Letters to the Editor
Don't blame Friends of Hammondsport

I very much agree with Mr. Gilmore's analysis of Urbana's Curtiss Park vote on this page. However, he made an error when he included the Friends of Hammondsport as proponents of the park. I was involved with the FOH for a few years, but that group, to my knowledge, ceased to exist when it lost its appeal in court to stop the condo project. They had nothing to do with the park effort. He's probably thinking of another group of lake huggers. I was not involved in the first or second park efforts, but I favored the first one and was ambivalent about the recent vote. I did help to gather petitions so that the second vote could take place. The first vote was close, and I believe it would have gone the other way had Town Board members stood behind the proposal just prior to the referendum. The board's enthusiasm for the paired-down purchase, along with the appearance of trying to avoid a referendum, gave that project a faintly bad odor.

As Mr. Gilmore says, the condo project will provide ratables to the town and village. In fact the land is now being assessed at its value, relative to other lake front properties, and the owners are now paying much more than was paid in previous years. However, because they are condos, NY State provides property tax breaks for their twenty-six owners that other residents of the community will not get on their homes.

I was against the project because It is too big (tall, wide, densely populated) for the site, and because the village planning board, not only made no effort to extract concessions that would have benefited the community (lake views, sidewalks, curbing), it actually granted sideline and height waivers so as many units could be crammed in to this space as possible. For an appointed board to have that much unsupervised power in a community like Hammondsport was unconscionable. This year, for example, will be the last time for perhaps a hundred years that travelers and resident on Lake Street will actually see the lake. Our water rates and village property taxes have just gone up significantly. Why? A lot of local people, who cannot be easily labeled, have a naive belief in fairness and democracy that sometimes trumps, or perhaps reflects, their Yankee libertarian bent. Too bad if they annoy some of their neighbors.
Vincent Domeraski
Hammondsport