Discusses Pearl Street sewer problem
By Clayton Smith
On Monday (July 21), the Nelsonville Village Board met to discuss issues pertaining to roadwork and general maintenance within the village.
The meeting began with Village Clerk Pauline Minners’ presentation of a packet, which arrived in the mail from the University of California at Davis, regarding shale gas drilling. The packet was set aside and the topic did not receive further attention throughout the meeting, however.
It was also announced that the Putnam County Department of Health’s Eat Smart Restaurant Week will be held from Sept. 7 through Sept. 21. Over 40 local food establishments have signed up to offer two to three healthy menu entrees that “make the best of fresh ingredients in appropriate portion sizes,” according to Putnam County Online.
A few projects on Healy Road were finally completed. These included redoing the drainage and piping for 1,500 feet, as well as resurfacing the road and planting grass where needed. Mayor Tom Corless described it as “a quarter million dollar project that no one knew about.” Trustee William Duncan mentioned that most of the project was paid for by taxpayers.
Next, it was announced that the village received a concerned email from Nelsonville resident Dave Limburg regarding the burning of schoolbooks along the trail in the woods between Secor Street and Haldane. Limburg’s email included photos of burned books, garbage, and a street sign found in the woods. He voiced his frustration in cleaning up the mess alone.
“It’s time for some official action,” he said. The email included that many hikers visit Cold Spring and Nelsonville, and he did not want this to be the impression people get of the local trails. Mayor Corless was not as concerned as Limburg about the issue, mentioning that the woods were much worse years ago when he was growing up. “The email makes it sound like a local dump back there,” he commented. Corless then said that he resolved the issue with the student burning books. “I identified whose book it was and talked to the parents (of the student), and it was cleaned up.”
The Pearl Street Sewer, which is a private line, has been giving some residents a bit of grief. It was recently clogged and resulted in a $6,000 bill to be divided among the houses affected. Everyone receives a copy of the bill in the mail and some don’t pay, but it gets included in their taxes. The sewer has been known to have issues in the past, and Corless and Duncan would like a long-term solution. “We’re just fixing the immediate issue,” Duncan said. “Every time we call Fred Cook [vacuum-excavation operators] we never know if he’s going to fix it,” Corless said.
Clerk Minners said that $15,000 was slated for street maintenance so far, leaving the village in need of $5,425. Upon hearing this, Trustee Duncan made a motion to take $6,000 from Contingency and move it to Street Maintenance, which passed.
On the subject of property taxes, Clerk Minners said that Nelsonville has received $221,279 of an expected $263,373 to be collected.
I am grateful that the subject of trash in the woods has finally gotten a brief official discussion. Like many other people here, I walk my dog in the woods every day. We encounter a lot of trash.
I wish that Mayor Corless would be bit more concerned on the topic. There may be less trash in the woods now than during his youth, but there is still an awful lot of it. I have found broken glass everywhere. I have found beer bottles and cans, soft drink bottles and cans, various wine and liquor bottles; cigarette boxes; snack chip bags, take-out food wrappers, brown paper bags; candy wrappers, and little plastic bags that may have contained drugs. And a couple of times I have found large human feces — with toilet paper — within a few feet of the path.
I have seen saplings hacked down with a machete. I have also seen young people light fires in the woods, even during a drought.
Why do I care? Because a year or two ago, my dog cut her feet twice on the broken glass that’s strewn all over the place. Each time she cut her feet, it cost me $375 to get her patched up. And she was really hurting. So I started picking up the broken glass and trash and carrying it out of the woods and putting it in the trash. Last year alone, I brought out about thirty pounds of broken glass. But I can’t keep up with it, and I can’t do it all.
The individuals discarding all this trash need to know that they are making the woods ugly and that they are hurting people’s dogs — many people’s, not just mine. It would be great if a policeman or a forest ranger could patrol the woods once in a while. Maybe that would help deter people from trashing the woods.
Follow-up to the above: as usual, I walked my dog in the woods today, and we passed the site where the burnt schoolbook had been. It was gone! Hurray! But then, 30 feet down the path, what should I find but an open trash bag – with the burnt schoolbook in it. Still on the path. Still in the woods. I don’t know if that really counts as “has been cleaned up.”