EDITORIAL The Downtown That Was, And The Downtown That Might Be In The Future First and foremost, welcome back! The half-million or so visitors who will be coming to Greater Cooperstown over the next 13 weeks – for Dreams Park and Cooperstown All-Star Village, for the Baseball Hall of Fame, for The Fenimore Art Museum, The Farmers’ Museum and Hyde Hall, for Glimmerglass Opera, for fishing and boating and summering on Otsego Lake, for hiking and canoeing. While our visitors…
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Editorial - Page 31
EDITORIAL At Colgate Graduation, Congressman Delgado Elevates Mother’s Love “There are no second acts in American lives” has been attributed – some say misattributed – to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Antonio Delgado – as he recounts in his splendid commencement address last weekend at his alma mater, Colgate University – is a contradiction in point. His experience as hip-hop artist AD, The Voice, which he assesses here for the first time we’ve seen, very well could have ruled him out as…
EDITORIAL Downtown Revival IS Exciting; Let’s ACT Excited About Plans There’s a lot going on in the City of Oneonta right now, as City Hall’s DRI (the Downtown Revitalization Initiative) begins distributing $10 million in state money, leveraging it in a way that attracts many millions more in private investment. Certainly, there are time pressures. There are conflicting agendas. There’s not ever going to be enough money to make everybody happy. Lately, environmentalists are ready to swoop down on any…
EDITORIAL Village Should Buy CVS, Make It Downtown Hub Editor’s Note: This is reprinted from this week’s Freeman’s Journal and Hometown Oneonta editorial pages. Click here for related editorial. What do you think? Letters to the Editor welcome at info@allotsego.com In a couple of weeks, we won’t remember that Cooperstown’s Main Street is a ghost town from Columbus Day to Memorial Day. The 500,000 visitors will begin arriving in earnest with Dreams Parks’ June 1 opening. By the time we…
SECONDARY EDITORIAL Village Hall Should Also Fund Strong Merchants’ Association While we’re at it, downtown Coopers(ghost)town needs a strong merchants’ association. So far, it’s always been a Catch-22. The Cooperstown Area Chamber of Commerce has been adamant: We only serve our members. Unfortunately, too few of downtown businesses are members to make the chamber an empowered entity to promote downtown. The result: No coherent, year-‘round downtown strategy. Again, the Village Board has $400,000+ plus a year in found money to…
EDITORIAL D’oh, Homer, You Got It Wrong. Comeback Coming To New York If you had driven from Cooperstown to Franklin late Sunday afternoon, you would have been greeted by one lovely scene after another. The sun had broken through. The brilliant light green trees promised the leaves that may be out by the time you read this, contrasting with the solemn evergreens. That panorama from the top of that back road leading from Otego’s I-88 exit into Franklin was never…
EDITORIAL Officers, Use Judgment: Law Allows To Provide Mugshots To The Public The recently completed state budget contains a measure, championed by Governor Cuomo, that prohibits police departments from releasing mug shots of suspects. The other day, Monday, April 22, Trooper Aga Dembinska, Trooper C spokesman, declined to release a mug shot of Gabriel Truitt, 33, suspect in the Dec. 29 arson fire on Oneonta’s Walling Avenue, where former city firefighter John Heller was killed. Dembinska advised that, while the…
EDITORIAL With Brainy, Creative Execs, Otsego County’s Future Secure A couple of months ago, Gerry Benjamin, director of SUNY New Paltz’s Benjamin Center and an expert on Upstate New York, saw the region’s economic future in nurturing and growing what we have. Craft brewing and yogurt production, in particular, are developing nicely, he said, although neither is generating sufficient jobs at sufficient salaries to begin replacing the manufacturing behemoth that was the Mohawk Valley. The advantage to incremental growth, of…
EDITORIAL Boys, Welcome To Baseball Mecca – Have A Joint The other day in downtown Cooperstown, a kitchen worker stepped out onto Main Street’s sidewalk in the middle of the day, lit a joint, took a few tokes and went back to work. You might think, get used to it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Legalization of marijuana, which the ascendant Democratic majorities in the state Legislature and Governor Cuomo expected to become law in January, has foundered…
EDITORIAL All Richfield Folks, Not Just A Faction, Should Map Future As it stands, regrettably, the Town of Richfield’s proposed Comprehensive Master Plan hasn’t yet accomplished its mission. So the Town Board – it meets on the second Monday of each month, and may act on the plan in either April or May – should put it on hold, at least for the time being, until the community’s will can be dispassionately determined and the plan revised to reflect it.…