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Friday, December 7, 2007December 7 2007Johnson’s Business Savvy Coming To County Board  Just listening to Jim Johnson recount his life is exhausting to most mortals.In high school in Oneonta, Johnson – as of Jan. 1, he will represent Cooperstown on the Otsego County Board of Representatives – leaps from flipping burgers at a Burger King into radio, and in three weeks has a late-night, on-air shift. Crazy about the radio business, he goes to SUNY Oneonta so he can keep working at WDOS. He graduates, joins The Curpier Co. in Cooperstown as a publishers’ representative, selling ads for magazines across the country. In a couple of years, he breaks away when colleague Angus Mackie forms Mackie Marketing Associates, and before long he’s running his own agency, J.V. Johnson & Associates, out of his home in Laurens, with 30 magazines on his client list. Two days after going out on his own, wife Amy discovers she’s pregnant with their first child, Alex, now in eighth grade, but there’s no turning back. Through all this, Jim Johnson has held on to a dream hatched on those late-night gigs. “I knew what I was trying to do was to – eventually – buy a radio station,” he said. “And now I was ready. I felt I could make a radio deal happen.” Now things really start to accelerate. It was 1995, Jim is 30-ish, and the Norwich Group becomes available – WKXZ-94 (Hot Adult Contemporary), WBKT-95.3 (Country) and WCHN-9.70 AM (Nostalgia.) “It was almost as if it was meant to be,” he remembers. He had a plan, and he immediately began to implement it. One, adopt the best technology. For instance, new transmitters could reduce power use by 70 percent. “These types of investments, I made right away.” Two, WKXZ broadcast at 50,000 watts; all other stations around here were 3,000 watts. “I thought of it as a regional, Central New York radio station.” Adding Oneonta’s WZOZ in 1999, Jim found he had four signals and four distinct formats – he could deliver a regional buy, hitting a wide range of demographics. During his years in magazine advertising sales, he had dealt with the big agencies in New York City. Contrary to most radio executives from country towns, he could walk into a Young & Rubicam, and he did. Creative entities like radio stations have relatively few concrete assets. “The assets are what you’re able to generate in revenue,” he said, and generate he did. And he centralized everything he could. When he started, he had 14 employees in three radio stations. By the time he was done, he had 12 employees in eight radio stations. All this was accomplished through several years of 16-hour days, seven-day weeks. For better and for worse, he knew all the jobs associated with radio. So, “when I lost my morning man on WZOZ,” he said, “I did it myself for nine months.” By time he sold what had become Banjo Communications to the high-flying Pilot Group in 2003, Johnson’s company was claiming more than $9 million a year in revenues. Phew. By this time, Jim’s bought The Vines restaurant in Oneonta from actor James Gandolfino of “Sopranos” fame, but he and Amy decide within a year it isn’t for them. In 2006 he invests in a Rock & Roll musical, “Once Around the Sun,” which opens off-Broadway to good reviews, runs six months, but isn’t able to make the leap to Broadway. Along the way, the Johnsons had acquired a house on Otsego Lake. When a downstate buyer made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, they sold it, then found there was simply no more property available on Glimmerglass. About this time, the “old Ralph Chamberlain place” came on the market. (During the recent campaign, when people talked about Jim Johnson, they’d say, “You know, he’s the guy who bought the old Ralph Chamberlain place.”) Jim and Amy had looked at the rambling, resort-like property on Bedbug Hill in the Town of Otsego, but decided against it. Too big. One Saturday, though, Jim went up to the auction; when he returned, to Amy’s surprise, they owned what they would call Fly Creek Stables (and, for a while, they operated The Inn at Fly Creek Stables, a B&B, there as well.) To fill any free time, Dad had taken up coaching youth soccer and Little League. And he’s a horror-movie buff: “The older, the more black and white, the campier, the better.” Oh yes, he plays in a rock band, The Pundits, occasionally at Hoffman Lane Bistro. Jim Johnson’s been talking about an hour now, sitting on one of the plump black-leather chairs in the marble-floored livingroom of the old Ralph Chamberlain place. The fire is crackling in the fireplace. Earlier, he and the kids, daughter Alex and son James, a fifth-grader – both are at Cooperstown Central – had gone out to the 31-stall horsebarn. The Johnsons have three horses, but are boarding a number more. Shades of that morning man, the barn manager they’d been depending on left, and Amy was shovelling hay with a pitchfork. This is in addition to her full-time job as a first-grade teacher at St. Mary’s, Oneonta. Like husband, like wife. So why politics? Jim was on the county Republican committee. He was troubled by the financial fiasco of the past year. When it appeared no one would challenge freshman Nancy Iversen, 59, a retired school teacher who had been in the middle of the controversies, he asked for the committee’s endorsement, and got it. On election day, Nov. 6, he discovered he’d won a seat, 689 to 502, and was part of a new solid Republican majority. His goals? Improve accountability. Keep taxes as low as possible. Better identify the county’s assets, “right now, tourism assets.” When a lad, he spent a lot of time with his grandparents, and granddad Pat Baldo impressed upon him that “hard work paid off. And how to be frugal.” And how. Given the record to date, District 8 voters don’t have to worry about getting their money’s worth. By the way, Jim Johnson’s now 42. County's $100,000 Makes Cooperstown's Christmas The departing Democratic-controlled Otsego County Board of Representatives gave Cooperstown a fond farewell Wednesday, Dec. 5, a $100,000 fond farewell. At the final meeting before Republicans resume control in January, the representatives approved allocating that amount from the county Occupancy Tax fund to help the tiny village cope with the expense of handling 450,000 tourists a year. The Occupancy Tax is a 4 percent levy on lodging, up from 2 percent last year. “I’m giddy,” departing county Rep. Nancy Iversen, D-Pierstown, who represents Cooperstown, said after the vote. “Wow, great,” said Cooperstown Mayor Carol B. Waller, a Republican, on hearing the news. The departing Democrats, who had gained control by allying with county Rep. Don Lindberg, a maverick Republican from Worcester, also tried to put $200,000 in the budget to hire a county manager next year, but that effort failed. Iversen, who has been lobbying for county funding for the village for the past two years, made that motion, and it was seconded by county Rep. Ron Feldstein, D-Otego, outgoing chairman of the powerful Administration Committee. Tellingly, county Rep. Jim Powers, the Republican from the Butternuts Valley who is expected to become chairman with the new year, and county Rep. Greg Relic of Unadilla, the other senior Republican, voted nay. However, with Republican rising star Jim Johnson, who will replace Iversen, pledged to get more county money for Cooperstown, taking the $100,000 back may not be easy or desirable to the new majority. In the end, Iversen said, her colleagues were convinced by a fact sheet that showed that upstate counties as a whole get 27 percent of their revenues from the property tax. In Otsego County, that number is 13 percent, because of Cooperstown’s sales-tax-generating prowess. “That statistic alone made people understand that giving a little money over to Cooperstown isn’t giving money to Cooperstown – it’s investing in tourism,” said Iversen. Chalets Rise On Route 28 In Hartwick  When Sal Furnari was considering building 15-cottage Chalet Village, he didn't spend a lot of time on market research."Dreams Park being across the road from us was as obvious as it needed to be," said Furnari, a health-care consultant who is developing the summer weekly rentals community in the former Hartwick Pines mobile-home park at the corner of Route 28 and Seminary Road. Since August, drivers-by have been asking themselves what's going on, as 36- by 20-foot plywood boxes began rising behind a line of trees, as they were sheathed with knotty pine, topped with peaked roofs, and Adirondack-style porches emerged on the fronts. Furnari and two partners, brother Angelo Furnari and a longtime friend, James LaRosa both of Long Island, are riding what’s turning into another wave of development aimed at serving the 55,000 people who visit 12-year-old Dreams Park each summer – the players, plus an average of 3.5 family members. So far, the youth-baseball facility has spawned three hotels affiliated with national chains – a Best Western, a Holiday Inn Express and a Howard Johnson’s. Construction is due to begin any day now on a Hampton Inn. On a parallel track, almost every rental property in the Hartwick and Milford vicinity was set aside for Dreams Park families, pulling year-long rentals off the market and forcing year-’round residents out of the area, as landlords found they could generate more income in three months than 12 with a quarter of the effort. This new wave, launched with the opening of August Lodge, efficiency units, plus a pool and spa a little further up Seminary Road, may erode that Mom-and-Pop piece of the market. In addition to the cottages, a multi-purpose building – the reception area, a game room, laundry and meeting space, will rise at the Route 28 end of the property. Year Two, a swimming pool is planned. Year One, a two-bedroom, one-bath unit will go for $1,450 a week; a two-bedroom, two-bath, for $1,550. After college, Furnari and wife Abbe spent 10 years in the Chicago suburbs, but as their children – Jesse, now 6, Jason, 4 – began to grow, the couple began to think about moving back east. The Furnaris had bought a farm in the Town of Exeter in 1999, but moved into Cooperstown because of the schools. (Since arriving a year ago, a third son, Joseph, now seven months, has joined the family.) While the husband focused on his consultant business, couple bought the Major League Motor Inn, and the wife took that on. “We found we liked the hospitality business,” Sal said. Village, Hospital Await Decision In Parking Suit Lawyers for the Village of Cooperstown and Bassett Healthcare presented arguments Friday, Nov. 30, in a dispute over parking at the Cooperstown hospital. State Supreme Judge Kevin M. Dowd will issue a decision in the case at a later date. The village wants to limit a new hospital parking lot to employees; the hospital wants patients to use it, which the village fears will increase traffic in residential streets. Notre Dame Students Due The Fighting Irish are due back. Not Notre Dame’s football team, but the team of grad students from its School of Architecture who have been studying Cooperstown since August. An exhibit of their findings and recommendations may be viewed from 6 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 12, in the Otsego County Courthouse, with a formal presentation beginning at 7 p.m. The public is welcome. Labels: Archives
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