Erin Rollins of Millbrook in the Fashion Feed booth, open year round, at the Millbrook Antiques Mall. All proceeds from Fashion Feeds go to the Food of Life Pantry. As an interior designer by trade, Rollins designed this booth to evoke a high-end department store to align with the designer brands she carries.
MILLERTON — The Townscape 50/50 raffle drawing has collected a pot of more than $7,000.
That raffle drawing will take place this Saturday at 2 p.m. in Veteran’s Park. The moment is not just about picking a winner, but also about reflecting on how far Townscape has come since its humble beginnings in 1998, when founder Catherine Fenn — alongside Renee Vollen and Jan Gilmor — first set out to beautify her beloved village.
Fenn’s connection to Millerton runs deep. “I moved here from the Bronx when I was eight years old and fell in love with the place, even as a child,” she recalled, remembering camping trips at Rudd Pond and enjoying the quiet pace of life.
At 15, her family relocated to southern Connecticut. “My dad didn’t think there was much here for us, so we moved. I left kicking and screaming, literally, and I said, ‘Someday I’m coming back.’”
Years later, after marrying, divorcing, and raising children, Fenn kept that promise. She returned to Millerton and married a childhood friend who was very involved in the fire department. After his passing, Fenn threw herself into her own way of giving back.
“I care about this village deeply. Townscape is my way of helping Millerton be the best it can be,” she said.
What began as an informal effort to gather volunteers and plant flowers eventually blossomed into something larger. “We started with flowers up and down Main Street — barrels of them everywhere. Then it grew into benches, tables, trees and even events. It was such a fun world, a really wonderful organization with so many people involved.”
Fenn’s service to the community extends beyond beautification. She spent roughly two decades on the Planning Board, served as Town Supervisor and worked with the county housing authority. Still, her passion for flowers, trees and landscapes has left the most visible mark on Millerton — shaping not only how the village looks, but how it feels.
In 2006, Townscape became a nonprofit organization. But beautification, Fenn admits, isn’t always the easiest cause to fund. “We’re just putting flowers out — and I shouldn’t say ‘just,’ because to me it’s really important. The trees, the benches, all of it matters. But it’s not high on most people’s list when they think about charitable donations. Still, people have been wonderfully generous over the years.”
This Saturday’s raffle drawing is one way neighbors can show their support. The winner does not have to be present to claim the prize, but those who stop by can enjoy cookies, lemonade and artwork by local creators on display in the park.
Peter Riva
I have been increasingly concerned over AI and questions of originality of journalists’ work, authors’ manuscripts, plagiarism.A new manuscript submission as agency made to a publisher was rejected because they ran the author’s text through an AI detector and claimed it was mainly AI generated. The manuscript was an anthology of short stories and true histories the author had written and compiled (about the history of dogs) over more than 10 years. The author claimed that most of the text was written before AI was around. The only editing he has done has been within the confines of MS Word (grammar and spell check). He has “NEVER used AI, ever.”
So I ran portions of the dog book text in Grammarly and Pangram and it came back “42% appears to be AI-generated” and “49% AI-generated,” respectively. Incredible.
So, as a test of these and two other AI detection systems, I ran 15,000 first (unedited) words of a manuscript I wrote in 2018 and was published in 2022 (Elephant Safari) and this was the result in a third AI checker: “75% of your text has signs of AI.” Considering I wrote this thriller on the dining room table in the dark of night without any copy and paste whatsoever, I knew this AI plagiarism was misleading, to say the least.
So I went further back and chose text from a book written in 1990… delivered in Nov. 1990, edited by Victoria Wilson at Knopf and still in print: Marlene Dietrich: By Her Daughter Maria Riva Result? On “JustDone” AI checker: “82% AI content.” This manuscript was handwritten on yellow legal pads.
So, the question we all have to ask is this: If AI memory already contains many of the materials, texts, of published books in AI memory… are they all now considered AI owned/generated? Or is AI actually saying that the material is not new to AI and therefore labels it as plagiarized?
The issue here seems to me to be a definition of “original” – original to whom? If an author sends a Gmail with a manuscript to an editor, Gmail (Google) has the file and their AI can presumably read it. Also, if Google or other AI platforms have scanned a previously published magazine article or a book, I believe the very familiarity of what is in the AI memory will give the result that “AI is familiar with this text” and therefore leads to accuse an author of plagiarism.
As for me, I have no faith whatsoever in these so-called AI detection systems. They provided complete nonsense on something I wrote in 2018 and an author delivered in Nov. 1990! To further illustrate the point, I ran Act 1 of HAMLET: “Most of your text is AI/GPT Generated,” so Shakespeare is also a plagiarist? Teachers, professors, and editors everywhere are relying on these false readings and contributing to fake literature appraisal.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.
Mac Gordon
Most of us tend to take food supply for granted. Our grocery stores and supermarkets are full of most everything we might wish to eat except for the occasional out-of-season fruit or vegetable—and even these have become more available. But there are some increasing signs that our food complacency may be short-sighted, that there may be trouble down the road.
Over the past eighty years, the world’s human population has quadrupled and still continues to grow. Just providing food for people in the less affluent regions is more and more difficult. All over the world forests are being torn down to make way for economically viable but strictly for export crops like palm oil trees. In many parts of the U.S., clean, fresh water, a basic requirement for agriculture is becoming scarcer thereby making agriculture considerably more expensive and food scarce.Drought caused by climate change is making more land around the world unsuitable for growing crops. Over-harvesting can devastate land; 2,000 years ago most of North Africa was forested and fertile but largely through poor management it became over the centuries nearly desert.
President Trump’s war in Iran has disrupted global commerce beyond expectations. The predictable closing of the Strait of Hormuz has limited trade of most everything coming to or going from the Middle East, the most obvious commodities being oil and gas which run most industrial (and agricultural)operations worldwide. The Middle East also supplies a major portion of the world’s fertilizer, both the finished product and the raw materials and that is for most of the world not just Europe and America. A significant reduction in world food supply is expected.
Currently before the U.S. SupremeCourt is a case regarding the legal liability ofMonsanto, now a subsidiary of Bayer, for its herbicide, Roundup, the country’s most popular weed killer. The suit concerns whether product liability warnings issued by a state agency are overruled by a differing federal ruling. While the state has a warning label on the container saying that the contents are “probably carcinogenic” to humans, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has said Roundup is not carcinogenic.Countless lawsuits and billions of dollars of possible settlements await the Court’s verdict.
To help diminish future lawsuits, a homegardening version without glyphosate, the key ingredient, has recently come on the market. Should standard Roundup actually be banished, the effect on conventional industrial agriculture would be huge. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has campaigned repeatedly for organic farming, has backtracked, speaking out forcefully against a ban on glyphosate saying that such a move would be “tooabrupt” (thereby infuriating most of his “MAHA” supporters). But a banning of Roundup’s glyphosate with no proven successor and a swift return from industrial agriculture to basic organic farming techniques would raise food prices enormously and probably cause a lot of political dissent.
Another looming problem comes from PFAS, often referred to as “forever chemicals” because of their inability to break down. In 1946, DuPont introduced nonstick cookware coated with Teflon. Today the family of fluorinated chemicals that sprang from Teflon includes thousands of non-stick, stain-repellent and waterproof compounds called PFAS, short for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances.
Back in the 1970s I was involved in the creation of several community parks and gardens on vacant lots in New York City. To cover the crushed rubble ground surfaces, we located a large supply of special compost soil from a drug company’s corporate campus in the suburbs—free but for the trucking.Composed of company dining hall food waste, sewage sludge, mycelium from drug manufacturing, and other organic waste. The compost proved to be fertile, humusy soil, an excellent growing medium, a good prototype for rich planting soil (without chemical fertilizers).
Over the decades more and more farm fields have drastically cut back on their use of expensive chemical fertilizers and, at the same time and are providing disposal for municipal sewage and other composted waste. But a few years ago, a New York Times environmental reporter discovered that compost from many sewage treatment plants across the country were contaminated with high levels of PFAS and other dangerous contaminants. Subsequently, this widespread use of sewage sludge fertilizer is being restricted in many instances and will continue to be discouraged until the federal Environmental Protection Agency follows through on its earlier promises to mandate cleaning up public water facilities of PFAS and other contaminants.
In 1935, the Dupont Corporation came up with one of the most famous advertising slogans of the era:“Better Living Through Chemistry”.But the naive optimism of the original slogan now carries a more sardonic tone. Modern science has made great strides in agriculture as in so many fields but our problems feeding ourselves and keeping healthy are not behind us.The Green Revolution that came into being after WW2 doubled world food production but also left us with perhaps insolvable medical problems.
Architect G. Mackenzie Gordon, AIA lives in Lakeville, Conn.
Nathan Miller
Voters will also decide on a resolution to purchase two new 72-passenger school buses.
AMENIA — Webutuck School District’s proposed budget marks the first increase to school taxes in five years.
Voters will decide on the budget on Tuesday, May 19, at a public vote in the Webutuck High School Gym on Haight Road near Route 22. The vote is set to take place from noon to 8 p.m.
Webutuck’s Board of Education first saw the budget in a public meeting on April 4. Business Amdinistrator Robert Farrier presented final tax numbers on May 5.
The tax levy is set to increase 1.35% to about $8.77cents per $1,000 of home valuation over last year. Farrier said homes valued at $200,000 should expect to owe about $2,036 in school taxes.
That tax bump accommodates a 4.45% increase in overall expenditures, largely driven by salary increases and health insurance costs.
Farrier said the district has multi-year agreements with labor groups that mandate increases to employee salaries, meaning those costs are predictable year over year. Salaries are set to increase by a total of $515,344 over last year’s budget, including special education positions that were added during the 2025-2026 school year.
Health insurance costs are projected to rise sharply next year. Farrier said he expects regular annual increases averaging 8% to 10% going forward.
Farrier reported the new special education positions will result in some savings, offsetting the cost of bringing those services in-house. Previously, some special needs students had to receive services through the Dutchess County Board of Cooperational Educational Services. Bringing the service in-house will save the district nearly $300,000 in payments to BOCES, Farrier said.
In addition to the budget, voters will also decide on a bus purchase and races for seats on the school board.
A resolution asks voters to approve the purchase of two 72-passenger busesand a Bobcat UW56, a side-by-side all-terrain vehicle.
Judy Moran, Amy Wesley and Jerry Heiser are all running for reelection to the school board. The three incumbents are running unopposed for an additional three-year term on the board.
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Graham Corrigan
Administrators balanced Millbrook Central School District’s budget with staffing and program cuts after insufficient revenue and ballooning health insurance costs caused a deficit of about $1 million.
MILLBROOK — The Millbrook Board of Education has approved a budget for 2026-27 that includes program and staffing cuts. But they still need the public’s approval, and on May 19, voters will head to the polls at Millbrook Middle School.
The $37,992,751 proposed budget represents a 6.57% increase from last year. The district’s tax levies will rise in turn, up 7.02% year-over-year to $29,733,237.
After anticipated state aid, the budget still results in a deficit of $1 million. The district has proposed a combination of program and staffing cuts to make up the difference. Summer school and some athletic programs will be reduced, Board of Education contracts will be trimmed, and some professional development opportunities for teachers will be cut.
Planned staff reductions are also part of the equation — 14 in all. That includes an administrative position, two full-time teachers, and a combination of teacher’s assistants and school monitors charged with maintaining safety on school grounds.
“It wasn’t in any priority order,” said Superintendent of Schools Caroline Hernandez Pidala. “It’s because those things are not mandated…I built some of these programs that could be eliminated.” The superintendent’s own salary will increase 3.5% to $226,000.
Millbrook Central School District, which enrolled 782 students in the 2024-25 school year, has been challenged by a number of price increases this year. They include rising insurance premiums, higher costs for special education and transportation, and a capital fund transfer to help repair district buildings. Multiple schools have been suffering from persistent roof leaks.
One notable variable is the amount of state aid the district will receive this year. New York state has filed a number of extensions for its education budget, and has yet to release its final numbers.
Last year, the district received $4,808,735 in state funding, but Superintendent Hernandez says the numbers can be deceiving. “The aid that we get doesn’t reflect the students who go to public schools,” said Hernandez. More than 30% of the Millbrook student body qualifies for free or reduced lunch, due to their parents’ socioeconomic status.
If voters reject the proposed Millbrook Central School District budget, additional cuts of $1.5 million would have to be made to satisfy a contingent budget.
Two seats at the Board of Education are also on the docket: Chris Rosenbergen and Howard Shapiro are running for reelection. The last day to register to vote is May 14.
Graham Corrigan
PINE PLAINS — The stakes are high for Pine Plains Central School District this budget season. Faced with rising costs and declining enrollment — 791 students attended Pine Plains schools this year, down from a 2002 peak of nearly 1,500 — the board adopted a proposed budget of $40,778,791 in April that includes cuts to school programs.
That’s an increase of 5.34% in expenses from last year. Levied taxes would rise at a slightly lower rate, 4.43%, to $29,122,160. That increase puts the district over its allowed tax rate hike as set by the state.
Piercing the tax cap means the budget will need a 60% approval rating from residents to pass, a so-called supermajority rule that comes into effect when a district’s tax levy exceeds the state’s cap rate.
But the district’s board of education still saw it as the best option. An earlier plan to balance the budget involved closing the Cold Spring Early Learning Center. That faced fierce pushback from parents, and the board subsequently formed an advisory committee to explore other options. That committee will make its recommendation in September.
In the meantime, the district had to make cuts elsewhere. Chief among the eliminations are two 5 p.m. bus routes, new equipment purchases, and elementary school enrichment programs. Some parents are still frustrated about the process that led to those decisions.
“I’m concerned about the lack of outreach from the administration,” said Brooke Brown, a parent in the district and Board of Education candidate. “I think the community is just feeling pretty separate from the school system. There are many things that are out of the board’s control, but an explanation of that would really be helpful.”
Pine Plains’ declining enrollment has been echoed across Dutchess County, an exodus that leaves school districts facing hard choices about consolidation. When that’s compounded with new insurance hikes and climbing transportation costs, an “immediacy of need” is created, said Pine Plains board member Chip Couse.
“Some of the things that were being kicked down the road can no longer be kicked,” Couse said.“I think it’s going to be a rough budget year, not only for Pine Plains, but across the county…But I’m guardedly optimistic. I think that the community will support it, because the alternatives are a bit draconian.” Couse said that in the past, approval has been around 70%.
If the budget fails to pass, the board has two options: put the same plan up for another vote in June, or revise the budget up or down. Superintendent Brian Timm has hypothesized that the board would attempt to scale down to within the tax cap — an approximate $300,000 in further cuts.
If that second vote fails, the district would be forced to adopt a contingent budget with last year’s tax rate, necessitating a further $800,000 in cuts.
There’s more than just the budget on this year’s ballot: two Board of Election seats are open, and are contested by the incumbent James Griffin, Amie Buehler, and Brooke Brown.
The district is also considering the purchase of five new buses through funds previously approved in 2022. At nearly 140 square miles, Pine Plains is one of the county’s largest districts.
Voting takes place on May 19 at Stissing Mountain Junior/Senior High School in Pine Plains. Unregistered residents have until May 14 to participate — you can check your registration status at ppcsd.org.
Leila Hawken
The Old Amenia Burying Ground of 1750 holds the graves of the town’s forebears including Ephraim and Mary Paine, lead characters in a new play, “Amenia’s Spycatcher,” to be presented as part of the town’s observance of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
AMENIA — A locally written and produced historical play is set to take the stage at Amenia Town Hall this summer as part of the town’s observance of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Resident George Bistransin announced during a Thursday, May 7, Town Board meeting that the Amenia Historical Society has been awarded a $15,000 grant from Dutchess County to produce “Amenia’s Spycatcher,” a new play he has written as a story of espionage, intrigue and romance set in Amenia during the American Revolution.
The play will be presented at the Town Hall Auditorium/Theater on Friday, Aug. 21, through Sunday, Aug. 23. Admission will be free. In support of the production, the historical society has also received a grant in the amount of $2,500 from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation to assist with a theatrical lighting upgrade.
Bistransin describes his new play as an adventure that weaves factual history from a variety of primary and secondary sources into a fictional historical drama.Early Amenia residents Ephraim and Mary Paine lived through the years of the Revolutionary War. The play follows their lives between 1777 and 1785, when Ephraim was a Dutchess County Judge and delegate to the Continental Congress.
Wherever possible, Paine’s actual words are used for the play script, Bistransin indicated, having engaged in extensive research. He is the playwright and will direct the play, drawing on considerable professional theater experience.
The process of casting Amenia’s Spycatcher and scheduling auditions is beginning. Auditions will be held on Wednesday, May 27, and Saturday, May 30. For details, phone Bistransin at 937-708-9717.
The Old Burying Ground on Mygatt Road holds the graves of Ephraim and Mary Paine, but over time, many of the gravestones, including Mary’s, have tilted, broken or fallen. The historical society is currently raising funds for stone restoration. For information on the effort, go to www.ameniahs.org.
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