One of the central questions posed by opponents of the Luke and Fitting properties was “What about Sharon? She hasn’t committed on paper to anything. She will get all of the benefits of the new transfer station while assuming none of the up-front costs and the associated risks.” [apologies to Mike LaRose for the use of the feminine pronoun!]

Still others have asked, “What about Millerton? Would we want to invite Millerton to join us since residents there have been without a transfer station for 15 years?” Well, if you listen to my simple proposal, the answer to both of those questions will be: “Who cares about them? Build it and they will come.”

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Actually, I’ve been moving in this direction for some time. While at the NYPA convention in Albany last month, I attended a seminar on backpack journalism. The concept is pretty much what it sounds like. With advances in technology, it’s now possible to work from almost anywhere. Plus, what better way to serve the interests of your readers than to get out of the office and look for news at street level?

A typical backpack journo rides around on a bicycle or in a modest car and carries with him a wireless-capable laptop, digital camera, tripod and cell phone. The LJ has provided me a with a pretty good camera and I already own the other four items. That means I’m ready. Watch out.

The advantages of this approach are many: you can stumble upon news, write a story or take some video and have it up on the web within minutes.

I’ve already practiced what I call tote-bag journalism, as when I videoed a couple of guys paddle surfing last September at the Salisbury Town Grove and filmed part of the Salisbury Memorial Day festivities a year ago. The difference is that now I can upload the clip quickly via a wireless connection on my Macbook.

Of course, I also experimented with live blogging the town meeting earlier this month on the purchase of land in Salisbury for a new transfer station. I got positive feedback from a woman who walked up to me in the Stop & Shop and said she loved the immediacy and informality of it.

As soon as the weather turns nice (Monday?), I’m going to make a practice of bicycling to work. I will pack my journo tools and see what happens. And I’ll even save some bucks on gasoline. Wish me luck.

P.S. Eat your heart out, Sam Herrick.

P.P.S. Sam is the business manager for the Region One School District. During the warmer months, he regularly bicycles from his home in Sheffield to the office in Falls Village. I’d say it’s 15 miles each way. Iron Man Sam is amazing.

Click here to download a relatively recent copy of that document (PDF- Adobe Reader required), then get over to your town hall, where the polls opened about half an hour ago and where they’ll close at 8 p.m.

Here are the thumbnails:

Polls open at noon at local town halls and remain open until 8 p.m.


Hey, if you were one of almost 600 people motivated to go to Friday’s town meeting in Salisbury to weigh in on spending $2 million for a piece of property for a new transfer station, then you owe it to yourself to vote up or down on a budget of close to $14 million.

And Marshall is right. I’m not sure I agree with Peter Halle, who said in an earlier comment that low turnout is a sign of “contentment.” A yes vote would be such a sign. Staying away from the polls shows an unwillingness to participate. Sounds more like “disengagement” to me.

I will post the referendum results in this space shortly after the polls close tonight — not that very many people will care about spending $14 million …

On a personal and professional level, it was also a first for me. Since wi-fi was working inside the Congregational Church, I live-blogged the event (see the post below this one) and took notes for a news story for this week’s print edition as well.

I’ve heard from several people who said they appreciated that approach. One of them walked up to me Saturday in the Stop & Shop and said she was out for dinner Friday night and unable to attend, but wanted to know what the verdict was. She was delighted to be able to learn about here it as soon as she got home.

As for the meeting itself, it went pretty much as I expected it to. It was passionate and well attended, attracting about 500 taxpayers. But the thing that has always amazed me is how few people usually turn out for town meetings and public hearings on routine budgets, but then fall all over themselves to come to meetings like this last one.

The town of Salisbury, for example, will hold a town meeting May 21 to approve the proposed town and local education budgets, which total $7.5 million. The Region One School District, which includes our regional high school, will hold a referendum Tuesday on a proposed budget of almost $14 million.

In Salisbury, perhaps a couple dozen people will vote on the annual town budget. And in Region One, they’re lucky to get 10% of eligible voters to weigh in on that huge sum of money. But try spending a relatively paltry $2 million to acquire a piece of property for a new transfer station and everybody and their grandmother (literally, in some cases) shows up to be part of the seething throng. Go figure …

I am convinced the opponents of the Luke-Fitting site are done yet. Here’s my shot-in-the-dark prediction and you heard it here first: The Belgo Road crowd will hire Michael Klemens, the Salisbury resident and eminent herpetologist, to scour the site for bog turtles, blue spotted salamanders and any other protected species they can find to derail the project. Then there will be expensive litigation that will double or triple the town’s line item for legal fees.

As Bill O’Reilly would ask with faux humility, “Am I wrong? I’ll give you the last word … “

The meeting starts promptly at 7:30 p.m. in the Congregational Church, but I’m told officials are expecting a packed house of possibly several hundred voters, so I would advise getting there by 7.

Two big questions for me:

#1 (and most obvious): Will it pass? Notwithstanding the relatively late effort by the (mostly) Belgo Road residents to derail the project, I do not sense enough of a groundswell to defeat it. But hey, I’ve been wrong before.

#2: How long will the discussion last before the vote is taken? In the town meeting form of government, citizens act as the legislature and so they are permitted to engage in deliberations before voting, just as elected legislators would. I’d say you can expect a motion to vote if the deliberations take more than 45 minutes. If the motion passes, then we fill out our ballots and let the chips fall where they may.

There has been a flurry of emails making the rounds just since the LJ came out yesterday. One in particular between Selectman Jim Dresser and Elaine Laroche is most interesting. Click here to read the exchange. And click here for two more emails from Betty Mitchell and Maureen Jerome.

Meanwhile, if the wireless network is working in the church, I will live blog the event right here and perhaps even upload a brief video report. If not, I will simply get the results up as quickly as possible.

I suppose it’s because he is seen as a turncoat — someone who used to be one of them, but has peered through the fog and rejected heroes of the left such as Howard Zinn, whom Horowitz condemned last night as “a Stalinist fraud.”

Once Nancy Johnson country, the Northwest Corner is now solidly blue. Still, about 75 people turned out see Horowitz at the Elfers music hall at The Hotchkiss School [see photo at left]. Before he began, Horowitz worked the room, introducing himself to everyone there. I chatted briefly with him about being a community journalist — a job he professed great respect for because “you really get to know the people you cover.”

The appearance was sponsored by the Hotchkiss Republicans and Young America’s Foundation, a conservative young people’s organization Horowitz has supported for years.

Horowitz, a nationally known author and activist who appears regularly as a guest on cable news shows, has long been a champion of academic freedom and has lamented the extent to which academia has been dominated by the left, especially on college campuses, but also in settings such as Hotchkiss.

In her introduction, Natalie Boyse, a junior at the school and a member of the Hotchkiss Republicans, lionized Horowitz in a way that would probably even make the Heritage Foundation blush.

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At 2 p.m. today, I opted to spend an hour sitting in my car in front of the Scoville Library and counting the number of trucks that passed me on Route 44. By “trucks,” I don’t mean panel trucks, UPS delivery vehicles, noisy Harleys or pick-ups. We’re talking heavy equipment here: industrial-sized dump trucks or semi-tractor trailers.

I tried this experiment once when I was editor of The Millerton News during an era when there was so much traffic on the narrow Main Street of that village that elderly people and the young were afraid the cross Route 44 in front of my office (now Irving Farm) and others were known to have had their car doors ripped off the hinges by the lorries passing in front of Phil Terni’s store.

The results of that survey were surprising. If you had to guess, how many heavy-duty dump trucks and tractor trailers would you say pass by my selected Salisbury location in a hour during mid afternoon on a weekday?

I’ll post the results tomorrow. You might be surprised by the number here, too. I’ll also tell you the single worst stretch of road in these parts for truck traffic, hands down.

About 15 minutes ago, the board appeared satisfied with the Board of Education’s revised budget. This is after the finance board would not endorse a proposed 2008-09 Kellogg budget that called for the additional full-time teacher. The board directed school officials to make unspecified cuts to get the increase below the proposed 5 percent.

Now the finance board is pleased that the Kellogg crew has gotten the budget increase down to 2.2%. That’s because school officials made a variety of cuts in computers, equipment and supplies, and decided to increase the hours of a part-time teacher to rectify a perceived shortcoming in a multi-age grouping (rather than hire a new full-timer).

P.S. Not earth-shaking news, but it’s an example of how this medium can be used. Have a good night.

As was the case at last year’s NYPA convention, there were some long faces after a series of seminars predicting the painful decline of what’s black and white and red all over. And for good reason.

The approximate figures I heard for 2007: ad revenue (classified and display) at the print divisions of U.S. newspapers declined by almost 10 percent at a time when several major events (e.g. the Iraq war and the run-up to the presidential primaries) no doubt increased the appetite for news nationwide.

But online advertising at those same companies grew by 20%. At about 10%, Web advertising is still a small portion of overall ad revenue, but it is the only sector that consistently shows growth.

True, most print divisions are still profitable, but their stocks are down all over the place because of the dismal projections of future performance. Others newspaper companies such as the dreadful Journal Register Company, which owns just about every other newspaper in this neck of the woods except for the LJ, have taken on so much debt that they can scarcely make their payments.

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