Serving the Towns of Wawarsing, Crawford, Mamakating, Rochester and Shawangunk, and everything in between
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$20M Deadline
Consolidation On The Line With Other Grants Across The Whole State

WAWARSING – This coming Wednesday, June 28 at midnight, comes the deadline for Ulster County to get its application in for a possible $20 million jackpot for a once-in-a-lifetime state Consolidation and Efficiency funding prize. For Ellenville and Wawarsing that jackpot is all important in their decades-long quest for an affordable consolidation, to dissolve the village into the town.

The program was announced last November. In February, the state announced that five counties and one town had each won $50,000 to work on their proposals for a next phase competition. At the time those proposals included a "broad range of dissolutions and consolidations, including police, water and wastewater services" and the starting of a health consortium in Chautauqua County; county-wide restructuring of services in Montgomery County; a municipal transportation plan in Otsego County; a shared highway garage and GIS mapping initiative in Madison County; inter-municipal operations in the Long Island Town of Brookhaven, and "a transit system coordination to eliminate overlapping routes and duplicative administrative services and a centralized fire training center to serve 50 districts" in Ulster County.

Winners of the next phase will receive $100,000 to develop their plans for up to $20 million in cost-covering funds from the state.

Since this winter, the consolidation of Ellenville and Wawarsing has been pegged as the key spending component for Ulster proposals, albeit with a growing push from the City of Kingston for connecting its city bus system with the county's UCAT system... and that fire training center.

Some of the $50,000 Ulster County has received has gone to Orange County-based Pattern for Progress to serve as consultants for pulling together a rough plan for Ellenville-Wawarsing consolidation, where cautious early approvals came in from village mayor Jeff Kaplan and town supervisor Leonard Distel before concerns over village policing and outright opposition started to arise at several public meetings, one called recently by Pattern CEO Jonathan Drapkin at Ellenville village hall.

Drapkin said this week that a county application has been completed and is now on county executive Mike Hein's desk in Kingston. Christopher Kelly, Deputy Commissioner of Finance said this week that "we think we have a very strong application due to the work we've been doing."

Concurrent with the deadline for the next phase of the big consolidation grant process, next Wednesday is also the deadline for the state's Consolidated Funding Application and Regional Economic Development Council process, which will determine much of the funding from the state for 2018. Recent years have seen the Mid-Hudson region do well for new agricultural and tourism projects, as well as hospitals, including a major surge of tourism- and arts-related funding for Kingston last year and smaller amounts for entities such as Shadowland Stages and a feasibility study for eco-tourism plans at Colony Farm in Wawarsing, as well as various water and sewer projects around the area.

Attempts to find out what's being applied for out of the region this year have to date run into stone walls, with everyone saying that the only official who can say what's being applied for from Ulster County is Hein.

Announcements regarding the next phase of the consolidation application is expected by late summer or early autumn. Word about state REDC/CFA grants and loans has come in December, like early holiday gifts.



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