A Feeling Of Sadness

For many years, the rural hamlet of Ghent, Columbia County, New York, had an iconic house. It was on the main street, State Route 66. It was quirky, and it was an eccentric landmark. It was a small house with a porch. What made it so unusual was that an enormous tree grew through the porch. Looking at the house made it clear: the tree came first, far more than a century ago, and the porch, a later, flimsier, manmade object, respected the importance of the tree and yielded to it.

Many people saw and marveled at the house and its porch. More than once when I mentioned Ghent, someone responded, “Is that where the house has a tree through the roof?” Here’s a photo of the house from 2011:

Yesterday when I drove down Route 66 I had an enormous surprise. A real shock that led slowly to despair. Not only was the porch gone, yes, it really was completely removed, but also the tree’s limbs had been removed and the entire tree was coming down as well. Today I found the remains of the tree lying in the yard. Here’s a photo of the house today:

I’m sure there are many seeming reasons for this. The house, after all was for sale last year, and who knows what kind of engineering havoc the tree’s roots did to the foundation and the plumbing. This is private property. It’s not a building preserved by statute or ordinance. But all of that seems oddly beside the point.

This is sad. I don’t want to be overly dramatic about it. But it’s as if a familiar neighbor, an acquaintance who lived nearby has died. I know nothing about why it happened, and I know that things like this happen often, but I feel the loss deeply.

I know the famous gatha well:

“From interdependent causes all things arise, and all things fade away, so teaches the Perfectly Enlightened One.”

I get it. I'm sure you do too. This is only another example of impermanence. It’s only natural that the house would eventually fall down, and that the tree would eventually topple or have to be cut down. And that eventually they’d both be gone. And their odd symbiotic relationship would be ended. Nothing is permanent, everything changes, everything fades away. This includes the iconic Ghent house and it’s giant maple tree, too.

Today, in their place is a pervasive feeling of sadness, which, too, I am sure, will eventually fade away.

The November Judicial Race In Columbia County

Disclaimer: The author has not endorsed and will not endorse any candidate for any position in the November, 2011 election. This essay is directed entirely at steps voters may wish to take to cast intelligent, responsible votes in November's judicial contest.

"Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains."
— Alexis de Tocqueville

Good order. Which brings me ever so briefly to the upcoming November, 2011 election in Columbia County, New York. The races are just beginning to materialize. This is an off-off year election. There are no national or statewide races. There are only fourth county-wide races. There are no coat tails. And, to nobody’s surprise, there will be very little voter interest. The two most important countywide races are for County Judge and for District Attorney. The others are for coroner and treasurer. In other words, the race, if it’s about anything other than personality and party political power, which is doubtful, is about good order. It remains to be seen whether it is about more than that.

Let’s face it, the electorate doesn’t really know much about either job. If the voter’s house hasn’t been burglarized, or s/he hasn’t been arrested for DWI, or her kids aren’t hauled in for smoking pot, the voter has no direct experience of what the District Attorney does and does not do. And since most people want nothing at all to do with being victims of crimes, somebody who is aggressively against crime—isn’t everybody?—seems to be a good enough candidate to maintain good order. There’s more, but the campaigns will illuminate these additional points.

The County Court job is far more opaque. There are very few people who know what goes on in Columbia County’s County Court. Most of them are participants. Virtually nobody shows up at the County Courthouse just to watch and find out what is going on, to observe the process, and how it is carried out. The stories in the newspaper don’t help educate about this. They discuss the outcomes of criminal cases, which are a relatively small part of the Court’s business, and they don’t talk about Family Court. Ever. That’s odd, because the overwhelming majority of the County Court’s business is Family Court. An unscientific estimate: 2/3’s or more of the Court’s business in Family Court.

The odds are that most voters know absolutely nothing about Family Court. The odds are that they have never been there, know no one who has been there, have no friends who have been there, and might not even know what is supposed to go on there. That’s because although Family Court is the county’s busiest Court, most of the litigants are not “frequent voters.”

Who are the litigants in Family Court? They are almost entirely the County’s poorest residents on one side and the Department of Social Services on the other. Or there are cases between the poorest residents on both sides. It is extremely unusual for wealthy and middle class litigants to end up in Family Court. Why is that? Because they and their lawyers do everything humanly possible to avoid it. At all cost. And because “good order” means different things in different t places, the Department of Social Services tends to ignore the questionable parenting of Columbia County’s most comfortable citizens.

If you’re solidly middle class and you are having a bad day and you had too much to drink before dinner and you throw a plate of spaghetti on the floor and curse and yell and scream and have a meltdown with your children present, the chances that you will ever be charged by DSS with neglect or abuse in Family Court are extremely remote. Nobody will call the cops or Child Protective Services. More likely, you’ll do a mandatory 8-count in a neutral corner, apologize profusely, and try again the next day to do better. In other words, nothing will happen to you. Commit this same conduct when you are poor, and it is far more likely that the event will be reported to some agency: 911, the cops, DSS, Social Services. The report of the event will be your engraved invitation to a Family Court experience.

In Family Court it is likely that your every facet will be investigated. These investigations are legion. You will eventually be told to participate in “services.” Parenting classes, anger management, mental health counseling, substance abuse treatment. The list is as extensive as its results are undocumented. And you may end up under the supervision of DSS and the Family Court for years, if not for all eternity, and you may end up losing your children to Foster Care or have your parental rights terminated if you don’t comply. In other words, this is serious business for your and your family. If you are poor, all of this is about good order, though it is more often couched in terms of protecting children from bad parenting.

The coming election is about many things, but chief among them is who will be the Family Court judge who will impose good order on the County’s poorest families. And how, one wonders, do political leaders who themselves have never been to Family Court and don’t know the first thing about it, decide whether someone is or is not a good candidate for this important and powerful position? Short answer: they have no real clue about the job, so they decide this the same way they decide other questions. They ask the circular question: who will be a good candidate, meaning who can get votes. Nothing else really matters.

This means that the voter cannot really rely on the wisdom of the nominations. They might be good; they might not. Nor can the voter rely on the campaigns. Judicial campaigns have rules that prevent the most basic confrontations between candidates on issues. The campaigns are designed to promote clichés about efficiency and justice and fairness and respect.

There is a better idea for voters. It’s about education. Before casting a ballot for County Court Judge in November, the voter would be well advised to take just a couple of hours off, sit in the gallery and watch Family Court churn out its cases some afternoon. Observe the judges (none are running for re-election in November), observe the litigants, listen to the lawyers. See for yourself what’s at stake in these horrendous cases. Talk to litigants in the hall about their experience. Talk to the lawyers too. Once you’ve seen this you’ll be far more equipped to decide which candidate is best suited to the position.

Without that, your vote is just buying a pig in a poke. And as deTocqueville argued, shouldn’t voters really be asking for more than good order? Shouldn’t voters be asking for understanding, wisdom, compassion, restraint, and intelligence? In fact, shouldn’t voters be asking that the candidates have human qualities that bend toward justice?

My Luck: The Jury Isn't Called

Earlier this year I received a notice that I would going to be called for jury duty. Columbia County wanted me to serve on a jury. Again. I wanted to serve, too. How else, I thought, will I ever find out what goes on behind the locked, guarded doors when a jury deliberates? Maybe, I thought, if I could be selected for a jury, I'd gain some insight that might help me when I talk to juries in behalf of my clients. I could be fair and impartial, I thought. As fair and impartial as anybody else. And yes, I'd leave my legal expertise at the courtroom door. I wanted to be on a jury.

Last time I was summoned, about 6 years ago, I wasn't selected to serve. I waited around for two days before being questioned. It was unbelievably boring. Incredibly mind numbing. I ran out of reading material after about 4 hours of sitting in the big courtroom. What a disaster. My ultimately being struck for cause by the prosecution resulted in the reversal of a murder conviction by the Appellate Division (pdf). It turns out I was improperly struck. This time I again wanted to serve. But let's face it: after the last time it was clear that almost anything could happen to mess up my chances for serving.

I got my dated juror summons about a month ago. I was to be juror 196 on December 7, 2009. It struck me that there was something odd about the date. I wasn't sure what it was at first. Then I figured it out.

Because of my part time Public Defender position, there was a felony DWI case I was supposed to try beginning on, wait for it, December 7, 2009. I realized last week that I had been summoned to serve on my own jury. How, I wanted to know, was I going to be able to voir dire myself, argue to myself. What rotten luck. I was going to be discharged. I had to be. It was obvious. I was disappointed. But there was still hope. Maybe somebody else would have a case to try on Monday, December 7, 2009, and if the stars aligned correctly I could be on that jury.

On Friday the stars did their part. My client received a favorable plea bargain. He pleaded guilty. There would be no trial in his case on Monday. So, amazingly, I was free to serve on somebody else's jury on December 7. I knew there weren't any other criminal cases set to be tried on that day, but maybe there was something else. A fender bender, or a breach of contract, or a medical malpractice case. Some kind of case, any kind of case, so I could be a juror and listen to testimony and deliberate. That's what I wanted.

The jury summons instructed me to call during the weekend and find out whether I was supposed to appear tomorrow. I crossed my fingers. I called. Bad news. I'm not supposed to show up. There are no trials. None at all. Nothing. And this is the worst part of it: I won't get another summons for another 6 years.

This is great news because I'll be free of sitting at the courthouse for a few days this week. But it's also terrible news because I cannot be re-called for jury duty for another six years and I'm not going to get a chance to be on a jury until that time expires. And, of course, there's no assurance that I'll be called again in 6 years.

I don't think I'm ever going to be on a jury.

It's Still The Economy

On Friday the nation's recession, the big, ugly one that so many people feel directly in foreclosure of their homes, at the gas pump, in the cost of health care, in towering credit card debt, in the cost of heating their homes, in job and income insecurity, in lack of consumer confidence, in diminishing retirement funds, paid a personal, uninvited and unwanted visit to the county in the Hudson Valley of New York where I live.

The county's fourth largest employer, Kaz Incorporated, a maker of humidifiers, announced that it was moving its production facilities from Columbia County, New York to Mexico. The announcement that about 350 workers were losing their jobs came on the heals of a similar announcement from LB Furniture earlier this year, that it was closing and that 150 production workers would lose their jobs. That's 500 production jobs lost in 2008 in a small county with a population of about 62,000. That can modestly be described as an economic disaster.

Join me in Columbia County, New York.

Columbia County, New York is absolutely beautiful. And quite rural. It is about 25 miles SE of Albany and abuts the Berkshire and Taconic mountains and the Massachusetts line. About 9% of the families live below the poverty line; about 92% of the people are white. There are many second home owners who do not work here, but infuse the local economy with cash made elsewhere.

In Columbia County the six largest employers are

Columbia Memorial Hospital
Hudson, hospital
Employs 1000

Taconic Farms, Inc.
Hudson, breeder of lab rats and mice
Employs 650

Hudson City School District
Hudson, educational programs
Employs 602

Kaz Incorporated
Hudson, electric housewares and fans
Employs 400

Berkshire Farm Center & Services
Canaan, educational programs
Employs 390

COARC
Mellenville, human services
Employs 350

For a rural county that's not much of an economic base. Only two businesses in the top six made anything. Four of the top employers are supported by tax revenues or are not-for-profits.

The mayor got it right when he said:

“I know exactly where [Katzman, the owner of Kaz] is coming from. He needs to compete,” said Richard Scalera, mayor of Hudson. “But that doesn’t make it any better for those waking up this morning and not knowing what to do next.”

“That has a devastating, gut-wrenching effect on our economy,” Scalera added. “In the short-term, it’s almost impossible to replace these types of jobs.”

In the long-term, Hudson and Columbia County officials must start defining a new economic development strategy, Scalera said.

“We know we can’t hang our hats on manufacturing jobs anymore, because those are too fragile,” he said. “We have to change our economic ways here.”

Meanwhile, as you'd expect, the closing has an utterly devastating affect on the low wage employees who worked in these production jobs, including many in the county's vibrant immigrant population:

The workforce at Kaz includes people from the local African American, Bangladeshi and Latin American communities. The loss of employment will force many of these employees to move elsewhere for work, disrupting these communities.
County Supervisor Billy Hughes (D-4th Ward) says many of these employees don't have a high school diploma or limited ability to speak English, so opportunities for employment in a worsening economy may prove few and far between.

The result will be displacement of these workers from their homes to other places in a search for work.

There is, of course, no local solution for those who will now lose their jobs. And this is the latest event in a trend in our community:

Mohammed Rony, a student at Columbia Greene Community College, and has lived in Hudson most of his life. Mr. Rony says that this is not the first time his community has faced a major employer closing, but this one could be the worst. "Bangladeshis began immigrating to Hudson because they were able to find work at the Emsig button factory in the early '90s. Until 1998 there was 100 people, 20 families," says Mr. Rony.
"When the button factory closed in 2001 about 80-to-90% of the employees were Bengali. It shook us up, but most people found jobs at LB furniture, Kaz and other factories in the area," he says. "Recently there has been a huge increase in migration. I'd say 50% of the Bengalis in Hudson now have moved in the past five years. They went to work at LB and Kaz. With the closing of LB and now Kaz, people won't be able to stay in Hudson. There aren't any manufacturing jobs in the city anymore, which for many of them is the only work they can do. Many of these people barely speak English, and though some have master's degrees from Bangladesh, those degrees mean nothing here."
Alderman Abdus Miah (D-2nd Ward) says that lack of jobs is the primary problem facing all Columbia County communities, not just the Hudson Bangladeshis. "We need jobs to keep all our communities in place; its bad that people will be moving," he says.

The only current "hope" for the laid off workers seems to be extensive unemployment benefits:

Some short-term help is on the way. Officials from the state Workforce Investment Office met with Kaz officials Wednesday to coordinate assistance for those soon to be out of work.
M.A. Wilse, director of the local office, said the Kaz plant will host a Career Resource Room, where employees can go for help in conducting job searches.
And Kaz is applying for coverage under the Trade Adjustment Act, a federal program that provides tuition assistance and extended unemployment benefits for workers whose jobs are moved out of the country under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
All laid-off workers at Kaz are eligible for 26 weeks of unemployment benefits from New York, plus another 13 weeks from the federal government. Those in certified training programs can receive up to two more years under the Trade Adjustment Act.

This is bleak news. The problem is the economy. The pain from the economy, as you'd expect, is most acute to those who have the lowest wages and the least assets. They lose their jobs, their homes, their communities first. But the losses aren't confined to those people. The losses spread eventually in waves to everyone.

In a rational, undistracted, attentive, focused nation, the connections between our government's economic policies of the past 8 years and the present recession they have created, and the obvious and pervasive pain these policies have caused, should be if not the main issue, an extremely important issue in the coming election.

A continuation of the present policies means that factory closings and losses of jobs like the ones that have struck my home county are going to continue to spread across the nation. Will the present administration be held responsible for its policies? Will voters require the candidates to propose policies that will end the present trend? Or will we continue to distract and entertain ourselves while everything falls apart around us? Will people actually vote for a continuation of the pernicious policies?

My Small, Local Stimulus Package

I live in rural Columbia County, New York. Columbia County is about 25 miles SE of Albany, New York, in the Hudson Valley. It abuts Berkshire County, Massachusetts. And it's really beautiful. It's also experiencing the same recession as the rest of the country.

The current recession has already thrown the real estate market into a deep freeze, so that home sales are very, very slow. Fortunately, there have not been a huge number of subprime mortgage foreclosures, though there have been a few. Gasoline is down to $3.21/gallon today. Heating oil is $3.389/gallon. There was an announcement last week that the state was going to close the Hudson Correctional Facility, the second largest employer in the county, within a year. The Correctional Facility employs 277 workers. Local politicians of all stripes are fighting the proposal; I'm not optimistic that those jobs will be spared. Most likely, the jobs will be moved away.

Two decades ago Columbia County used to be filled with dairy farms. Those farms disappeared during Reagan's dairy farm liquidations. There are few dairy farms left. This has resulted in huge herds of deer, which browse land that was formerly pasture, and a large growth of second homes for people from New York City, New Jersey, Long Island, and Boston (all about 2 hours away). Two decades ago Columbia County had factories. Now there are very few. Mostly, the county is filled with rural, second homes, people who provide services, or telecommute, or commute to Albany, or to Hudson. There is no Starbucks in Columbia County. There is a Wal-mart. There is no Home Depot or Lowes. There is no large mall though one is planned. There is a lovely, new food coop in Chatham. There are many restaurants. There is theater, and an excellent film festival, and art and sculpture. There are amazing, organic farms. But I digress.

An important strategy for rural counties like Columbia County is to put land back into production for food. Not for animal corn. Not for soybeans. For food. Why? Because local, organically produced food is healthier. And it tastes better. And it does not need long distance transport, so its price does not depend on oil prices or the cost of transporting it or the cost of chemical fertilizers. But, alas, I'm not really a farmer. I raised sheep for about a decade, but ultimately gave that up: it was impossible for me not to lose serious money. I would have needed a flock of thousands, and to do that I would have had to give up my usual work. Instead, I quit raising them.

I have some lovely fertile land, land that will grow beautiful vegetables and flowers, land that for at least two decades has never had chemical fertilizers on it or pesticides. And I wanted to get it back into production. Know what? I don't care if I make any money from it at all. If I can get an agricultural tax exemption on my land taxes, that will be great, but that's not really the point. If I get the inside price of vegetables that will be enough. The point is to find ways to get local land into production of food that will be sold and consumed locally. That makes ecological and economic sense.

So I scouted around the local natural food store, the local food coop, the local organic, biodynamic farm, and I found an organic farmer who wanted to grow vegetables and flowers and was doing so successfully on other land nearby. A farmer who wanted more land. An organic, skilled farmer. And I made him a deal he couldn't refuse: I'd lease him between 5 and 10 acres for $1.00 a year for 5 years or longer if he'd put it into production, if he'd promise not to use chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and he could keep whatever money he made from the crop he grew. If he made enough that I could get an Ag exemption, great. If not, that's fine also. What I really want is for the land to be productive and to feed people. And I want the land to become more fertile, and better farming land as we go along.

My hope is that by doing this I can inspire other people who own land or who have abutting lots with enough vacant land (5 acres seems to be the minimum) to find farmers to put their land back into production of food. I want them to give the same deal I'm giving.

Is this a stimulus? Absolutely. It's a modest one to be sure. But it's a real stimulus. Unlike the one they're talking about in Congress, it's a real one. It's new production. It's turning fallow land into food. And does the money stay in the local community? Definitely. And does it decrease food prices for organic local vegetables? Sure. And does it provide a farmer with additional income that he will spend in the local community? Yes. In other words, it's a real stimulus. And my hope is that it's an example: we can find ways of making our lives better by being creative. And we can begin to change the way the economy runs for the better when we do that.