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HOMES EVERY WEEK! Valley News

May 4, 2019

suncommunitynews.com

• EDITION •

County clerk candidate knocked off party line More than 60 petition challenges ruled valid by Essex County Board of Elections By Elizabeth Izzo STA FF W RITER

ELIZABETHTOWN | A candidate for Essex County Clerk has been removed from the Republican party line and will instead seek an independent slot on the ballot this November. Chelsea Merrihew, a title searcher in the Essex County Clerk’s Office, filed 144 objections to candidate Kari Ratliff ’s petitions on behalf of incumbent clerk Joseph Provoncha. » Clerk Cont. on pg. 2

Kari Ratliff, a candidate for Essex County Clerk, was knocked off the Republican ballot line after objections were filed against her petitions.

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Pu'BLIC

HEARING Inaugural ELW budget th 7 set for public hearing Ma y Ill

There will be a public hearing on the E-L-W school budget May 7, along with the next school board meeting at the Elizabethtown school building, starting at 6 p.m. The school budget vote will be held May 21 at one site: the Westport school building, noon to 8 p.m. Transition Advisory Team meetings are ongoing. Students, parents and staff are looking at ideas and options to improve and expand services in the new district, such as school identity, extracurricular activities, course electives, technology and school policy. Recommendations from these stakeholder meetings will inform School Board decisions in the coming months. Transition Advisory Team meetings are open to the public, and the schedule is online: elwcsd.org/board-of-education/transition-advisory-teams/ ■

File photo

No-frills spending plan accommodates $561,000 increase in health insurance costs STA FF W RITER

School Board President Phil Mero likened budget planning for the emerging district as “trying to build a plane while flying it.” Board member Karin DeMuro said the proposed budget sets a starting point. It stabilizes the tax rate across six towns with parcels in the district. “We’re going to move forward,” she said. “There is going to be a lot of steering involved.”

WESTPORT | The newly seated Elizabethtown-Lewis-Westport (E-L-W) School Board adopted a tentative first budget last week. The 6-to-1 vote saw one dissention from board member Dr. Suzanne Russell, who expressed concern with plans to lose one middle school math teacher by attrition and no plan to reinstate an Academic Intervention Services (AIS) post cut from Westport’s budget last year. “I would like to see us have a better school district, one that has room to expand,” she said of what was presented as a conservative spending plan. “I cannot vote for a barest bones budget,” she said, indicating the merger, in her view, was meant to move the combined district away from subsistence spending.

No positions are cut from the merged budget, but one retiring math teacher is not being replaced. The proposed E-L-W budget sits below the state-assigned tax levy cap allowance of 2.26 percent, looking to raise $7,291,850 in taxes, some $156,654 less than the total Westport and Elizabethtown-Lewis Central schools (ELCS) raised (combined) last year. Total spending proposed for 2019-20 is $15,075,669, up 3.45 percent from Elizabethtown-Lewis plus Westport budgets last year. The tax levy increase is offset by use of $486,080 from fund balance, the same as the sum from each district in 2018-19. Use of the money would leave just over $600,000 in E-L-W reserve. » ELW budget Cont. on pg. 2

By Kim Dedam

TAX RATES

KCS looks to override -4.28% tax levy cap

I ..

Spending plan would pay off Keene share of BOCES project By Kim Dedam STA FF W RITER

KEENE | The tax levy cap set by state calculations for Keene Central School (KCS) in 2019-20 is -4.28 percent. That is minus (-) 4.28 percent, due in part to the fact that the district has paid off all capital projects. The school board is looking to exceed that tax cap and raise $5,214,773 with the tax levy. As proposed, the levy represents a 1.62 percent increase — $83,100 more than current year spending. The total budget planned for KCS in 2019-20 is $6,381,471, up 2.03 percent. And it includes the $302,875 full payment for Keene’s share of the BOCES capital project. Keene Central opted to not participate in the Essex County Sheriff ’s Department School Resource Officer program this year, Superintendent Dan Mayberry told The Sun.

Historian Amy Godine speaks about blackface to an audience at the Whallonsburg Grange. Photo by Tim Rowland

ADK BLACKFACE Racist entertainment was equated with community service, historian says By Tim Rowland STA FF W RITER

WHALLONSBURG | A recent flurry of racism based on the old entertainment schtick of blackface is a rekindling of an unfortunate tradition that lasted more than a century, and was common even in the lily white Adirondacks, historian Amy Godine told an audience last week at the Whallonsburg Grange. Blackface predated the Civil War, but it was in the postbellum period that it became wildly popular, something of a nervous reaction to the newly freed

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slaves. By darkening their faces and taking on a dim or goofy demeanor, whites were doing on stage what they had not been able to do on the battlefield — perpetuating the subservience of an entire race of people. Godine said blackface was late in moving into the Adirondacks, “but when it moved, it flew.” The mountains were strongly pro-Union, but

that did not imply a desire for racial equality. The delay of blackface’s arrival was not out of any sense of social justice, but for the practical reason that scant populations, difficult travel and a lack of suitable theaters discouraged the minstrel acts that were popular in the city from infiltrating the nooks and crannies of the evolving Adirondack Park. » Blackface Cont. on pg. 3

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» KCS budget Cont. on pg. 2

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