Faso voters get what they bargained for

RUPCO project isn’t best fit for Alms House

Dear Editor, As the city of Kingston Planning Board reviews the site plan for RUPCO’s proposal to create studios and apartments in the Alms House building to be named “Landmark Place,” it should be noted Ulster County is served by one city, 20 towns, and three villages. Yet, RUPCO has set its sights on another city of Kingston property for construction of what it deems a “solution to meet the city’s shortfall for affordable housing” (quote by RUPCO chief executive officer Kevin O’Connor) for our senior citizens, homeless and mentally ill population.

Isn’t it enough they are ready to break ground at ESquare on Cedar Street and have plans for The Metro mixed commercial use property on South Prospect Street and Greenkill Avenue?

Kingston has enough “pockets of poverty” and we are saturated with subsidized housing. While this construction may fulfill a portion of the affordable housing gap, we will not meet the needs of the hundreds of individuals and families that are on waiting lists for Section 8 housing or supportive housing if this project is allowed to be built. It is also ludicrous to assume there will not be issues when you commingle special needs individuals, veterans, frail and disabled alongside a senior housing complex on the same campus.

Additionally, the Landmark Place campus will tax an already failing infrastructure and the suggestion to simply reroute the water and sewer lines across the street does not solve the problem as the engineer has proposed.

RUPCO needs this project to go through because they are relying on all the tax credits they will be eligible for to cover their 30-35 percent rehabilitation costs.

The Planning Board should be mindful of the comments that were made from the residents who live in the immediate vicinity of this project. They are very concerned if this project moves forward.

The Planning Board should ask why it wasn’t engaged early in the process, such as being invited to the Ulster County Economic Development Alliance board meetings to speak during public comment. When the authorizing resolution was passed for the disposition of 300 Flatbush Ave., the county thought it was a great idea to market the property to the highest bidder. RUPCO was not the highest bidder. We have since learned there were two other bids that were tossed aside. Most of the negotiations for the disposition of this property were done behind closed doors in secret executive sessions. Would this have changed the outcome of accepting RUPCO’s offer? RUPCO has not encountered opposition until now.

RUPCO’s Landmark Place project is not the best fit for the former Alms House, and I would hope when the Planning Board weighs in on the zoning change that is required for RUPCO to proceed they will concur that Landmark Place is note the “solution to meet the city’s shortfall for affordable housing.” Ellen DiFalco Kingston, N.Y.

Embracing fossil fuels at the nation’s peril

Dear Editor, The Trump administration has a very clear agenda and it involves fossil fuels.

In his first days in office, Trump restarted Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines (both primarily for oil export by private firms). His first legislative act was to overturn a law requiring transparency in oil payments to foreign governments; suspect in that his secretary of state had worked on a deal between Russia and Exxon worth $500 billio. We have no idea to what extent Trump is invested in fossil fuels — until we see his tax returns.

Most recently, Trump is abolishing the fuel economy standards designed to curb carbon pollution responsible for thousands of premature deaths every year, and contributing to global warming. More gas guzzlers mean a big step backward in efforts to rein in climatological changes that cause devastating effects already evidenced in worsening and costly — sometimes deadly — storms and warming/acidifying oceans. Unstable climate has huge “hidden” costs when flooding and droughts negatively impact our property and food supply.

Continuing to push SUVs and other autos with low MPG ratings will mean Americans need to buy more fuel to fill their tanks, not a hardship for many while oil prices stay down. Pushing oil exports might make for less domestic supply, which could reverse the market.

When oil prices rise, who’ll benefit? Deb Weltsch Tillson, N.Y.

Dear Editor, A recent front-page story reporting on the hundreds who turned out for the “Faso-less” forum in Kingston quotes a U.S. Rep. John Faso, R-Kinderhook, voter who pronounces herself “very much disappointed” at the congressman. Color me confused. With the exception of a couple of votes, Faso has turned out to be exactly what he promised: a reliable acolyte for House Speaker Paul Ryan’s agenda to undo the Affordable Care Act, along with environmental protections and other Obama regulatory rules. Voters who shunned the progressive Zephyr Teachout in favor of Faso got exactly what they wanted: a party-line, rightwing, Tea Party, Republican who votes consistently against the interests of the majority of average citizens in the 19th district.

If you voted for Faso, what’s there to be disappointed about? Richard Gilbert Rhinebeck, N.Y.

President Trump’s first budget is an attempt to reshape the federal government in his own image — crass, bellicose, shortsighted, unserious and ultimately hollow.

Unsurprisingly, Trump titled it “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again.” The reality is that if Congress were to accept these numbers — which it can’t possibly do — America would be made dumber, dirtier, hungrier and sicker. That may be Trump’s idea of greatness, but it’s certainly not mine.

Would we at least be safer? I doubt it. Trump wants to boost defense spending by $54 billion, or about 9 percent. But at the same time, he proposes cutting funding for the State Department by an incredible 29 percent, slashing the relatively modest hands-across-thesea assistance and advice the United States gives to other nations. Most of the generals and admirals I know believe in projecting U.S. strength through soft power as well as hard power. Trump apparently disagrees.

As is becoming customary with this administration, the document billed as a budget is really more of a preliminary sketch. Many of the cuts it proposes are transparently designed to play to Trump’s populist constituency rather than save any meaningful amount of money.

Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, confessed as much. “When you start looking at places that we reduce spending, one of the questions we asked was, can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?” he said Thursday on MSNBC. “The answer was no. We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

Thus the Trump budget would eliminate $445 million that goes to support public broadcasting. Never mind that the millions who listen to “All Things Considered” while driving home from work include single moms, or that the millions who loved “Downton Abbey” include coal miners. The budget also ends all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

All told, ending governmental support for these cultural institutions saves a bit less than a billion dollars — not even a pittance in the context of nearly $4 trillion in government spending. But the point isn’t to save money, it’s to punish the fancydancy “elites” who define and consume high culture. (The president’s personal idea of cultural refinement, as we know, includes a Fifth Avenue penthouse that Louis XIV would find a bit gaudy and a six-foot portrait of Donald J. Trump paid for by his charitable foundation.)

I’ve worked in Washington far too long to believe the federal bureaucracy is fat-free. But the proposal to cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 31 percent can only be seen as a first step toward dismemberment. “The president wants a smaller EPA,” Mulvaney explained. “He thinks they overreach.”

Trump wants to eliminate more than 3,200 EPA jobs, representing more than 20 percent of the workforce. It was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who founded the agency, and it is another Republican president who apparently wants to end the federal government’s role in protecting the environment. It is perhaps no surprise that Trump wants to end EPA programs and regulations aimed at halting global warming, since he has ventured the opinion that climate change is a Chinese hoax; NASA programs to study warming would be cut as well. But the budget also eliminates federal funding for efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes. Make America’s Water Dirty Again!

The Energy Department’s Office of Science would see its $5 billion budget cut by nearly 20 percent, while the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy would see its $300 million budget zeroed out. The National Institutes of Health would suffer a 19 percent cut, sharply reducing the amount of federal money available for research grants to universities.

There’s barely a peep in Trump’s budget about Medicare or Medicaid. Given the angry reaction to the Republican health care plan, Trump must have decided — for once — that silence was the best choice.

Many of the programs Trump wants to slash or eliminate have support in Congress. The budget could never pass the Senate in this form, and probably not the House. But Trump will get some of what he wants, and consequently the nation will suffer. We get what we pay for — rather, what we elect.

Eugene Robinson is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. His email address is eugenerobinson@washpost. com.