A Traveler's Tale, Redux

Another traveler, another negative reaction to Utica. Although in this case, the writer is a former resident of the area:

I grew up in a small town outside of Utica. In the 50's it was incredibly vibrant, young, and prosperous as WWII and Korean Vets settled and raised their families. There were several GE plants (light military and household appliances), Bendix (military parts and washing machines), Bosherts (heating systems), and a lot of small manufacturer's. Everyone had 3 to 4 kids so the schools were growing. For the most part, all this is gone. Utica's once bustling downtown area is empty now. Large department stores are gone, replaced by Dollar General, Walmart, and chain drug stores in the strip malls on the outskirts. People my age left for college and didn't come back and the population aged.

Click through and read the rest of this post, as well as the followup.

Stories like this make me incredibly depressed. What other reaction can you have? No one likes to live in a place people describe with words like "dirty", "empty", "rundown", and "hardscrabble", but what makes it even worse is that things never seem to change for the better. Even projects that should improve how the city looks end up being disasters because of the pervasive "Eh. Good enough for Utica" attitude.

Case in point- the area around the Memorial Auditorium. How many millions of dollars have we spent building state-of-the-art public safety buildings down there? The new buildings themselves are beautiful, but their siting is a nightmare. Everything seems cramped and shoved together because of the lack of green space or open areas, a problem compounded by the fact that the rest of the neighborhood looks like Berlin after WW II.

Move more than a few feet beyond the new construction and you're confronted by empty, boarded up buildings surrounded by waist high weeds and shattered, pothole filled streets. Walk around the block and you'll find sidewalks in disrepair, unraked gravel parking corrals, wrecked police cars, rubble strewn empty lots, vacant industrial buildings...it's a veritable picture-book of urban decay, despite the expenditure of piles of taxpayer money.

Who approved this embarrassment? Who amongst our local leadership can look at that and say "Great job boys, you should be proud"? Why does everything in Utica, every single public works project in recent memory, have to be so shoddy and ugly?

A Tale Of Two Blog Posts

The Green Conundrum - a well-written, thoughtful posting on "green" power and it's potentially deleterious effects on Oneida County.

Pure Speculation- a borderline salacious post speculating that a local man accidentally strangled himself while masturbating.

One of these postings generated 15 emails, while the other generated 0.

Based on that response, and the number of hits the post in question generated, it's probably time for me to do another well-written, thoughtful posting about Utica's thriving porn underground. Oh, and thanks to everyone who emailed. I can sleep easier knowing that even death won't stop...uh...happiness. La petite mort, indeed.

The Observer-Dispatch Deathwatch: The Final Meltdown

Shares of the Observer-Dispatch's parent company Gatehouse Media soared today. Well, if you can call hitting 52 cents a share "soaring" with a straight face.

Sadly, at this point Gatehouse could probably double it's market cap by converting each share of stock into a tin of Altoid breath mints. Heck, even a Bubblicious Bubble Gum Party Pack goes for $2.74.

Gone, But Not Forgotten

This doesn't sound good:

John Daniels - Oneida County Commissioner of Jurors - resigned July 31, according court officials.

Calls had been made to the County Courthouse in order to reach Daniels for several weeks, but his office would not comment on his whereabouts or the status of his returning messages.

Sources say he was the subject of a state investigation, but could not confirm why he was investigated.

Allegedly, investigators have seized at least one computer from the Commissioner's office.

I wonder if we'll ever find out why?

Hotel Utica Countdown: H - 7 Days

Only a week to go before we find out how Dave Roefaro is going to solve the Hotel Utica problem.

I'm quivering in anticipation.

Pure Speculation

This story sounds like a real tragedy:

The unattended death of a 37-year-old Rome man Tuesday has been ruled accidental as the result of asphyxiation, Oneida County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Brian Pfendler said.

Terry Smith of 198 Pine Haven Circle in Rome was found dead in his home at 12:45 p.m. Tuesday about one hour after he died, when family members discovered him, Pfendler said.

Oneida County forensic pathologist Michael Sikirica conducted the autopsy at 7 a.m. today and determined the cause of death to be accidental asphyxiation, Pfendler said.

How the asphyxiation occurred is not being released for the family’s sake because officials feel it wouldn’t be appropriate, Pfendler said.

Given the circumstances, and the coroner's willingness to avoid embarrassment to the family, it wouldn't take a leap of logic to assume this was an incident of autoerotic asphyxiation. It's a surprisingly common practice, with some law enforcement officers I've talked to speculating that up to half the "suicides" of young men are actually the result of an AA session gone bad.

The Green Conundrum

Even more green power could be coming to upstate New York:

Federal officials will talk about how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will handle the expected application for a fourth nuclear plant in Oswego County at 7 p.m. Aug. 21 at Sheldon Hall at the State University College at Oswego.

UniStar, a partnership including Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station owner Constellation, is expected to apply for a license next month to build and operate a new nuclear plant in Scriba.

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wants communities located near potential new reactor sites, such as Oswego, to know what's being proposed," David Matthews, director of the division of new reactor licensing, said in a news release.

The state's ever increasing demand for energy requires more plants like this, but it's a two-edged sword that, quite literally, will cut right through our area. Upstate is already home to a truly stunning amount of "green", or carbon-neutral, energy production- one of the largest hydroelectric facilities in the world, an ever growing number of wind installations, and the existing nuclear reactors northwest of Oneida County. The problem is that all that pure green energy needs to get to downstate, necessitating an expansion of the state's power grid with projects like NYRI.

And I think we all know how popular NYRI is.

One of the reason's I think the NYRI powerline is unstoppable is *because* of upstate's green power. Our state government has already mandated the purchase of carbon-neutral energy, but it's been amazingly lax in making sure that the plants generating that power are actually located near the centers of demand. In addition to being wasteful, requiring the construction of new power lines that just bleed off energy into the ether, that strategy places a rather undue burden on the residents of upstate. Advanced third and fourth generation nuclear reactors could meet all of downstate's power demands with only minor upgrades to the existing energy infrastructure, but the mere suggestion of siting a reactor there would trigger massive protests.

Unfortunately, the demographics of the state mean that protests downstate automatically drown out protests upstate. While upstate might be home to gigawatts of electrical capacity it's notably lacking in political power- and that's the kind of power that really matters.

Hotel Utica Countdown: H - 8 Days

Just eight days to go before we discover how Utica Mayor Dave Roefaro is going to solve the Hotel Utica problem.

The excitement, it builds!

The Observer-Dispatch Deathwatch: The Final Meltdown

Shares of the Observer-Dispatch's parent company, Gatehouse Media, plunged to a new low of 40 cents today before closing at 50 cents. You can watch the drama unfold at Google Finance.

Hotel Utica Countdown: H - 9 Days

How time flies. It seems like just yesterday that the ongoing Hotel Utica debacle entered it's latest phase, but now we're just nine days away from discovering how Mayor Dave Roefaro and the crack team at City Hall are going to solve the whole sorry mess:

Mayor David Roefaro said in 90 days the city should have a resolution to Hotel Utica’s continuing pattern of falling behind on its tax and federal loan payments.

Roefaro and Urban and Economic Development Commissioner Robert Sullivan Thursday met with hotel co-owners Joseph R. Carucci and Charles N. Gaetano. The mayor said a few options were discussed, but he wouldn’t elaborate.

That 90-day period comes to a close on August 13th. Will Roefaro stick to his principles and refuse to continue subsidizing a private business? Or will he cave and keep the Hotel Utica's taxpayer-supported gravy train chugging along?

Update: As the suspense builds, keep in mind that the Hotel Utica *should* be one of the most successful hotels in the country based on it's own business figures. Here's a flashback to some numbers from earlier this year:

What an interesting contrast. By any objective standard the Hotel Utica is in desperate financial straits, as it's inability to make regular tax and mortgage payments would clearly demonstrate. Business must be terrible, right?

Actually, no. If the given figure of a 70% occupancy rate is true the Hotel Utica is doing some boffo business. In fact, based on numbers from the American Hotel and Lodging Association, it's occupancy rate is well above average. Here are the latest figures for the hotel industry as a whole:


At-a-Glance Statistical Figures

4,389,443 guestrooms
$133.4 billion in sales
$61.93 revenue per available room (RevPAR)
63.3% average occupancy rate

The average room rate was $97.78 in 2006—up from $90.88 in 2005.


A quick check of Travelocity shows that the weekday rate at the Hotel Utica is $99.99 while the weekend rate is $149.99.

That means both the hotel's standard room price and occupancy rate is well above the industry average, which would seem to be exactly what you want for a thriving hotel.

A Traveler's Tale

Four guys from Buffalo spent last week biking across the state along the Erie Canal. Their experience riding through Utica is particularly illuminating, demonstrating an all too common reaction to the city. See it for yourself over here.

Mike Arcuri: How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Congress officially kicked off it's annual five week long summer vacation yesterday. Hopefully, that means we can look forward to Congressman Arcuri using some of that time to take questions from his constituents, but you probably shouldn't get your hopes up too high since his congressional website doesn't list any upcoming appearances.

On the bright side, the Congressman has committed to an open interview on WIBX sometime during August. Unfortunately, he's still dodging a radio interview with Bill Keeler, a venue where, unlike WIBX, he probably won't be asked about the morality of wearing baseball hats inside a restaurant.

Turn Out The Lights

Earlier this week I linked to the brand new SeeThroughNY website from the Empire Center. It collects thousands of pages of government documents and makes them available to the public, including records that include the salary of every public employee in the state. Predictably, the folks sucking at the public teat are horrified that taxpayers can actually see how much of that sweet, sweet milk they're slurping up:

Pushback, if not outright anger, against the Empire Center’s SeeThroughNY.net continued today on a number of fronts. At least one union was complaining that the site, which lists state employee salaries, may actually endanger some people as they can provide some idea of where people work, although addresses are not included.

And there seems to be lots of frustration about the fact that public employee salaries are public.

I got a call earlier in the day from a fellow at the State Education Department demanding that I take down any links to the dreaded site, or else I would be charged with harassment. When I replied that A) the site isn’t mine, and that b) the salaries are public information, this individual said that he and others were trying to launch a complaint campaign with Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to get the AG to look into the matter.
(Makes one wonder how much work is getting done over at the Education Department with people spending all this time filing complaints and calling to complain about the website.)

If you click through to the website you may notice it's running a little slow. That's because it's been inundated with traffic...primarily from computers owned by the state.

The Observer-Dispatch Deathwatch: The Final Meltdown

Gatehouse Media, the corporate parent of the Observer-Dispatch, saw it's stock plunge to a record low of 44 cents at today's market close.

I guess investors didn't hear what they wanted to hear during this morning's conference call.

Update: Except, of course, that the Gatehouse conference call isn't until August 8th. My smugness, it fogs the brain!

Fly The Friendly Skies

Strikeslip has some interesting commentary on the Oneida County airport :

I actually find myself agreeing with the County Executive on this. "Oneida County-Griffiss International Airport" is too cumbersome. "Griffiss" has historical significance and already enjoys name recognition on its own among aviators (the the market for the facility) - recognition that does not need to be diluted with "Oneida County." Lastly, "Griffiss" signifies something bigger than "Rome," bigger than "Utica-Rome" and even bigger than "Oneida & Herkimer Counties" combined, because all of these are far to small to justify such a huge airport (and, more than likely, to keep it going financially).

A few years ago, some Syracuse-area legislators actually suggested that Griffiss be used as an alternative to their own Hancock International for air cargo, in order to avoid having to make some expensive additions and impacts to their neighborhoods. It's unknown if those additions were ever made, but if they were not, there's Griffiss' market: all of Central New York, from Auburn to Canajoharie including Greater Syracuse, Greater Utica, and Rome.

I once had a conversatiion with a commercial pilot who lamented the sad state of development at the former Griffiss AFB. From what I understand the facility is one of the premiere heavy-lift capable sites in the northeast and has easy access to highway, rail, and even canal transportation facilities.