Rep. Bill Owens got a huge boost for his re-election campaign yesterday from an unexpected source – political foe Doug Hoffman, who put out a letter charging election fraud on the part of, well, the little demons running around inside that somewhat goofy looking head of his.

Hoffman's letter, seeking money from conservatives to enable him to challenge the results of the election he conceded to losing only two weeks ago, charged the Democratic Party, the liberal organization Acorn and, presumably, the Oswego County Board of Elections, with election fraud. He did this without a shred, not an iota, of proof.

In reality, the only acorns in Oswego County are produced by oak trees. And the Oswego County Board of Elections, like every other such body in New York state, is run equally by Democrats and Republicans, and has nothing to gain in an 11-county congressional district by cheating, or allowing others to do so.

Leveling criminal accusations against political opponents – and in Hoffman's case, even against political allies – is a serious action. You ought not do it unless you have some proof. When pressed on that issue by Times reporter Jude Seymour, a Hoffman aide rapidly distanced himself from the allegation and offered not a shred of evidence, even a hint of a third-party rumor, that the ballot process was tampered with.

A lot of conservatives are still frothing at the mouth over Hoffman's defeat, and making plans to turn that election around next year, in the regular election. Unfortunately for them, they've backed a candidate that has shown, and now, in defeat, continues to show, he is spectacularly unqualified to be in Congress.

In politics, as in bar fights, you'd better be prepared to back up whatever silliness comes out of your mouth. Hoffman's paranoid rant about Acorn and the little men who weren't there in the Oswego County elections office is going to be impossible to back up. And it will show him to be the small-minded, confused man that came out during the last campaign.

The conservatives probably ought to quietly take the saddle off Hoffman, brush him down, put him out to pasture and start looking for a new horse to ride next year.

With yesterday's counting of absentee ballots that pushed Urban Hirschey ahead of five-term incumbent Thomas Rienbeck, the three towns where commercial wind-development policy became something of a local referendum have sent a loud and clear message to wind farm developers and their rabid supporters: wind politics is local.

In Hammond, an incumbent who had served for 18 years and who was strongly in favor of wind farm development, Janie Hollister, lost by 50 votes to Ronald Bertram, a newcomer who promised to look at all sides of the local wind debate. In the Town Council race, two candidates running on Bertram's platform defeated two men who have urged a quick adoption of a permissive wind energy law that would open much of the town up to windmill development. Douglas Delosh and James Tague will join Bertram on the council.

In Cape Vincent, Mr. Hirschey won in a town riven by the wind debate. He is joined by incoming councilman Brooks Bragdon, putting two members of the Wind Power Ethics Group, the Cape's wind farm opposition group, on the Town Council.

In Henderson, the results are more subtle but the message was clear: people in that town are opposed to wind farm development. A new supervisor leading a reconstituted town board without question heard that message.

To put these elections purely in the context of pro-wind or anti-wind is a simplistic view, however. In both Hammond and Cape Vincent, residents spoke to the concern over conflicts of interest on the part of public officials, the speed with which wind ordinances were proposed and the lack of heed the elected officials accorded to wind-power opponents. If you don't think this interaction is a vital component of the dynamic between elected representative and voters, look at Orleans and Clayton, where there was no backlash vote and where, not coincidentally, the town councils have made sure the public has been involved in the process with community based committees formed to advise on wind-power decisions.

Hammond resident Brooke Stark assessed the town election and why the incumbent board was rejected in the Nov. 4 story in the Times: "They really have done a lot," she said. "But I think they got complacent and were not interested in educating the community about something they'd already made up their minds about. They wanted the wind law to go forward and that was that. People got fed up with that, and every time we felt that our voices were being shut down, it provided more impetus to get active."

Caveat emptor! While the wind power issue was at the core of this election, the arrogance of power was the nail that sealed the coffins of the defeated incumbents. To take it a tad further, Henderson voters, while vocal about not endorsing wind power projects in the town, were probably more sick of the chaos that reigned over the Henderson Town Council; out-of-control meetings that lasted four hours, a deputy supervisor who frequently appeared to be in charge, petty bickering over nearly every matter to come before the board and a supervisor locked in a legal battle with his own town over what is probably an illegal junkyard all made Henderson voters simply unwilling to endorse the status quo.

Now comes the challenge for the victors: you all have to find a way to respond to the voters' mandate. In Cape Vincent, a Town Council unable, theoretically, to even vote on any wind-power-related issues has nevertheless bent over backward to ease the path for two wind developers. Actions taken by the lame-duck board between now and Jan. 1 will set the tone for the incoming council. Mr. Rienbeck appears determined to ram a wind-power zoning law through in the next six weeks, even though three of his fellow councilmen have acknowledged conflicts of interest because of existing agreements with wind-farm developers. The only way a zoning law can be enacted is if at least two of those three violate ethics codes to vote on an issue they have promised not to vote on.

If that happens, it is almost inevitable the town will be taken to court, the attorney general will be asked to undertake an investigation of how the law got forced through and Mr. Hirschey and his board will have to figure out how – and in fact whether – to defend the town against the actions. It's going to be a mess and it's going to be expensive. And it's needless.

In Hammond, the new council would do well to immediately return its wind policy to a legitimate, inclusive citizens committee with the promise to take their recommendations seriously. If those recommendations and subsequent public hearings end up severely restricting wind-farm development in Hammond, well, the people will have spoken – just as it should be.

And in Henderson, where the looming battle is over the transmission lines from a wind project that the town has absolutely no control over because it's in Hounsfield, the challenge will be to refocus the council so that it has the wherewithal and political resolve to respond in the way its citizens demand. A focused and rational governing body would be such an improvement in Henderson that an unsuccessful but well-waged battle against the transmission lines would no doubt be a huge relief to most Henderson residents.

This election sent a powerful message about the relationship between the elected and the electorate. It would be good if everyone was listening.

(Thanks to updated information provided by Paul Warneck, director of the Jefferson County Real Property Tax Office, I have updated this blog post.)

At a public hearing on the Galloo Island Wind Farm payment in lieu of taxes deal, no one from the town of Hounsfield raised a voice in support of or in opposition to a plan that will bring $2.14 million annually to the county, town, Sackets Harbor Central School and Jefferson County IDA. You have to wonder why.

The deal, after all, will give the wind farm a 45 percent break on taxes that would be due without the PILOT. On an assessment of $400 million (the project will cost at least $500 million to build), from a total property tax bill of $4.8 million, the school district alone would receive $2 million a year. The district's budget for this school year is $7,900,835. Hmmm. Is someone giving away the farm?

Likewise, the county would receive $2.5 million and the town $245,700 if full taxes were paid. Under the terms of the PILOT, the county will receive $750,000. Only the town gains; it will receive $321,000 under the PILOT but would get only $245,700 under full taxation. And the town gains only because the school district agreed to concessions in its share of the pilot.

There is, however, a caveat: If the town were receiving full taxation, the additional taxable assessed value created by the wind farm would lower the tax rate for everyone by 58 percent -- from $2.56 per thousand to $1.08 per thousand. On a house assessed at $125,000, the town tax would drop from $320 to $138 -- a savings of $185. Similarly, for Hounsfield property in the Sackets Harbor Central School District, the tax would drop from $22.28 per thousand to $8.94 per thousand. Taxpayers won't realize those savings, however, because under the PILOT, the property is assessed but not counted toward the tax levy.

Then, of course, if you're starting to ponder the full cost of corporate welfare, you can add this into your philosophical equation: by being certified by the IDA, which will take title to the wind farm for the duration of the PILOT in order to grant these benefits, the developers will avoid paying almost $23 million in sales and mortgage taxes. Almost half of that would have gone to the town and county. While that is concentrated over the initial year or years of the project, it's still a chunk of money.

And don't forget the 30 percent of project costs the federal government will subsidize the project if it gets in under the wire for stimulus funding (which is the reason this is all being rushed to get done), and an accelerated depreciation schedule from the IRS that will allow a 40 percent depreciation in the first year, and full depreciation over five years.

Add it all up, and you can see just how much this "private sector" developer will rely on federal, state and local taxpayers to permit him to make profits. Especially galling is the extent to which local officials, especially the IDA, are doling out hard-won tax dollars to bring, at best, a handful of jobs to the region, and a short-lived flurry of construction money. And with the employees of this project likely living on an island miles out in Lake Ontario, it's not as though they're going to be pouring their wages back into Sackets Harbor or Dexter or Watertown. It would be interesting, indeed, if the IDA were called upon to tell us the cost per job for this project: could it reach $1 million?

Most PILOT agreements give a graduated tax break that never exceeds 75 percent and which drops over time to zero. This agreement keeps the break, although adjusted for inflation, throughout its 20 year lifetime. And there is no host community component to this; at least if Hounsfield were getting a landfill, it would receive compensation unique to the siting. As it is, the town is going to be the red-headed stepchild of this agreement. And Jefferson County won't be far ahead of the town.

If this is the model for future wind farms in Jefferson County, we're in big, big trouble. If the marketplace plus controlled federal subsidies can't sustain wind development, it should not be the obligation of local and state taxpayers to foot the bill for the developers' profit margins. We all seem to be forgetting this: this is not an industry we're courting to come here. It's coming here because here is where the wind is. It's not as though we're competing with a

site in central Ohio for this.

Next time there's a public hearing on a wind farm PILOT agreement, it wouldn't hurt if those of you who think this model is broken and should be tossed out would show up and speak your mind.

Lost in the noise of last week's election was a release from the office of U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer that called for stiffer penalties for domestic abuse, and more money to support programs that fight those crimes.

In his release, he noted that Jefferson County had the third highest rate of domestic violence reports of counties outside of New York City, at just a little over 14 incidents per thousand people. At that rate, almost 1,700 cases of domestic violence are reported to police each year. And this is the number of cases that are reported – it's difficult to estimate how many remain untold. Estimates of unreported domestic violence range from 50 percent to as high as 90 percent, when emotional abuse is factored in. But at a rate of 50 percent reported cases, that means there could be almost 3,500 incidents of serious domestic violence in Jefferson County each year.

Today, as you read this, a man is in the Metro Jefferson Public Safety Building, awaiting further action on a murder charge stemming from the death of his former girlfriend, Annette Vazquez. Ramon Robles-Ruiz is charged with strangling her and dumping her body beside a remote road in Theresa. And this is just the most visible incidence of domestic abuse; not a day goes by, it seems, without some arrest on a domestic incident reported in this paper.

The problem appears most acute in Jefferson County. In St. Lawrence County, the rate, at 5.58 cases per thousand, is 60 percent lower, and Lewis County's rate is only 6.42 incidents per thousand, more than 50 percent less. That raises one question: why is Jefferson County so violent?

It would be extremely easy to attribute it all to Fort Drum; blame it on the soldiers. That, however, is a straw man argument. It allows local officials to sweep the whole issue under the rug, lay the blame at the Army's door and move on. That is a huge mistake.

Mental health experts generally agree, based on all the data that has been presented, that one in three women worldwide will suffer violence at the hands of an intimate partner in her lifetime. When you see one region where the numbers bulge outside of the curve, like Jefferson County, you have to start wondering why.

While Fort Drum presents unique challenges – soldiers returning from long wartime deployments frequently find coming home difficult in more ways than one – it is only a part of the overarching problem. You can't avoid wondering if the problem in Jefferson County is somehow made worse by public policy – or a lack thereof. Is the district attorney's office diligently prosecuting these cases? If so, are local judges consistently meting out punishment? And are police adequately answering these calls, which is to say, are they following the law and making required arrests?

Of those three, it's most likely that the police are, in fact, doing their job. If they weren't, it's unlikely the Jefferson County numbers would be so high. The DA and the courts, however, are a lot harder to judge.

One of the problems with the fragmented court system in this state – scores of local courts with dozens of local justices, meting out justice with widely varied backgrounds and prejudices and less than comprehensive legal training, in some cases – is that there are many, many serious misdemeanors, including many domestic violence cases, which are prosecuted in local court. Hence, justice and punishment can be all over the lot. A judge in, say, Adams, might treat domestic violence cases completely differently than a judge in Alexandria. In fact, two judges in the same town might have different views of domestic violence.

If you think I'm making this up, consider how long it was considered something less than a crime if a man had to, from time to time, give his wife an "attitude adjustment." As barbaric as the concept is, many misogynists out there still advocate that "right."

And this issue can't be addressed unless the district attorney's office is called into question. Cindy Intschert has not gained a reputation as a particularly aggressive prosecutor. It appears, based on anecdotal evidence, this district attorney's office is often ready to wheel and deal with defendants, which might be OK on a case by case basis but probably shouldn't be the rule with the truly dangerous misdemeanors, such as domestic violence and driving while intoxicated.

Family Counseling Service of Northern New York and the Victims Assistance Center of Jefferson County see the effects of domestic violence every day. For Family Counseling, it revolves around trying to end domestic violence by changing patterns of behavior. For the Victims Assistance Center, it’s a matter of immediately removing victims from harm's way. There has to be an in-between here, a consistent platform between rescue and reform. That has to be the courts.

As long as the fractured court system of this state remains as it is, local judges need to get on the same page when it comes to meting out justice in domestic violence cases. No one should be in danger from family members in their home, and judges need to do whatever within the law it takes to end that danger – whether it's mandatory counseling, or a combination of counseling and jail. And the district attorney's office has to shepherd these cases through the court system with vigorous prosecutions, to insure the law is complied with and justice is served.

Domestic violence should not continue as our dirty little secret. We should all be demanding action that will reduce its prevalence – and thus keep families safe within their homes.

It's morning in the north country. It almost feels like we should have a hangover from this acrid, acrimonious political binge we've been more or less forced on. But if you're like me, you feel refreshed and relieved – the campaign is over, the parade of national politicians, pundits and panjandrums has melted away and we return, once again, to the relative obscurity of being a rural region in the far northern reaches of the state.

And not a moment too soon. I am sick to death of hearing about the 23rd Congressional District of New York every time I change from one TV news station to another. In the past 10 days, the attention has become circus-like. And just about every report about the district suggested that its residents were living in some kind of petri dish of modern political experimentation, that our congressional election was, in fact, a referendum on both President Obama's leadership AND on whether the Republican Party should capitulate to the strident demands of its far right fringe.

I'm proud to say the district's voters made a resounding statement with its vote – leave us the hell alone and let us elect our own representatives. Politics, Dick Armey not withstanding, is local. Even if we end up electing an idiot, he's OUR idiot. In the case of yesterday's congressional election, I'm pretty happy to say we didn't elect an idiot – Bill Owens is an intelligent nondemagogue who will do a fine job representing us in Congress. Against all odds, in a large congressional district with a widely varied population, he became the first Democrat in a century and a half to win in Northern New York.

And the incredible, irrefutable irony is this: if the right wing Republicans and the nattering conservative pundits and the self-righteous single-issue religious groups had kept their meddling hands out of the pie, we would be sending yet another Republican to Washington. Without the assault from the right, in a race that contained only our own DeDe Scozzafava and Bill Owens, DeDe would have preserved the seat for the GOP. Last night's results prove that the core northern counties – Jefferson, St. Lawrence and Lewis – are the mortar that holds the district together, and those counties are Scozzafava Country. In an Owens-Scozzafava election, she would have won handily in those three counties and in heavily Republican Oswego and Madison, and a far more gentlemanly race would have ended up DeDe 56 percent, Owens 44 percent.

So the 23rd district election did send a message to the Republican Party, though not the one intended by those who urged Doug Hoffman to buck the local committees and launch a third-party campaign. No, the message is this: let local politics remain local. As Don Rumsfeld would probably tell them, you have to run with the candidate you have, not the candidate you might hope or want to have. Without the outside meddling, the makeup of Congress wouldn't have been changed with this election. But the neocons and the bizarre Palin Wing of the GOP couldn't keep their hands to home, as my grandmother would say, and now the state's congressional Republican caucus is down to just two.

Thank you, voters of the 23rd. And to those who forced this ridiculous situation, I say this: What a bunch of maroons!

There was a time, not so long ago, when town officials both elected and appointed felt a necessity to comport themselves with dignity, to try to uphold their oaths of office, to set an example through word and deed for their constituents. It was sort of what we expected from the people we put in office, and the people that they appointed to unpaid, volunteer posts.

But somewhere along the line, all that stopped. Somewhere, local officials got it into their heads that a town post was a good path to take for personal enrichment. And I have to admit, the sudden proliferation of proposed wind farms has brought this out in spades.

In October, Oswegatchie Councilman Kenneth Wilson let people know he is unashamed of using his vote to cash in on the, er, windfall. The Times reported recently: "What's the big deal?" Mr. Wilson asked when contacted Thursday. "These things are coming and you're involved. I have nothing to hide and no intention of recusing myself from voting, unless there's a legal issue, at which time I would seek advice from our legal counsel."

Huh? Ken doesn't see any problem voting in favor of the wind farm that's going to line his pockets. Wow. Way to go, Ken — at least you're up front about it. Most people give at least a passing effort to hide that from the voters.

Now, in Hammond, a Planning Board member, Crayton Buck, has distinguished his office by tearing down a political sign in favor of an anti-wind-farm slate of candidates and, well, urinating on it. Crayton is 78, and if I were him, I'd seriously consider using an arteriosclerosis defense.

Crayton was captured in the act on one of those nifty trail cameras that are primarily used to get candid shots of wildlife afield. In this case, the Buck was caught red-handed. Or, you know, red-some-other-body-parted. When the property owner looked at his pictures, he called the cops. And Crayton was (I'm sorry) outed — and ticketed.

You might expect this kind of behavior from someone in their teens. Kids, after all, will be kids. Crayton is well beyond that excuse. He oughta know better, as they say around the kitchen table.

The whole sordid incident points out just how divisive the wind power issue is. It has become the new landfill-siting fight of the 21st century. Unfortunately, the wind power brouhaha is tinged with the greed factor, as landowners who might host wind towers see nothing more than dollar signs. And whether intentionally or by facilitous accident, it has been complicated as wind-farm developers have started cutting checks for public officials.

In Hammond, as in Cape Vincent and Lyme and Orleans and Henderson and Clayton, there is significant blowback against wind-farm proposals. A lot of people, especially those along the lake or the river, don't want the visual pollution attendant to these 400-foot-tall behemoths, and the flicker and the noise and the radio-signal interference. They have legitimate concerns that town officials should objectively consider. It's hard to be objective when you've got a $5,000 check burning a hole in your pocket.

Meanwhile, Crayton Buck will head to court Thursday, to answer his charge. And no matter how you feel about his action in light of his position on the Planning Board, he will always have this: he is the 2009 poster boy for prostate health.

I just hung up on my 307th political "robo-call", this one from some downstate or out of state Republican campaign organization that didn't ask me to support their candidate – it told me what a pair of bozos Doug Hoffman and Bill Owens are.

This election to replace the departed John McHugh has morphed from a relatively innocuous upstate congressional race into what some people are apparently seeing as a referendum on Democratic leadership in Washington. Both the Republican and Democratic congressional campaign committees have poured outrageous amounts of money into the battle, usually without any consultation with their candidates.

And the race is also becoming a mini-referendum on factions within the Republican Party; the far right wing of the GOP, stung by recent repudiations at the polls, can try to reclaim control of the party if only Hoffman can beat DeDe Scozzafava. Imagine – an election within an election. Sounds like a Spike Jonze movie plot.

Unfortunately, the voters across the 23rd District end up being the losers. No one is really talking issues – they're too busy spewing party-line fooferaw, signing inane pledges and ducking the press who are trying, God bless 'em, to get the candidates positions on record. Might as well try to lasso a barn swallow.

"Politics as usual, the people be damned" could be the theme of this election, and while it would be nice to think this is an anomaly, you only have to cast back to either of the elections that put Darrel Aubertine in the Senate, and kept him there, to realize that partisan politics has grown far larger than the people the parties putatively represent.

And it's galling that serious efforts by journalists – I'm thinking immediately of Jude Seymour's Times story that pretty much supported Bill Owens's job creation claims – are being turned on their ear by party hacks who use headlines without any context to claim this or that egregiously incorrect position about their candidate, or about their opponent.

I don't care who wins this election. I'll probably break down in the voting, er, station, and vote for one of them. But I won't like it. I will come out of there knowing exactly why I register no party affiliation – I don't like rubbing elbows with a bunch of slimy, unscrupulous characters.

This week has been a real bad day for Dede Scozzafava.

It started a couple nights ago, when police were called to, of all places, the annual Lewis County Republican Dinner, a spot not necessarily on a par with, say, moe.down for suspicious activity. They were called by candidate Scozzafava’s husband, who wanted police to remove an obnoxious reporter from the vicinity of his wife. (No, it wasn’t Steve Virkler.)

Then on Wednesday, candidate Scozzafava marched down to the Doug Hoffman headquarters to give a sort of Twitterized press conference, and when the film hit the nightly news, there was Dede in a tasteful, muted salmon suit absolutely surrounded by a sea of bright red Hoffman for Congress posters. I don’t know what she was saying; all I could do was stare, mouth open in amazement, at this visual. I’m certain that about half the people who saw it thought she was quitting the campaign and throwing her support to the Conservative Party candidate, because that was certainly the image that lingers.

Any moderately competent political campaign manager will agree that on the campaign, you have to control your environment. It just doesn’t appear that the folks in charge of Dede’s run for John McHugh’s 23rd district congressional seat have constructively learned this. At the dinner, they obviously took the concept of control to its most absurd level. Even if a reporter is a complete dirtbag, it is seriously bad form for a candidate’s spouse to try to have him arrested. If Dede had taken this ambush journalist head on and answered his questions or demurred, it would have been an inside-politics blog post the next day. Calling the cops let the entire cadre of right wingnuts and all the Democrats start chattering about Dede’s disassociation from the First Amendment.

On Wednesday, geez, what was anyone thinking? The huge potentials for disaster with a photo op at the opponent’s headquarters had to be obvious to SOMEONE in the Scozzafava camp, didn’t it? No? Are you kidding me?

It appears that, as a congressional candidate, Dede is a fine assemblywoman. There is a very good possibility that her popularity will fade from first, when the first poll came out, to third on Nov. 3. She could be beaten by both Hoffman and Bill Owens, the Democrat. Owens may win simply because he has been astute enough to keep the campaign blood spatters off him.

Dede is a legitimate candidate. She is smart, she has heretofore always shown principle, she has shown she can be electable. But the difference between being a qualified candidate, and an effective campaigner, is as big as the drive between the two furthest removed points in the 23rd district. No part of her campaign has satisfied her supporters or frustrated her opponents. She is quietly sinking like an autumn leaf in a quiet pond, and she has precious little time to invigorate her campaign and turn this all around.

I took a spin out the just-opened County Route 202 this morning, just hours after Jefferson County took the wrapper off, and I have to say, it has to be one of the finest four-lane highways in the north country. And when I drove over it, it still had that new-road smell.

County Route 202, you may remember, was designed to ease some of the traffic congestion on Route 3/Arsenal Street; it connects to Route 12F west of Salmon Run Mall’s Coffeen Street entrance. While highway engineers designed it to act as a traffic safety valve from Watertown’s busiest commercial corridor, town officials see it as The Next Big Thing for development west of the city.

And I have to say, it opens up acres and acres of scrub fields and woodlands to development. Right now, of course, it’s just empty land full of birds and other wildlife. But Watertown Supervisor Joel Bartlett and his Town Council see it as yet another tax cash cow for the town that already has no local tax rate, full of businesses and commercial enterprise that will further stuff the town’s bank accounts.

And boy, it’s a nice road. Four lanes of brand new pavement, not even a memorial cross in sight. And while it isn’t level, it sure is straight! In fact, if it doesn’t develop, it could become an unofficial county drag strip.

While the town has figured out how to spin flax into gold with this road, the city and the county might be less sure. If county finances go dark ages, I suppose it could put tollbooths at each end and charge a small fee, like the Thousand Island Bridge Authority. Or it could wait for Bartlett’s development and just sit back and collect property tax.

The city, on the other hand, must sigh every time someone brings up Route 202. Any development will want to hook to the city’s sewer system, of course, but right now, there is no room at the end of the road, near Route 3, where initial development is most likely. The Arsenal Street line has a “no vacancy” sign on it, and without some help from either a generous state or the town of Watertown, that isn’t likely to change any time soon. Meanwhile, the city’s own Arsenal-Coffeen connector, the grandiosely named Western Boulevard, seems farther away than it did two years ago when the city was so enthusiastic about building it. Who knew?

You should go check out Route 202 before they put up the tollbooths. It’s a dandy ride, if a tad short. And you can look at the trees and brush and envision The Next Big Thing.

While Washington does battle over health care reform, it’s instructive to look at the issue a little closer to home.

For the past 10 years or a little more, Dr. Richard Muller has been my physician. If you have a vision in your mind of the old-time country doctor, Rich Muller is probably the picture you’ll come up with. Never mind that he practices out of a less than elegant modular building that’s a clone of the kind popular in expanding school districts in the early ‘70s. Outside of the ambiance, of which there was none, his office was a throwback to the days when medicine was delivered by folks you called by their first names.

I have Type II diabetes, which requires a lot of vigilance and quarterly doctor visits. I was a regular in Rich Muller’s tawdry waiting room, but that is not to say I spent any time there to speak of. I never waited more than 10 minutes to be served, and I think that the total amount of time I was kept waiting, in 10 years, was less than four hours. That’s remarkable in this day and age.

And it wasn’t because the doctor had nurses do all the grunt work, flew in for two minutes and sailed out to the next patient. When I had questions, Rich Muller answered them to my satisfaction. We had many, many fairly long discussions about my ailment, new discoveries in the field of diabetes research and treatment and how that all related to me. And we also hit on politics, golf, families, what was happening around town and in the area. I always looked forward to my doctor appointments.

Rich Muller, however, has moved on, gone to work in a larger clinic in Virginia. He and his wife had had enough of the north country’s short summers, of the biting cold, of the snow and inconvenience of the long, long winter. Even in leaving, though, Rich went the extra mile, finding doctors for his patients that he thought might match both their medical needs and their unique personalities.

So with considerable trepidation, I had my first visit with my new doctor today. I will call this person simply Doc, because I’m not going to give any hint as to whom it might be. So don’t try to figure it out. Doc works in a practice with several other physicians, in a modern office with a dedicated lab. The reception area has a sliding glass partition that is closed (Rich had a sliding glass panel that had been perpetually open for so long I don’t think it could be closed), a waiting room with a television and a boatload of chairs. My first wait in my new Doc’s office was 46 minutes. My second wait in my new Doc’s office was 15 minutes. I quickly figured out that I had spent about four years of Muller waiting time on my first visit.

I think I’ll like my new Doc. Doc is sharp, has a sense of humor and to some degree, is willing to talk to patients. But I get the feeling that Doc likes, well, procedures. I’m going for an ultrasound exam tomorrow (Doc didn’t laugh all that loud when I said “Oh, great, I’ll be able to see the baby’s head!”) for something that Rich and I had discussed, and ultimately rejected. But I’ll cut Doc some slack, because I’m new and it isn’t entirely unreasonable to want to be cautious to the extreme at first.

But at some point, I suspect Doc and I are going to clash about some procedure. And it is the medical society’s proclivity for extra tests and expensive procedures that are in large part driving up the cost of medicine for you and me.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. But I can’t help but wonder if, perhaps, the totality of care offered by a Rich Muller -- care based not only on medical observations, but on a keen understanding of the emotional and mental state of the patient being treated, a knowledge born of observation and interaction -- isn’t being lost in the health care behemoth of modern America.

The march of medicine must go on. Research into disease provides miracle cures, and more importantly, provides the smaller steps that vastly improve the quality of life for millions suffering from long-term diseases. But depersonalizing the delivery of medical care must, in the long run, increase its cost and decrease its efficacy. When the patient becomes a number on a chart, and not the stepfather of Sarah and Megan and Chris who loves golf and likes nothing more than a lazy day on the lake, something infinitely valuable is lost.

As I was walking up the road I met an angry man.

Even at some distance on the quiet country lane, I could see he wasn't happy. His gait was something of a stomp, and as he neared, his countenance was dark and forbidding. Nevertheless, I hailed him.

"Hello, sir," I said. "Is everything all right?"

"No, everything is not all right!" he snorted. "Nothing is at all."

So I asked him what was troubling him, and he proceeded to tell me.

"This country is sliding downhill on a greased sled," he said. He railed against a left-wing Congress bent on creating a socialist state, against an administration doing everything in its power to make government so big it controlled everything. He said the gutless Democrats in power were getting ready to abandon Afghanistan and would let foreign terrorists overrun this country. He was mad about health-care reform, the federal bailout of the banks and the auto industry. Nothing, he said, was going right.

"It's gotten so I can't sleep, I'm so disgusted with everything," he said.

I wanted to talk to this man, discuss some of his issues. But we were so far apart in our beliefs, and he was so agitated, that I decided against it. I told him I hoped he found some peace, and went on my way.

I had walked less than a mile when I met another angry man. His look, too, was black as storm clouds and as he strode toward me, the dust flew from beneath his feet.

"Hello, sir," I said. "Is everything all right?"

"Nothing is right!" he replied, and given my last encounter, I wasn't going to ask the cause of his angst. But he launched unbidden into an explanation.

"The Democrats are driving me nuts," he said. "Here they are with the biggest mandate they'll have for years, maybe decades, and they're just letting it slip away!"

He was unhappy that health care reform was coming to a vote in such a watered-down version that it left out a public option. He was angry that after a year, Guantanamo still held uncharged and untried prisoners. He was furious at the drawn-out withdrawal from Iraq, and he was livid that President Obama was even considering a massive escalation of the eight-year war in Afghanistan. He couldn't believe Congress was still dragging its heels on climate-change legislation and that there has been little progress in moving environmental legislation forward.

"This is making me crazy. The American people give the Democrats the authority to make powerful, positive changes, and they dither and dawdle and squander this chance!" he said.

I wanted to talk to him, tell him that while I agreed with many of his positions, he had to give the system a chance to work. But before I spoke, I saw a look in his eye that warned me off. I wished him well and took my leave.

As I walked along, I thought of the two angry men. And it began to bother me more, and more. After a bit, I realized I was stomping down the road, scowling. I am, I thought, just another angry man. And that made me sad.

What happened, I thought, to civil discourse? When, exactly, did the political process become so polarized that shrill, personal charges and invective became the currency of political campaigns? When did we stop looking for honest debate over public policy, in favor of bizarre litmus-test pontification of allegiance to the right or the left? What has happened to the Americans who could be socially progressive but fiscally conservative, or those who identified with a party for many reasons but felt comfortable taking every issue on its merits, rather than infusing it with ideology and running it up one flag pole or the other? When – and why – did politics become the moral equivalent of cage fighting?

I had no answers, as I walked the quiet rural road. But I did have another question: If this doesn't change, what is to become of us?

St. Lawrence County legislators have now been personally introduced to the hard choices we mentioned here a couple weeks ago. They were presented a budget that offers no increase in the tax rate, but is predicated on some choices, and some predictions, that ultimately may be difficult if not impossible to support.

County manager Karen St. Hilaire's budget includes cuts in staffing and overtime, although it doesn't propose to lay anyone off. Still, it would eliminate 24 positions through attrition, a figure that's often hard to pin down because it relies upon the decisions of employees, not employers, to attain. And the budget contains a wage freeze, even though most county employees are covered under union contracts that could prevent that from being enacted. With at least $12 million in unexpended funds, and with the county committing only $1.8 from the unexpended balance to reduce the tax levy in this budget, I don't see any unions that won't put the wage freeze proposal on an express train to Nowheresville.

To the extent that total spending has only gone up by about $750,000, the budget appears lean. But you have to put that in perspective, noting the county will still spend more than $222 million in 2010. And Ms. St. Hilaire continues the inane claim that the levy will be reduced by an increase in taxable full-value assessments. Let's put that fiction to bed right now: the levy is the levy. It can be reduced only through the budget; it cannot be reduced through a change in assessments. Tax rates will benefit from higher taxable full value, because the levy will be spread over a larger sum. But this is of little consolation to the property owners whose reassessed value contributes to the increase in full-value assessments; if the tax rate stays the same and their assessment has gone up, they are in most cases going to pay more in taxes next year.

And Ms. St. Hilaire's revenue enhancement schemes rely on the state Legislature, on unproved assumptions and on establishing an entirely new tax that will quietly slip onto the monthly bills of all wireless telephone customers in the county. The proposal to raise the mortgage tax from 0.75 percent to 1.25 percent sounds tiny. But it will raise the cost of recording a $75,000 mortgage from $562.50 to $937.50, a hefty increase in real dollars. And Ms. St. Hilaire's projections of how much that will mean to the budget are based on no changes to the mortgage market, even though there is little on the economic horizon to distinguish her estimates from mere hopes. Even if she's right, both actions will require the approval of the state Legislature – and lawmakers have begun asking counties to justify these requests before they'll submit a home-rule bill. The passage of these measures is no longer guaranteed.

The proposal to take $700,000 from the Mohawk's casino gambling payment and apply it to the general fund simply isn't going to pass state review, because that money is supposed to be spent on economic development and gambling addiction programs. I don't know if St. Lawrence County even HAS a gambling addiction program, but if it does, I suspect it spends about $1.98 on it. The county does have economic development programs in place, but to take $700,000 in gambling money and apply it to that budget category while removing $700,000 in money from other sources and applying it to the general fund is really no different from just sticking the Mohawk's cash into the general fund to begin with. I don't see Empire State Development Corp. going along with that transparent subterfuge.

There are no easy choices in municipal budgets this year. But budgets must be based on measured expectations and on reasonably assured projections. By presenting a budget with cuts that cannot be sustained, or revenues that are purely pie-in-the-sky, local officials virtually assure midyear corrections that can be truly painful, like sudden reductions in staffing, cuts in essential services and deep, unplanned dips into the reserve funds. A government paralyzed by a bad budget can present some suddenly unpalatable surprises.

The St. Lawrence County Legislature should beware of enacting a budget that isn't firmly grounded in reality. The one they're looking at right now doesn't appear to pass the test.

Almost two years ago, a legislative coup in Lewis County ended up with the dismissal (well, actually it was an intentional contract lapse) of County Manager Joe Baruth. While the actual death blow was dealt in a Republican caucus not open to the press or public, parsing statements of support for Baruth after the vote could only lead one to believe that Montague Legislator Rick Lucas was, if not the instigator of the action, an avid supporter.

There is no doubt that Joe Baruth was a force to be reckoned with. He frequently brought legislators on board with decisions when they were all but made, which galled the elected officials, and he helped the county make the (right) decision to leave the court complex downtown instead of taking it to outer Stowe Street – assistance that some legislators considered bordering on insubordinate. Outside observers seemed to think, rather, that Baruth was saving them from themselves.

In January 2008, Baruth’s enemies gathered enough strength to oust him, and they all doubtless figured that, since Joe was then 75, he’d just fade away.

Ha! He faded away like a lake-effect blizzard; he’s now running against Lucas for his legislative seat and he has come out with both barrels ablaze. His latest broadside was on a topic that probably presents Lucas’s greatest vulnerability, the ATV trail system. Despite rulings by the county ethics board that Lucas should not vote on ATV related actions nor try to influence them in debate, he has continued to participate at full voice in the creation of the ATV trails system. Even people who are in favor of ATV trails are wondering whether Lucas, the owner of the Montague Inn and one of the Lewis County businessmen that stands the most to gain from a trails system, should be acting so forcefully to feather his own economic nest.

Baruth, who understands things, has started the attack with the observation that the county’s decision to take a trail fee from riders on the newly approved trail system probably will expose it, and the private landowners who are also offering their property for riding, to greater liability. His reasoning: the state’s General Obligations Law, which protects municipalities from tort actions for most public land use, stands silent in that protection when fees are charged. The state Legislature probably determined that anyone who charges a fee for their land use should probably also be held liable for tortious actions like poor maintenance or willful neglect. Sort of makes sense, actually.

As with most of Lewis County legislators’ reactions to negative comments about its trail system, this criticism has been tossed off as anti-trail negativism. However, even the Legislature’s bought and paid for attorney warned them about this, once, before he was apparently told to stop talking about THAT. As a result, it will be a significant lawsuit against the county or a landowner or, most likely, both, that will answer this issue.

Baruth’s raising of the General Obligations Law issue is brilliant – he can attack Lucas for what is, and what Lucas has done, without actually coming out against the concept of a county trails system. Lucas could actually be beaten on the trails issue by someone equally dedicated to having the system in place; all Baruth has to do is convince everyone the current system is flawed, and he can help fix it.

Rick Lucas’s position is vulnerable, and in the past, that wouldn’t have much mattered because no one savvy enough to exploit that vulnerability has run against a seated legislator. Now, however, it’s a new day. You can’t help but wonder whether, some time around Nov. 5, Rick Lucas won’t be kicking himself for being so eager to fire County Manager Joe Baruth.

In the space of a month, two St. Lawrence County legislators have committed public blunders that reflect nearly as poorly on the Legislature as they do on the two elected officials involved.

On Sept. 21, Daniel J. Girard ran into the parked car of fellow legislator Laura Perry (remember this name). Then, instead of doing the right thing and reporting what he did, Mr. Girard left the parking lot, went across the street to another lot, parked, and tried to act as though nothing had happened. Sadly for him, there were witnesses more than eager to tell authorities what they saw.

Mr. Girard was ticketed -- and scolded -- by Canton police. Three days later, he offered a nearly tearful mea culpa, admitting he was wrong to have lied to a police officer who questioned him about the minor accident.

Now, Mrs. Perry herself is under the gun for using a bulk mailing permit paid for by the Potsdam Chamber of Commerce to send out Teamsters Union campaign material for her husband, who is running for office in an upcoming union election.

One of her husband's opponents is claiming that action violates the Landrum-Griffin Act, although it isn't certain that's true. What IS true, however, is that anyone with enough sense to function as a county legislator ought to have enough sense not to take any actions that would appear to interfere with an independent union election — whether or not that legislator's spouse is involved.

Mr. Girard acted like a cad when he hit someone else's car and absconded. He compounded that by lying to police. A mouthful of apology doesn't change the facts here — he did it, and he lied about doing it.

Mrs. Perry has avoided at least part of Mr. Girard's discomfort — she denies there is anything wrong with what she did. But...if she were not a county legislator, would the Chamber have been so willing to let her use its bulk-mail permit for what is clearly not Chamber business? The Chamber should not be lending its name to partisan politics, whether it be county politics or union elections. Mrs. Perry either didn't consider this — or just didn't care.

There used to be a hope that public officials would hold themselves to a higher standard, have an understanding that even the perception of unethical behavior can taint an official body. That hope is apparently of little concern for at least some legislators in St. Lawrence County. And what a shame that is.

Because of Fort Drum, there aren't many areas of the country any more directly affected than the north country by the Obama administration's decision on what course of action to take in Afghanistan. The men and women of the 10th Mountain Division, the most-deployed unit in the Army, have a real stake in decisions made in Washington.

With the Pentagon's request for an expanded force, the president must decide what course this long war will take. The U.S. has been the major force in Afghanistan since the 2002 invasion, and now military leaders say the best way to end this conflict is to expand it. A lot of 10th Mountain Division lives hang in the balance.

Before President Obama makes a commitment, I hope his advisers force him to look at the history of Afghanistan, and the history of foreign invaders there. They need not look any farther back than the 1980s to see some eerie parallels between the U.S. situation there today, and a failed Soviet invasion 30 years ago.

With Afghanistan in a civil war in 1978, its government called on the Soviets to provide assistance. The Russians complied with a vengeance, eventually invading the country on Dec. 19, 1979 and promptly deposing the president and installing its own government. The Soviets invaded from the northeast in Termez, from the northwest in Kushka, and swiftly moved to Kandahar and Kabul, controlling the major cities.

And then the Soviets discovered what other invaders of Afghanistan had discovered over the centuries: it isn't a country easily captured, and once invaded, is heart-breakingly costly to control. The Russians' initial force included three rifle divisions, an airborne assault brigade and an air force division, with an initial troop strength of 80,000. Within two years, the force had grown to 100,000. When Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev gave military leaders one year to end the war in 1985, troop strength grew to 108,800.

And how did this work out for the Soviets? They lost 14,500 soldiers, with an additional 53,750 wounded. The Soviet Army never, in nine years of occupation, controlled more than 20 percent of the country. It took almost a year – from May 1988 to February 1989 – to pull out of the country. The war sapped Russia's defense forces and treasury, and Osama bin-Laden, who rose to power as a tribal commander as a direct result of this invasion, says it was Afghanistan, not U.S. pressure, that brought about the collapse of the Soviet system. Many people outside the U.S. to some degree agree with this.

And there are other parallels that should make us think long and hard about our presence in Afghanistan. The Soviets' exit strategy, for example, was to build the Afghanistan Army into a real fighting force, and turn the war over to it. Sound familiar? Although the Afghan Army grew to a nominal size of more than 300,000 when the Russians pulled out, the desertion rate was 30 percent and many of the units, let alone individual soldiers, were more loyal to the mujahideen than the government.

Afghanistan poses the same swamp for the U.S. today that it did for the Soviets in the 1980s. The mujahideen have been replaced by the Taliban, but for all practical purposes, we are facing the same foe that sent the Soviet Army packing after nine years of punishment. Like the mujahideen, the Taliban are little more than feudal warlords, loosely tied politically but fiercely united militarily. The geography of the country – nearly impassible mountains surrounded by inhospitable deserts – lends itself to the guerilla warfare tactics of the militants. And the government of Hamid Karzai has about the same control over the country that a farmer has over a herd of barn cats.

To really believe the U.S. can achieve a positive outcome in Afghanistan is truly an example of the triumph of hope over experience. When Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal asked for a surge of troops in Afghanistan similar to the one in Iraq, he was confusing a more graceful American exit in Iraq with a U.S. victory. Since the Iraq war had no real point – there were no weapons of mass destruction and Iraq posed no more danger to the U.S. than Liechtenstein – it would be hard to declare any victory.

In Afghanistan, we set out to capture bin-Laden and destroy al Qaeda, ousting the Taliban along the way because bin-Laden and his group were under the aegis of Afghanistan's ruling factions. We should refocus our Afghanistan strategy on our initial goal: destroying al Qaeda. If that goal is no longer possible in Afghanistan because the terror group's leaders have moved on, we should move on. If it still is possible to destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan, that's what we should be working toward. Making the seven or eight significant ethnic groups and hundreds of Afghanistan tribes support our mission through some "hearts and minds" initiative simply isn't possible, and we'd be wise to forget about it.

We do need to refocus our objectives and our strategies in Afghanistan. But for the sake of our military and our treasury (and perhaps our moral health), we should take a real look at what we're trying to do and where we're trying to do it, and find a realistic path to a reasonable goal.

My bride and I took a spin up to Rensselaer Falls Saturday to assuage my curiosity about a story that ran in the paper last week about efforts to keep an old mill in that rustic village from falling into the Oswegatchie.

We went to an open house at the old Morrison Mill, hoping to drink in a little history and enjoy the fall scenery. The scenery didn't disappoint, and I got way more history than I bargained for; I met Kyle Hartman for the first time. It can be overwhelming if you're not prepared.

Kyle is, by turns, a purveyor of old things, an amateur historian, a Rensselaer Falls booster, a fair self-promoter, something of a gadabout and a pack rat. He has also spent the past 35 years trying to help the old mill win its ill-fated battle against the river. To date, he has fought the river to a draw.

Kyle and his wife Sally bought the old mill in the early 70s, and began what looks like is going to be a lifelong battle to restore it. Over the course of the years, the Hartmans have weathered ice and floods and the DEC and the vicissitudes of a rural economy that hasn't exactly filled their pockets with gold. Kyle has, by his own count, more than a thousand old wooden doors that are just waiting for the right buyer to come along and take one or many home to finish that old-home renovation project. He has windows taken from old buildings, and old cars and a shack full of old millwork, several score of old tires and some old printing presses and even, imagine my shock to discover, a linotype machine.

The outbuildings of the old mill are filled to overflowing with the detritus of projects past. Back in 1983, the Times reported on Kyle's construction of two outdoor kilns to complete his wife's pottery studio. Kyle took us past them Saturday, and said they are no longer used because they're too expensive to fire up. Likewise, he announced in1985 that he was building a railroad depot next to the mill. It was, the Times reported, to house a museum and provide workshops for building and car restoration projects. Today, the bays, open to the north country weather, are filled to the brim with – well, to an uninformed eye, junk. The museum awaits completion.

The mill itself houses Sally's art studio, and an apartment. Where the studio ends and the apartment begins is a matter of conjecture. Kyle took us down into the bowels of the mill to show us the yards and yards of concrete he has poured over the years, trying to stem the ravages of time and the Oswegatchie. The mill dates to the 1840s, although this incarnation exists back to 1913, when it was rebuilt after a disastrous fire. It's laid stone foundation has been attacked yearly by the river, and Kyle has brought in reinforcements in the form of concrete stub walls to beat back the barrage. He is winning, but just barely; if you put a marble in the middle of any floor, it would still be gathering speed when it hit an outside wall.

A foundation wall that runs the middle of the building is, Kyle told us, disappearing into the river mud. While an engineer might suggest jacking the building up, pouring a substantial footer and then rebuilding the wall atop it, Kyle has decided to pour reinforcing walls on each side of the disappearing foundation, and add a giant I-beam above to carry the load.

His relationship with concrete is not unlike the Battling Bickersons; some of his pours have the look of solid craftsmanship, but others aren't so encouraging. One major setback came, he told us, when he used pine boards as his concrete form; the softwood splintered and the pour turned into a blowout.

Through it all, Kyle perseveres. His love of his adopted village, and of the cantankerous old mill, is obvious. He laments that he has been unable to tap the mother lode of government grants to help him pay for his work to preserve the mill (and when I say laments, of course, I mean he speaks with an epithet-laden bitterness usually reserved for in-laws and the IRS), and he enlists volunteer help from far and wide to help him in his almost daily battle.

You sense that Kyle doesn't consider his Sisyphean task to be such. Despite his unending battle against the Oswegatchie, he seems to love the river. And he speaks of his many, many failed plans as though they're all good ideas that just need more time to ripen. He put me in mind of a modern-day Don Quixote in a NASCAR cap, ready at a moment's notice to joust with the sometimes mighty Oswegatchie. Tilt away, fair knight…

The Watertown City Council faces a daunting challenge. It must find some way to deal with development pressures on the city side of Interstate 81 without completely ignoring the capital needs of the rest of the city. How it meets that challenge will have a significant impact on taxpayers for years to come.

With requests for sewer and water extensions on Commerce Park and Gaffney Drives and on the west side of the former Seaway Plaza, the council is facing new, unplanned work that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not a few million. Two new hotels proposed for Commerce Park Drive will require new water mains and an extensive upgrade to a sewage pumping station, investments the developer wants the city to make. And further development along I-81 adjacent to the Holiday Inn Express will require new sewer and water lines — and probably a new city street linking the development with Gaffney Drive, a road that was proposed to become Western Boulevard.

These improvements have been favorably reviewed by most of the City Council. Mayor Jeff Graham has said that the increased tax base from development will help all city taxpayers. And with some caveats, that’s true. But the caveats are doozies.

One caveat is that while the city is putting capital money into the new developments, other projects are falling by the wayside. Things like deteriorating city streets -- Breen Avenue and Factory Street are great examples -- decrease the city’s quality of life and leave residents and businesses along those streets wondering where their tax dollars are going.

And there are other projects not quite so taxpayer friendly as fixing streets that nevertheless are important. The city’s continued failure to separate sanitary sewers from street runoff means that in periods of high flow, untreated sewage enters the Black River. This condition has been a problem since the city began treating sewage scores of years ago, yet progress on correcting it is torturously slow.

It isn’t wrong for the city to consider new capital proposals. City officials are elected to do the triage on capital spending and set the priorities for the city’s future. As part of that responsibility, the council needs to be cautious about lunging after the latest “big new thing.” While hotels and retail development are now bright and shiny, their luster dims quickly as their cost to the city grows. And whether developers want to agree or not, there is ample precedent for the city to require that they help pay for the improvements that so narrowly benefit them.

The city should encourage development on the west side. But it shouldn’t pay for it alone, especially at the expense of other equally important and deserving projects. The council should tell Vision Development and Russell & Dawson, the companies asking the city to expand its infrastructure to them, that it’s a two way street -- they must bear some of the costs. Pay-to-play isn’t such a bad thing when companies hope to reap millions in profit over the coming decades.

Coldly, sadly descends

The autumn evening. The field

Strewn with its dank yellow drifts

Of withered leaves, and the elms,

Fade into dimness apace,

Silent; hardly a shout

From a few boys later at their play!

– "Rugby Chapel"

– Matthew Arnold

No matter how many times I hear it – and I hear it a lot in the north country – I view the statement "Fall is my favorite time of year!" with a decent mixture of wonder and scorn.

I've always been a summer guy, myself, all warmth and sunshine. Maybe it's from spending most of my first 12 years in Arizona; maybe it's genetic code, but give me hot and sunny over crisp and dreary every time.

I have heard the argument that the beauty of the leaves turning, especially in the Adirondacks and along the Seaway, is matchless. And in our minds eye, it can be so; we recall the Kodachrome visions of deep reds and shouting-out yellows and luminous oranges merging to turn hillsides and island into shimmering scenes of nature's glory. But if you look around, you might wonder where that ideal image is, as drab and dull reality frequently overtakes the memory of vibrancy. In my experience, the scene almost never matches the memory.

And in the north country, fall isn't a long, luxurious glide into a short, mild winter. Recall last year, if you will, when the snow started falling in earnest at Halloween and didn't really stop until sometime in January. By the time winter officially arrived, we had 6-foot snow banks obscuring our view of the street. Fall is not a quiet and satisfying and reflective season when you spend half of it behind a snow blower.

I pulled my boat out of the water yesterday, a day when Lake Bonaparte was as serene as a farm pond. For late September, there were a lot of boats still moored at the docks along the shore. But it was obvious that the majority of the lake's seasonal and permanent residents had shouldered their melancholy and put their boats on trailers to spend the long, dark winter. This job, pulling the boat, is one I dread – not because it's difficult, but because it is a tangible sign that summer is over. I have no doubt this is a scene – and a feeling – replicated on all the lakes and rivers of Northern New York.

This September has been insidious, feeding the myth that fall is such a wonderful time of year. Golf courses are still busy and lawnmowers are still running. For you putative autumn lovers, this is probably what you live for.

But the Summer People – most definitely including me – know better; we know the cold winds will be coming off the lake soon enough, carrying feet of snow and obscuring the sun for months. And we can't truly appreciate any season that leads directly to that. Although, hasn't this been a beautiful week?

CSX Corp., the community-spirited owner of all things rail, especially in the north country, has told the Jefferson County Job Development Corp. that if it doesn’t begin to pony up $7,500 a year to maintain the switch that controls the corporation’s access to a rail siding in the City Center Industrial Park, it will pull the switch and disable the siding.

This has the JCJDC board debating whether to even bother with the cost, since no companies in the park now use the spur. In fact, the $370,000 hunk of steel and wood and cinders has NEVER been used, in the seven years since it was built.

The issue raises a number of questions that no one wants to ask, let alone answer. For example, in 2001 the Times reported the plans for the siding in a story that included the following paragraph:

“The construction will cost about $370,000, including $85,000 being paid to CSX for the switch. The JCIDA has a $340,000 state grant to pay for most of it. It hopes to recoup the remaining $30,000 and pay for maintenance by charging a fee for the rail's use.”

After seven years, it appears, CSX wants to take back a switch that it has already received $85,000 for. While it’s hard to argue CSX shouldn’t be paid for its maintenance of the switch, shouldn’t someone be asking if it should be allowed to remove it?

Another troubling question is one often ignored with quasi-governmental agencies like JCJDC – just how wise was the investment of $370,000 in a rail siding that has NEVER been used? You have to wonder just how much research went into the decision; did, for example, the board ever survey existing and potential industrial park tenants to see if it was important? Did it look at the future of rail, or the trends in industrial growth, before it agreed to buy into this project?

Finally, somebody reading this is already saying “What’s the big deal – it was a grant.” And that brings me to the final troubling point: isn’t it time governments and agencies stopped taking every grant that comes down the pike simply because the money is dangled before them? When does that million-dollar grant become not worth pursuing? Perhaps when it goes for a rail siding that may never be used, or a walking trail that actually could be provided with existing sidewalks (remember the Lowville debacle?), or some other municipal bauble that never occurred to anyone until some government agency came along and said “Hey, don’t you need a giant carousel in your city square?”

The rail siding in City Center Industrial Park could stand as a metaphor for bad policy. JCJDC acted like an out-of-touch aunt; the rail siding is a lot like the footie pajamas present in “A Christmas Story” – embarrassingly inappropriate. The grant money – all $340,000 of it – has been completely wasted. The $30,000 the agency put out will, apparently, never be recovered. And CSX wants its switch back – the one JCJDC paid for. This boondoggle will end the way most do – brush will gradually overtake the siding, hiding it, and the memory of how this all came to pass will be obscured by the undergrowth and the passage of time.

Last week, the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court overturned the second-degree murder conviction of Wayne Oxley, who was convicted by a St. Lawrence County jury of killing Bernard Trickey in a brutal baseball-bat attack. The decision means the county will have to once again take Oxley to trial for the August 2005 murder.

The court ruled that Judge Jerome J. Richards erred when he refused to allow testimony at trial that the defense claims would have shown jurors there was another, perhaps more likely suspect in the murder. By denying the defense the ability to present an alternative theory to the crime, the appellate court ruled, Oxley was denied the ability to present a full defense.

Without getting into the details, which you can read in the Watertown Daily Times, Oxley's defense team had lined up a number of witnesses who were ready to testify that another man, not Oxley, had threatened to beat Trickey shortly before his death, and that the man had bragged to a cellmate while in jail on an unrelated charge that he had made good on his threat. Judge Richards, however, would not allow the jury to hear the testimony. In his ruling during the trial, the judge said "It will only serve to confuse the jury." Defense attorney Rikchard Manning at that hearing protested that his client's constitutional rights were being denied.

The new trial for Oxley is unlikely to begin until late in the year, if then. And it could be a whole new ballgame for the prosecution, which will have to counter this new testimony that will be allowed based on the appeals court ruling. A second conviction of Wayne Oxley is far from a sure thing.

The decision to overturn Judge Richards in this case appears to be something of a trend for the judge, a former district attorney who became County Court judge in January 2005. A cursory examination of the record shows this is the sixth reversal for the judge. The Appellate Division has also overturned the cases of Ronald Dillon, Ronald LaPage, Anthony Tehonica, John Emerson and Christopher Abar.

Of those, the Abar reversal might be the most galling. Abar was convicted of first-degree depraved indifference to human life and given 20 years in jail for a vicious beating of James L. Ashley, who suffered brain damage from the attack. The appeals judges ruled that the vicious and unrelenting nature of the attack indicated Abar "acted intentionally during the crime, and not with a depraved indifference to human life." The court also threw out the indictment, making a second prosecution much less likely. By allowing the charge to stand, the judge may have given Abar a free pass on the assault.

Other reversals came because the judge would not allow one defendant a justification defense and in other cases dismissed a juror over objections of the defense, withheld parts of a plea agreement from a defendant and reneged on a plea agreement with another defendant.

No judge goes without some reversals; it's part of the job. But to have six cases reversed in just four years on the bench, Judge Richards appears to be well ahead of the curve in reversals. It seems that the judge likes to make rulings that favor the prosecution, based on the reasons his cases have been returned.

The cost of this is high on several levels. At the most basic, it means that St. Lawrence County is paying a high price for trying cases twice. The cost of a murder trial can run to six or seven figures, a tough added expense for a county already strapped for cash. And in cases like that of Mr. Abar, the county may find it cannot put a guilty defendant behind bars.

A more important consideration is this: each time a judge denies a defendant essential rights, it increases the possibility of a wrongful conviction. The system isn't supposed to work that way. The judge is separated from the prosecution for a very good reason: he is an arbiter, not a proponent. He isn't supposed to take sides, he is supposed to govern the trial so the jury can reach a fair conclusion, then mete out the appropriate punishment to the guilty.

Perhaps the six reversals of Judge Richards' trials are an anomaly; maybe he'll be on the bench for 10 years and these will be the only setbacks he suffers. At the very least, perhaps the judge can look at these decisions and make course corrections that solve any problems that might exist. The people of St. Lawrence County – both taxpayers and criminal defendants – deserve no less.

(Reprinted from the former Northern New York Follies blog.)

When the Cape Vincent Zoning Board of Appeals affirmed Monday night its decision to require that Roger D. Alexander tear down the windmill he built on his property, it might as well have sent e-mails out to every lawyer in the county that a lawsuit is a-comin'.

Mr. Alexander, you'll remember, went to the town zoning enforcement officer with his plan, asking for guidance and a permit to erect the 90-foot tower. He got a permit in May, and it was renewed in August. And he built his windmill. And then spit hit the blades.

The howl was made by Mr. Alexander's neighbors, and the Zoning Board of Appeals apparently heard them loud and clear, because it not just once, but twice, rescinded the permits and will tell Mr. Alexander to remove his windmill. His, ahem, $80,000 windmill.

I suppose I understand the neighbors' positions. (I do, however, hope these neighbors have never sported pro-wind-farm signs on their lawns.) But it occurs to me that perhaps complaining after the tower was up might weaken the neighbors' position.

And it would seem almost a given that Mr. Alexander will have to resort to the courts to try to protect his not insignificant investment. He did not, after all, defy the rule of law. He did everything by the book. Now the town is telling him our fault, your loss. Does that seem fair to anyone?

Lots of planning boards and zoning boards of appeal get sued, but many of them prevail. The ones that lose are the ones that made egregious errors in their rulings. At least on the surface, it looks as though Cape Vincent ought to buckle its seat belt — it could be in for a bumpy ride.

Let the dithering begin.

The St. Lawrence County Legislature is starting its difficult budget deliberations by foreclosing on one proposal that had some promise to close much of the looming budget gap, and by discovering another plan that had been offered wouldn't have had much positive fiscal impact. Based on early returns, this could get ugly.

In a straw poll of its members, the Legislature voted 10-4 Monday evening against an increase in the local share of the sales tax. St. Lawrence County's 3 percent local share is the lowest in the north country, three quarters of a percent lower than in Jefferson and Lewis counties and a full percent lower than Franklin County. In fact, St. Lawrence is one of only five counties in the state still at a 7 percent combined state and local sales tax rate.

While raising the sales tax appears to be too big a political weight for legislators to heft, the alternative should be even less palatable. The only ways to close a budget gap for a county government are to lower expenses, raise revenues or find some magical combination of the two. The only place the county can raise revenues is through fees and taxes, and there are insufficient county fee sources to begin to make a dent in this problem.

If the Legislature won't raise the sales tax, to avoid a property tax hike of frightening proportions it is going to have to cut costs. That means eliminating positions and cutting programs. You have to wonder where the legislators think there is $7 million in budget cuts – it isn't going to come from human services or health or probation or courts or any of the mandated programs, which leaves highway and law enforcement as the juiciest targets. But the Highway Department has been the budget whipping boy in St. Lawrence County for so long that there isn't anything to pare there, and there isn't enough money in the law enforcement budget to bridge this gap.

Likewise, closing the gap by eliminating positions would require that the county work force be slashed, an act that it's pretty clear this group does not have the will to do. The Legislature was informed Monday that a proposed retirement buyout not only wouldn't save much money, in some cases it was cost the county money because it would be forced to dip into its cash for incentive money for positions fully funded by outside sources. That leaves laying people off as the only option.

This budget is going to take political fortitude, an asset that seems to be in short supply on the Legislature. Legislators can spew all they want about not raising taxes, but the reality is, they have no choice. Their only real choice is deciding where the pain will be the smallest. With minirevolts going on in several towns over revaluations, legislators should probably consider just how sensitive a subject spiraling property taxes are. The least painful solution is going to be an increase in the sales tax, because the alternative – a whopping hike in property taxes – would be crippling.

Straw polls are pretty little things that might look good to gullible constituents. But the Legislature was elected to do the right thing, make the hard choices. This budget is going to offer little else, and the sooner the Legislature stiffens its backbone and starts seriously considering its hard choices, the better it will be for county taxpayers.

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