Practical suggestions for better town communication

As can be seen from the story on the front of the October 27 – November 3 River Reporter, “The Township zoning forgot,” Beach Lake, PA—only a short hop from here—is experiencing the horrors that having no zoning can allow.

We in Narrowsburg have zoning in place, and those laws are good and could be better.

The problem seems to be the understanding and administration of those zoning laws.

As I have warned before, we have a very dangerous situation which, if not addressed decisively, will wedge open the door to large-scale, high-density development, namely apartments or condos in huge complexes.

Please take time to acquaint yourself with the details involving the Philip G. 10-family multiple-dwelling project, proposing 10 people per acre in a R1 zone. Note that almost all of Tusten/Narrowsburg is zoned R1.

We have a bottleneck in operating and procedures for our town government. Tusten’s website has a Google calendar, but no listings of any town board meetings. If this were functioning, it would allow subscribers to view and any town government member with a computer or mobile to post meeting cancelations or special instructions.

This would mean postings to the calendar could be made anytime or anywhere. Simple, cheap and easily learned apps like Slack, which can be seen at slack.com, give real-time messaging both single and group, file sharing, searchable records, archiving and privacy features suitable for executive board sessions, allowing private online meetings.

This is just one solution that could speed up the process of communications between the members of our local town boards and the functionaries that maintain our community. It would also allow for a greater transparency to those members of our community who wish to participate with ideas or special circumstances, but can’t personally attend.

Geoffrey Gangel

Narowsburg, NY

Time for the state to give back to hunters

I appreciate all the state land in New York, but the state land needs habitat improvement and better road and parking access. I’ll be sending this letter to Albany too.

Where I live, our state lands and wild forests are beautiful but are not good habitats for deer, bear, or turkey and we have way too many squirrels. First of all, we need some logging done to allow access and provide parking, then some tilling of the ground and planting of brush, bushes, grasses and fruit and nut trees. If the state had done this 10 years ago, we would all be reaping the benefits now.

I tell you I have hunted in other states and some states give back to hunters big time by planting standing soy, corn and other crops, or they keep deer out to allow areas to recover from browse and actually go in with manpower and machinery to improve the habitat. New York takes all our hunting dollars and has given us coyotes, the SAFE ACT, foolish ammo rules like we can’t use buck shot or .410 slugs on deer, crossbows on our muzzleloader license and we can’t carry a firearm with a bow There is poor access to hunting areas for older hunters, trout access parking but no parking in these same areas for us hunters, even though the state land is just on the other side of these creeks, and our state lands are multi use so hikers and anti hunter types are in the woods bumping deer. Lastly, most of the trail work and maintenance is done by volunteers with hand tools. It’s time for Albany to give back to us hunters! Please cut this letter out and mail it to Gov. Cuomo.

God bless America, One nation under God, In God we trust.

John “JP” Pasquale

Livingston Manor, NY