Being active in preserving ecological preservation for 45+ years, I’ve been attending “Chester municipal Conservation Council” meetings to stay informed of its often mysterious activities.
In my decades of experience with municipal conservation boards, starting with attending meetings of Warwick’s conservation board, (one of New York’s very first, and co-founded by my cousin) I’ve understood the purpose of such boards to be to (from the NYSDEC’s own website: extapps.dec.ny.gov/docs/remediation_hudson_pdf/cacfsheet.pdf): “...serve as important advisory bodies to local governing boards, planning boards, and zoning boards of appeals.”
Since Chester’s CAC’s creation in 2024, I’ve found Chester’s council to act almost exclusively as a grant generator and organizer of non-preservation-related activities.
A secretive, recent grant was unsuccessfully written by Chester’s “CAC,” with the town’s tax-salaried grant writer, proposing to do the opposite of what one would hope from a conservation council: to build a new structure at an already protected open space (“Knapp’s View”), and to hire a state pesticide applicator to “restore” it (in my long years of experience in ecology, we don’t “restore” preserved open space that supports rare species, we preserve it). The kicker? This was going to be a “matching grant,” one requiring the taxpayers pay half of the $50,000 for the construction bill alone. This would then authorize the “removal” (according to the grant) of existing grasses(?) at Knapp’s View, where rare birds currently breed, to replace them with new grasses, at even greater cost. In fact, the pesticide applicator states that this could cost “100s of thousand into the millions” of dollars to kill and replace the existing grasses of “Knapp’s View.” More strangely, this pesticide applicator that might do this work was being included on town emails.
As an ecologist that’s worked with preservation for decades, it’s my opinion that “removing existing grasses” at a preserved natural area where rare birds currently nest goes against all logic, and for a “conservation board” to suggest doing this, when we’re losing so much open space to development every year, it’s mind-boggling. To charge taxpayers for this is unconscionable.
At a recent Chester CAC meeting where having a website was discussed, (they hadn’t been posting meeting minutes as legally required), the chair stated they could only consider keeping a website if they have “a grant.”
I maintain my own websites, so I found this strange, just as I found the grant writer’s suggestion that this same pesticide applicator be hired for all ecological grants in Chester, like he was designing grants to enrich that person, instead of enriching the residents’ quality of life.
It’s my opinion and observation that some politician climbers jump at any grant, regardless of its usefulness to residents, to use the numbers to misrepresent what they’ve accomplished for them. Brandon Holdridge boasts new grants each month.
Hoarders can’t pass up deals, even for useless “white elephants.” Imagine a hoarder with a home filled with useless junk that they were able to get for free; now imagine that hoarder claiming to be a millionaire, based upon the original retail value of each basically useless item. This is how career politicians claim to have raised millions for their constituents, while hiring friends as grant writers to find these roadside deals.
Be careful of any political climber bragging about the grants they’ve generated: Your taxes might be matching grants to buy white elephants, and hastily created town councils might really be white elephant buyers, created to give the appearance of wealth, often while using a conservation board to “replace the grasses” at a protected open space, at taxpayer expense.
Jay Westerveld, Ecologist
Sugar Loaf