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Friday, January 18, 2008January 18 2008Chicago Investors Explore 5th Youth Baseball Facility A Hudson Valley architect says he is representing a group of Chicago investors who are looking at an East Springfield farm, and considering other sites as well, for a Cooperstown-Dreams-Park-like facility modeled after the Boston Red Sox’ Mini-Fenway Park project. While cautioning that everything is very preliminary, Andrew Wright of Wright Builders Inc., Kingston, said the goal is “to try to recreate a mini Yankee Stadium or mini Wrigley Field” – about two-thirds the size of a Major League ball park – on the former Cope farm on Continental Road. Ideally, Wright said, the park would open for operation in summer 2009. Like Dreams Park, the idea is that the new facility would be a venue for a round of youth baseball tournaments during the summer months. Wright declined to name the partners, but said he has met with Henry Miller, the Town of Springfield building inspector, and the partners are arranging a second meeting with Miller the near future. For his part, Miller said he has simply handed out applications, same as he would for any applicant. News began surfacing a month ago around the rural town, population 1,396, at the north end of Otsego Lake, but details have been sketchy. The situation has been discussed in two public forums. The first week in January, the town Planning Board, which is involved in preparing the town’s first Comprehensive Master Plan – the current plan is just one sheet of paper – agreed to ask the town board to declare a one-year moratorium on development while the plan is completed. At a testy meeting Monday, Jan. 14, the town board, by a 2–3 vote, rejected a moratorium, but agreed that town board members Richard Rathbun and Bill Elsey will meet with Planning Board chair Mary Clarke and her designee to try to reach a middle ground. Rathbun voiced opposition to the Planning Board’s term “unprecedented” in defining the kind of major developments that would be stalled. The partners, Wright said, envision a kid-friendly facility – “no cars, so kids are safe” – that would include year-’round components. For instance, a mini Wrigley might be surrounded by a “mini Chicago,” houses that echo the ambience around the Windy City ball park. Given the rural nature of the town, the goal would be to apply the most up-to-date “green” technologies. For instance, those pavers that allow grass to grow up through the gaps might well be used instead of asphalt. By allowing drainage, the pavers would minimize runoff issue and, during the off season, would blend in with the meadows around it. The partners also looked at the Springfield site, owned by Paul Stitzel, a tractor and farm implement dealer from Pennsylvania who now lives near Allen Lake, because “Cooperstown in the summer is abysmal.” Wright said the idea might be for the ballplayers families to warehouse their cars at the Continental Road site during their visits; if they wanted to visit Cooperstown, they would be ferried up and down Route 80 by non-polluting electrical-powered buses. The housing component, and related shops, might create a pleasant destination point for townsfolk to visit on-season and off. The Mini-Fenway project, the prototype of the local one, has been in the works since 1997, but picked up momentum two years ago through a new partnership with the Boston Red Sox and MLB licensing. The plan is to build a $2 million half-size stadium, complete with a mini Green Monster, on 12 acres of state-owned land in West Quincy, the Boston suburb. The mini park would seat 5,000, although Wright said the local concept is considerably smaller. If this park were to happen, it would be the fifth youth-tournament park in the county, after Dreams Park, Cooperstown Baseball World in West Oneonta, Cooperstown Diamonds on Route 20, Town of Warren, and a camp associated with SUNY Oneonta. Eddie Einhorn, the Chicago White Sox vice president who owns Cooperstown Baseball World, had been mentioned as one of the possible investors. But he called Wednesday, Jan. 16, from MLB meetings in New York City to say he’s not involved in this new effort. Cooperative Extension Faced Financial Crisis  When Dinnie Sloman was interviewing to become executive director of Cornell Cooperative Extension of Otsego County, he was told the Cooperstown-based agency had a $40,000-$50,000 budget gap.“You don’t have a budget gap,” he told executive committee members interviewing him. “You have an unrealistic view of what your budget really is.” That wasn’t the only bad news – or reality gap, if you will. Cooperative Extension headquarters at Ithaca told him that this agency was among the five “most critical situations” among New York State’s 57 such agencies. For instance, the annual report that was supposed to be submitted to the county Board of Representatives had not been submitted in three years. Still, while working in Delaware and Schoharie counties, he’d lived in Otsego since the early ‘90s – in Oneonta, where he and wife Lisa are raising two daughters – so he felt he had a vested interest. He was intrigued by the challenge, and Cornell encouraged him to try it. So when he arrived in the summer of 2006, part of his mandate was to prepare a five-year plan to put the troubled agency back on a firm footing, financially, but also program-wise. The plan he unveiled to the full Cooperative Extension board – a year ago Jan. 18 – was a year-by-year detailed blueprint to do just that. (To review the plan, follow the link from www.thefreemansjournal.com) The directors approved it. Controversy Explodes The next morning, two extension agents, including one with 33-year tenure, and two educators were told they were losing their jobs. They were escorted from the Lake Street offices and the locks were changed. And the whole situation exploded. By the time the dust began to settle months later, confrontational meeting had followed confrontational meeting, and veteran board members had resigned in protest. In the fall, friends of the people who were let go mounted a campaign that some credit with the defeat of county Rep. Nancy Iversen, D-Pierstown, who appeared blindsided by the fallout. At the Jan. 2 reorganizational meeting of the county Board of Representatives, a majority of the representatives – Republicans and Democrats alike – voted against a $20,000 increase in the county contribution to Cooperative Extension, from $175,000 to $195,000. But when the weighted votes were tallied – the representatives’ votes are tailored to reflect the varying number of people in their districts – the higher allocation had squeaked by. “I felt I had turned the corner on Jan. 2,” said Sloman. However narrowly, the representatives had agreed to move forward. Now, the executive director had another year to prove his concepts will work. Man From Texas Richard “Dinnie” Sloman is a Texan, raised in Dallas, who ended up in the northern Catskills by a circuitous route. He came north to attend Williams College. After graduation, he returned to SMU – Southern Methodist University – for a law degree. He missed the Northeast, so he joined the Boston law firm of Testa Hurwitz & Thibeault, where he practiced corporate and commercial real estate law for a few years. But something was missing. When he began thinking of what he liked to do – he had been a Boy Scout, all the way to Eagle, and was an avid back-packer, canoeist and camper – he enrolled in the Yale School of Forestry, and worked his way to a master’s. By then he’d met his future wife, so he followed her to Oneonta, interned for a year with the DEC, then joined the Catskill Forest Association as executive director, where he spent the next nine years. A self-defined “change agent,” that aspect of Sloman’s personality began to come to the fore. He helped develop an Americorps adjunct that grew from three young people to 33 in three years. He introduced Soren Eriksson’s internationally embraced “The Game of Logging” training program to local woodsmen. He helped develop the Catskill Institute for Teachers, where 25 teachers from New York and 25 from Upstate would spend a week together each summer learning how to introduce forest ecology to the classroom. In 2000, when he began to look for a next step, the Cooperative Extension executive director’s job in Cobleskill was open, and it looked like an opportunity to build on the experience he’d had so far. He had discovered that change works best when it bubbles up. Top down? “That’s not the way I run things,” he said. When the people working for him realized he wasn’t kidding, his approach began to work. One of his educators, Jan Ryder, took the initiative in transforming what had consisted of handing out pamphlets at health fairs into the Diabetes Prevention & Control Program, which sought to find people who were at-risk to contract diabetes and train them to halt the deadly disease before it developed. Demolish ‘Silos’ In Cooperstown, Cooperative Extension staffers were in three “silos” – 4H, agriculture and nutrition – with a director, educator and staff in each. One of his goals, reflected in the five-year plan, is to demolish those silos, so agents can help each other, and educators can participate in all three disciplines. Bubble-up things are already starting to happen. Picking up on a 4H-er’s question about hydroponics, educator Jano Nightingale arranged for her charges to get a tour of SUNY Cobleskill’s such facility, where vegetables are grown in nutrient-rich liquid, not soil. A 4H pilot project is now in the offing, using equipment on loan from SUNY to see if seeds that have been shot into outer space – provided by NASA – can still be grown into plants. As the Cooperative Extension board came to grip with its financial challenges, the budget dropped from the upper $900,000s in 2006 to $857,000 in 2007. This year, it’s up to $905,000. With the new collaboration, staffing has dropped from 14 staffers to 11, and eight of those 11 were among the staffers who were there when Sloman arrived. The controversy of the last year hasn’t been easy. “It’s been very difficult,” he said. “Nobody likes to have this kind of thing going on all the time.” But, he says, he has “the best board of directors I’ve every worked with anywhere. They backed me 100 percent.” What would he have done differently? “The only thing I would have stressed more,” he recalled of that Jan. 18, 2007, meeting, “is what (was to) have happened in the morning. Tomorrow morning, THIS is going to be implemented in my office.” What has he learned? Everybody has a point of view, many of them equally legitimate. “Other people can speak their truth,” said Sloman. “All I can speak is my truth.” Please click here to read more on the Five Year Business Plan ‘Mockingbird’ To Be Staged At Courthouses All the world’s a stage including, occasionally, a courthouse. During “The Big Read,” to be launched Mother’s Day, a play based on “To Kill A Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee novel, will be performed in the courtrooms of the historic county courthouses in Cooperstown, Norwich and Delhi, according to Sam Goodyear, who is coordinating the effort for the Foothills Performing Arts Center, Oneonta. “The Big Read,” funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, will organize a series of readings, plays, discussions and other events in Otsego, Chenango and Delaware counties to raise interest in reading. Tompkins Supervisor Eyes Rare Challenge To Seward State Sen. Jim Seward, R-Milford, hasn’t been challenged since 1996. But he seemed in fighting trim when word surfaced Wednesday, Jan. 16, that Don Barber, Democratic supervisor in the Town of Caroline, Tompkins County, is thinking about taking him on. The challenge, the senator said, is part of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s stated goal of turning the state Senate Democratic, which would give one party control of the governorship, the Senate and the General Assembly. Seward said constituents in his 51st Senatorial District, one, know how hard he works on their behalf and are generally satisfied with him and, two, are not interested in single-party rule in Albany. If the Democrats had control, said the 22-year incumbent, “illegal immigrants would have drivers’ licenses right now.” Barber had sent out a press release earlier in the day reporting he has raised $126,400 so far from 750 individual donors to finance his campaign in a 10-county district that stretches from the west side of Tompkins County, to the Hudson River, north to Old Forge in the Adirondacks. “They’ve told me they want change,” Barber said. He said he hasn’t officially announced, yet, since the big district requires painstaking preliminary work to build an organization in each county. Sally Barlow, Milford, secretary of the Otsego County Democratic Committee, is his point of contact locally, he said. (Also, one of his daughters, Cara Rosenberg, works in the Hartwick College admissions office; his two other daughters live in Amherst, Mass., and Poughkeepsie.) Barber said he was prompted to run for higher office by, among other things, unfunded state mandates that are a burden to towns. “I’d like to work on it,” he said, “but I can’t through a town supervisor position.” Seward said he’s been aware of Barber’s interest for some time, since the Caroline supervisor had first considered making a run for the seat the last time around, in 2006. As for Seward, he said his official duties are keeping him occupied in the state capitol for the time being, but he expects to announce in the spring that he will run again. His last challenger was also from Tompkins County – Beverly Livesay, who ran against him in 1996, 1994 and 1992. Labels: Archives
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