Newfield Ski Club Starting

Greek Peak Mountain Resort is an hour from Newfield but those who don’t want to make the drive can join the Newfield Recreational Ski and Snowboard Club and hop on a bus every Friday for six weeks during the winter.

Last year the club had about 20 members and already has that many people signed up for this year, said Joyce Frank, club advisor. The club is open to anyone interested in joining and has been around for several decades.

“There are some people in the community who are fiftyish and talked about being in the ski club,” Frank said.

The club sells passes to Greek Peak that gives members access to the mountain from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays. Once the club season ends, the passes may be used during the same hours until Greek Peak closes for the year but transportation will not be provided, Frank said. Parent passes are also available for adults who want to ski with their younger children (kids under six ski for free at Greek Peak). Though the club is open to everyone, its membership is largely a mix of high schoolers and middle school students, with a few elementary schoolers, Frank said.

“It’s a nice opportunity for the kids in the community to get outside,” she said.

Newfield Genealogy Group Shares Search Tactics

Few people in the United States today have ancestors that originated in this country. With the advent of the automobile and airplane it became more common for families to move not only from town to town, but across states. As time goes on and families become more spread out and older genealogy is becoming a growing hobby. Newfield recently started its own genealogy club to bring family history enthusiasts together.

The genealogy club meets at the Newfield Public Library once a month and had its second meeting on October 25. The club’s goal is to bring people researching their family history together to share stories, ideas and problems. Rosemary Rowland informally leads the group but much of the two-hour meeting consists of group sharing and individual discussion between members.

“Our genealogy group is very open,” Rowland said. “It’s not set in stone or anything. You might know things that we don’t know.”

The group is open to anyone interested in genealogy and currently has seven members researching histories in Newfield, Tompkins County and other states. Some of the members belong to old Newfield families and are connected to the Taggarts and McDaniels but other members, like Deb Weeks, are busy researching family lines in Canada, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

“A lot of people are researching [Newfield] but I’m not,” she said. “I just want to connect with people.”

What’s in the Water

The Community Science Institute, based in Ithaca, has been traveling to local municipalities and requesting funding for area water testing. The institute has encountered open arms in some communities, but is running into some hard customers in others.

The institute was founded in 2000 as a non-profit organization and gained tax-exempt status in 2002. Steve Penningroth, executive director, said the institute works to monitor stream and storm water and educate the public.

“Our mission is to protect natural resources and to do it in partnership with citizen volunteers,” he said.

The science institute has six major testing areas including Taughannock Creek, Trumansburg Creek, Six Mile Creek and Fall Creek, and tests suspended sediment, bacteria, phosphorus, nitrogen and salt and mineral levels. Samples are collected by community volunteers and delivered to the institute’s Ithaca laboratory.

“It cuts down on costs to have volunteers collect the samples,” Penningroth said. “Normally you pay more to collect the samples than to test them.”

Mystery Dismissal

Former Seneca County Undersheriff Wayne Brewer is consulting an attorney and reviewing his rights regarding his recent termination from the sheriffs office.

Brewer was relieved of his position on October 17 by Sheriff Jack Stenberg. In an email Brewer said he was not expecting the action and was unaware there was even a problem with his work.

“I was told by the sheriff, as recently as this month, that I was doing a great job,” he said in the e-mail.

Stenberg said issues leading to the dismissal had been addressed before Friday.

“Some of the issues had been discussed for some period of time,” he said. “The actual termination was not discussed seriously prior to last week.”

South Seneca Awards Bids

At the October 22 meeting of the South Seneca Central School, Stuard Mattey noted the district had secured funding for its capital project. In a special meeting on October 27, contractor bids were approved. The school will now move forward with the capital project.

Money for the project will come from the Dormitory Authority, Mattey said. The interest rate has not been secured yet but the loan will cost taxpayers approximately $38,000 over 15 years, he said.

The board met on Monday, October 27 to approve bids. The board award five contracts for its capital project at a special meeting on Monday, October 27. The largest bid approved is for $9,380,000 awarded to Fahs Construction for general construction. Edgar Enterprises was selected for the project’s site work after submitting a bid of $2,069,220. HMI Mechanicals will do the Heating-Ventilation-Air Condition (HVAC) work for $2,501,000 and Billitier Electric, Inc. was chosen for the electrical work with a bid of $3,305,250. The contract with the lowest price tag was awarded to Unified Mechanical Contractors for plumbing work at $876,076.

All contracts were awarded unanimously and were the overall lowest bids in their categories. The contracts bids came in lower than the district originally anticipated, enabling the board to accept all five bids with the optional alternatives. Overall, $27,981,000 of voter approved money for the capital project was awarded.

Story Time Brings Animal Companions

Pepper, a black kitten, and Beans, his black and white companion, ran around the Newfield Public Library on October 16, chased by a group of squealing children. The kittens and kids were at the library early on Thursday for the first SPCA/Newfield Library story time.

The SPCA started the program last fall in Dryden, Groton and Trumansburg. Pam Stonebraker, SPCA humane education and outreach coordinator, travels to the local libraries once a month with different animals to read books and interact with the children.

The program debuted in Newfield on Thursday with a Halloween theme, complete with books about black cats to match the live black kitten Stonebraker had in tow. The books were age appropriate and Stonebraker engaged the children by asking them to name the different animals on the pages.

“I don’t believe in the scary Halloween books for kids,” said Tina Winstead, library director.

Open Campus Rights Restored to Newfield H.S. Seniors

The Newfield Central School Board of Education granted the senior class open campus privileges at its Thursday, October 16 meeting. In other news, the high school recently inducted 56 students into the National Honor Society, the largest class Newfield has ever inducted.

Four students attended the board meeting and requested the open campus privilege, outlining certain rules seniors must observe to retain their open-campus rights. Students must be passing all classes, have no standing detentions, exhibit good behavior and attitudes, sign in and out of school and return on time or the privilege can be revoked. The students also said that if a senior is driving off campus during school hours they may only have one passenger and open-campus privileges may be suspended for inclement weather. Before granting the request, several board members stressed responsibility and safety.

Seniors have had open-campus rights for the past several years but last year’s students proved to be irresponsible and abused the privilege, said Sue France, high school principal. If the problem persists this year France will begin by revoking individual students’ rights but said she would not hesitate to cancel the privilege all together if necessary. Before any senior can leave campus a guardian must sign a permission form at the school.

Internet Links in the Boondocks

While half of the Town of Newfield is connected to Time Warner high speed Internet, the other half is left dealing with dial-up connections. Lightlink, an Internet provider based in Ithaca, is moving into Newfield, building towers and using hilltops to provide more people with the option of better Internet.

Homer Smith and Jane Staller founded Lightlink in 1994 and began by focusing on Ithaca. As Time Warner moved in and took many of their customers Staller and Smith have shifted their business’ focus to outlying areas.

“We’ve been expanding out to the boonies that can’t get [high speed or dialup],” Smith said.

Lightlink provides radio transmitted Internet connections. Homes that can see one of the company’s transmitting towers will be able to connect, and houses that can see connected buildings can also get on the network.

Tentative Ulysses Budget Presented

Town of Ulysses Supervisor Doug Austic presented the tentative town budget to the Ulysses Board of Trustees at its Tuesday, October 14 meeting. Austic announced that if the budget remains as it is in this preliminary draft local taxes will be reduced 30 percent. He also warned that the board has not yet discussed the budget so the final product may increase or decrease.

Many of the requested budgets are the same or lower than last year’s. Some areas, such as health care and consulting costs, have risen. A big-ticket item on the proposed 2009 budget is $350,000 for a new highway department building. The proposed budget will put $10,000 in the town’s snow and ice reserve fund, $50,000 in the equipment reserve and $130,000 in the building reserve.

Fuel costs are driving the highway department’s budget up this year as the price of oil, gas and tires rises. The snowplowing budget will increase $4,000 because of salt prices and machinery costs, which include tires and fuel, are up by $18,000. For the month of September, the board approved an unanticipated $5,845 bill for highway department fuel because of escalated prices. Austic said he believes the town now has enough fuel to last until December.

Radish-al Idea

In a garden in front of the Trumansburg Central School, a group of third and fourth graders spent part of Wednesday afternoon tugging carrots out of the ground, plucking beans off stalks and snapping kale and collard leaves off the plants. Just outside the garden’s thin fence more kids weighed the fresh produce, running around and proudly announcing that some carrots were as big as 18 ounces, while peers sat at their feet bagging and bundling veggies for sale at the Trumansburg Farmer’s Market. Dave Gell and the Black Locus Imitative, the group that helps run the garden program, must have figured out the perfect way to get kids to eat their vegetables, because more of the beans and carrots ended up in students’ mouths than went into the farmer’s market cooler.

“We’re establishing healthy habits and whole eating at an early age,” Gell said.

The garden project began in spring 2007 when Gell and some others took a photo of the snow-covered ground to demonstrate the first phase of a garden. The first students came out around April, Gell said.

“We’ve proceeded in a linear fashion to improve soil, improve weed control through mulching, used planting calendars to start plants indoors and apply concepts for which [students] will be tested,” he said.

Last year, elementary school students visited the organic garden every Wednesday during school to help maintain the plants and harvest veggies in the fall. This year, students use the garden during school hours and an after-school garden program has recently begun.

“We’re increasing outdoor activities while promoting healthy eating,” Gell said.