Paterson slots $5 million for new green jobs program

HYDE PARK — Gov. David Paterson announced the release of $5 million in funds to train alternative energy workers at mid-Hudson community colleges Monday.
The surprise announcement came in midst of an alternative energy conference at which Paterson praised his newly appointed “senator in waiting” Kirsten Gillibrand.
As representative for the state’s 20th Congressional District, Gillibrand, a Democrat, was one of the sponsors of the event.
Paterson announce the creation of a “clean energy training consortium” that will be spearheaded by Ulster County BOCES and will involve programs at Orange and Sullivan, Dutchess and Rockland community colleges
“This should be a real shot in the arm,” the governor said.
Paterson gave the kenynote address at the standing room only conference.
It was an ideal platform for Gillibrand to take the spotlight as the new senator from New York. Paterson named her Friday to take the seat of Hillary Clinton, who has been appointed as secretary of State in the Obama administration.
Elements of the training programs are already up and running at the various community colleges. For instance, SUNY Ulster has a lot of solar effort underway.

Mountain Jam V to feature Allmans, Richie Havens, Coheed and more

January 22, 2009

MONTICELLO — Sullivan County environmental groups that oppose gas drilling in western Sullivan, casino gaming in Thompson, the landfill expansion in Monticello and the mushroom plant in the southern Town of Mamakating are getting together.

They're not, they say, teaming up to oppose economic development projects.

"This is not to fight anything," said Janet Newberg, president of Special Protection of the Environment for the County of Sullivan.

Newberg said the concept is modeled on organizations in Pennsylvania, which have pooled their expertise, established goals for environmental protection and sustainable economic development and educated the public.

For example, SPECS has done lots of research on recycling and composting, whereas other groups are experts on solar energy, community cleanup projects, green building practices and the environmental review process.

"People are thirsty for information," she said.

Several of these groups, however, such as SPECS, which opposes the county landfill expansion, have been focused on a single issue.

Tim McCausland, president of the Sullivan County Partnership for Economic Development, said he doesn't feel threatened by the prospect of having to debate a super-sized opponent at public hearings — provided they don't gum things up with unrealistic objectives.

"It comes down to hysteria and total irrelevant issues that are brought up that make my life and economic development projects more difficult," he said.

The groups held their first meeting Thursday in Monticello. Others attending included the Sullivan Alliance for Sustainable Development, Catskill Mountainkeeper, The Delaware Highlands Conservancy and The Basha Kill Area Association. Representatives from the Gerry Foundation and Sullivan County Planning Department also attended.

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Link is here:  http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090113/NEWS/901130336

Catskill Home Prices: How Low Will They Go?

Jennifer May for The New York Times

PREPARATION Ronny Murphy, a Sullivan County broker, gets ready for a showing.

link to complete article is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/greathomesanddestinations/02catskills.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Jennifer May for The New York Times

ON THE MARKET Mark and Lisa Hellman, with their children Avery and Owen, outside their renovated farmhouse in Youngsville in Sullivan County.

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Jennifer May for The New York Times

The entrance to the Highlands at Bethel, where lots are for sale.

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Fred A. Bernstein for The New York Times

A PERSONAL INTEREST Randy Florke, a broker in Sullivan County, in front of his house in Livingston Manor. He put the property up for sale a year ago at $299,000. It is still for sale but the price has dropped to $199,000.

Some sellers have had to reduce prices by a third or more. (His own house in Livingston Manor, which he had hoped to sell last year for $299,000, is now listed at $199,000.) And still, he said, buyers are scarce.

But during a drive last week past some of the houses he would like to sell, as sunlight reflected off the perfectly white snowbanks, the situation seemed far from bleak. Mr. Florke said that, if anything, “part of me is thrilled about this market.”

When he started selling weekend houses in 1996, he said, prices in Sullivan County (the heart of what has traditionally been called the Catskills) were so low, he was able to help Manhattanites of modest means buy second homes.

“It was an exciting time,” he said, recalling days when young couples, with only $100,000 to spend, could find a farmhouse fixer-upper. “And I feel like we’re recapturing that moment,” he said. He recently listed a house for $85,000, a price, he said, he hasn’t seen in years.

Mr. Florke, who has several other businesses, can afford to be sanguine. But for many in the Catskills, this is a tough winter.

“Buyers think everything should be a fire sale,” said David Knudsen, a broker at the Catskills Buyer Agency in Liberty, who said the average sale prices declined more than 15 percent from November 2007 to November 2008. At the same time, he said, the number of closings was down by about a third.

The tightened credit market is part of the problem. But even those buyers who can get financing are playing wait-and-see. “They don’t have one iota of motivation to do anything,” Mr. Knudsen said, because they think both prices and interest rates are going lower.

At the same time, Mr. Knudsen said, “many sellers are in la-la land,” unwilling to recognize how low buyers expect prices to go.

And that — the expectations gap — means houses aren’t selling.

In early October, in his Catskills real estate blog, blog.catskill4sale.com, he called the situation an “economic Armageddon.”

A few weeks later, Sullivan County’s largest brokerage, Yeager Realty, with 40 agents in Liberty, Bethel and Rock Hill, shuttered its offices, after a 24-year run. (The company’s owner, Paula Yeager, said she would continue to work from home.) .

Indeed, with so many fewer serious buyers, Mr. Knudsen said, he thought the best advice to some sellers was to close up their houses for the winter, rather than keep them open for the occasional — very occasional — showing.

“If they want to come up for a weekend, they can stay in a motel,” he said. It’s cheaper, he said, than heating the house all winter.

True, Ronny Murphy, a broker at Coldwell Banker Currier Lazier, in Rock Hill, said she has sold a few places recently — one, in Fremont, was reduced to $205,000 from $300,000 — and that she had a “quite a few” people looking in December. Some of them figure “real estate is a better place to put their money than the stock market,” she said.

At the same time, Ms. Murphy said, a number of sellers have taken their houses off the market, because the Multiple Listing Service reports how long they’ve been for sale, and they don’t want the listings to say “one year.” They’ll put them back on the market, as fresh listings, in the spring, she said.

Mr. Florke said that he had an offer on his own house, but the buyer needed financing, which required an appraisal. And the appraiser said he couldn’t come up with comparables, because there hadn’t been any sales in a 10-mile radius in several months.

Homeowners who haven’t been able to sell include Mark and Lisa Hellman, who own a large farmhouse on a spectacular site in Youngsville. After buying the place for $275,000 in 2004, they put $500,000 more into a gut renovation. “I got my dream kitchen,” said Ms. Hellman, surveying her six-burner Viking range and Sub-Zero refrigerator, amid a sea of tasteful cabinetry. The entire house is ready for the cover of a magazine, thanks to the decorating efforts of Ms. Hellman (who is an executive of the fashion house Versace).

But the Hellmans — who have two small children and are considering exchanging their city and country homes for a single suburban residence — put the house on the market in mid-2007. At the time, they were asking $1.2 million. Soon they had an offer for $1 million, which they rejected as too low.

Now their asking price is $985,000, and still no one has looked in months, said Mr. Hellman, an executive of his family’s building maintenance company, Temco Service Industries. That may reflect a particular softness at the high end of the market, Mr. Knudsen and other brokers said.

But the Hellmans have something in common with many people offering houses in the Catskills: they don’t need to sell.

“You don’t see a lot of distressed sellers up here,” said Dorothy McArdle, the owner of Apple Tree Realty, in Andes (a small town in Delaware County). People who bought second homes in the Catskills, she said, have tended to buy places they could afford, and to make large down payments. “You don’t see the high loan-to-value ratio” that is causing problems in other areas, she said.

The owner of a house on a pond in Andes recently lowered the price to $299,000 from $329,000, said Ms. McArdle, who is listing it. She said she had seen “some reductions more drastic than that, but in those cases the original asking prices were inflated to begin with.”

Having sold real estate in Andes for 30 years, Ms. McArdle said she remained “optimistic about the market.

“Right now, people are scared. We need to get through the inauguration, through the winter. At the end of March, the beginning of April, we’ll see an increase in activity.”

But at what prices? Mr. Knudsen said the Catskills were seeing “a move to moderation.” He said that in 2007 “the sweet spot in the second-home market” — where a mid-range New York City buyer would be looking — was around $325,000. “That would have bought a chalet-style house,” he said, “with wood floors, cathedral ceiling, three bedrooms, two bathrooms — a really nice getaway.”

A year later, he said, buyers expect to pay about $100,000 less. “The buyer that I’m seeing in what I call the mid-range — employed, not wealthy, the middle-class urban buyer, looking for a getaway — is looking in the mid-200s. But I don’t know that their expectations have necessarily shrunk as fast as their budgets.”

Some of the biggest bargains may be not in homes, but in homesites. In mid-2007, Redstone Properties, a national developer of subdivisions, began marketing lots in Bethel, in Sullivan County. The lots were priced at $149,900 and up. Some of those same lots, which range from 4 to 10 acres, are now available for as little as $69,900, according to Toby Potterton, the sales manager for the development, the Highlands at Bethel. He said that the company was actually bullish, and that it wanted to sell the land so it could use the money for larger projects.

Undeveloped land isn’t the only real estate available for under $100,000. When a neighbor asked Mr. Florke to list his house — a cute cabin with an unfinished interior — Mr. Florke decided to price it at $85,000, making it his least expensive listing in years. (In 2007, he would have asked almost twice as much, he said.)

“Everyone asks, ‘Are we at the bottom?’ ” Mr. Florke said. His answer: “I don’t know, but there are some great deals out there.”

Indeed, he said, “this may become one of those periods that people look back on with nostalgia, talking about the bargains they were able to pick up.”

Paterson proposes extending legal gambling to boost budget

Critics seek risks of more addiction

ALBANY — Faced with a rising state budget deficit, Gov. David A. Paterson is turning to a reliable source of revenues previous governors have tried: gambling.

The governor’s proposed budget for the fiscal year that will begin April 1 envisions nearly $500 million in revenues from extending gambling to bars, restaurants and racetracks. Other ideas on the table also could dramatically expand the number of places in the state to place wagers.

“It’s amazing. Here we go again,” said James Maney, executive director of the New York Council on Problem Gambling, an independent group that promotes greater awareness of compulsive gambling.

“We’re very concerned that when things get tough for state government, we’re going to make it easier for New Yorkers to lose more money,” Maney added.

Just as the state turned to a big gambling expansion following an economic downturn and the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, Paterson is eyeing all sorts of ways for gamblers to open their wallets and the state to pick up the resulting revenues from gambling losses.

In the proposed budget released last week, Paterson calls for eliminating restrictions for the Lottery’s Quick Draw game — an electronic keno game that treatment experts deride as “Crack Draw” because of its addictive ways — that had been enacted to give gamblers a built-in respite from playing.

Under the proposal, Quick Draw, now in 3,200 establishments and limited to 13 hours a day, could be played around the clock. Paterson also called for removing the provision restricting the game to establishments licensed to sell alcohol but drawing at least 25 percent of sales from food.

That potentially would open its availability to thousands of additional outlets. Another Paterson proposal would make the game permanent, instead of subject to review by the Legislature every few years.

Finally, the governor wants to lower the age restriction — now 21 — to allow 18-year-olds to play.

Longer hours for casinos

The Quick Draw changes would bring the state an additional $50 million next year and $59 million annually after that.

Paterson also wants to drop restrictions requiring racetrack casinos to operate no more than 16 hours a day and to shut down at 2 a.m.

That would allow casinos, such as ones in Hamburg and Batavia, to stay open 24 hours a day, bringing the state an additional $45 million next year from its share of the bets. The requirement that the law allowing such casinos expire in 2017 also would be eliminated and the casinos made permanent.

The governor wants to permit New York to join another multistate lottery game and possibly an international high-stakes game, which would bring an additional $11 million in revenue.

He also calls for allowing Belmont Park, a racetrack on Long Island, to have a casino with up to 5,000 slot machines. The state would receive at least $370 million for the casino development rights.

While they are not in his budget, the governor also has signaled openness to offering new electronic table games — such as roulette, baccarat, craps, and blackjack — alongside slot machine-like devices now at eight racetracks around the state. State legislators, meanwhile, are pushing a constitutional amendment to permit three non-Indian casinos in the Catskills.

The governor’s plan even would let the state’s Lottery Division engage in a little Wall Street gambling. The agency maintains a fund of about $1.2 billion that pays lottery winners who collect their money on a multiple-year basis.

It now is banned from investing the fund’s holdings in stocks and bonds, limiting it to Treasury notes. Paterson wants to lift those restrictions because he projects the market over time will beat the safer Treasury investments by about $50 million a year.

The proposals worry counselors and gambling addiction experts. While calling for allowing more ways for people to gamble, the governor has frozen funding for treatment and prevention efforts at $4.2 million — a level that, they say, prevents many counties from launching any substantial outreach efforts for compulsive gamblers. New York is the only state not to have a dedicated flow of money — from gambling revenues, for example — for treatment and prevention. The state, some say, has not even studied the impact of the big gambling expansion over the past decade on compulsive gamblers.

More funding urged

Robert Rychtarik, a senior research scientist at the University at Buffalo’s Research Institute on Addictions, said the state should expect more problem gamblers with the Paterson plans to expand gambling.

“The state needs to provide the funds for the anticipated increase in gambling problems that might be expected from the increases of the gambling venues they are proposing,” said Rychtarik, who is also president of New York Council on Problem Gambling, which takes a neutral stance on gambling itself.

The Paterson administration said it plans to expand the number of counties providing gambling prevention and treatment programs to 37 from 30 in the coming year and will continue its operation of a 24-hour gambling addiction hotline.

“We believe that there is room for responsible growth in the gaming industry to help the state manage its fiscal difficulties. That said, we recognize the need to continue to address the issue of problem gambling through targeted initiatives,” said Matt Anderson, Budget Division spokesman.

Amherst Town Justice Mark G. Farrell, recognized for setting up the country’s first suburban drug court, said the state has not been effective in expanding treatment and prevention efforts “because the biggest partner in gambling is only one thing: government. Because government can see certain economic benefits to the proliferation of gambling, . . . there’s a reluctance to take a look at this addiction.”

Farrell noted that Australia, where he recently attended a gambling conference as a guest of the national government, has strict rules governing casinos, including mandatory shut-down periods and even clocks and windows in the facilities.

Gambling headquarters

“It’s just troubling that government is compromising standards, and promoting and proliferating gambling without taking into account the human issues,” Farrell said. But counselors on the front lines say the state is becoming saturated with gambling opportunities, from new lottery games to casinos. And Western New York, home to three Indian and two racetrack casinos, has become the state’s gambling headquarters.

“Those with gambling problems have fewer and fewer places where they can go where they are not tempted to gamble,” said Renee Wert, a Buffalo psychologist whose clients include compulsive gamblers.

She said the state’s gambling industry has exploded in the past decade, while the effort to prevent and treat compulsive gambling “is really in its infancy stages.”

With the recent economic downturn, Wert said she has seen clients turn to gambling to try to raise money to make car and house payments. Some people who lost their jobs took their severance checks to casinos looking for luck.

“It might help the state, but it harms the community,” Wert said of the Paterson proposals. “I think the governor really needs to look at that and what he might be doing. It might be good in the short term for the state, but bad economically long term for the state, and that’s not even counting the impact on the residents.”

Maney, of the gambling council, said the law involving Quick Draw and racetrack casinos incorporated provisions to avoid 24-hour-a-day gambling.

“Suddenly, the barriers are being stripped down. It’s like taking down the guardrails on the highways,” he said.

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