Same old same old

Back in January, when Sullivan County first started looking for uses for the Apollo Plaza/landfill property in Monticello, planning commissioner Luis Aragon spoke of the possibility of creating “a recreational/retail experience that recognizes what we’re known for, which is the outdoors.” He envisioned a place where you could not only buy a kayak, but use it. While we were not quite clear as to how kayaking per se could be facilitated on that piece of land, we do know there are other municipalities that have transformed their landfills into recreational attractions. Therefore, we looked forward eagerly to see what other ideas might be forthcoming as to how to transform this piece of land, which stands at what is probably the county’s most important gateway, into an asset.

Requests for expressions of interest duly went out, and the returns for the first round are in. We have a grocery store with a truck stop, a truck stop without a grocery store, and a minor league baseball stadium, possibly combined with other sports facilities like an electric motorcycle racetrack.

It’s easy to backseat drive, but we can’t help but find this progression—or regression—of ideas disappointing. And although different criticisms can be aimed at each of the three proposals, there is one respect in which all three fall short: lack of vision. They look toward the past, not the future, while providing little or nothing in terms of branding the county as an attractive, forward-looking destination with unique assets.

Grocery store? Been there, done that. There used to be another major grocery store in town, a Great American, on lower Broadway. It couldn’t compete with the ShopRite and Wal-Mart super center, so it failed. The Aldi that is among the bevy of smaller stores that replaced it is still there, but it is not a full-scale store; we think the evidence is ample that Monticello does not need, and indeed cannot support, another major supermarket.

Truck stop? It’s our guess that this would have a better chance of business success than a grocery store, and would certainly be a way to, in effect, collect a toll from those who might otherwise pass through the county without spending a dime. But it would, by the same token, do nothing to intrigue visitors and inveigle them further into the county to see what it has to offer. A paved-over venue catering to vehicles, most likely accompanied by over-priced and over-packaged fast foods and, according to developer Orseck, pulling in dollars for the county by pushing a proven toxin to the dwindling cadre of folk who are still addicted to it (tobacco), is just not the way we would prefer to say “Welcome to Sullivan County.”

Minor-league baseball stadium? Actually, from a branding standpoint, this is probably the nicest idea of the three. At least it has a sweet, all-American small-town feel to it. And by talking about combining it with a racetrack that is for electric, not internal combustion, motorcycles, developer Kaplan is at least making a token gesture toward sustainable-energy sensibilities. But talk about been there, done that: if you have a stadium, don’t you need a team? Sullivan has had teams. At least two of them. The Mountain Lions lasted one year. The Catskill Cougars lasted longer—1996 to 2000, missing out on 1999—but last we heard of them, they had lost $500,000 in their final season. Even if we got a team again, if it fails again we’ll be left with a stadium—and a whole new lot of requests for proposals will have to go out so we can figure out what the heck we’re going to do with that.

Of course, all these complaints would carry more weight if we could conclude this editorial with some bright ideas of our own that combine a good chance for commercial success with creative imagination and the capacity to help brand Sullivan as a green Mecca. Unfortunately, the best we can do is to go back to Aragon’s admittedly somewhat vague vision.

The good news is that now a round of formal requests for proposals will go out—apparently that’s one step up from requests for “expressions of interest”—and there is hope that this time around we will turn up some ideas that are a little better adapted both to the realities of the 21st century, and to our dreams of what it can become. If you’re reading this and you have some such ideas, maybe you should send them to your county legislator—or at least write us a letter to the editor.

Also in this issue:

• Thank God for the drilling…

Dr. Punnybone

It was so funny