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Public can comment through Dec. 31

Five years after it was due, Putnam County has released a draft of its updated Solid Waste Management Plan and is seeking public comments through Dec. 31.

Each county in New York state is required by law to update its solid waste plans every 10 years; Dutchess released its most recent plan in 2023.

One problem for Putnam is a lack of data to determine how much waste, and of what type, each municipality generates. The plan blames this on "inconsistent reporting by private haulers" during the annual permit application and renewal process and "variations in recordkeeping" by its towns and villages.

The data gap means the county can't track waste disposal and recycling rates within each town and village. The plan recommends clearer guidelines and increased oversight. But it stops short of recommending a "flow control" system, which would allow the county to dictate to each municipality where waste must be delivered, because "Putnam County is a home-rule county, so each municipality has the authority to district as they see fit."

The plan says 78,822 tons of municipal solid waste were generated in Putnam County in 2024, compared to 71,641 tons in 2010, even as the population shrank from 99,644 to 96,870. In addition, 11,083 tons of waste were recycled and composted, compared to 4,839 tons in 2010.

Putnam doesn't have any active landfills; some of its waste is hauled to western New York and Ohio. The incinerator in Peekskill burned 54,000 tons of Putnam waste in 2024, and one in Poughkeepsie burned 2,500 tons. The plan notes that a Putnam landfill is not feasible due to cost and watersheds. It said it doesn't know how much local waste is going to landfills because it's dropped at transfer stations outside Putnam and mixed with waste from other counties.

In its previous plan, released in 2010, Putnam urged the Legislature to adopt the pay-as-you-throw program that "treats waste disposal like a utility service, where users pay proportionally to their usage. Households that produce less waste pay less, while those generating more pay higher fees. This pricing model provides a direct financial incentive to reduce, reuse and recycle, leading to decreased landfill use and increased participation in diversion programs."

The updated plan moves away from that recommendation, saying that research and outreach demonstrated that such a system was "not feasible" for most towns.

Organics make up 25 percent to 30 percent of the county's waste stream. While several municipalities encourage backyard composting and food scrap drop-off, Putnam does not have its own composting facility. The plan recommends a feasibility study to determine if, and where, one could be built.

The plan also recommends a pilot curbside collection program for compostable materials. In the meantime, compostable materials deposited at drop-off sites are composted at Sustainable Materials Management in Cortlandt Manor and turned into soil amendments that can be bought locally. (In Philipstown, food scraps can be dropped on Saturday mornings at the former landfill on Lane Gate Road.)

The draft plan can be viewed online here, or copies are available at the Philipstown Town Hall, Cold Spring Village Hall, Butterfield Library in Cold Spring and Desmond-Fish library in Garrison. Comments are being accepted at bit.ly/PutnamSWMP or by leaving a voicemail at 845-808-1390, ext. 43164.

Beacon Music Factory opens venue

Stephen Clair knows that it's impossible to reincarnate the groovy, decade-long music scene that animated Dogwood, which shuttered in 2023 and is now Cooper's on East Main Street. But with help from Daria Grace and a coterie of friends, he's going to try.

Clair's venture, the Beacon Music Factory on Fishkill Avenue, has always housed an intimate performance space for teachers and students, but a three-month makeover upgraded the lighting, interior design and sound system to create a new venue, Lucky Dog, birthed with simple math: a beer and wine tavern license. One goal is to share the wealth with performers.

After a soft opening earlier this month, the club will host a banger on Jan. 1 that resurrects an hours-long tribute to artists who have died in the past year. Around two dozen vocalists will sing karaoke with a live house band on what is billed as New Year's Day of the Dead, says Grace.

The irregular, reverent event began locally as Lou Year's Day at Quinn's in 2013, says Grace, and paid tribute to the demise of Velvet Underground guiding light and iconoclastic New York rocker Lou Reed, whose only hit, "Walk on the Wild Side," reached No. 16 on the Billboard pop charts in 1972.

The musical canines held another gathering in 2016 after the deaths of Prince, David Bowie and Merle Haggard. Clair ticks off 14 prominent musicians who died in 2025, including Sly Stone, Brian Wilson, Ozzy Osbourne and Garth Hudson of The Band, which maintained close ties to the Hudson Valley. The event also serves as a fundraiser for Fareground, the food and community nonprofit.

The music space reunites the old dogs and introduces new trick ponies. During a showcase earlier this month, the stalwarts included Jonathan Frith and Jon Slackman. Soon after Dogwood's demise, Slackman tried to revive the venue's vibe by hosting Grateful Dead cover shows at Stinson's Hub, but the concept never took hold.

Mark Weston plucked a silver resonator six-string and Beacon High School senior Skylar Clair, daughter of Stephen, fingerpicked introspective original songs. Playing guitar, Jeannine Young accompanied Brian Waite's piano for his humorous Broadway-inspired song, "Bubble Bath."

"The place feels legit now with the redesign," says Clair. "It's a platform for just about anything, and we'll see what sticks. The community embraced it, helped create it and takes pride in it, so we're going to get our ya-ya's out, for sure."

George Mansfield, co-founder of Dogwood, donated the club's original sign. Just inside the entrance on the unofficial opening night, Mansfield assembled three plastic letters in different fonts that spelled d-o-g.

"We floated many names," says Clair. "We're next to a dog park, but we'll never be a bar like Dogwood and will only serve when there's an event."

The top of a red Farfisa organ is the bar, and the place provides seats for around 50, including chairs, couches and high-top tables with barstools. A large sign reading "Free Painkillers" hangs on the wall at stage left.

"We cherish Dogwood - it was something special and fun," says Frith. "But we can create a new community spot that mingles us with all the new people who have moved here since it closed."

Lucky Dog is located at 333 Fishkill Ave., inside the Beacon Music Factory. The performances on Thursday (Jan. 1) begin at 4 p.m.; a $10 donation is suggested. See instagram.com.

Metro-North changing prices, policies

Metro-North train commuters will pay higher fares beginning Jan. 4, and unused paper or mobile tickets will expire the next day at 4 a.m., instead of 60 days later.

The latter is intended to prevent fare evasion; currently, passengers can wait to activate mobile tickets until a conductor appears, which may not happen during short trips. According to the railroad, tickets purchased before the new fares go into effect will be honored until their stated expiration dates.

Monthly and weekly tickets will increase by up to 4.5 percent, and all other tickets will rise by up to 8 percent, changes approved earlier this year by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board.

Other changes include:

The surcharge for tickets purchased from a conductor or through the TrainTime app but not activated before departure will increase from $6 to $8. Mobile customers will receive a few initial warnings.

Round-trip tickets will become passes that expire at 4 a.m. the next day. Weekday passes will cost 10 percent less than two one-way peak tickets; weekend tickets will cost the same.

After 10 trips in 14 days, mobile ticket-holders will receive an 11th ride free in the same period.

Reduced fares will be available 24/7 for seniors, people with disabilities and Medicare recipients, including during the morning peak hours.

Children ages 5 to 17 can ride for $1 each when accompanied by a fare-paying adult, including during the morning peak hours.

The MTA is upgrading its vending machines to offer change in $5 and $10 bills instead of coins and provide translations in nine languages instead of three. The project is scheduled for completion by summer 2026.

Decommissioning board also discusses data centers, project funding

The board overseeing the decommissioning of the shuttered Indian Point nuclear power plant south of Philipstown moved its Dec. 11 meeting from Cortlandt Town Hall to the Buchanan-Verplanck Elementary School, about a mile from the facility.

The venue change was notable because Michael Tromblee, the superintendent of the Hendrick Hudson school district, spoke to the board, outlining the financial pressure the district faces without the payments in lieu of property taxes paid by the plant, which closed in 2021.

The shutdown resulted in the loss of nearly one-third of the district's annual operating budget, he said, "a financial hit that no school district is built to withstand."

Tromblee said that, while the district is grateful for state grants it has received, "these targeted, specific acts of aid do not address the long-term consequences of our district hosting over 1.7 million kilograms of spent nuclear fuel stored on tax-exempt land that cannot be repurposed for economic development."

Although state and federal lawmakers have allowed municipalities to tax spent nuclear fuel as property, Tromblee urged the board to lobby for the proposed federal STRANDED Act (Sensible, Timely Relief for America's Nuclear Districts' Economic Development) and other legislation that would increase the compensation that municipalities would receive until the U.S. government builds a permanent storage facility for spent nuclear fuel.

If the legislation were to pass, Tromblee said that the federal aid coming to the district would make up for the budget shortfall caused by the Indian Point closure. Without it, the district will have to raise taxes by 5 percent to 8 percent every year, or make drastic cuts, such as eliminating sports programs, severely reducing arts programs or merging with another district.

"That is not meant to scare people," he said. "It is meant to provide a stark reality of what the shutdown of Indian Point has caused."

Fund factors

Board members asked representatives from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) at the Dec. 11 meeting about their oversight of a $2.1 billion fund that is paying Holtec Decommissioning International (HDI). While Indian Point was operating, a small portion of each customer's payments went into the fund.

HDI hired its parent company, Holtec International, for some waste disposal and fuel storage work. Noting that some projects have cost much more than estimated, board members accused Holtec of overcharging itself and essentially "double-dipping" from the fund.

NRC representatives said they had determined that Holtec had not done anything to "impede" the timely decommissioning of the plant. "If they're overspending, it ends up being an impediment to decommissioning because they run out of money, right?" asked board member Richard Webster, from Riverkeeper.

"Our focus is not on whether they went over or under their budget," said Elise Eve of the NRC. "It's that they have sufficient funds to complete decommissioning." She noted factors that can affect the budget, such as inflation. She said the NRC would continue to review the fund annually to ensure it has sufficient funds.

"The question is: If Holtec International charges HDI twice the price per cask as they charge any other [decommissioning] site, is that acceptable to the NRC?" asked Webster. Eve replied: "That's not something that we're going to be regulating."

What next?

Holtec is finishing an extensive analysis of the area around a former training building that was discovered last year to be unexpectedly contaminated with cesium-137. The company has theorized that the low-level radioactive contamination may be from soil near the first reactor that was excavated and deposited at the edges of the property when the site's second and third reactors were built in the 1970s.

Once the contamination is cleaned up, Holtec plans to apply for a "partial site release," which would...

In 2021, four boys transferred from private schools into Lesli Tompkins's fourth-grade classroom at J.V. Forrestal Elementary in Beacon.

They were "brilliant and eager to learn, and I could have put them in books that would have filled them with new knowledge," recalled Tompkins, who envisioned the boys doing fun projects exploring all manner of ideas.

But there was a problem. "They didn't know how to read," she said.

While these boys could converse like adults, their reading was far below grade level.

The boys had not been taught how to sound out words, especially complicated words like photosynthesis, a common fourth-grade topic. They were part of what some view as a nationwide crisis in which only a third of elementary school students read at grade level.

The news is a little better in New York state, where 53 percent of younger students are considered "proficient" at reading for their grade.

That perceived crisis prompted New York to require public schools this year to certify that their reading curricula comply with the "science of reading," a vast body of research that points to phonics, or sounding out words, as the most efficient way to learn how to read. About 40 states have passed similar laws.

The science of reading conflicts with "whole language" instruction, which dates to the 19th century and Horace Mann, known as the father of American public education. Mann viewed phonics as "soul-deadening." By contrast, whole-language instruction focuses on the pleasure of stories, looking at pictures and enjoying what was thought to be the "natural" process of learning.

But reading is not natural, argued Sarah Holbrook, who trains teachers at SUNY New Paltz's Science of Reading Center. "Language develops naturally. But reading is a manmade phenomenon that has to be taught."

The science of reading has five components: phonemic awareness (recognizing and manipulating sounds), phonics (how letters translate those sounds) and building fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Focusing on those principles has boosted reading scores in Beacon, said Sagrario Rudecindo-O'Neill, the district's assistant superintendent of curriculum and student support. Two years ago, 37 percent of third graders in Beacon were deemed proficient readers in state testing. Last year, that number rose to 45 percent. Fourth graders increased from 45 percent to 55 percent. Fifth graders went from 35 percent to 54 percent.

Before 2021, Rudecindo-O'Neill said that teachers were using phonics, but in a haphazard way. Today, teachers follow a "structured literacy model" and related initiatives. Students start with the basics, learning how to decode words.

"They're teaching the letters one at a time," Rudecindo-O'Neill said. "They're saying it. They're writing it. They're having opportunities to practice reading the words."

One building block is "phonemic awareness," a child's ability to recognize, pronounce and manipulate the 44 distinct sounds, or phonemes, of the English language. Before children decode letters, they need to hear how elf can become shelf by adding the "sh" sound, and get a feel for how words rhyme and how words like cat, hat, bat, mat, mate, fate and late are different yet share similar sounds.

With that in mind, Stacy Ricci, who has taught kindergarten and prekindergarten at the Garrison School, often starts the day with an "initial phoneme isolation." She might say the word cloud and ask students to repeat. Then they isolate the beginning "c" sound. "We use our hands to make it interactive so they can see it and feel it," she said. They move to another word like catch, showing how it includes three sounds: "c" – "a" – "tch".

Such quick exercises are part of a daily routine to ensure compliance with the state's new reading mandate, said Allison Emig, the Garrison principal. "In years past, we weren't always doing this every single day," she said. Last year, 78 percent of Garrison's students tested as proficient at reading.

Emig added tha...

Competing reports vary widely on cost

A study released on Dec. 10 suggested that, if it moves forward, a proposal for New York State to take over Central Hudson would cost $3.5 billion.

Customers would see immediate savings, according to projections from the Hudson Valley for Public Power coalition. By Year 30, a publicly owned utility could save ratepayers $210 million per year, it said.

At the same time, an executive summary of a second study, released the same day and funded by opponents of the proposed Hudson Valley Power Authority, doubled the purchase-price estimate to $6 billion to $7.5 billion. The industry-backed Protect Our Power coalition also added $2.6 billion to $5.2 billion for a potential transition from natural gas to electric service that the HVPA would study.

Customers could see their bills swell by 36 percent, it said, with conversion from gas to electric costing about $57,000 per home by 2028. Protect Our Power concluded that the cost of a takeover could climb as high as $12.2 billion.

Legislators must parse the conflicting narratives as they consider a bill that would have the state take control of a system serving 315,000 electric customers and 90,000 natural gas customers in parts of nine counties, including Dutchess and Putnam.

Central Hudson says it's not for sale; separate legislation would allow the state to buy the utility under eminent domain, which requires only "just compensation" for property needed for public use. Central Hudson, one of six private utilities in the state, has been owned since 2013 by Fortis, a Canadian holding company.

The HVPA bill, introduced in the state Senate by Michelle Hinchey (a Democrat whose district includes parts of Dutchess and Putnam counties) and in the Assembly by Sarahana Shrestha (a Democrat whose district includes the northwest corner of Dutchess), outlines the process by which the state would create a "democratically governed" nonprofit that would work to keep residential electric bills below 6 percent of household income.

Putnam County Executive Kevin Byrne, a Republican, opposes the HVPA, calling the notion that it will save customers money "speculative, at best." Leaders of the electrical workers' union that represents about 700 Central Hudson employees also oppose the plan, as do the Orange, Ulster and Dutchess chambers of commerce.

Dutchess County Executive Sue Serino, a Republican, has taken a wait-and-see approach, saying that "any new proposal should come with clear, concrete guarantees that it will truly deliver the savings and reliability people deserve."

Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger, a Democrat, is a proponent, saying residents should be confident their utility "can meet the challenges of the day, including climate change." In February, Kingston became the first municipality in the region to back the plan, unanimously passing a resolution.

A decision by legislators isn't imminent. Shrestha said this summer that she doesn't expect Democratic leaders to call for a vote until the bill has enough support to pass, which she said could take two or three years.

The Hudson Valley for Public Power study relied on data from Central Hudson's rate-increase requests to the state Public Service Commission. It asserts that a public authority would save customers $15.2 million in Year 1, $116.8 million in Year 20 and $210.5 million annually by Year 30.

The study did not analyze supply costs, assuming they would be the same for either entity. On the delivery side, it projected an immediate 1.9 percent decrease in gas and electric rates and a 12.7 percent decrease over Central Hudson's expected rates by Year 30. Overall, the estimated savings would be $2.9 billion over 30 years, it said.

The estimates include taxes paid to localities and charitable giving, "to make this as close to an apples-to-apples comparison" as possible, said Scott Burnham, one of the analysts. The report assumed the HVPA would receive an interest-free $76 million loan from New Yor...

District had considered police presence

The Beacon City School District is not adding a police officer to its security detail, at least for now.

Six of seven board members (two seats are vacant) said in a straw poll on Monday (Dec. 15) that they are satisfied with the district's security staffing.

The board had discussed hiring a school resource officer, who is typically armed, after Board Member Eric Schetter suggested the position for Beacon High School and possibly Rombout Middle School. On Monday, Schetter, a former 25-year administrator in the Arlington district, was the only voice in favor.

"I feel the SRO makes the high school and/or the middle school that much safer," he said. "That's where I've been from the start."

The board mulled the idea for several months while hearing reports from Superintendent Matt Landahl on existing security and what a resource officer might do.

There are unarmed security monitors at each of the district's six elementary schools, as well as four at Rombout and nine at the high school, including two who work at night. They are supervised by Mark Thomas, a retired Beacon officer hired in 2018 as the district's first director of security.

The hire came the year after then-Police Chief Doug Solomon asked the board to let him assign an officer to the district. Thomas works with Altaris, a consulting firm that conducted security audits at each school and assists with emergency planning.

Through Thomas, the district works closely with Beacon and Town of Fishkill police (Glenham Elementary is in Fishkill), who do security walkthroughs and provide support during lockdown drills.

In 2014 and 2016, the Obama administration issued guidance emphasizing hiring school resource officers for safety and mentoring, rather than for discipline. It urged schools to create agreements that ban SROs from enforcing school rules, but ensure they are trained in child development and de-escalation techniques.

In Cold Spring, the Haldane campus has had a Putnam County sheriff's deputy as a resource officer since 2015. Garrison discussed the issue in 2020 and, earlier this year, hired a special patrol officer (SPO), a retired police officer whose role is limited to security and who does not carry a weapon.

Elsewhere in Dutchess County, Landahl said on Monday, each of five comparable high schools - Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, Spackenkill, Arlington and Wappingers - has an SRO. The Poughkeepsie City School District is the only other district with a director of security. And Beacon has the highest security guard-to-student ratio in the county, "by a lot," Landahl said.

If Beacon were to hire an SRO, the district would pay the officer's salary and benefits for 10 months out of the year - roughly $100,000, "so we would need to reduce somewhere to do it," Landahl said, noting "there's not a ton of enthusiasm" among building administrators to cut existing security staff.

That led Board President Flora Stadler to call for the straw poll: Table the discussion or move ahead?

"I would not want to lose that [security-to-student] ratio that we have," Stadler said. Others agreed.

"I'm not convinced yet that it's effective, that it does make anything safer," said Catherine Buscemi. "I'm not convinced that there would be an acceptable comfort level for students having a police officer in the school."

When the board began its discussion in September, Stadler cited a 2023 University at Albany study that showed SROs are associated with a decline in some forms of violence. At the same time, they were associated with an increase in firearm offenses, which researchers said might be attributed to increased detection.

The study also concluded that having a police officer in school leads to an increase in "harsh" disciplinary actions, such as suspensions and arrests, particularly among Black students, male students and students with disabilities.

Meredith Heuer, the board vice president, said the district will probably have to revisit the convers...

Beacon filmmaker chronicles origins of raucous crawl

Sitting in an East Village watering hole around the holidays several years ago, Seth Porges and his friend, Scott Beale, began talking about Santacon, the international bar crawl where men and women dress in Santa suits and related holiday apparel. It often gets a bad rap for the "Santanic" mayhem that happens every December when crowds collide with too much alcohol.

"I figured it began with some drunken frat boys," says Porges, a filmmaker who moved to Beacon in 2016. "But Scott tells me, no, he and his friends started it in the mid-1990s, and he had the videotapes."

Porges says he thought it sounded like "the stupidest thing in the world," but he discovered that the footage was "like the Zapruder tape - if it had no meaning or bearing in history."

In his new documentary, Santacon, which premiered in November at the NYC DOC festival, Porges stays classy by covering the obligatory shots of fighting, puking and public urination by people in Santa suits with concision and hilarity via sensationalist TV news clips.

Then he lets an amazing story breathe by lingering on the extensive video documentation of the founders' first Santacons, which took place in four cities during the mid-1990s, including the alleged theft of a mall stanchion's velvet rope at the initial event that tarnished the concept.

As the U.S. became more homogenized and corporatized after the greedy 1980s, a group of weirdos in San Francisco created the Cacophony Society, which devised outlandish ideas and sometimes acted them out. In one incendiary incident that teetered toward performance art, they mocked PETA by throwing pig heads and chicken guts into the crowd during a staged parade.

The group spread to other cities without any organizational structure, but the San Francisco chapter published a zine, Roughdraft. "Reading through old copies, you'd see little items and go, 'Whoa, that's the original idea for Burning Man, or that's the one for Santacon,' " says Porges.

Burning Man became a commercial venture disavowed almost immediately by Cacophony. Santacon blew up into something they never intended to control or copyright, a decentralized phenomenon that benefits bars, restaurants and clothing stores.

It began after Rob Schmitt, a member of the Cacophony Society, saw a postcard of Santas playing pool and said, "We should do this." A prescient post in the December 1994 issue of Roughdraft reads: "Imagine a bunch of cheap-suit Santas singing bawdy carols, staggering drunk, fighting in the street, mooning cable cars and other such mischief."

On Dec. 20 of that year, participants paid $35 for a Santa costume and a seat on the "specially decorated" bus. BYOB and "don't forget the elf-throwing contest."

Handheld camcorders captured the bewildered faces of bystanders as the Santas invaded a mall and a high-end restaurant. The cops clamped down during the second go-round, so Cacophony moved it from San Francisco to Portland, where the police shadowed them and warned against entering Macy's. One scene in the film shows the fat red line deciding not to mess with the thin blue line.

The footage felt like "unlocking the Rosetta Stone for this underground movement that led to things like Jackass and The Rehearsal," says Porges. "They invented the flash mob, and Santacon is one of the first things to go viral worldwide."

During the final Cacophony-sponsored soiree in 1998, Santas are shown in New York City joking around with the police. The event ended on a high note when some lunatic Santas climbed the Brooklyn Bridge.

"It had nothing to do with fame or fortune," says Porges. "They were just merry pranksters seeking tribes of odd people to do new and interesting things and have fun in the moment with their friends. Back then, they did prank culture for art's sake. Now it's for clicks."

For more info, see santacondoc.com. The film is making the festival circuit, but two of Porges' documentaries can be streamed: Cla...

Artist to create 'living museum' in Newburgh

The first delivery of 24 tons of Vermont marble landed on the Newburgh waterfront earlier this month — the yellow crane and rockpile marking the start of a new sculpture park is visible from Beacon.

Rhea Marmentini, 46, secured a five-year lease to create and curate a 2-acre Marmentini Living Museum just inside the fence at the Regal Bag factory complex. This is the first steppingstone in grand expansion plans envisioned by the artist and Bank Art Gallery, up the hill at Broadway and Liberty Street.

Marmentini wants to place a string of mythical, mystical creatures from Governor's Island in New York Harbor (where she had a residency) upriver to whatever locales are receptive. She also works with granite on the waterfront in Athens, in Greene County.

Newburgh is the concept's nucleus, and when the weather warms up, Marmentini will don ear and eye protection to wield a handheld grinder with artificial-diamond saw blades and shape shards of stone into her quirky works — although 24 tons of marble, the largest load that a flatbed truck can carry, looks larger in the mind's eye.

"We're expecting a lot more deliveries," she says.

Born in Hungary and raised in Spain, Marmentini is an international art rock star; her sculptures dot landscapes worldwide and her magnum opus, "Dragon de la Calderona," near Valencia, Spain, is a huge house built on a former quarry that looks like its namesake and took eight years to build.

Last year, she decided to move to Brooklyn. Shirley Giler Noto, director at Bank Art Gallery, discovered her work on Instagram and began promoting her peculiar paintings, bas-reliefs and sculptures.

No matter the medium, Marmentini's style is instantly recognizable. One marble statue at the gallery, "Flying Gaulkees," includes beasts with gold-leaf eyes that are neither fish nor fowl. In her work, lips often turn down, but the life-size sculpture "Catwoman," also in the gallery's cavernous subterranean space, is smiling and beguiling.

Because Edward Doering owns Bank Art and the Regal Bag property, the deal to create a sculpture museum on the Newburgh waterfront zoomed from idea to reality in months.

Things germinated when a representative from Garner Arts Center in Rockland County reached out to Marmentini and proposed a collaboration. Drawn to the river, she scouted Haverstraw's waterfront.

When Noto heard the story, she had a eureka moment: Why not let Marmentini fill the flat, grassy area just inside the gate at the northern end of Front Street with large-scale sculptures?

The living museum is intended to serve as the catalyst for a planned Hudson River Sculpture Walk that would extend beyond the former bag factory and other buildings, nearly to the Newburgh Yacht Club.

Noto foresees plenty of lease extensions, but if any entity way down the line decides to remove the project, it will have to uproot concrete foundations, stainless steel anchors and the bulky artwork itself.

Marmentini is sketching out a black-and-white sci-fi-style backstory about her future figures on high-end comic book paper, a mythology centered on the river's history and ecology for the last 10,000 years, after the glacier thawed.

Despite being constructed from one of the planet's most resilient materials, the sculptures decay and change over time. "It would be cool if they gathered moss," she says. "Or if kids climb on them and a part gets eroded."

Bank Art Gallery, at 94 Broadway in Newburgh, is open from 4 to 8 p.m. on Friday and noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, or by appointment. See bankartgallery.com.

County executive rejected extra prosecutors

Dutchess County legislators voted on Wednesday (Dec. 17) to keep two new prosecutors and an administrative assistant in the district attorney's budget for next year, despite warnings from County Executive Sue Serino about "difficult decisions" ahead.

By a quick voice vote, legislators rejected Serino's veto of their bipartisan amendment to add the positions to the $653.6 million spending plan that they passed Dec. 8. Their additions included five new DA positions overall, costing $711,000, plus other amendments that increased Serino's $651.4 million proposal by $2.2 million and the use of reserve funds, or savings, by $7.2 million.

In a memo explaining her veto, Serino said District Attorney Anthony Parisi had decided to "walk back" an agreement to hold the positions vacant to offset $300,000 in spending on promotions for 22 of his attorneys. Serino said she sought a compromise: allowing Parisi to keep two of the five new positions, a third prosecutor and a junior accountant approved by the Legislature.

Even without the three extra positions, Parisi's office would have 73 employees, compared to 68 when he took office last year, said Serino. "You all share in the responsibility for fiscal sustainability," she said before Wednesday's override vote. "We will need to compromise in the new year to work together to do what's right for our community while minimizing the impact on taxpayers."

In a statement released shortly after the override vote, Parisi said the positions were "the five most critical" of nine he asked legislators to add to Serino's draft budget. Without them, the district attorney's ability to prosecute would have been "significantly reduced," he said, citing "growing demands" from the reform of state evidence-sharing rules and ongoing efforts to fight drug and violent crime and elder abuse.

"Unfortunately, the county executive's vetoes failed to acknowledge the real-world consequences these cuts would have had on victims, law enforcement and the safety of our communities," said Parisi.

All 15 Republicans voted for the amended budget, with nine of 10 Democrats (one was absent) voting against the plan. It anticipates $268 million in revenue from sales taxes, $107 million from property taxes and the use of $34 million in savings - $7 million more than Serino proposed.

The tax levy will stay below a state-mandated cap, and the rate assessed on property owners will fall slightly, from $2.17 to $2.10 per $1,000 of assessed value. The budget also eliminates 10 vacant jobs and leaves 17 unfilled.

Legislators also rejected a proposal by Serino to end an exemption from the county's 3.75 percent sales tax on clothing and shoes costing less than $110. (Dutchess consumers pay 8.125 percent sales tax, which includes 4 percent for the state and 0.375 percent for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.)

Letting the exemption expire as scheduled on March 1 would have yielded $5.4 million in additional revenue, including $133,000 for Beacon under a revenue-sharing agreement, according to Serino. Beacon's share of sales tax collections, which was $6.1 million in 2025, will still rise from 2.35 percent to 2.45 percent in 2026, or about $268,000.

On Wednesday, legislators also approved each municipality's share of the $107 million property-tax levy. Beacon property owners will be assessed $4.7 million.

After Jan. 1, Serino will have to work with a Legislature led by Democrats, who defeated five Republican incumbents in November to flip the 15-10 majority. Democrat Yvette Valdés Smith, who represents Ward 4 in Beacon and part of Fishkill as the minority leader, is expected to succeed Republican Will Truitt as majority leader.