
The Town of North East’s new six-bay highway garage and offices with interior to be completed on Route 22. Behind is another four-bay building and salt shed. Photo by Christine Bates
MILLERTON — The North East Town Board discussed affordable housing, the town’s new highway garage, and the preliminary 2024 budget at its meeting on Thursday, Oct. 12.
Mark Long of CPL Architecture, Engineering and Planning gave the board an update on the building progress of the new highway garage. The dimensions of the building are “about 80 by 30” and 32 feet high inside. The building has room to store the Highway Department’s equipment as well as offices for staff. A wash bay will clean off equipment, and there will be a kitchen, restrooms, a shower, and a lift for equipment.
A mason will be installing the wash bay “very soon,” according to Long, along with finishing framing the walls, plumbing and HVAC. Once the building is complete, paving will happen and the entrance driveway will be reconfigured. Long said completion of the building is expected by late November.
Councilwoman Meg Winkler reported that the board’s Housing Committee is working with the North East Community Center (NECC) and the town Zoning Review Committee to determine definitions of affordable housing and appropriate income levels, as well as a study of area median income tools.
Winkler mentioned a discussion that took place during a Salisbury Forum presentation on Sept. 22 about using land holdings of area land trusts that are “not acceptable for conservation” to build affordable housing and that the committee will be “following up” on the idea. The Village of Millerton is one of the places in Dutchess County identified by Hudson Valley Affordable Housing Conservation and Strategy as being able to benefit from that possibility.
The preliminary budget for 2024 has been presented to Town Clerk Elizabeth “Tilly” Strauss. “This is the single most significant act of town government,” said Town Supervisor Chris Kennan.
Kennan noted that the preliminary budget includes increases in earnings revenues; an 11% estimated increase in insurance costs; a slight increase in accountant fees; a 2% increase in the ambulance contract; and increased cost for town attorney, mostly due to work on the wastewater district.
Expense lines were added for the renovations and contractual expenses for the new Town Hall. A 7% increase in health insurance costs is expected, as is a 4% increase in salaries and wages, and an increase in interest on the town’s bond anticipation notes.
A public hearing on the preliminary budget has been set to take place during the board’s next meeting on Thursday, Nov. 9, at 7:20 p.m. at Town Hall. The budget is available for viewing by the public in the town clerk’s office.
The town’s five-year contract with Northern Dutchess Paramedics—which it entered into along with the towns of Dover and Amenia—will expire at the end of 2024. Yearly increases have been around 2% and the town is considering putting the contract out to bid. “It’s such a significant cost item for the town that we need to be thinking about every way that we can to control that cost,” said Kennan.
COPAKE — The Copake Grange will be busy on weekends in February.
On Friday, Feb. 14, and Saturday, Feb. 15, starting at 7:30 p.m. and on Sunday, Feb. 16, at 3 p.m., The Two of Us Productions is putting on a production of “CLUE on Stage — The Comedy Murder Mystery.”
“CLUE on Stage” will return Friday, Feb. 21, Saturday, Feb. 22, and Sunday, Feb. 23 at the same times as the previous weekend.
Tickets for the performance will cost $20 for adults, $15 for children under 18 and for seniors over 60. Tickets are available at the door or online at www.thetwoofusproductions.org.
The Copake Grange is located at 628 Empire Road in Copake. Full details for events can be found on their website, www.copakegrange.org and navigating to the “events” page.
COPAKE — Roeliff-Jansen Community Library is hosting Hillsdale resident Maria Socolof for a discussion of her memoir “Turning the Key: Unlocking the Mystery of my Chronic Pain,” Wednesday, Feb. 12 at 6 p.m.
The memoir details Socolof’s journey healing her chronic pain caused by a ruptured disc in her neck.
Socolof is a former gymnast and scientist with a Master’s degree from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Attendees will have a chance to win a free Audible audiobook copy of the memoir. The event is free and open to the public.
Roeliff Jansen Community Library, which is chartered to serve Ancram, Copake, and Hillsdale, is located at 9091 Route 22, approximately one mile south of the traffic light at the intersection of Routes 22 and 23.
Jan. 27 marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. I traveled to Poland as part of a delegation for the commemoration and spent a few days before the event with my father and sister learning, remembering and gathering information.
My dad’s parents, Miriam and Yehuda, of blessed memory, were deported to Auschwitz -Birkenau from the Lódz Ghetto. They both had families that perished and met each other after the camp was liberated.
The gate at Auschwitz. Natalia Zukerman
I put my feet in the train tracks where they would have arrived, ran my hands across the walls of the horrible gas chambers, the broken wood of the crowded bunks, gathered dirt in my shoes where they would have walked, and made sure to touch the trunks of the trees along the path—innocent witnesses.
My father’s parents survived. How did they do it? Miriam was quickly sent to a work camp on the Czech border, and Yehuda played violin in the Auschwitz orchestra (aka the Death Orchestra). Music saved him. A million miracles saved them both.
Many members of our extended family did not survive.
Suitcases taken from prisoners at Auschwitz.Natalia Zukerman
Cuikerman was the original Polish spelling of our name. We poured over page after page of our name in the Book of Names. I can’t explain it, but as I read the names—aloud and quietly—I felt some of their spirits finally release.
Innocent witnesses.
I never wanted to come to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. It was part of our dark story. From the time I was very little, I saw all the images, watched the movies, read the books. I’ve had nightmares my whole life. I remember the tattoo on my grandmother’s forearm. This was enough.
But until you stand in the field the size of a city and look out at the expanse of crematoria, gas chambers, bunkers, the enormity and scale is just a story, words on a page. Now I have metabolized it in a different way. Now it is part of my DNA on a deeper level. Now I am changed.
A crematorium at Auschwitz.Natalia Zukerman
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, world leaders from fifty countries—including King Charles, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau and so many more— gathered with survivors and their families, musicians, friends and patrons of the organization in an enormous tent at the entrance to Birkenau. A freight train stood in front of the main gate. The car, from Germany, honors the 420,000 Hungarian Jews deported in 1944. Its conservation was funded by Frank Lowy, whose father, Hugo, was killed in the camp.
It radiated with horror in almost theatrical lighting, its now silenced whistle audible in the memories of all who gathered.
I listened to survivor after survivor speak. I watched as each world leader lit candles in remembrance. I said Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) with the several thousand people present.
But I only heard one person, 99-year-old Polish-born Swedish-Jewish doctor Leon Weintraub, utter any words that made sense to me, to my very fragile and shaken heart. He became a doctor after the war and told the group gathered the one absolute truth: there is only one race—the human race. He talked about the fact that under the skin, we are the same, words that were beyond powerful. In the very place where the most evil “experiments” were conducted to prove the supremacy of the Aryan race, this man stood there in all his beautiful bravery and told the truth. He was able, for a moment, to remove a hierarchy of care and replace it with an expansive, human appeal. He brought the memory of all the people killed, not just the Jews when he said, “be sensitive to all manifestations of intolerance and dislike of those who differ in terms of skin color, religion or sexual orientation.” He widened the conversation, lest we also forget the Romani, queer, disabled, dissidents and more that were also victims of the Nazis. Lest we forget the lesson of Gandhi when he said, “intolerance itself is a form of violence.”
Weintraub ended by saying, “allowing the memory of millions of innocent victims to fade would be equivalent to robbing them of their lives a second time.”
Shoes taken from prisoners.Natalia Zukerman
There are multiple genocides on planet earth right now. There are humans in actual concentration camps as I write this. There are whole populations being murdered.
After this experience, more than ever, I vow to speak the truth as loudly and as often as I can.
Speaking up, questioning and protesting is not only not antisemitism, it defines the core principles of what it means to be Jewish.
A beautiful Jewish human named Albert Einstein said, “Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”
This must and will be my task. Nothing else makes any sense.
Prisoners slept four to a bunk at Birkenau.Natalia Zukerman