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Barrett tells state Cascino’s no farmer

In News, News - Columbia, The Columbia Paper
May 14, 2020
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COPAKE—Salvatore Cascino has been fined thousands of dollars for damaging fragile wetlands and a protected trout stream, again… and again.

These new environmental violations cropped up in February before Mr. Cascino was ordered in April to stop work on a new 15,000-square-foot “greenhouse” he was building without a permit. The timing also coincided with a site plan review by the Copake Planning Board of Mr. Cascino’s “master plan” for his 300-acre property.

Now, one critic of Mr. Cascino and his frequent and long-running illegal activities hopes these new instances of thumbing his nose at the law will backfire on him.

Assemblymember Didi Barrett (D-106th) has written a three-page letter to New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets Commissioner Richard Ball, asking him to reconsider his department’s support of Mr. Cascino’s “farm operation” in light of these latest violations.

Mr. Cascino and the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) go way back in a relationship that reads like a broken record: the DEC finds that Mr. Cascino has violated environmental law and slaps him with fines and orders him to undo his violations; Mr. Cascino agrees to pay and to fix his violations but then breaks the law again… and so on.

Mr. Cascino, 80, of Larchmont, Westchester County is a convicted felon who has spent the past 22 years amassing violations of federal, state and town laws for illegal dumping, building and excavating at a place he calls Copake Valley Farm, along the east side of Route 22.

The Cascino property’s 313 acres includes freshwater wetlands at the northern end and the Noster Kill, a protected trout-spawning stream, that runs the length of his property.

According to this new settlement agreement dated March 31, DEC staff, representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Mr. Cascino’s engineer met at the Cascino property February 28 and “observed the result of new unauthorized clearcutting of understory vegetation… during February 2020 as well as new clearcutting of stream bank vegetation by use of mechanized equipment, resulting in stream disturbances in several locations of the Noster Kill.”

Mr. Cascino’s actions are violations of New York Codes, Rules and Regulations (NYCRR) and Environmental Conservation Law (ECL). And these were violations of a previous consent order agreement.

The DEC ordered Mr. Cascino to pay a civil penalty of $25,000. He was required him to pay $16,000 when he signed the order in March, with the remaining $9,500 suspended as long as he “fully complies with the requirements of this order, including the Schedule of Compliance.”

Under this agreement, Mr. Cascino is supposed to “immediately cease all earthmoving, vegetation removal and disturbance activity in the stream, wetland and corresponding adjacent area, except as specifically provided for in this Schedule of Compliance.”

His engineer has to make a restoration plan, the DEC has to approve it, and Mr. Cascino has to complete it on time.

The list of Mr. Cascino’s DEC violations date back to 2000 and include: dumping of solid waste at the property; the unlawful disposal of ground construction debris—dumped and graded in the wetlands; unlawful disturbance to the Noster Kill; open burning of wood pallets and disposal of ash at the property; excavation with side casting of spoils evident in the Noster Kill causing reduced hydrology within the side channels of the Noster Kill.

Though in the settlement agreements for some of these violations he was ordered to fix what he had damaged, the DEC has now noted, “restoration of wetland in this area may not be possible given the extent of impact.”

‘Mr. Cascino’s activity will likely ruin this beautiful stretch of land permanently…’

Didi Barrett (D-106th)

New York State Assembly

Mr. Cascino knows that the Noster Kill and the wetlands on the property are subject to the jurisdiction of the DEC, and that a permit from DEC is required prior to excavating, filling, grading or conducting other disturbance activities in the wetlands or disturbing the Noster Kill or its bed or banks, according to the DEC document.

In Assemblymember Barrett’s letter to the Department of Ag and Markets commissioner, dated May 5, she writes about Mr. Cascino’s “lies, deceit, crimes, cover-ups, and costs” to Copake over the past two decades. She calls the situation “desperate for my constituents in Copake who over the last year have seen the institutions that are supposed to protect small communities from deceitful and malicious actors fail repeatedly.

“This is why I am writing now… to implore you to reconsider your department’s support of Mr. Cascino’s ‘farm operation.’”

The Department of Ag and Markets sent a formal opinion to the Town of Copake in September 2019 stating that after a site visit by department staff member Dr. Robert Somers, the department concluded that the Cascino property is a “farm operation” and the town must not “unreasonably restrict” his agricultural activities.

Following the release of Ag and Markets’ opinion, Ms. Barrett had a series of communications with Ag and Markets staff. “On December 4, 2019 we spoke via conference call with several [Ag and Markets] staff, including Dr. Somers, in which the staff insisted that they were constrained by statute to not consider Mr. Cascino’s terrible history and to not consider the various prosecutions undertaken by numerous state and federal authorities in recent years and not to consider any point of view other than that of Mr. Cascino’s. However, staff did say that [Ag and Markets] would reconsider the opinion if it was found that there were ‘open violations’ against Mr. Cascino,” Ms. Barrett wrote.

The assemblymember then enumerated several ongoing violations, some within the last few weeks, “so recent that your colleagues at [Ag and Markets] may not yet know about them. She listed the recent DEC settlement agreements detailed above and:

• A March 13, 2020 DEC order on consent with Mr. Cascino regarding numerous petroleum storage violations at his facility in Dover Plains, Dutchess County (Region 3). “Although not agricultural in nature, these violations speak to Mr. Cascino’s continued and flagrant disregard for the laws of this state.”

• She also noted Mr. Cascino’s recent installation of a septic system on the Copake property, for which he did not secure the needed permit from the Columbia County Department of Health

• She mentioned that Mr. Cascino began construction of a building without a permit (a 15,000-square-foot greenhouse) on the property in April and that the Town of Copake secured a Stop Work order to prevent further construction

• She brought up Mr. Cascino’s 30-foot-wide steel bridge, constructed without a permit over the Noster Kill; in 2009 and again in 2013 he was ordered to remove the bridge, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court Appellate Division in 2012. But Mr. Cascino has ignored multiple court orders and DEC actions to remove the bridge, which is still there. “This disregard for the laws of our state cannot be dismissed,” Ms. Barrett wrote.

“I hope that this documentation is sufficient to show that Mr. Cascino’s actions are not only in the past, but ongoing… I believe [Ag and Markets] has no choice but to re-evaluate their determination.”

If the Ag and Markets opinions stands, Assemblymember Barrett wrote “the Department will have allowed Mr. Cascino to make a mockery of the laws meant to protect legitimate farmers by using the right-to-farm as a shield for his nefarious purposes. Mr. Cascino’s activity will likely ruin this beautiful stretch of land permanently for future agricultural use, as well as permanently pollute protected wetlands and streams… We need your help to prevent this and hopefully salvage the soil, water, and habitats Cascino is destroying right now.”

Ms. Barrett enclosed a copy of a report dated May 3 from the Copake Conservation Advisory Committee (CAC) in which the committee finds that the scale of Mr. Cascino’s current “master plan” project “will have adverse impacts on the environment at that location.”

The project involves the construction of a 25,000-square-foot barn allegedly “for the care and management of cows and sheep;” the 15,000-square-foot greenhouse “for the production of retail crops;” and four overhangs totaling 24,300-square-feet “off the top of existing walls to protect feed and equipment.”

The CAC’s report notes that the entire 313 acres is located within the Roeliff Jansen Kill Watershed, the kill is a Designated Inland Waterway to the Hudson River.

The report also points out that:

• The state-protected Noster Kill is located within the 100-year flood plain, and supports wetlands, wildlife, plants and flood soils. It flows into the Bash Bish Brook and then the Roe Jan Kill, which empties into the Hudson River

• The southern part of the property is adjacent to the Harlem Valley Calcareous Wetland, a significant biodiversity area, according to the DEC Hudson River Estuary Program

• Two aquifers lie under the property

• The buildings are within the Scenic Corridor Overlay Zone (SCOZ).

“This history of land use violations, taken in conjunction with the environmentally sensitive conditions of the site outlined herein, lead the Conservation Advisory Committee to recommend strongly the disapproval of the Copake Valley Farm site plan now before the Copake Planning Board,” the report states.

An email request to Attorney Michael H. Sussman for comment on his client’s [Mr. Cascino’s] latest violations did not receive a response.

To contact Diane Valden email dvalden@columbiapaper.com

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Healthy forests: How can we help?

In News - Columbia, The Columbia Paper
June 30, 2024
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Last of the series

By DEBORAH E. LANS

GHENT–Nature isn’t vindictive. Even though human actions have fostered many threats to our forests, the forests continue to provide their many benefits. Climate change, pollution and bad forestry management practices all take their toll, and yet (and among other things) forests continue to serve as a major means of carbon sequestration – a key to controlling the warming of the atmosphere – a source of health (emotional and physical) for people and the habitat for a vital ecological system.

With most of the woods in the county (and state) in the hands of private owners, the opportunity and responsibility to help our forests largely rests outside governmental management. And, while private citizens may not be able to eliminate the stressors that the woods confront, they can address and ameliorate many of them.

For example, for many years forestry practices called for large scale clearing with an emphasis on old trees. Those practices undermined the health of forests. As Bernd Blossey, professor of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell, explains, the carbon capture and biodiversity values are greatest in old trees. “If we cut a red oak that may be 300-400 years old, even if we replant the area with saplings, they won’t attain the same value for many, many years.”

This photo shows a site of a deer exclosure (the fenced area) and outside the exclosure (current deer density). Photo by Ray Winchcombe

So, land owners considering timber management – often as a revenue source – need to consider whether to shift their goals away from immediate cash flow and toward greater sustainability.

Even more importantly, and more immediately, landowners need to consider deer management. As deer are the greatest immediate threat to the future health of the woods (see the article in the June 13 issue of this paper), then addressing the damage that is caused by the overpopulation of deer is an obvious solution.

The benefits of deer “exclosures” – fencing an area to keep deer out – are often discussed when scientists address the damage that deer cause to the forest understory. Even within a few years, an area from which deer are excluded will begin to show the regeneration of orchids, trillium and other plants deer usually browse, and, more importantly, seedlings and saplings that can eventually regenerate the forest canopy. Similarly, within the exclosure, the presence of invasive species or species that crowd out seedlings – ferns, stilt grass, garlic mustard and barberry, for example – will diminish. (Moreover, with the lessening of invasives, the toxins that they release into the soil and that impair the uptake of nutrients by trees will also be lessened.)

Unfortunately, however, fencing a large woods area is not a particularly feasible project for a landowner, so while the value of reducing the effects of deer browse may be demonstrated by an exclosure, the technique does not lend itself to large-scale application.

Which leads to a discussion about controlling the deer population. The state DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) controls hunting practices and licensing. At a recent presentation sponsored by Chatham’s Partners for Climate Action on “The Deer Dilemma” DEC Big Game Biologist Brendan Quirion noted that the effects of deer overpopulation are currently so severe that the DEC has shifted its deer management priority away from protecting the deer population to fostering forest regeneration. Based on its ecologically-based philosophy, as well as citizen input, the DEC’s specific goal is reduce the deer population in the Hudson Valley by 25% by 2030. A recent study suggests that a 25% reduction in the deer population could lead to a 15% increase in seedling density.

Various shifts in hunting practices would help to achieve that goal. As the Columbia Land Conservancy (CLC) President Troy Weldy puts it, “Hunters are chivalrous. They avoid does in favor of bucks, even though the bucks are less tasty.” Hunters also seek out bucks for their trophy value – that deer head with antlers hung on the wall.

Mr. Quirion explains, however, that hunting bucks does little by way of managing the deer population. When you kill a buck, you remove one animal from the woods. If hunting is focused on females, you remove not just the animal but its many future offspring as well. Good hunting stewardship suggests that a hunter take at least one female for every male.

A shift in thinking about hunting is also advocated by many. Hunting is not simply a sport. It is, as Mr. Quirion puts it, good environmental stewardship. Mr. Quirion’s wife took up hunting, for example, because it allows her to know both where her meat comes from and that it is sustainably sourced. In other words, wild venison is not produced by the industrial agricultural complex, and it does not arrive with the carbon footprint of having been transported a long distance, frozen and packaged. Moreover, unlike domesticated cattle, which are known to produce significant, deleterious methane emissions, wild venison do not add unhealthy gases to the atmosphere.

However, state laws enacted back when deer were scarce prevent the sale of domestic wild venison; most of what we eat is either sourced from New Zealand or farm-raised. A change in the laws could, accordingly, shift meat consumption to a locally- and sustainably-sourced product.

In a county where food insecurity is a significant issue, the availability of local wild venison can also ease a problem. While hunters may not sell venison, they can donate it. The DEC partners with several non-profit groups (the Venison Donation Coalition and Feeding New York State) to help provide venison through regional food banks. Hunters currently contribute nearly 40 tons of venison each year.

If hunting is the primary means of reducing the deer population, then access to hunting lands is important. Mr. Quirion notes that there are a variety of ways landowners can open their property to deer management. The DEC has a Deer Management Assistance Program and issues additional permits to address areas of severe deer impacts. In turn, CLC, which currently allows managed hunting on some of its public lands, is seeking funding to create a Hunter Match Program which would introduce landowners to responsible and ecologically-minded hunters. CLC is also exploring the use of the HuntStand app to schedule specific hunting times on its own properties.

Though landowners might shy away from allowing hunting on their lands for safety reasons, the DEC’s statistics suggest that hunting is relatively safe. Statewide in 2023 there were 12 hunting-related injuries, two fatal and six self-inflicted. Only nine involved deer hunting.

In some situations, culling – hunts conducted by professionals to achieve a rapid reduction in population – is sometimes used as a strategy to manage overpopulation. A recent article by the ecologist Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker (“Move in for the Cull,” June 17, 2024) explores the ethical, emotional and practical complications of deliberate culling for conservation purposes and observes that, though deliberate culling may sound distasteful, the fact is that the slaughter of farm-raised animals is a given.

Moreover, with humane means of population control, like contraception, currently considered to be both ineffective and costly, hunting seems the only feasible remedy for deer overpopulation at present.

Different techniques apply to repopulating forests and keeping pests and pathogens out. Charles Canham, the Cary Institute ecologist, stresses that while tree planting is a good long-term strategy, trees should be grown from bare root or seeds, because a tree with a root ball in potting soil may carry along harmful worms. Likewise, overfertilizing trees is actually counterproductive, as it will make the tree more attractive to pests.

Cutting away vines that can choke a tree is helpful. Avoiding driving over lawns – and hence tree roots – is also good.

And, as with all of nature, exposing young children to the woods and instilling a love of forests will help ensure a population of stewards for the future. Moreover, a study conducted in Finland found that three- to five-year-old city-dwelling children in a day care program, who were exposed to daily forest walks and gardening for as little as one month, saw improvement in their immune systems. The study supports the “biodiversity hypothesis” – a theory that says that exposure to a diverse environment enhances the human immune system.

To experience local forests and see the effects of stressors first-hand: The Rheinstrom Hill Audubon Sanctuary in Craryville (225 Cambridge Road) has some long-standing exclosures where the effects of excluding deer from an area can be seen. The recently-published field guide “From the Hudson to the Taconics,” authored by the Farmscape Ecology Program and Hudsonia Ltd., devotes nearly 100 pages to identifying the different types of forests and their publicly-accessible locations in the county, as well as species of environmental concern and potential stewardship methods. Montgomery Place, adjacent to the Bard Campus, is, as Dr. Canham puts it, an example of “a great old forest.” The DEC website includes materials on forest health and sets out the regulations that govern deer hunting.

THROUGH THE WOODS: Halloween

In Communities, Communities - Columbia, The Columbia Paper
November 3, 2022
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Photo by Nancy Jane Kern

HALLOWEEN HAS GAINED STATUS as one of the top holidays of the year. Commercialism wins once again, and even in this bad economy, it is expected that American shoppers will spend over $10 billion on human and pet costumes, candy and decorations. If you doubt this, make a trip to Walmart, a grocery or the dollar store. Talented mothers can make costumes for considerably less than the examples on display.

Sixty-plus years ago we used old white bed sheets with cut-out eye holes and flapped about as ghosts. We had plenty of fun and candy even at this primitive level. We dragged chains and made weird noises, and were restricted to visiting only friends and relatives approved by our parents. This is still a good plan. Why collect pounds of questionable candy that watchful parents often dump?

For the most part, we rarely consider the real history behind it. It is believed that the real Halloween started in Ireland and Scotland as Samhain, which is Gaelic for “summer’s end.” The harvest ended the Gaelic year and it was believed the gap between the living and the dead lessened on this day, and both good and evil spirits returned to earth. People tried to scare off the bad spirits by wearing masks and displaying jack-o-lanterns. (more…)

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