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Utility criticized for seeking higher delivery rates
Two administrative judges have recommended higher electricity and gas delivery rates for Central Hudson but rejected the increases the utility sought and demands by elected officials, advocates and customers to deny any hike.
The decision, released May 1, follows nearly a year of testimony that began last summer when Central Hudson said that it would seek state approval to raise revenue for electricity delivery by $139.5 million and for gas by $41.5 million during 2024-2025.
Under that plan, the utility's customers, including 6,800 households and businesses in Beacon and 5,200 in Cold Spring, Nelsonville, Philipstown and Kent, would have seen their monthly bills rise by an average of $30 for each service.
The increases will be lower under the judges' recommendation, which, if approved by the state Public Service Commission, grants Central Hudson revenue increases of $75 million for electricity and $29.6 million for gas, according to an analysis of the decision by the Public Utility Law Project.
That's less than the $128.7 million in new electricity revenue and $47.2 million in gas increases requested by Central Hudson in a revised proposal but more than the $65.5 million increase for electricity and $25.1 million for gas sought by the state Department of Public Service (DPS).
Even the judge's lower amounts are "way too high," said Jonathan Jacobson, a Democrat whose state Assembly district includes Beacon. "The original request was merely a bargaining chip and was never a serious proposal, so this recommendation is not a win for consumers."
How the increases affect monthly bills will not be known until May 21, the deadline for Central Hudson and DPS to submit those figures.
Central Hudson's basic delivery charge for electricity is 10.5 cents per kilowatt-hour; for gas, it's $24.50 for the first 200 cubic feet, $1.36 per hundred cubic feet (Ccf) for the next 4,800 and 95 cents per Ccf for additional amounts.
But the decision noted that the "general sentiment" expressed at public hearings "was that Central Hudson is not providing basic service and should not be rewarded for its poor performance." The utility is being investigated over billing problems that began in 2021.
Rep. Pat Ryan, whose congressional district includes Beacon, described the recommendation as "outrageous."
"I'm again calling on the PSC to reject this exorbitant rate increase and hold public hearings," said Ryan. "We need real accountability and relief, not another corporate handout."
Central Hudson has said that the additional revenue is essential to replace aging transmission and gas lines, connect solar and wind projects to its system and add personnel and equipment to restore power after outages caused by extreme storms, which have become more frequent.
The company also said it planned to expand financial-assistance programs for low-income customers and increase its workforce by 20 percent.
Joe Jenkins, a Central Hudson representative, said on Tuesday (May 7) that the company is "reviewing the decision in its entirety and will provide additional information by the end of the month."
Overshadowing the process is continued anger over widespread problems that began when the company switched in 2021 to an $88 million customer-service system. Programming errors caused delays in issuing statements that lasted more than three months for some customers and overcharges that affected more than 8,000.
Central Hudson agreed to pay for an independent monitor to verify the utility's progress in correcting the sources of its billing mistakes.
The company also agreed to end its practice of estimating every other monthly bill and transition to reading meters monthly. The change launched with customers in Orange and Ulster counties and is scheduled to take effect in Beacon and Philipstown this spring.
Central Hudson, which during the pandemic shutdown paused efforts to collect past-due bills, announced April 19 it will

Drivers caught illegally passing face $250 fine
The next time you illegally pass a stopped school bus in the Highlands, say "cheese" and take out your wallet.
That's because two of the three local public school districts have adopted for their buses a high-tech system that videotapes violators who ignore stop-arms and fines them $250 for the infraction.
Last month, Haldane decided to employ the camera system, which Beacon has used for over a year. Haldane expects to have the cameras installed on the district's 15 school buses by next fall, said Philip Benante, the superintendent. (So far, Garrison has not adopted the system.)
The stop-arm cameras are part of a statewide attempt to crack down on an estimated 50,000 motorists who each day illegally pass stopped school buses, according to the New York Association for Pupil Transportation. A state law authorized school districts and municipalities to begin using the cameras in 2019.
They capture and transmit footage to local authorities, who then decide whether to issue a citation, according to BusPatrol, the company that operates the systems in Dutchess, Putnam and other New York counties.
BusPatrol funds the artificial-intelligence-powered cameras and keeps a percentage of the fines as compensation, with counties and local municipalities receiving the rest. Drivers who receive more than one violation face increasing fines.
Dutchess first offered it to school districts in 2021, and more than 750 buses now have stop-arm cameras installed, said Eoin Wrafter, the commissioner for Dutchess' Department of Planning and Development. Beacon's school district has outfitted 53 of its buses since January 2023, he said.
So far, more than 30,000 citations have been issued countywide, including over 700 to cars registered in Beacon, said Wrafter. After receiving a citation, car owners may either pay or dispute the violation with the issuing county.
In 2023, Dutchess County received $240,000 in proceeds from the program, said Wrafter. The county has also seen a drop in illegal school bus passings, which are down 28 percent over the last year in the participating school districts, according to BusPatrol.
"Our bus drivers have seen a marked improvement in motorists obeying the state law," said Dwight Bonk, the superintendent for the Wappingers Central School District, one of eight Dutchess County districts that have opted into the program in addition to Dutchess County BOCES.
Whether Putnam, whose school districts have only had access to the cameras since April, will see the same results is to be determined, but Benante hopes to improve safety for students. Brewster, Carmel and Mahopac have also joined the program.
Putnam just completed a "warning phase" in April, when 219 warning citations were issued in Brewster, 62 in Mahopac and 51 in Carmel, said Capt. Michael Grossi of the Putnam Sheriff's Department. Putnam began issuing citations with actual fines on April 28.
In the past, bus drivers have attempted to catch violators by trying to quickly record license plates or reporting a description of the car, but "to get a license plate when someone is passing you is difficult," said Grossi. The camera system "gives us a lot of extra eyes out there," he said.
But some drivers have successfully challenged the tickets. A New York State appellate court has overturned citations issued in Suffolk County after finding that the video did not prove that the buses were properly equipped and marked, and had stopped to pick up or discharge students.
In response, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Legislature expanded the list of evidence required to include images of an activated stop-arm and an electronic indicator showing activation of a bus' flashing red lights. Those images are needed to create a "rebuttable presumption" that a bus was stopped to load or unload students, according to the amendments, which were included in the 2024-2025 budget enacted last month.
The changes also include requiring that municipali

Couple takes over former Hudson Hil's spot
The breakfast-and-lunch spot formerly known as Hudson Hil's is now the Cozy Corner Café. Expect the hours and menu to expand and say hello to happy hour once the new owners get a liquor license.
Eventually, Ramiro Prolo and Jessika Martinez aspire to offer weekend dinners as a curated experience with wine pairings. Breakfast and lunch will still be served with brunch-style cocktails available.
Prolo, who hails from Uruguay, and Martinez, born in Argentina, met in Miami, moved to the New York City area and looked in the northern suburbs for a place to open a restaurant.
"We know Cold Spring and love it," said Prolo. "We walked by Hudson Hil's and talked about how it would be perfect for us. The next time we passed by, maybe three months later, we saw the 'For Sale' sign and figured life was telling us something."
For now, the couple is living with family in Westchester County. They hope to open before the end of the month. A cousin, a niece, an aunt and an uncle painted, cleaned and spruced up the warren of six rooms, including prep stations.
Though many changes are coming to the menu, the couple decided to leave the bones of the two dining rooms alone. Martinez holds three college degrees, including in interior design, and plans to add minimalist touches to the rustic, blue-and-white décor.
"I want to keep what's good and add some flowers and plants for an organic, unprocessed-food, get-away-from-the-city vibe," she said.
Aside from overseeing the design, she will work behind the scenes to create cocktails and plate the food with artistry. Wine selections will lean toward Italy, Argentina and California, she said.
During the fallow winter months, Martinez plans to offer events centered on wine and art. "It will take some time to study Cold Spring and figure out what people need and want," said Martinez, whose background is in marketing.
The restaurant side is Prolo's. He rose to management positions at upscale Miami hotspots Hosteria Romana and Fifi's on the Beach and said he understands the importance of smooth service.
"We served 500 tables every day - it was crazy," he said. For now, he is auditioning chefs. His sister will oversee the fresh pastry program.
The fare at Cozy Corner will be American, a catch-all phrase, but the offerings are far more extensive than what was offered at Hudson Hil's. The accent is Italian because Prolo and Martinez have forebears from the country.
Their local partners include Cold Spring Fish in Philipstown and Trax Coffee in Beacon. Meat comes from an upstate farm. Seafood selections will eventually expand. Salads and toasts will revolve around the seasons. None of the sides should cost more than $5, they said.
Beyond a bone-in rib-eye steak with rosemary, Argentinian influences will include choripan sausage, chimichurri sauce akin to spicy pesto, and an empanada appetizer with a twist.
"Instead of ground beef, we'll cut a steak into small pieces with a knife," Prolo said. "Like everything, I am going for simple, but good."

Bob Mitchell, the Albany County architect who designed the new consolidated Beacon fire station, corrected me when we spoke over Zoom this week. I had toured the under-construction station on April 26 and remarked that I was impressed with the facility's many bells and whistles.
"Bells and whistles" suggest extravagance, Mitchell said. The firefighters are actually getting "nuts and bolts - spaces that are highly functional and necessary."
The $14.7 million, 16,400-square-foot structure, which is on schedule to be completed by September, will have three bays for fire trucks on Wolcott Avenue, across the street from City Hall. There will be two more bays on South Avenue - which had fronted the former Lewis Tompkins Hose Co. station - one for a backup fire truck and the other for Ambulnz, the city's advanced life support ambulance provider.
City leaders in 2022 decided to gut, refurbish and enlarge the 1979 Tompkins Hose building, ending a nearly 20-year debate over consolidating Beacon's three aging stations - Tompkins Hose, Mase Hook and Ladder on Main Street and the Beacon Engine firehouse on East Main Street, none of which met modern firefighting standards.
Rather than build a station at a new site, Mayor Lee Kyriacou pushed to renovate Tompkins Hose, a decision that he said this week cut costs significantly and allowed the city to "do something state-of-the-art that will last a few generations." He said a renegotiated 10-year sales tax-sharing agreement with Dutchess County, reached in 2022, also helped. The deal brought Beacon an extra $1.2 million in revenue last year, and the numbers could triple over the life of the agreement.
The all-electric station, heated and cooled by 20 geothermal wells dug in the adjacent parking lot, will have six bedrooms, each equipped with four lockers. That means each firefighter will have a private locker for their 24-hour shift, and the six rooms gives the department, which has 17 paid "career" firefighters plus Chief Tom Lucchesi, ample room to grow.
The partially enclosed engine bays will be enlarged and equipped with an exhaust-removal system that will connect to the trucks. There's even a simulated manhole inside the station where firefighters will practice subterranean rescues.
Perhaps the most important upgrade will be the decontamination facilities. When returning to the station, firefighters will enter a three-step "hot zone" designated for cleaning. There will be a "gross decontamination" room to surface-clean their gear, then another room with deep-cleaning laundry machines and dryers, and then showers. After those safety measures, firefighters can go into the "cool zone," which is the rest of the station.
There's more data these days on the effects of the toxins concentrated in smoke that firefighters inhale, ingest or absorb through the skin. For example, Mitchell said, the rate of testicular cancer among firefighters is twice the national average. He also cited the recent case of three children of firefighters at the same station in Honolulu who, over a six-year span, developed Ewing's sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.
"Ultra-fine particles in smoke pass through protective garments and into the skin," Mitchell said. "They have to be washed off quickly, because if that dust is on them or their clothing, it goes home with them."
For previous generations, facilities like these didn't exist. "When my dad was a volunteer firefighter, he would just throw his gear in the back of the car," City Administrator Chris White told me. "There was no place to go."
The lobby and interior spaces of the building will pay tribute to "the spectacular volunteer effort" to fight fires and handle other emergencies in Beacon over the past century, Kyriacou said. The U.S. flag and a memorial to fallen volunteers will be moved from South Avenue to the front of the station on Wolcott.
The brick exterior is envisioned as a gateway to the city. "We asked the architect to look at Main Street and make this loo

Charged with installing cameras in a restroom
A former Stonecrop Gardens employee was arrested on April 18 and accused of secretly filming girls in 2018 and 2019 as they used a public restroom.
A criminal complaint filed in federal court accuses John Towers, 54, of Mahopac, of making more than 800 hidden-camera videos that also captured women inside stalls as they used the toilet.
The complaint describes the scene of the alleged crimes only as a "privately owned, public park in Putnam County" and states that Towers had worked there for 20 years, since 2004. A Facebook profile for John Towers identifies him as a Mahopac High School graduate employed at Stonecrop since August 2004, and archived Stonecrop material, such as a newsletter from 2007, identifies John Towers as a part-time horticulture assistant.
Towers was arraigned April 18 and released on a $200,000 bond until his next court date, scheduled for May 15.
Stonecrop did not respond to an email or phone message seeking comment. [Update: On May 7, Stonecrop issued this statement: "The individual who was arrested has been terminated from our employment. We are fully cooperating with law enforcement officials in their investigation. Our No.
1 priority is ensuring the safety and privacy of our staff and the public who visit our beautiful gardens."] The park was created in 1958 by Frank Cabot and his wife, Anne, on their 60-acre property on Route 301 and opened to the public in 1992. Towers' attorney, Michael Burke of White Plains, also did not respond to an email or phone message.
In the criminal complaint, filed April 17, a Putnam County Sheriff's Office investigator assigned to an FBI task force said that, during a raid at Towers' home, officers seized a desktop computer with a 2-terabyte hard drive that contained 816 videos taken with cameras hidden in a park restroom, including 78 with the word "yung" in the title and at least 15 that depict children. According to the complaint, the videos were created between July 2018 and October 2019.
According to the complaint, the investigation began in February after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children passed along a tip from an internet service provider that a customer with a phone number associated with Towers had uploaded 57 files depicting child pornography to its cloud storage.
Responding to a search warrant, the company provided more than 6,000 images and videos that had been uploaded by the customer, including photos that depict girls and women in stalls in a restroom with blue-and-white tile walls. At least one image was embedded with GPS data that indicated it had been taken at the privately owned, public park. Mark Tunney, the Putnam County investigator, said in the complaint that he visited the park and noted its restrooms have blue-and-white tile walls.
During an early morning raid on March 29 at Towers' home in Mahopac, police seized 10 spy cameras, including three that resembled ballpoint pens; 20 DVDs with explicit content; a cellphone and the desktop computer. Towers was arrested and arraigned in Carmel Town Court on six charges related to the DVD images and sent to the Putnam County jail before being released on bail.
According to the complaint, investigators searching the computer found a folder with the 816 videos, whose titles included the word "visitor" and a date, that were focused on a toilet in a restroom with blue-and-white tile walls. A number of the videos appear to show the same person from different angles, suggesting multiple cameras, the complaint said. Towers allegedly captured screen shots from the videos.
Investigators said they identified the mother of a 7-year-old whose genitals were filmed as she used the park restroom in July 2018. The woman showed police a photo taken of her daughter on the same day in which the girl was wearing the white tank top shown in the video, with the word "Summer" across the front.

Voters will also weigh budget, capital project
Four candidates filed nominating petitions this week to run for three open seats on the Beacon school board, creating the first contested race since 2018.
Flora Stadler, the vice president, is seeking her third, three-year term on the nine-member board. She will be joined on the May 21 ballot by newcomers Chris Lewine, LaVonne McNair and Meg Phillips.
Two of the open seats are held by Stadler and Yunice Heath, who announced in February that she would not run for re-election. A third seat was vacated last year by John Galloway Jr., who resigned.
Lewine, a former high school principal and math teacher, is the chief of data strategy and product innovation for Connecticut RISE Network. McNair is an analyst with Carrington Mortgage Services and a board member of I Am Beacon. Phillips has a master's degree in English and a master's in teaching secondary education.
The candidate with the most votes will join the board immediately to fill Galloway's seat and serve a three-year term. The other two winners will begin their three-year terms on July 1. A Meet the Candidates event is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on May 13 at Beacon High School.
The May ballot will also ask voters to approve the district's $83.86 million budget for 2024-25. The school board unanimously approved the budget on April 23; it will hold a public hearing during its Tuesday (May 7) meeting.
The district is proposing a $47.68 million tax levy, a 3.91 percent increase over last year, that will trigger a modest tax hike. For a home worth $425,000, the median value in Dutchess County, the increase is estimated to be $88 annually for district residents who live in Beacon, $100 for those in the Town of Fishkill and $106 for those in the Town of Wappinger.
Like many districts, Beacon will receive less state aid this year in New York State's newly adopted budget. The district will receive $30.8 million, a decrease of $168,499 over 2023-24.
The ballot will also include two propositions related to student transportation and one that would allow the district to borrow money to fund a $50 million capital project.
The first proposition would give the district the OK to purchase a second electric school bus. Voters approved one electric bus last year but it has yet to be purchased. The state will provide $257,250 toward each $495,000 bus.
The second proposition would permit the district to spend $485,000 to buy three 72-passenger, gas-powered buses.
The third proposition asks voters to approve an initiative for sweeping capital improvements across all six district school buildings. It would include heating, ventilation and energy-efficiency upgrades, new roofs on some buildings, secure visitor entrances and Americans with Disabilities Act compliance, among other repairs.
Many classrooms will receive new flooring, ceilings, lighting, windows and doors, while the stage and theater at Beacon High School will be upgraded and new playground equipment installed at Sargent and Glenham elementaries. The tennis courts and baseball and softball fields at the high school will be improved and the cafeterias and gymnasiums at the four elementary schools and Rombout Middle School will be air-conditioned to create "cooling centers," the district said.
If approved, the capital project would trigger a second tax increase, estimated at $127 annually for a home assessed at $300,000; $170 for a $400,000 home or $212 for a $500,000 home. Taxes have not gone up as the result of capital improvements in at least 15 years. Individual bills could decrease if a homeowner has a STAR or Enhanced STAR exemption.