What the heck is a Stromatolite?

Do you know what a Stromatolite is? I didn’t until I read chapter 19 in Bill Bryson’s book “A Short History of Nearly Everything” – which I found highly interesting.

Well a Stromatolite is one of the first complex living organisms that arrived on the scene about 3.5 billion years ago; which is quite a long time ago considering the earth is only 4.5 billion years old.

The interesting thing is that I found a press release from the NY State Museum which tells us that the Adirondacks a few billion years ago were teaming with them. Some of the more complex ones have been found in present day Washington County.

“New York has the oldest animal fossils in the eastern United States – dating to a time that takes eight zeros to express. The (museum had an) exhibition … of these, a star-like trail discovered in Washington County. (NY has) fossils that are even older, stromatolites made by blue-green bacteria living more than a billion years ago in the seas of what are now the Adirondacks.”

Next time you’re out for a walk, you’ll know what to look for.

Tax Report Card

With the 2009 year almost upon us, one of the topics the Huletts Current will be addressing in the weeks ahead will be the taxing policies of the jurisdictions that we find ourselves part of. Today we release our “historical report card” for the tax and spend policies for the Town of Dresden, Washington County and the Whitehall School District.

The Town of Dresden over the last 30 years has established itself as a “low tax” Town that works very hard at keeping expenditures low. For the past two years running, the Town Board has cut the amount of money raised from taxes and Town taxes have actually decreased. A few years ago during a state audit, the Town Board members actually came to the Town Hall and counted certain assets like chairs, etc., themselves! For this the Town of Dresden gets an “A” for their wise stewardship of our tax dollars over the past 30 years.

Washington County has been more of a “mixed bag” with its historic taxing policy. We give it a “C+”. Over the last 30 years spending has continually grown, but much of this is because federal and state mandates have been imposed on the counties with no corresponding state or federal aid. However, Washington County needs to do a lot more in terms of attracting business and “growing the tax base.” Recently computer chip manufacturer, AMD, has announced a major new facility in neighboring Saratoga County. The southern towns of Washington County are poised to grow with this facility located nearby. Hopefully, this will attract businesses and residents to Washington County.

The Whitehall School District’s tax and spend policies over the last 30 years have been an unmitigated disaster for the taxpayers of the District and earn it a solid “F”. They have driven almost all business from Whitehall with their excessive spending. This is part of a “Letter to the Editor” that I wrote to the Whitehall Times a few months ago. “I went back to the 1970’s and looked at the budget for the Whitehall school district and compared it to spending for this current school year. For the 1974-1975 school year, the entire budget was $2,443,937 and the amount raised from property taxes was $704,000. Enrollment was right around 1100 students. For the 2007-2008 year, the entire budget is $12,960,569 and the amount raised from property taxes is $4,805,069. Enrollment is 900 students. That means that over the last 33 years, the total budget increased 430% and the amount raised from property taxes increased 582% while enrollment was falling by 200 students! These increases far outpace both inflation and the Consumer Price index for this period. The amount of the budget raised from property taxes went from 28.08% of the budget to 37.07%. “

The members of the school board are elected for staggered terms in May. We will be informing you this year as we get closer to the election about which candidates are committed to cutting taxes and who is not, because we can no longer sit on the sidelines while our money is spent like this. “F’s” make the Current move.

Looks Like a White Christmas

We had our first significant snowfall in Huletts yesterday. All total, we got about 6 – 7 inches. If you’re planning on heading up for the weekend, we would advise you to be very careful.

Alot of people are without power in southern Washinton County but everything is good here. We will try to take some pictures for those who are in more southern parts of the country right now. It should be a white Christmas though!

“Frogging in Huletts”

With news in Huletts being kind of slow with winter hanging around, we thought we’d share some original artwork. This sketch done by Elyse Kapusinski is entitled; “Frogging in Huletts”. She did it a few years ago when she witnessed some children running around the fountain exhibiting great glee trying to catch some frogs. Now being a child in Huletts is probably one of the best things on earth, so she imagined what it would be like from the frog’s perspective. In this case, being a frog in Huletts is also a great thing because of the happiness some child gets when you’re caught! Now you understand the frogs expression.



Technical Update

Just a brief update on our technical progress. We believe we have improved our page loading times significantly. However, we still are looking into a small DNS issue which sometimes prevents the name www.hulettscurrent.com from resolving properly. If www.hulettscurrent.com, does not resolve properly, please use: http://www.hulettscurrent.com.

We will now move onto establishing policies and implementing the code that will allow the posting of comments. Interested in this stuff? Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode – same bat channel – a few weeks in the future.

Dresden Town Meeting – Monday Night

The regularly scheduled meeting of the Dresden Town Board was relatively quiet on Monday night (12/8/08). Supervisor Banks did reiterate that even if funding for the Washington County Beach was cut from the Washington County Budget, the Town would find a way to keep the beach open.

Beach Vote – More Facts

We thought you would find the following information useful. On the recent vote to approve some funding for the Washington County Beach (which was defeated), out of the 17 Supervisors, 11 voted for the Beaches, 5 voted against the Beaches, with 1 member absent. Fort Edward, Kingsbury and Granville (Towns with the most weighted votes) all voted “NO”.

We will continue to update you on this issue in the days ahead.

Saturday Quote

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”

Abraham Lincoln