossips retells the story of Ockawamick because of its relevance to the current situation with 11 Warren Street. Unfortunately, the Columbia County Board of Supervisors doesn't seem to have taken the right lesson from the Ockawamick experience. They should have learned that it is important to engage the community in their planning early on. Instead it seems what they learned from the experience is to be as secretive as possible about their plans and to let the public in on what's happening only after it's a fait accompli. 

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