Word of the plan leaked out over the weekend, although there was some initial uncertainty about whether the building involved was the former Charles Williams School or the St. Charles Hotel. At 11 o’clock on Monday morning, more than 30 people from Hudson and elsewhere in the county packed into the already crowded committee room, eager to learn if what they’d heard was true and if so to voice their opposition to the plan. But their intentions were frustrated by Art Baer (R-Hillsdale), chairman of the Board of Supervisors, who was chairing the joint committee meeting. Over the objections of Scalera, Baer called for a motion to go into executive session, and everyone but the county supervisors was expelled from the room while the plan was presented and discussed.
Out in the hallway, Scalera, who had only been briefed about the plan at 9:30 that morning, told fellow Hudson officials, Hudson business owners, and representatives of the Columbia County Chamber of Commerce that the county was in discussion with the owner of the St. Charles Hotel to lease rooms for emergency housing for the homeless. |
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City Treasurer, Eileen Halloran, shown here demonstrating last Wednesday against the relocation of the Department of Social Services, was among the Hudson officials objecting to the new plan to turn the St. Charles Hotel into an emergency housing shelter. |
The plan also involves converting the ground floor of the hotel into a satellite office for the Department of Social Services. It is estimated that the satellite office will handle 75 percent of the DSS customers in Hudson, significantly reducing, although not eliminating, the need for DSS clients to travel to Ockawamick. The new plan does not affect the relocation of DSS to Ockawamick. That plan is still going forward.
Scalera explained that originally the intention was to lease the space from the current owner, but the owner wants to sell the hotel to a real estate investment firm called East Coast Realty. The investment firm, according to Scalera, is interested in purchasing the hotel only if the deal with the county goes through. It was later revealed that the initial contact with the hotel owner was made by Supervisor Phil Williams (D-Livingston) about four or five weeks ago.
Scalera called the St. Charles Hotel a “landmark hotel,” and indeed in the late 1990s, after the Columbia Hudson Partnership had channeled major economic development grant money into the 19th-century hotel’s restoration and renovation, the St. Charles Hotel was listed—along with such venerable hostelries as the Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck and the Gideon Putnam in Saratoga Springs—in the National Trust’s directory of Historic Hotels in America. Since the sale of the hotel to its current owner, its status has diminished, but it remains a contributing structure in the National Register-listed Hudson Historic District and the locally designated Warren Street Historic District.
The Baldwin Bell Green study, which sets forth a long-term plan for economic development for the county, identifies Arts, Entertainment, and Tourism as the first key area for new economic initiatives. One of the constraints to this initiative cited in the study is the “lack of hotel rooms.” Columbia County has 400 hotel rooms as compared with Berkshire County, which has 4,000. In light of this, one has to question the wisdom of eliminating 34 hotel rooms in the City of Hudson.
David Colby, President of the Columbia County Chamber of Commerce, reported that Kenneth Flood, Commissioner of Planning and Economic Development for the county, knew nothing of the plan proposed by Mossman before it was presented to the committees. John Maiuri, past chair of the Chamber’s Board of Directors, made the point that “none of these moves [DSS, Pine Haven, the plan for the St. Charles Hotel] does anything for economic development,” which he added is what ultimately could improve the lives of the people served by DSS.
Don Moore, Democratic candidate for Hudson Common Council President, commented, “It’s easy to read this—they are attacking the city.” His assessment seemed later to be supported by Jim Cashen, who said that he’d been invited to participate in discussions with the county Economic Development Committee and those discussions “consciously excluded anything in Hudson.”
After nearly two hours of discussion—by the committee behind closed doors and by those waiting in the hallway among themselves and with the press—the supervisors emerged from executive session to continue their meeting in public in the larger space of the Board of Supervisors chamber. The first order of business was to vote on a resolution authorizing Commissioner Mossman, with the assistance of the County Attorney’s office, to move forward in negotiating a lease agreement. The eight members of the Human Services Committee voted on the resolution. At the request of Supervisor William Hughes (D-Hudson-4), it was a roll call vote. Five members of the committee—Raymond Staats (D-Clermont), Roy Brown (R-Germantown), Lynda Scheer (R-Gallatin), Jesse DeGroodt (D-Chatham), and Elizabeth Young (R-Taghkanic)—voted in support of the resolution; the three Hudson supervisors on the committee—Ed Cross (D-Hudson-2), Hughes, and Bart Delaney (R-Hudson-5)—voted against it.
After the vote, Mossman repeated his Power Point presentation for the public, outlining the problems with the current practice of providing emergency housing in motels throughout Columbia County and in Greene County, reviewing alternatives that had been explored, justifying the decision to locate emergency housing in Hudson with statistics that showed 52 percent of homeless people reported their prior residence was in Hudson, and asserting that the plan could save the county more than $400,000 annually. Within an hour after the meeting, the Department of Social Services issued this press release.
How the residents and officials of Hudson plan to counter what they consider this assault on their city is uncertain. The Mayor suggested that the next step was to “go high-profile” in expressing their opposition to the plan for the St. Charles Hotel, as well as the plan to relocate DSS and other county agencies to Ockawamick. |
