I already knew about Flock cameras from the news: automated license plate readers that photograph the plate, make, model, and color of every car that passes, whether or not there’s any reason to suspect the driver of anything. Their use is drawing pushback nationally — cities canceling contracts after finding officers running searches for inappropriate reasons, researchers exposing camera feeds that were livestreaming to the internet, senators demanding federal investigations. What I hadn’t expected was to find one smack dab in the center of Hudson.

I was even more surprised when I zoomed in and saw that Hudson’s only reported Flock camera isn’t outside the police station or bolted to a traffic light. It’s mounted on a private building at 441 Warren Street — a building on the tax rolls as being owned by Hudson Meters LLC. A historic preservation application ties the property to Hugo van Vuuren. And this is common knowledge for anyone who lives in town anyway: the rotating flags, the letter board that quotes Gossips of Rivertown, along with van Vuuren coming and going. Van Vuuren is also widely understood to be the primary driver behind Hudson Common Sense, an anonymous and prolific local blog.

A Flock camera is an automated license plate reader (ALPR) that photographs every vehicle that passes beneath it, logs the time and location, and feeds it into a searchable database. It records and saves data from every vehicle, regardless of how you’re driving.

Unlike the Ring doorbell camera, where footage sits on someone’s phone until they decide to look at it or do something with it, a Flock camera is active – it’s built to be searched, and we do not get access to who is doing the searching or why.

Flock’s pitch to the towns and cities that install these cameras is about safety and order: they can help recover stolen vehicles, find missing persons, and support departments in responding faster to Amber and Silver alerts. That’s the pitch that’s gotten Flock cameras into more than 6,000 communities.

Flock also sells add-ons that expand what the system can do. Nova, for example, cross-references license plate data against other law enforcement databases and against commercial data brokers (the companies that buy and sell personal information like where you live, who you’re related to, and what else is known about you online) so that police can go from knowing that a car passed by to who owns that car and who is connected to that owner. FreeForm allows the user to query the system with words – e.g., “a red pickup truck with a dog: – meaning AI technology is analyzing footage of the people as well.

Why does this matter? Because this data is collected on all of us, all the time, without a warrant and without suspicion of a crime. And it doesn’t stay where it was collected.

Reporters have spent the past year documenting how license plate data captured by Flock cameras has ended up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This is sometimes happening through official data-sharing agreements, and sometimes through a side door: local police running searches on behalf of ICE and Border Patrol without their residents knowing.

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That network is called “National Lookup”, and around three out of four agencies using Flock have it switched on. Turn it on, and your local camera becomes a node any participating agency in the country can search. Flock’s position is that it no longer contracts with ICE, dropped federal agencies from National Lookup last August, and blocks immigration-related search terms. All changes that came after reporters exposed what was happening.

And these tools have been used beyond immigration cases. In Texas, a sheriff ran a nationwide search of Flock’s network looking for a woman who’d had an abortion. In New York, agencies were found to be running plate searches tied to protest activity. It can easily be used inappropriately by its users without anyone’s awareness.

Another important risk – these cameras are often wrong. Los Angeles data suggests that roughly one third of the system’s stolen-vehicle plate matches were false positives – leading to the wrong people being pulled over and treated as felony suspects because a camera misread a plate.

And the system doesn’t need to be misused to be a problem — sometimes it’s just unlocked. In December, researchers found more than 60 Flock cameras livestreaming to the internet with no login required, discoverable through a Google search. Anyone who found one could watch the live feed, scroll back through 30 days of archived footage, and in at least one documented case, pan, tilt, and zoom the camera itself.

In addition to the camera problems, the database itself has its own. By default, Flock holds onto footage for 30 days before it’s automatically deleted — a policy the company says is a privacy safeguard. But that number only describes what happens to data that stays local. Once National Lookup is switched on, a search from another department can surface and copy that data before the 30 days are up.

Which raises the question for Hudson: has the camera at 441 Warren Street shared data to any external source?

This is where the picture gets muddy. I was not able to find any written record of a contract between the Columbia County Sheriff’s Department or the Hudson Police Department and Flock, nor was I able to find any written record of a relationship between either force and the camera at 441 Warren Street.

I assumed that both would require a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to know for sure – something that would take time to come back. But on a whim on Monday of this week I searched “Flock cameras” on Facebook, and I was surprised to see a brand new post show up, from the Stuyvesant Community Board.

It read:

I could not find a publicly available agenda for that meeting (odd for a public meeting). But after being in contact with county officials, the reference to Flock cameras was nine pages in, on a Financial Resolution Request Form. It read, “this grant will provide funding to purchase Law Enforcement software enhancements for the Flock System.”

I was troubled by this — it references the Flock system, as though it is already a system that is in use. However, the County Supervisors have not voted to enter a contract with Flock.

I could not attend this meeting. But a friend did. And what they learned surprised me. Don Krapf, the previous sheriff, bought Flock cameras in 2025 — after the Board of Supervisors’ Public Safety Committee had already tabled his request for a memorandum of understanding with Flock back in March 2023. He used part of a $279,790 state law enforcement grant the county had approved in July 2024 to do it, buying Flock’s software that December, then ordering the cameras in October 2025. The county attorney’s office is now investigating whether the purchase was even valid without the board’s approval.

Sheriff Jackie Salvatore referenced two privately-owned Flock cameras at that meeting as well, one of which has not been reported to DeFlock yet. There are also several more nearby — ten of which belong to the Columbia County Sheriff’s Department. There is one at Greenport Town Park — a central gathering spot for kids across the county. There are also several cameras in the Lowe’s parking lot in Greenport, and one mounted to a pole near Cantele’s Laserwash on Fairview Avenue, facing Hudson’s 5th ward.

DeFlock shows 15 reported cameras countywide — relatively few next to neighbors like Dutchess (125) or Albany (122). New York overall ranks 7th in the country by camera count, and Columbia County ranks 33rd out of the state’s own 56 counties with any reported cameras.

But it is important to keep in mind that DeFlock relies on volunteer reports – it could be that fewer cameras have been reported here relative to other counties, like is the case in Hudson proper.

There’s no Hudson municipal policy governing Flock cameras yet, but when I spoke with Mayor Joe Ferris, he was already taking action.

“As cities across the country pushed back on Flock cameras this summer, I began looking into what if any Flock cameras had been installed in Hudson,” Ferris told me. “While there are two privately-owned cameras in our community, the City of Hudson has no contracts with Flock.”

He also shared that the Hudson Police Department does scan license plates using Axon LPRs, but he said that “Axon has significantly stronger safeguards including no national data-sharing networks. As a strong supporter of A.10808/S.9890, the Comprehensive ALPR Guardrails legislation championed by Senator Michelle Hinchey and Assembly Member Pamela Hunter, I am looking into ways these guardrails can be implemented on the city level while the bills are considered in Albany.”

Nearby in Troy, their local government has spent the last year working through public rules governing Flock use. The city has 26 working Flock cameras, and until recently, no public guidelines or laws governing how they are used. This spring, the Troy City Council advanced a local law that would have restricted ALPR use to cases involving outstanding felony warrants.

The proposed law received significant pushback from the Rensselaer County DA and the police chief, calling it reckless. When the council could not agree, it tabled the contract-renewal vote – leading to the Flock contract’s auto-renewal by default. The city eventually backed off the harder legislative fight for a 60-day working period between the mayor, council leadership, the DA’s office, and police, landing on policy tweaks instead of a binding law; Troy’s national search tool was switched off as part of that deal.

Other small cities and towns in New York are taking action against Flock cameras. In Saranac Lake, police installed a dozen Flock cameras using a state grant in 2024. When residents found out, the backlash was significant enough that the village board halted the program, shut off the cameras, and eventually voted 4–1 to ban them outright. Trumansburg, just outside of Ithaca, simply decided not to renew its Flock contract when it came up. In both cases, a handful of dedicated residents showing up to demand answers and push back on this level of surveillance changed local policies.

That is why showing up at the Public Safety meeting, as many of our community members did, on Tuesday was so critical. It’s the same pattern: a resolution that could have moved through committee unremarked, but instead there was a room full of people asking questions. We don’t yet know whether that turnout will change anything about the county’s plans — but the pattern in other cities and towns suggests that community pressure is what does it.

Hudson has not yet had the Flock conversation at the city level. What can be done, here and now? Ask your Council Members what their position is on ALPRs, and let them know your perspective. Show up when this reaches a Common Council meeting. And report the Flock cameras you spot to DeFlock, so the public record of what’s actually out there keeps pace with what’s actually installed.

Whether Hudson gets a conversation about that before a second and third camera go up, or finds out about them after the fact, depends on whether enough of us ask the question before it’s already been answered for us. We should be aware of the camera at 441 Warren Street. We should be aware of the cameras all throughout our county. Awareness is what makes it possible for us to speak out.

Because underneath all of it is one question for our community to answer: should we, as residents, have a say in when we’re recorded and how that data gets used? For me, that is a resounding yes.

This is my fourth time writing about Bliss Towers — first its history and memory, then the current state of the building, and then a recent update on the redevelopment proposal. I want to tell you why this issue has a hold on me the way it does.

I love Hudson. For the beautiful architecture, yes, the Catskill views, Oakdale Park, the waterfront, the Hudson Area Library, the coffee shops and restaurants. But most of all, for the people who are on this land. The artists who make this city beautiful in so many ways. The schoolteachers, the small business owners, the Little League coaches, the elders who carry our community’s memory. The first responders, the writers, the nonprofit staff who serve every different pocket of Hudson. It is not the architecture, or the real estate, or the views, or whatever else the New York Times decides to cover here that makes a place worth being in. It’s the people who steward the land, the culture, the feeling of belonging to it.

So this housing crisis is personal because it is changing us. It is displacing the very people who make Hudson feel like a community. Since the 1990s, Hudson’s population has declined 25%, from around 7,500 to just under 5,600. In the last decade, households spending more than half their income on housing have tripled. Hudson’s median rent now requires an income of over $52,000 a year to afford, but our food service and retail workers average $37,000 to $46,000. The math doesn’t work, and so people leave.

There is now a proposal in front of the Planning Board that addresses genuine safety concerns, with a site plan that is, by every account, a vast improvement on the current public housing in both aesthetics and community feel. It also adds over 100 units, and introduces workforce housing for the middle class — a demographic public housing doesn’t typically reach, and one that is feeling acute pressure in Hudson right now.

I keep returning to housing on this blog, and to this proposal specifically, because I believe it is one real way to keep Hudson accessible to the people and communities that make it what it is.

Tomorrow at 6pm at the Firehouse there is another public hearing on the redevelopment. If you’re able to attend, please do. You can also still submit public comment by email to Linda Fenoff at lfenoff@cityofhudson.org through tomorrow; she will post them on the portal (where you can check out other comments). Make your voice heard during this important, historic moment in Hudson’s history.

Below, you’ll find my own comment, written after reading all 43 published public comments to date.

I have more pieces in the works for you all, on all sorts of community issues. Right now, though, Bliss has my attention, and my heart.

With care,
Caitie

Dear Members of the Planning Board,

I am a fifth-generation resident of Hudson, living in the Fifth Ward. My family was directly affected by Hudson’s Urban Renewal program in the 1970s. I’ve spent the past year reporting on Bliss Towers — its history and its current condition — for my Substack, and I spoke in support of this project’s funding request back in May 2024. I am writing again to say: I support this site plan, and I hope the board approves it.

I grew up with kids who lived in Bliss, but I have learned a majority of what I know about Bliss Towers in the past few years. I toured the building with Housing Authority staff. I interviewed residents past and present — Tyrone Hedgepeth, Larry Decker, Glenda Lee, Linda McGriff Andrews, Sonya VanAlstyne, and others who have called that building home at different points across its five decades. What I heard, consistently, was two things held at once: memory of the place as a community — dance contests in the hallway, neighbors who watched each other’s kids — and urgency and fear about the current state of the building. I rode an elevator that scraped against its shaft the entire way up. I stood on a floor that wasn’t level. I saw multiple uninhabited units with holes in the wall.I learned that as of my tour last year, only 84 of the building’s 135 units were occupied, because asbestos remediation now costs more than the units are worth.

I have read all 43 public comments submitted on this application to date. I’d also ask the board to notice a pattern in this record. Nineteen of the 43 comments — nearly 40 percent — come from a single anonymous outlet, Hudson Common Sense, submitted one at a time over the course of a month, each one raising a new procedural question while declining to draw any conclusion. This tactic — sending a high volume of comments one-by-one — creates the impression of sustained, unresolved concern regardless of whether it exists. The hedging lets serious-sounding implications go on the record — conflicts of interest, concealed findings, financial impropriety — without the outlet ever having to provide proof or stand behind a claim.

Separately, several comments describe the people who will live in this development — and by extension, the people living at Bliss right now — through the language of “ghettoization,” “concentrated poverty,” and density itself as a threat. That framing treats the people who need this housing as the problem to be managed rather than the community this project is meant to serve. It’s also simply not what this project does. The redevelopment is mixed-income by design. Existing Bliss units serve households at roughly 30 to 50 percent of Area Median Income; additional units are aimed at 50 to 80 percent — the nurse, the teacher, the two-income household that earns too much for public housing and nowhere near enough for Hudson’s market rate rents.

Several comments stated that this project conflicts with Hudson’s Strategic Housing Action Plan and its preference for geographically dispersed affordable housing. Scattered-site housing is a genuinely important part of a healthy housing system, and Hudson should keep pursuing it. But Hudson is two square miles, and scattered-site development means acquiring parcels one at a time, each likely to face its own version of this exact fight. It cannot produce housing at the volume or speed this crisis demands. This project can, because the Housing Authority already owns the land — it is buildable now. And this plan has already been revised to be more in line with the Housing Action Plan in response to community and state feedback, dropping a seven-story element, dropping underground parking, and replacing the original nine-story tower with a design under four stories meant to sit inside the neighborhood.

It’s also important to consider Hudson’s history, because we have been at a decision point like this before. In the early 1970s, this city demolished roughly 286 buildings and displaced nearly 850 people — close to one in ten Hudson residents — following the national Urban Renewal trend. Those neighborhoods were dense, working-class, and disproportionately Black. My own family lost a house on Warren Street in that clearance. My great-aunt Liz Miroddi was still living when it came down, and she ended up in public housing at the Terrace. Many Black families displaced in that same period did not get that same chance — poorly-enforced fair housing laws and discriminatory lending across the Hudson Valley meant Black families had less access to home ownership and were instead directed into public housing. Quintin Cross’s letter in this record speaks to that history directly, and better than I can.

Critically, none of the objections in the public comments I’ve addressed above come from Bliss residents. The people who actually live there have said what they want, plainly, on the record, for years. They want redevelopment. They want a safe, secure place to call home. I’d ask the board to weigh those voices at least as heavily as the ones raising objections from outside the building.

I ask the board to approve the site plan. Thank you for your time and your service to this city.

Sincerely,
Caitie Hilverman
Fifth Ward, Hudson

I wasn’t sure what to write about this week. When I started making a list, it bummed me out. Should I finish the piece about the millions of New Yorkers — myself included — losing health insurance because of federal cuts? What about FLOCK cameras right here in our county? Midweek, I thought maybe I’d write about the floods and our shoddy sewer infrastructure. It all felt like too much.

In moments of overwhelm, I try to drop in and see the world through my kids’ eyes. They’re both in summer camp. Cliffy is at Art Omi, and Poppy is enjoying her fifth year at Oakdale in the free camp run by Hudson’s Department of Youth.

It’s been a challenging summer to be the parent of kids in camp — trying to assess risk, asking questions I never expected to have to ask all right in a row.

Is the flooding too severe to send them to camp?
Is the air quality too bad to send them to camp?
Is the heat index too high to send them to camp?

It feels a lot like it did during COVID, constantly assessing whether Poppy could go to daycare, whether we could go to that birthday party, whether we could visit my parents when local case counts were surging.

But when I think about what my kids are actually experiencing, my whole body relaxes. Poppy is having the most 1990s summer of her life, hitting me with unparalleled nostalgia to see her living like I did, in the same exact place. I let myself imagine it, and try to live inside it for a minute, too.

Let me set the scene for you.

You are nine years old. You’re going to Oakdale Summer Camp, at the little lake a quarter mile from your house, spending all day outside — swimming, riding bikes, playing Nok Hockey, hanging out with your friends. A couple of your best friends are there too. The counselors are all teenagers you’re trying to emulate, with their cool hairstyles, crop tops, and Gen-Z slang you’re starting to fold into your own vocabulary.

When the weather or air quality is bad, you’re inside at the Youth Center down on 3rd Street, learning how to hustle people in pool and doing arts and crafts with Ntangou, a local artist, or doing acting club with Open Air Shakespeare.

You have a new bike — a hand-me-down from a bigger kid nearby, also tall for her age — and for the first summer ever, you’re allowed to ride it by yourself to and from camp.

Sometimes after camp, you head to the Hudson Area Library, right around the corner from Oakdale, to borrow a couple of new graphic novels. You get a recommendation from Emily, the librarian, for Supa Boba Tea, and a big kid in the YA section suggests The First Cat In Space Ate Pizza. You see some friends there and linger a bit longer than you meant to, because you’ve finally aged into the tween and teen room and get to use the computers.

Then your mom needs what seems like the millionth coffee of the day. She drags you to Supernatural, and you let her without protest, because you know what's coming — a cookie the size of your face and quarters for the crystal machine.

One evening, you get a special treat — one of your best friends is in another camp, Columbia County Youth Theater, and you get to go see her play The Emperor’s New Clothes. Afterward, you go to Stewart’s for ice cream with two dozen other kids. It takes forever, thank goodness; it feels like night will never end.

For dinner, your seemingly always-tired parents are making cheeseburgers on the grill again — thank goodness. You ask them, for the tenth time this week, if you can get a Sprite to drink with dinner, and by the grace of all things holy, they finally say yes.

After dinner, you go to the waterfront. First you walk around the corner to ask the nine-year-old who lives around the block if she wants to come. Her parents say yes; she can! You bring her along with a volleyball and some stick-on nails. You chat with other kids playing soccer that you know from school, and you make fun of your mom for saying, yet again, how beautiful the sunset is.

You do not have a phone yet, even though you are desperate for one. You do not have deadlines. You do not have bills to pay. You do not have to make decisions about risk, or media exposure, or anything at all. You are suntanned, you are pedaling around town, you have friends up and down the neighborhood.

And when you come back to reality — and you are the grown-up watching this all unfold, coffee number four in hand — you get to hold two truths. Yes, there is flooding and the air quality is not great and the whole world unraveling around us — AND your kid has a new-to-them bike and they are getting their first taste of freedom. They have neighbors looking out for them and friends on every block. It does not have to be one or the other. We get to hold both. It is the summer of 2026, and sometimes, we are doing just fine.

A quick, timely one today — relevant for folks who care about the landscape of affordable housing in Hudson.

If you’re tapped into housing in Hudson, you know that we’re in a moment of community decision-making about public housing; there is a proposal before the planning board for the redevelopment of Bliss Towers, public housing constructed during Urban Renewal in the early 1970s. Earlier this year I wrote two pieces about this issue: Bliss Towers, Then and Bliss Towers, Now, that cover the memory of what that building meant to the families who first moved in, and the reckoning with what it’s become after fifty years without real reinvestment.

Tonight, that story hits another decision point.

The Hudson Planning Board is holding its public hearing on the Bliss Towers redevelopment at 6pm tonight at the Hudson Central Fire Station. This follows the board’s decision in May that the project won’t negatively impact the environment – a major procedural hurdle cleared. Tonight’s hearing is on the site plan itself — the plan that would take Bliss from 135 units to 276, will phase construction so no one is displaced, and will replace the nine-story tower with brick, bay-windowed buildings that stay under four stories.

If you can’t make it in person, the meeting will also be posted on the city’s YouTube, and there’s a 10-day written comment period after tonight for anyone who wants their voice on the record. You can send comments to Linda Fenoff at lfenoff@cityofhudson.org.

It’s easy for a hearing like this to feel procedural. But for residents, this is the difference between more years of waiting and an actual timeline. I attended a public hearing about this project two years ago, in May 2024, when the ask was much different — the Council was only voting on whether to apply for a demolition grant via Restore NY, not on the design. Even so, the room was packed and tense, residents and neighbors talking over each other, everyone fighting for three minutes at the mic.

That meeting changed how I think about the way we engage with each other on housing. Several Bliss residents spoke that night, giving firsthand testimony about their living conditions and pleading the room not to delay on redevelopment any further. Others commenters focused on process and design — zoning, traffic, scale, whether the City had enough information to vote responsibly.

Every voice matters here — that’s the point of a public hearing. This is something we figure out together, and it will shape our community for generations. But if you go tonight, or catch the coverage after, I’d ask you to listen especially closely to the folks speaking from lived experience — people who have called Bliss Towers home for years, sometimes generations, and who’ve been dealt a different hand than those of us who own houses. Listen for what they’re asking for. Listen for what it took to get here.

The developer is targeting a December closing for state funding, and missing that window could push things back six to nine months or more. I’ll be writing about this – and other housing issues in Hudson – in the coming weeks.

A small aside: a few of you noticed I skipped posting a week or two this summer. I took some time off — kids out of school and into camp, my birthday, some somatics practice, actual REST — and I’m glad to be back. Thank you for being here.

More soon,
Caitie

I’m writing this from my kitchen, dark even though it’s late morning. There’s a heat wave rolled in over upstate New York, and I’ve covered every window in our house with those sunshade reflectors that usually go in the front window of your car — twelve of them, from the Dollar Tree, a.k.a. the five-quarter store. The heat is pressing down l…

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Two things nagged at me. The first was whose idea it was. I’d heard it came from a parent group. There is nothing I love more, truly, than a group of exhausted parents of young children getting organized for a cause. But I worried they might be imposing their own vision of what schooling should look like onto a district where the real experts were the teachers, the administrators, and ultimately the kids. The second thing I worried about was accessibility. One-fifth of Hudson students have individualized education plans (IEPs), legally binding documents that outline specialized instructions, accommodations, and services that a child needs to succeed in public school. An outdoor learning space doesn’t automatically meet every need; it can just as easily exclude as it can open up.

Both concerns dissolved pretty quickly once I understood how this had actually been shaped.

Parents for a Healthy Hudson, the group behind the project, sent a survey to the entire staff at M.C. Smith before drawing up a single design. Thirty-four teachers responded. Every single one of them supported expanding outdoor learning. Nearly half wanted to be directly involved in planning and implementation. Accessibility ran through the survey responses and the design conversations from the beginning: gated enclosures, wheelchair-accessible ramps and tables, sight lines for supervision, raised garden beds with tactile features for students with disabilities. The teachers had thought about this carefully, as the people who have spent hours upon hours with Hudson kids.

So I got on board.

I should say: I have some skin in this game. My kids go to M.C. Smith. I went to M.C. Smith. My mother and uncle were public school teachers at M.C. Smith. My stepmom is a public school teacher nearby. I grew up understanding public school as something you believed in and supported, not something you abandoned when it got hard. The north side lawn along upper Paddock Place — the stretch of grass that is about to become an outdoor classroom — is a piece of ground I have walked on more times than I can count.

We didn’t have outdoor learning when I was there (nor did we have smart boards, Chromebooks, and tablets). The addition to M.C. Smith had just been built when I started fifth grade, when they closed Greenport and Claverack schools and integrated the elementary schools into one. My education happened fully inside that building, under fluorescent lights, the way everyone’s did. Nobody thought to question that or ask for more – until this year.

The idea behind the outdoor classroom is simple. Hudson kids currently get about 20 minutes outside per day for recess. Parents for a Healthy Hudson – and the teachers that they surveyed – wanted more than that. Not just more fresh air, but actual learning outside. Science in a garden. Reading in the shade. Music in the open air. Something that the private schools in the area regularly incorporate into their curriculum – that they have the infrastructure to support.

Schools – both public and private – are incorporating outdoor learning across the country, with research to back it up. A 2022 review of 147 research studies found that outdoor learning in natural settings produces increased student engagement and ownership of learning, development of social and collaborative skills, and improved self-concept factors (e.g., resilience, self-esteem, pro-social behavior). A large English study of 125 schools and over 40,000 students found that 92 percent of teachers reported pupils were more engaged when learning outdoors, while 92 percent of students said they enjoyed lessons more outside and 90 percent felt happier and healthier as a result. A Norwegian study that followed 555 children for 10 years found that those who spent more time outdoors in their early years had better attentional control and stronger academic results by adolescence. Time and time again, the data shows that outdoor learning has a positive impact on our kids.

When Parents for a Healthy Hudson first started reaching out for funding, they were thinking they would need $100,000, maybe $200,000, enough to get something started. Then they went to their legislators. Assemblymember Didi Barrett was engaged. So was her team. When Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie came to M.C. Smith alongside Barrett in early June, the conversation moved faster than anyone expected.

What came back was $1.6 million — through the Community Resiliency, Economic Sustainability, and Technology (CREST) program, a state capital fund with more than $300 million set aside specifically for projects like this one.

With that kind of funding now confirmed for the outdoor classroom, the vision grew to match it. The planned space divides the north side lawn along upper Paddock Place into four parts: a covered outdoor classroom with writing surfaces, tables and chairs; a garden; an amphitheater-style area for science and agricultural classes; and a storage space that doubles as a student workspace. Native plants will border the whole thing. Accessibility is built in from the ground up — wheelchair-accessible ramps and tables, fully gated enclosures for students with elopement risks, raised garden beds with tactile features. The space is designed for simultaneous use by up to three classes.

As Hannah Black, Parents for a Healthy Hudson co-founder, wrote in the comments of a Gossips of Rivertown (a local blog) post: “I think we got lucky with timing for funding, and we presented a clear and compelling idea — but also the proposal to support more outdoor time came as more parents and districts are pushing back on schools’ increasing reliance on technology with smart boards and Chromebooks.”

This funding was a win. It will allow the Hudson City School District to build an outdoor learning space that generations of kids will use. But the news of $1.6 million arriving that quickly, on the heels of significant budget cuts, stung.

This year, Hudson’s school budget faced a roughly $4 million shortfall, driven in part by unplanned expenses, including increased health care costs and an almost $1 million adjustment in pharmaceutical costs. The Board of Education adopted a roughly $59 million budget that calls for a 5.8% tax levy increase and draws nearly $2 million from the district’s fund balance. Even with all of that, the budget cut 33 positions. The teachers and staff are feeling it, and the kids are too.

[Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that Wincap software contributed to the budget shortfall. According to School Board President Mark DePace, the software created significant administrative difficulty in building the budget but was not the cause of the $4M gap. The piece has been updated to reflect this.]

I was a guest speaker for four periods at Hudson Junior High last week, and in every single period, I overheard students talking about the teachers they were losing. One teacher was giving away her classroom supplies to other teachers in the wing. Kids lamented the loss of “the best staff member ever.” The teacher whose class I was visiting gently corrected them at one point, reminding them that a layoff is not the same as a firing. The kids understood the distinction and also did not really care about it. What they knew was that someone they loved was not going to be there in September.

I can only begin to imagine how it landed for those staff members, and for the teachers and staff who remain — many of whom will now be asked to do more with less — to read about a $1.6 million announcement the same week. Even the teachers who supported the outdoor classroom. Especially them, maybe. It is a particular kind of grief to watch infrastructure get funded while people get cut. And it is a thing I have seen again and again — the willingness to pay for capital improvements while people and programs are stripped away.

Maureen Sheridan, a former teacher who now sits on the Board of Education, named this directly at the BOE meeting on Tuesday. After offering congratulations to the community members who spearheaded the project, and emphasizing that she did not want her comments to interfere with or jeopardize the funding, she asked the question that a lot of people in Hudson have been asking quietly:

“How is it that we are laying off staff, cutting programming, raising school taxes to close a multimillion dollar spending gap in part because the State of New York is not able to or willing to increase its aid allocation this year, but there’s $1.6 million readily available and offered to a grassroots parent group for an outdoor project that just a week ago few people knew about?”

She added that no one on the board had any idea this kind of money was going to be allocated to the project. Diana Howard, also a former teacher, said her first knowledge of the project’s scale was when she read about it in the Register Star.

I also want to say clearly: this is not the money that could have saved those jobs. CREST is a capital fund. It pays for ramps and pergolas and raised garden beds. It does not, and cannot, pay teacher salaries. It is also a reimbursement grant; HCSD will not be able to claim those funds until they have already spent them on eligible program costs. The $1.6 million for an outdoor classroom and the layoffs happening down the hall are not trade-offs against each other, however much it might feel that way.

But none of that erases the sting. And pretending otherwise would be a disservice to everyone holding both things at once.

There were, of course, people who opposed the project outright. Primarily in the comments section of Gossips of Rivertown, a local blog that posted about the classroom twice. The same handful of voices that have made a hobby out of opposing nearly every initiative in this district piled in within hours. The same voices that pushed hard for a no-vote on the budget. The same voices that, on a long enough timeline, have something contemptuous to say about almost any expenditure that benefits Hudson kids.

The project was dismissed as a “luxury belief.” Compared to a million-dollar chalkboard by the road for newcomers to admire. The school itself referred to as a “factory that produces less and less.” One commenter wrote: “Indoors or out, uneducated is still uneducated. Birdsong will not make an illiterate student suddenly grasp critical reading or thinking.”

The central claim, repeated in multiple variations, is that Hudson schools are failing. The evidence offered is always the same: standardized test scores. “Only one in four kids reads at grade level.” “Near the bottom of New York on literacy and numeracy.”

I have a PhD in cognitive psychology. I have spent a meaningful portion of my professional life thinking about how learning is measured and what those measurements actually tell us. So I want to say this plainly: using standardized test scores to evaluate a high-poverty school district, and then using those scores as a moral argument against investing in the district, is one of the most well-documented analytical errors in American education discourse.

I wrote about this last month, and I will say it again — the correlation between socioeconomic status and standardized test performance is one of the most robust findings in education research. It has been replicated across decades, across countries, across testing instruments. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Education examining international student assessment data found that student socioeconomic status had the largest correlation with math and reading test scores of any student-level variable studied. The OECD’s PISA 2022 report found that socioeconomically disadvantaged students were seven times more likely than advantaged students to fail to achieve basic mathematics proficiency.

The Hudson City School District is approximately 67% economically disadvantaged. About 10% of students are English language learners. Nearly 20% have IEPs. These are not excuses. They are facts about the population the district serves.

When you compare Hudson’s test scores to wealthier, whiter, less diverse districts in Columbia County and across the state, you are not measuring whether Hudson teachers are good at their jobs. You are measuring poverty. You are measuring the gap between a child whose family can afford private tutoring and a child whose family is choosing between rent and groceries. You are measuring whose parents read to them at bedtime and whose parents work the night shift. You are measuring, in other words, exactly the conditions that public schools exist to push against.

And then the same people who use those scores to declare the district a failure turn around and use that declared failure to argue against funding the district. The logic is circular and cruel: schools perform worse, so we shouldn’t put resources into them, so they continue to perform worse, so we still shouldn’t fund them.

The framework, if followed, would guarantee exactly the outcome it claims to point out. Strip funding from the district. Consolidate it with wealthier neighbors. Push the families who can afford to leave into Hawthorne Valley and Red Hook and other surrounding “high performing” schools. And leave behind — in a smaller, poorer, more under-resourced school — the very kids whose test scores started the conversation.

There is a conversation to be had about Hudson schools. About curriculum. About communication between the board and the community. About what students actually need to thrive. That conversation requires good faith, intellectual honesty, and a basic willingness to believe that the kids in this district are as deserving of investment as any other kids in this state.

And Hudson kids are so, so deserving.

Every morning, regardless of the weather or the budget or the latest comments-section-crossfire amongst the grown-ups, hundreds of children walk through the doors of M.C. Smith. They show up to teachers who are grieving the loss of their colleagues. To classrooms where supplies are being passed hand to hand. To a building that has held this work for almost a century, and is about to hold a little more of it outside on the lawn.

In a year or two, that lawn will have raised beds and writing surfaces and a covered space where a science class can meet without the wind blowing the papers away. There will be a garden tended by parent volunteers and high school agriculture students. There will be kids in the dirt, kids reading under a shade structure, kids learning the names of native plants because the plants are right there to point to.

It will not fix the budget. It will not erase the layoffs. It will not silence the people who have decided, on principle, that nothing this district does is worth supporting.

But it will be there. For my kids. For their classmates. For the kids who come after them. For the teachers who said, unanimously, that this is what their students need. And for me, that is enough.

It’s also a week of community celebration. Flag Day, Juneteenth, and Pride — all inside a seven-day turnaround. That’s Hudson for you. We’re a small city, but we know how to show out: we parade all year round, for everything, and sometimes there are more people marching than watching. Whenever I get overwhelmed by the cynicism and political differences here, I watch folks come together and celebrate – over and over again, for different reasons, with different people. It feels sort of miraculous.

Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth. If you’ve never marked it before, here’s why we recognize it: on June 19, 1865, Union troops rode into Galveston, Texas, and told the enslaved people there that they were free. That should have happened two and a half years earlier, when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. But Texas was the last hold-out of the Confederacy, and freedom only moves as fast as the people in power are willing to let it travel. Juneteenth is a reminder that freedom delayed is still freedom denied, and that the work of making liberation real, for everyone, all the way, is never finished. It’s a day for Black joy and Black resilience first. It’s also an invitation to the rest of us to sit with how long justice can take, and to keep pushing for the parts of it that still haven’t arrived.

If you’re white, like me, that invitation means show up and don’t make it about you. Buy from Black businesses, listen to Black speakers, and be grateful for the people who built this tradition.

See the fliers below for two local observances:

Flag Day

Last weekend was the Flag Day parade. I’ve shown up for this parade in some form or fashion consistently over the last two decades, like when I was in the Hudson High marching band with a xylophone strapped to my front. This year was a particularly fun one with my kids. My daughter brought Cherry, her bearded dragon, down Warren Street and drew a crowd of marchers who broke formation to come say hi. My son high-fived anyone who got within four feet of him. Both kids collectively caught more candy being thrown from floats than they got trick-or-treating on Halloween. We ran into dozens of people we knew, and joy was everywhere. It was a really great afternoon.

I have heard Flag Day get a bad rap — too patriotic, too red-white-and-blue, at a moment when our government is making horrific decisions about our values and how to spend our tax dollars. I get the discomfort. But this parade isn’t what people assume from the outside. It’s our community. It’s first responders, Little League, the Office for the Aging, the Youth Center, a mariachi band, a dance team, disability services groups, the Common Council — volunteers, neighbors, public servants, and elected officials who regularly show up for our community doing so together on a day that has become a Hudson tradition. Don’t knock it till you try it.

Pride

And Saturday, June 20th is Pride, a Hudson celebration I am crazy about. The first Pride marches happened in 1970, organized in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to mark one year since the Stonewall uprising — several nights of resistance after police raided the Stonewall Inn. It wasn’t floats and songs and rainbows at first. It was people who’d had enough of being arrested and erased marching to resist, to stand in their dignity. “Pride” was the deliberate opposite of the shame they’d been told for years to carry. The celebration came later once the day had room to hold both grief and joy.

This is the 16th year OutHudson has put on Hudson pride, each year complete with an amazing theme. This year’s theme is “Charlie & the Disco Factory”: glitter, top hats, a disco ball, candy-colored joy. It steps off at 2pm from 7th Street Park, down Warren Street, ending at Promenade Hill with a festival overlooking the river. My kids love this one too — there are people of all ages, music, performances, and candy galore. This year we’re marching with the Hudson Bluehawks so my kids can show their pride about where they go to school (and where I did too!).

I’ll be back to writing civic pieces next week. But this week, we celebrate. We wind down the school year. We welcome the summer — the solstice is Sunday, June 21st. We celebrate dads on Sunday too. We come together. We celebrate. We remember through these community gatherings how much we have in common – the threads that pull right through.

See you this weekend, Hudson!

The gathering was relatively small — only a few dozen people, when we had graduated with 136. There was no organizing committee, no significant outreach. Just a Facebook invite and a graphic sent around to people who had stayed relatively local, who might want to mark the occasion. An invitation to simply show up for each other, twenty years out.

When we first walked in, I was struck by how little people had changed. Everyone was completely recognizable — even the ones I hadn’t seen since graduation day. There were memories built up around the eyes, gray hairs to varying degrees (some of us compared, openly). But otherwise, people looked as I had held them in my mind.

We caught up on the big things. Who married who. Who was on their second husband. Who worked what job. Whose dad had died. Who was about to have another baby. It was a macro-dose of major life transitions — the whole arc of adult life, compressed into a few hours. Birth and death and everything in between. My favorite things to sit with.

We also talked about Hudson. About how much it had changed, about Warren Street and how unrecognizable it was from the one we grew up with. We talked about Polar Bar, Strikers, the Town Faire — places that exist now only in us, in the particular way that lost places live on in the people who loved them.

There’s something specific about returning to a place you grew up in, a place you never fully left. Hudson holds all of my eras simultaneously. Walking into Hudson Brewing Company, I was carrying the girl who graduated in 2006, the Warren Street of my childhood, and this present moment all at once. The city has been overwritten so many times. So have I. Standing there with my classmates, I kept wondering: what are we, exactly, when we gather like this? What are we doing when we take stock of who’s still here, who’s gone, what’s been transformed beyond recognition, what has somehow remained?

A reunion is a particular kind of remembrance. We were honoring something — not just the years, but the specific people we were to each other before we knew who we would become.

As the night went on, I kept checking in with myself. Sometimes when I return to old contexts, I return to old versions of myself too. I notice it especially with my siblings — the way I can step back into a dynamic that is decades old and familiar as muscle memory, but not quite who I am anymore. I was watching for that.

But it didn’t come. No lingering insecurity from high school. No low-grade anxiety about what people might think of what I’m doing with my life. Just openness. Curiosity. Something that felt, surprisingly, like ease.

The conversation that has stayed with me wasn’t even with a 2006 graduate. It was with someone who graduated in 2007 — the partner of a classmate — who, at the end of telling me what she’d been up to, said simply: “And I really love myself.”

It rolled off her tongue without ceremony. Not performed or rehearsed. Just a fact. An update, like saying I moved back home or I changed careers. Just: I love myself, and this is where I am now, twenty years later.

I felt an ache in my chest when she said it. I recognized it quickly: longing. What would it look like to say that and mean it? To run into someone I hadn’t seen in years and have one of my updates be I love myself and how I show up in the world? To carry that not as an aspiration, but as a simple true thing?

I’ve been sitting with that since Friday. I think it’s pointing somewhere.

The rest of the night went the way high school parties used to. Ryan Wexler DJed, playing all the 2002-2006 hits — and at some point, our class song came on. Soco Amaretto Lime by Brand New, the line I’m gonna stay 18 forever looping again and again across the room. We were thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old. We had buried parents, raised children, found new jobs, survived marriages. And we danced together anyway.

There’s something that felt both absurd and tender about that — the anthem of our adolescence playing for people who are nothing like they were at eighteen, who have been broken open and reassembled in ways that eighteen-year-old us couldn’t have imagined. I’m gonna stay 18 forever. We did not. And somehow, on the other side of all that becoming, we seemed to be doing just fine.

We laughed and caught up. We drank — notably less than in 2006. The Knicks were on the TVs, and the bar filled up to watch them win their second game in San Antonio. Leslie and I left at 10:15, a late night for me these days.

On the drive home, we marveled at what a sweet night it had been.

I’ve been thinking about why reunions matter, especially in a place like Hudson, where many of us are still here, still in it, still becoming. I think it’s because they ask us to hold two things at once: who we were, and who we are now. And there is something sacred about gathering with the people who knew you before the story had gotten very far — and finding that you’re still glad to know each other, still curious, still here.

See you in ten years, Class of 2006. I can’t wait to know you then too.

Curious about how Hudson works? How decisions are made and how power moves? Check out my civic explainer series:

The Mayor’s Office — Who holds executive power in Hudson, and what they can (and can’t) do with it.

The Common Council — The legislative body that sets policy, passes the budget, and shapes the city’s direction.

The City Treasurer — The office that manages Hudson’s money.

The Planning Board — Where development decisions get made, and who gets a seat at the table.

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There are only three citywide elected positions in Hudson. The Mayor, the Council President, and the City Treasurer. Every other person working in city government is either elected by ward, appointed, or hired.

I’ll be honest: for most of my adult life, I’ve let my eyes glaze over at the financial parts. I trusted that someone competent was handling it. I stayed tuned into the issues — the planning board contention, the housing debates, the Council meetings — and tuned out when the conversation turned to fund balances and bond anticipation notes. That felt like professional territory, not mine.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: this is an elected position. The person managing Hudson’s money — collecting taxes, paying bills, sitting on the body that produces the annual budget — answers to voters, not to a professional board or a city manager. That means it’s ours to pay attention to, whether or not we feel equipped to.

And the stakes are real. Hudson’s tax base has been shrinking even as property values have risen, which means the people who have lived here longest are often feeling the squeeze hardest. There is an affordability crisis here, and rising taxes are part of it. There are active efforts to defund city departments. The city is navigating major capital projects, a growing pile of grants with no one dedicated to managing them, and a charter so old it still has rules about horse blocks and triplicate receipt books.

In that context, understanding how money moves through city government — and who is responsible for moving it — isn’t a wonky side interest. It should be central to how we engage.

Every year, the school budget vote generates public anxiety about the tax levy. When those bills go out, they come through the treasurer’s office. When $2.6 million in delinquent property taxes piled up during COVID, this office was on the hook to recover it. When Airbnb lodging taxes come due each quarter, they flow here. When someone nearly walked away with $350,000 of city money in a wire transfer scam, Hudson found out because this office is required to disclose it — in public, at the monthly Council meeting.

Every time something financial about this city makes the news, there is an office behind it. The treasurer’s office is that office.

The current City Treasurer is Heather Campbell. She has held the office since 2014, been re-elected five times, and her current term runs through December 2027. I sat down with her to talk through the role for this piece.

Collecting the City’s Money

Once a year, the tax list gets certified and warranted by the mayor and City Clerk — and from that moment, it lands on the treasurer’s desk. Every tax on that list automatically becomes a lien on real property. The treasurer publishes notice, opens the office for payments, and starts collecting.

Hudson issues a single property tax bill covering both city and county taxes. Because Hudson is treated as a town of Columbia County for tax purposes, the treasurer also collects county taxes — and is required to make the county whole at year’s end, regardless of how much has actually come in. Same with school taxes: after about three months, the school district stops collecting within city limits and turns every unpaid bill over to the treasurer’s office. The city carries those receivables and makes the school district whole on a monthly basis for two years, then covers whatever remains.

“The little city is responsible for all the outstanding tax receivables for both the county and the school,” Campbell told me. It’s New York State law.

Beyond property taxes, the treasurer collects all other money owed to the city — including rent on city-owned property. Every collection gets recorded daily: the amount, the payer’s name, the ward. All of it flows into one of approximately 40 bank accounts the city maintains, each of which has to be reconciled and kept current.

When people don’t pay, the treasurer is responsible for enforcement — including foreclosure. During COVID, that process slowed deliberately. By the time the pandemic era was over, the city had accumulated $2.6 million in delinquent taxes across 153 properties.

The recovery has been significant. In late 2025, the Council passed a local law extending repayment windows and lowering down payment thresholds to help owners stay in their homes while the city recouped what it was owed. By early 2026, the list had dropped to 30 properties, with over a million dollars recovered. Five properties now account for 64% of what remains.

One complication worth knowing: the treasurer can identify delinquent properties and submit the list, but actually pursuing foreclosure requires the mayor’s office to hire an attorney. Campbell told the Council she has no authority to hire counsel herself — that falls to the mayor. She also noted that finding attorneys willing to work through Hudson’s foreclosure process has historically been difficult, partly because of errors made in prior years that made attorneys reluctant to take on the work. The charter says the treasurer must collect. But to actually move on it requires cooperation from the mayor’s office.

Paying the City’s Bills

The charter creates a two-track system for paying bills. Salaries, wages, and bond payments go out without prior review — the treasurer pays these on drafts signed by the mayor or Council President and countersigned by the City Clerk. Everything else — vendor payments, contracts, other claims — requires audit and allowance by the relevant board or department before the treasurer can cut a check.

Every payment, regardless of which track, has to be made on uniform numbered draft forms. The charter is specific: no other form can be used to draw city funds. It’s old language, but Campbell told me the practice is still alive: every department still has a receipt book with triplicate receipts — one for the department, one for the treasurer’s office, one for the record.

The charter's fingerprints are everywhere in how the city operates administratively. Campbell mentioned one example that is still bugging me: Hudson has five different people running five different payrolls for five different sections of city government, instead of one centralized payroll function. "It's inefficient and it doesn't make sense," she said, "but it's developed based on how the charter is written." It's a small window into how much of the city's administrative complexity isn't the result of bad decisions — it's just the accumulated weight of very old rules that nobody has had the political will or bandwidth to modernize.

The city also hasn’t had a municipal credit card, Campbell told me, since a Common Council resolution passed years ago, after misuse of the card that existed. It hasn’t come back since. Campbell is now working to reopen that conversation — a single card, two required sign-offs, limited use. Her argument for her own office’s use is practical: they buy a lot of envelopes and postage, and buying them online instead of directly from the post office could save several thousand dollars a year. Right now, when a city department needs to pay for a recurring software subscription, someone puts it on a personal card and gets reimbursed. That’s the workaround.

The treasurer also cannot pay anything the Common Council has directed to be withheld — unless a majority of members votes to release it. The Council can freeze a specific payment, and the treasurer is bound by that, regardless of what the mayor wants.

Accountability and Reporting

Every month, at the regular Council meeting, the treasurer is required to report a summary of all receipts and disbursements since the last report — broken down by account and fund, with current balances. Once a year, by June 30th, a full itemized accounting gets filed with the City Clerk: every dollar in, every dollar out, plus a statement of the city’s overall financial condition. It’s a public record. Anyone can ask to see it.

What these requirements don’t mandate is any forward-looking planning — no multi-year projections, no fiscal strategy, no long-term outlook. The charter requires Hudson to look back, not forward. Campbell does try to add some forward-facing context in her reports — flagging trends, noting where revenues might shift. “We don’t really do a long-term projection per se,” she told me, “but we absolutely look at prior years and trends and discuss how those trends might impact the city’s finances going forward.” That’s not nothing. But it’s also not required of the role.

Whether that’s sufficient for a city under significant financial pressure is a fair question. When Campbell started in 2014, the city had one active grant. It now has approximately 35 — with no specialized grant management staff to track them. “It’s like trying to herd cats,” she said.

Each grant comes with its own rules: eligible expenses, documentation requirements, reimbursement timelines, reporting deadlines. Miss a deadline or miscategorize an expense and the city can lose reimbursement it was counting on — or worse, have to pay money back. Right now, that tracking falls across multiple people in multiple departments, none of whom are dedicated to it. Campbell has been raising the alarm about this for years. The complexity has grown dramatically. The staffing hasn’t.

The stakes of the office became clear in December 2025, when hackers gained access to Campbell’s work computer and nearly got away with a $350,000 wire transfer from the Bank of Greene County. She clicked a link in an email she was legitimately expecting related to a city audit, which compromised her computer. The bank’s verification system caught it before the money left. Hudson residents found out the way they’re supposed to find out about what happens in this office: Campbell disclosed it at her regular monthly report to the Council, in a public meeting. That’s the accountability structure the charter built.

The BEA: Where the Real Power Lives

The treasurer’s most consequential role is the seat they hold on the Board of Estimate and Apportionment. The BEA is the three-person body that produces Hudson’s annual budget. Its members are the mayor, the Council President, and the City Treasurer — one vote each.

The BEA must deliver a budget to the Common Council by November 10th each year. As we covered in the Council piece, the Council can only reduce line items from there — it cannot add to the budget or send it back. Which means the BEA’s budget is, in large part, the budget. And the treasurer is one-third of that body.

At a Finance Committee meeting in December 2024, Campbell presented a five-year budget review showing city spending had grown from $14.9 million in 2020 to $19.7 million in 2025 — a 32% increase in five years. She walked me through some of what’s driving it. Retirement contributions to the New York State pension fund have nearly doubled in a decade — particularly the Police and Fire Retirement System, which has grown sharply as officers retire after 20 years at the highest salaries in city government. Healthcare costs have climbed steadily. And the city has been carrying significant borrowing costs for two major concurrent capital projects — the Ferry Street Bridge and the Downtown Revitalization Initiative — both of which required short-term borrowing while waiting for grant reimbursements that have been slow to arrive.

“The free $10 million grant,” Campbell told me, “has cost us about $2 million.”

Both projects are now substantially complete, and she expects the borrowing costs to ease once the reimbursements come through. The 2025 budget required drawing $800,000 from the city's fund balance to cover the gap — but Campbell was quick to put that in context. In every budget she can remember, projected expenditures have exceeded projected revenues. That's not unusual; it's how municipal budgeting typically works. What has kept it from being a real problem, for most of her tenure, is that revenues consistently came in higher than projected and expenditures came in lower — so the city actually added to its fund balance rather than drawing it down. 2024 was the first year that pattern broke. "Not only did we not use that amount," she told me, "we didn't actually add to the fund balance." It was the first time in her tenure the gap was real and not just a budgeting artifact.

Campbell gave me a short lesson on what fund balance actually means, because the term gets thrown around in ways that obscure more than they clarify. Fund balance is essentially the municipal equivalent of equity — the difference between the city's assets and its liabilities. It's often described as a rainy day fund, but she pushed back on that framing: much of it is already earmarked for specific purposes. What people are usually talking about when they worry about fund balance is the unassigned portion — the slice that's genuinely available to cover gaps. Drawing from it isn't automatically a crisis, she said, but doing it repeatedly, without a plan to replenish it, is how cities get into trouble.

The BEA also controls fund transfers throughout the year. Under $500, the treasurer can authorize alone. Between $500 and $1,000 requires the full BEA. Over $1,000 requires BEA approval plus the Council. Those thresholds haven’t been updated in decades, despite inflation — but every dollar moving between city funds still passes through a process the treasurer is part of.

Something worth understanding about the BEA: all three members are independently elected. The mayor doesn’t appoint the treasurer and can’t remove them. They are co-equal partners whether they agree or not. Campbell confirmed that disagreements happen. “From time to time, yes,” she said. “It really depends on the combination at any given time.” She’s worked with multiple mayors and multiple Council Presidents over twelve years. “At the end of the day, we get something done,” she said. “It has to get done.”

Should This Be an Elected Position?

Campbell has held the office long enough that folks might forget that it is an elected position at all. The last contested race was in 2021, when Michael Hofmann ran against her — the first real challenge since 2013.

I followed that race and found myself genuinely uncertain how to evaluate the candidates. Campbell had credentials and a track record. Hofmann had a compelling vision for transparency. But how was I supposed to know whether either of them was good at debt management? At reading a bond market? At the technical financial work the office actually requires? I’m not sure most voters were asking those questions — and even if they were, how would they answer them?

Campbell acknowledged as much. “I think a lot of people do not understand what this job is or how complicated it is,” she said. “They think I help put together a budget and then pay the bills.”

Managing 35 active grants, issuing bond anticipation notes, reconciling 40 bank accounts, carrying the county and school district’s tax receivables — none of that shows up on a campaign flyer.

Nationally, the trend has been moving toward appointed treasurers for decades. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that cities in California with appointed treasurers paid 13 to 23 percent less in borrowing costs than comparable cities with elected ones — particularly on technically complex tasks like refinancing debt. Appointed treasurers tend to have higher levels of specialized financial training and are selected precisely for that expertise.

But the BEA complicates the picture. If the treasurer were appointed — reporting to the mayor — the mayor would effectively control two of the three BEA votes. The budget process would look very different. Some cities have gone further and eliminated the BEA structure entirely, consolidating budget authority in the mayor’s office or a professional city manager. Others have kept an elected treasurer but added a professional finance director alongside them to handle technical work.

The question isn’t just about expertise versus accountability. It’s about what kind of budget process Hudson wants — and who should have power over it.

Campbell herself has a view that surprised me. "I don't think it should be an elected position," she told me — but she was quick to add that the devil is in the details. Appointed by whom? The Council? The mayor? That's where it gets complicated. She's watched enough political compositions shift over twelve years to know that who does the appointing matters enormously. "There are certain councils where I think they would pick a very responsible person," she said. "And there are years when I don't think that would have been the case." Appointment sounds like a meritocracy, but it's still a political act — just one step removed from the ballot box.

Council President Margaret Morris has announced she intends to pursue charter reform. What that process will look like, and which offices it will touch, remains to be seen. But the treasurer’s role — elected versus appointed, and what that means for the BEA — seems like exactly the kind of structural question a charter revision needs to address.

Pay Attention to This Office

Most of us don’t look. I didn’t, for a long time. But if you want to understand how Hudson’s money actually moves, here’s where to start.

The treasurer’s office is at City Hall, 520 Warren Street, open Monday through Friday, 8:30am to 5pm. You can walk in. You can ask questions.

The annual report is filed with the City Clerk by June 30th each year. It’s a complete accounting of every dollar that came in and went out, plus a statement of the city’s overall financial condition. It’s a public record. You can ask to see it.

The monthly treasurer’s report is presented at every Common Council meeting. It’s a summary of all receipts and disbursements since the last meeting, broken down by account and fund, with current balances. Council meetings are public. The reports are part of the public record. If you attend regularly, you’ll start to develop a feel for the patterns — where money is tight, where it’s flowing, what’s changed since last month.

The BEA budget process happens in the fall. The Board of Estimate and Apportionment — the Mayor, the Council President, and the treasurer — must deliver a budget to the Common Council by November 10th. That process is where the real decisions get made. Showing up to BEA meetings, or even just reading the budget document when it’s released, is one of the most direct ways to understand what the city’s priorities actually are (as opposed to what people say they are).

And if any of this raises questions — about a specific line item, a grant, a payment, a fund balance — you can ask. At a Council meeting during public comment. In a written question to the treasurer’s office. Via a FOIL request if you want documents. The accountability structures are there. They only work if people use them.

Hudson is at a real inflection point financially. The decisions being made right now — about borrowing, about staffing, about what gets funded and what doesn’t — will shape this city for years. The treasurer’s office is at the center of all of it. The charter made sure of that. The rest is up to us!

Locally, we’ll be voting on the Hudson City School District budget, just as communities across New York State will be voting on their own public school budgets. The stakes are high. I know it because I’ve lived it. When I was a rising senior at Hudson High School, the school budget failed twice. A contingency budget went into effect. We lost sports, art, and music, alongside most extracurricular programming. The sentiment then is a bit like what I’m hearing now: our school is failing, just look at the test scores.

Today I want to tell you why test scores are a flawed metric for assessing how a school is performing — and why, in Hudson specifically, they are a particularly inadequate way to measure what’s actually happening for our kids.

This is also personally well-timed. My daughter is in third grade, which made her eligible for her first round of New York State testing. Two weeks ago she had her third grade ELA state tests. Last week, math. I have not seen that level of anxiety from her before. She has such apprehension about going to school, a place that she usually loves

It seems our kids know the stakes too. The system makes sure of that.

For this post I dug a bit into the New York State report card data. I’m focused especially on third grade as a snapshot of our district — in part because it’s most relevant to me right now, and in part because what it reveals is clarifying.

1) 67% of our students live in poverty.

This could be the whole piece.. The relationship between poverty and test scores is one of the most well-documented findings in educational research. When children’s basic needs aren’t met — stable housing, food, safety, routine — they don’t test as well. That is not an opinion.

Sean Reardon, the endowed Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at Stanford University, has built the Stanford Education Data Archive from over 430 million standardized test scores — every public school district in the United States. What the data have told us over time: the test score gap between high-income and low-income children has grown roughly 40 percent over the last 50 years. That gap is nearly twice the size of the achievement gap by race or ethnicity. Income is the primary variable. We see it in our own data, consistently, across every grade level.

Take third grade ELA as a snapshot. Last year, the New York State proficiency average was 54%. Hudson’s overall average was 44%. That headline number looks bad. But when you break it down by economic status, economically disadvantaged third graders in Hudson scored at 37% proficiency. Non-economically disadvantaged third graders scored at 55% — higher than the statewide average.

This pattern holds across every grade level in both ELA and math. In grades 5 and 6, non-economically disadvantaged students score at 57% and 55% proficiency in ELA respectively — again above the state average. In every single grade, the gap between economically disadvantaged and non-economically disadvantaged students tells the same story.

The overall district number is not a school quality score – it is a poverty score. It’s a weighted average of children with vastly different circumstances, flattened into a headline that gets used to argue the school isn’t worth funding.

If this community genuinely cares about test scores — or about our kids — the most direct thing we could do is make sure every child in Hudson is housed and fed. Address the housing crisis. That would move the needle faster than any curriculum change, any new superintendent, any amount of outrage in a comment section.

Cutting the school budget moves the needle in exactly the wrong direction.

2. 10% of our students are English language learners.

New York State requires English Language Learners (ELL) students to take state tests after living here for just one year. One year. Many of our youngest ELL students have been in this country for less than three years — still sleeping in unfamiliar beds, still learning the sounds of a new language, still figuring out how school works in America. And we sit them down and test them in English.

The results are exactly what you’d expect. In third grade ELA, 17% of ELL students scored at proficiency. In fourth grade, 13%. In sixth grade, 8%. The subgroups in other grades are too small to report. Across every grade where we have data, ELL proficiency in ELA is in the single digits or low teens. These are children being measured in a language they are still acquiring.

Those numbers get folded into the district’s overall score, which then gets cited as evidence that Hudson’s schools are failing. They are not failing. We are using the wrong tool to assess them.

When we look at the data like this, we reduce these children to numbers. But it’s worth saying that the ELL students in Hudson City School District are some of the most remarkable kids out there. In a single classroom, children are speaking English, Spanish, Bengali, Arabic, French Creole. My daughter comes home with more language and culture than other kids get from traveling the world – all right where she attends school. She shocked the heck out of me when she said “Ramadan Mubarak” to someone at Aldi. She knows the traditions of holidays that we do not celebrate at home better than I do. And a lot of this she knows not from a curriculum, but from a kid sitting next to her who shared something about their family.

These children are bilingual. Many are trilingual. They are doing something extraordinary and hard — acquiring a new language while simultaneously learning to read and do math in it, in a country that isn’t their first home, often while their families navigate enormous instability. Research on language acquisition suggests it takes five to seven years to develop the academic language proficiency needed to perform on grade-level standardized tests in a second language. We give them one year.

And here is what the data also shows, buried under the headlines: students who were ever in Hudson’s ELL program and stayed through graduation do so at a 95% rate. Ninety-five percent!! The kids who arrive not speaking English, who score zero on third grade state tests, who get counted as failures in the district average — they graduate at even higher rates than everyone else when they get the support they need.

That support — the ENL teachers, the bilingual aides, the counselors who speak their language — is exactly what gets cut first when a school budget fails.

3. 19% of our students have IEPs.

Nearly one in five Hudson students has an Individualized Education Plan. This means a significant portion of our student body has learning differences — dyslexia, processing disorders, ADHD, autism spectrum, and more — that affect how they engage with standardized timed tests.

Students with disabilities are legally required to take state assessments. Many receive accommodations, but the tests still measure them against the same proficiency benchmarks as everyone else.

In third grade ELA this year, students with disabilities scored at 16% proficiency, compared to 51% for general education students. In third grade math, 11% versus 37%. A significant portion of our “failing” test score data is generated by children who are being tested in ways that do not reflect what they know or what they’re capable of.

What those children need are the aides, the specialists, the resource room teachers, the counselors who know their names and their needs and show up for them every single day. Those are exactly the positions that disappear when a budget fails.

4. Wealthier districts teach to the test.

In more resourced districts — wealthier and more homogeneous — test preparation is often a significant part of the educational program. Schools hire test prep specialists. Students practice with released test questions for months. Families pay for tutoring. Some districts offer explicit state test prep curricula that drill kids on the specific question formats and timing they’ll encounter.

This does not mean our kids are learning less. It means they’re being compared on a metric that wealthier districts have had more resources to prepare for. That is not a level playing field, and it should not be used to make the case that our school isn’t worth funding.

5. Children are excelling on tests here too.

The test scores tell you what happens when a significant portion of your student body is living in poverty, learning in their second language, or navigating learning differences — all while being measured by a test designed for none of those realities. But here’s the flip side: when kids from those same schools do well on tests, we credit the parents. When they don’t, we blame the school.

My third grader just took her state tests. We don’t have scores back yet, but she came home with a 94% score on a practice test. She is housed and fed. She has a stable home. She has a father who is brilliant, a grandmother who spent her career in public education, and a mother with a PhD who believes deeply in public schools. She does not have an IEP. English is her first language. She is white.

I do not do test prep with her. I do not drill her on academics at home. I leave her education entirely to her teachers — and her teachers are doing their jobs.

If my daughter scores well, people will say: well, look at her parents. And yes, the conditions of a child’s life matter enormously. But those conditions don’t exist in spite of her school. They exist alongside it. Her teachers are the ones who taught her to read. Her teachers are the ones who built her confidence, who made her love school, who made her excited to walk in on a Monday morning.

The school is not the variable when kids struggle. It is not irrelevant when kids succeed either. It is doing the work either way — with every child who walks through the door, whatever they’re carrying.

So what are we actually voting on tomorrow?

We are voting on whether to fund the teachers, aides, counselors, social workers, reading specialists, and programs that serve 1,471 kids — 67% of whom are economically disadvantaged, 10% of whom are English language learners, 19% of whom have IEPs, and 41 of whom are living in temporary housing right now.

We are voting on whether the Hudson Bluehawks — who made it to the Section II Class A championship this year — get to keep their coaches and their programs.

We are voting on whether the children who arrived in this country one or two or three years ago, who are doing the extraordinary work of learning a new language while also learning to read and do math, get to keep the support staff who are helping them do it.

We are voting on whether a kid who struggles to sit still and focus gets to keep the aide who figured out how to reach them.

We are voting on whether our kids get to make art that gets hung in the halls of a local community college for them to stand proudly next to.

We are voting on whether a teenager who has never felt big anywhere gets to feel big on a stage in the high school musical — whether they get the moment of walking out under the lights to an audience that includes their family, their neighbors, their city.

We are voting on whether the school social worker who knows which kids are struggling at home — who knows to check in on Monday mornings — gets to keep showing up.

We are voting on whether Hudson kids get a counselor, a reading specialist, a coach, a music teacher. On whether the adults who chose to stay in this district — who chose these kids — get to keep choosing them.

That is what is on the ballot tomorrow.

A yes vote does not mean that you’re saying everything is perfect. It does not mean the system doesn’t need reform, that Albany’s funding formula is fair, that there aren’t hard questions worth asking about how resources are spent. There are. Ask them. Show up to budget hearings. Vote for school board members you believe will represent what you care about.

But please, vote yes. Because the kids in Hudson’s public schools are not a test score. They are a community of young people doing remarkable things under genuinely hard circumstances — and they deserve our investment.

Polls are open 11am to 8pm at three locations:

• City of Hudson: Hudson Central Fire Station, 77 N. 7th St.

• Greenport/Stottville/Stockport/Ghent: Greenport Community Center, 500 Town Hall Drive

• Claverack/Livingston/Taghkanic: A.B. Shaw Fire House, 67 Route 23

Vote yes. For our kids.

At the Farmer’s Market, two men approach her. They take issue with her presence, with her fliers, with the school budget she’s advocating for. The exchange becomes a spectacle. One of the men tells her, loudly: “People like you are the reason we can’t have nice things.”

I wasn’t there. But I heard about it from several people who were — witnesses who know and admire this teacher, who cannot seem to make sense of what they saw. Why would someone confront a schoolteacher giving her Saturday morning to the kids she cares about and call her the problem?

I’ve been stewing on this question ever since. It wasn’t an isolated incident. It’s a symptom of something bigger.

Something has taken root in Hudson — something we see playing out all across the country, but that has its own particular flavor here. It’s not disagreement; disagreement is healthy. It’s not even anger; anger, directed well, can help change things, build things. This is something else. It’s a way of moving through civic life that begins from the assumption that anyone who shows up, who cares publicly, who gives their time to a cause — must have an angle.

It shows up in the comments sections of local blogs, where elected officials are given rude nicknames and their motives are picked apart with a certainty that no amount of counter-evidence could shake. It shows up in long, footnoted reports — dressed in the language of fiscal analysis, full of charts and citations — that exist not to ask hard questions but to build a case that everything is rotten and everyone in charge is in on it. It shows up on Facebook community boards and in whisper networks and in the texts we send each other late at night after we’ve been doom-scrolling through the local discourse.

What it cannot do though — what it is structurally incapable of doing — is imagine that people might do things because they love their community.

There is no version of this worldview in which a teacher hands out fliers at a Farmer’s Market because she believes in her students and knows that further cuts will hurt them. There is no version in which a group of parents raises money for a park because they want kids to have somewhere safe to play. There is no version in which a nonprofit is founded because a community looked around, saw a gap, and decided to fill it. In this worldview, care is always a cover story. Love for a place is always a con. And if you can’t immediately see that — well, that just means you’re not smart enough, or not looking hard enough.

And so they look harder. They cherry-pick what they cover — crime, dysfunction, conflict — and go quiet when Hudson kids do something worth celebrating. They make memes out of people’s hard work. They turn genuine civic effort into satire. They confront a teacher at a Farmer’s Market on a Saturday morning and call her the problem.

What they are not doing is worth naming too. They are not knocking on a neighbor’s door to see if they need anything. They are not coaching a team or staffing a food pantry or sitting through a three-hour budget meeting because they believe it matters. They are not imagining a Hudson where children can grow up safe and known and cared for — because imagining that would require believing it’s possible, and believing it’s possible would require a kind of hope they have ruled out.

The cost of this way of approaching the world can be heavy. When we make caring look stupid — when we make showing up feel unsafe — we lose people. The volunteer who gets targeted steps back. The teacher who gets confronted at the Farmer’s Market thinks twice about next Saturday. The long-time resident asked to serve in a commissioner role declines because they don’t want to be slandered online. The young person who was starting to pay attention to local government reads the comment section and decides it isn’t worth it. We lose exactly the people we most need. And that is exactly what they want.

For a while, I let them get to me. I read the blogs. I engaged in the back-and-forth. I let the first thing I took in each morning be someone else’s contempt for the place I love, and I carried it in my chest all day.

I’m done with that.

What I do now is follow where my care takes me. I pay attention to what’s actually growing here — and a lot is growing. It doesn’t make the headlines. It doesn’t even get the footnotes. It doesn’t generate the online engagement that a good takedown does. But it is real and it is ours.

The Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood Community Cleanup Day. The youth workers who stay late at every event. The organized community celebrations like Waterfront Wednesdays. The Common Council members who show up to do a thankless job for almost nothing because they believe in a better Hudson. The volunteers at the Salvation Army and Columbia Kitchen who feed their neighbors every week without fanfare. The Columbia County Sanctuary movement folks who keep our immigrant community safe and seen. The adults who coach little league, who serve as reading mentors in our schools, who work our fire departments. The people who show up not because anyone is watching, but because they cannot imagine not showing up.

I have stopped reading the cynical blogs. I have stopped engaging in the discourse designed to exhaust me into surrender. I start my day differently now. My kids ride their bikes to M.C. Smith every morning, excited to be there — our neighbors call their names from the porch on the way. The cherry blossoms are in full bloom all over this city. I smelled our neighbor’s grill going earlier this week, and he waved and yelled, Come have a burger. My daughter told me last night there are fifty nine days until Oakdale summer camp starts. Fifty nine days. She has been counting.

This is what is worth attending to. This is what we have. And there are so many people building and dreaming and loving on this place — showing up in their full bigness and aliveness, with so much care — because they believe it can be better.

I believe it too. Hudson can work for everyone. I’ve written about it before, and I believe it now.

Not Hudson as a tourist destination – the glossy version that gets written up in travel magazines. Hudson as a place where people actually live and afford to stay. Where kids can grow up knowing their neighbors, riding their bikes to school, counting down the days to summer camp. Where elders are not forgotten. Where the person who just arrived and the person whose family has been here for five generations both have a stake in what this place becomes.

A Hudson where being housed and fed is not a radical position. A Hudson where a kid in the public school system is seen not as a drag on tax dollars but as a person worth investing in – learning to be a grown-up, surrounded by kids who speak different languages and come from different circumstances and carry different kinds of hardship and joy. Being shaped by teachers who chose to stay, who show up on weekends, who drive across the state to watch them play.

And here is what I know: the people building that city are already here. They are already doing the work. They are coaching and tutoring and feeding and organizing and showing up to meetings and handing out fliers on Saturday mornings. They are doing it without recognition, often without thanks, sometimes while being actively mocked for it.

They deserve better than that from us. We deserve better than that from ourselves.

We could stop reaching for our phones the second we wake up and instead go outside, feel the morning, let ourselves be here. We could show up to a City Council meeting and learn something about how decisions get made in our name. We could introduce ourselves to someone on our block we’ve never spoken to. We could see a neighbor struggling and bring them something — food, help, just our presence. We could treat the kids in this city — all of them, not just our own — as ours to protect.

We could fight for a vision instead of just against everything. We could build the Hudson we want instead of cataloguing the Hudson we’re angry about.

That is a choice available to all of us, every single day.

There is a teacher in the Hudson City School District who spent her Saturday morning at the Farmer’s Market with a stack of yellow fliers because she believes in her students and she could not think of a better way to spend her time.

Someone told her she was the reason we can’t have nice things.

I want to say, for the record: she is the reason we have the things worth having. She is the reason kids in this city feel seen. She is the reason any of this holds together.

To her, and to every person who shows up for this place when showing up is hard — thank you. Hudson is worth it. You are worth it.

Now go vote for our kids on May 19th.

If this piece resonated with you — if you’re tired of numbing and ready to come back to what matters — I’m running a 30-day presence challenge starting May 22nd called Awaken to Summer. Daily practices, regular prompts, a small online community, and a solstice gathering at Cedar Park on June 21st (or a guided meditation if you can’t make the trip to Hudson). $33. Learn more and join here.

I was stuck because I used to live there, with my dad and little sister in the 90s. The first floor was a law office and a chiropractor. The second floor was the rape crisis center. The third floor housed apartments, including my dad’s — complete with a claw foot bathtub and roof access that made me feel like we were rich-rich.

Standing in front of it, I felt a pang of sadness and a longing for an earlier time, a version of my life that felt less complicated, more free. And a version of Hudson that felt less complicated and more free, too. I knew then, as I know now, that real estate turnover is commonplace, responding to changing demographics and market forces. But standing there, flooded by a surge of memories of Warren Street weekends with my dad, I was full of nostalgia and grief that had no clear place to land.

I have felt this way time and time again throughout my life — each time I moved, from Hudson to Rochester to Iowa City to Nashville and back home again. Each time I started a new job. When I lost my stepdad. When I had a child. When I had another one. There is a shifting, a sadness, that comes along with transitions — the things that give your days new shape, your identity an adjustment, your life new meaning. It is uncomfortable, and it feels like something you have to carry alone.

But why should we?

I hear the people around me echo the same kind of feelings — difficulty filling their days with anything meaningful after retirement, loneliness and resentment after the birth of a child, a feeling of performing a role that isn’t fully yours after getting a new job. Friends share this hurriedly, belittling their own experiences, making self-deprecating comments about how they should just move on.

I have seen this particularly acutely in Hudson, in people responding to the warp speed at which these two square miles are changing — feeling as I did when standing outside the Barlow. Looking at something and not recognizing it. Knowing that even though you have deeply embodied memories in a place, that place is no longer for you.

I’ve seen no better example of it than when The Shacks — Furgary, Shantytown — came down last April. I went down the evening before they were bulldozed to offer one last thank you, take one last look. But I learned the next day, after they were all flattened, that so many people with long histories in Hudson had no idea they were coming down at all. They mourned openly and publicly, on community boards and out loud to each other.

Others were glib, citing how unreasonable it would be to have kept them — they were dilapidated, a safety hazard. Why would people get so worked up about some shacks?

Because they meant something. Their removal is more evidence to the people who lived here for decades, for generations, that this place is changing faster than we can catch up. Those shacks represented a version of Hudson that is no longer present here. And when there is no ceremony, no gathering, no ritual to mark a loss like that, the grief just — sits. Unwitnessed and alone.

And I think that’s the problem. Not the change itself — but the absence of anything to hold it.

The answer isn’t to freeze things in place. We can’t keep every dilapidated building in perpetuity. We can’t stop people from retiring or having babies or moving on. But we can honor these changes. With ceremony, with ritual.

Research backs this up: across anthropology, psychology, and organizational theory, structured ritual has been shown to reduce anxiety, support emotional regulation, and help people find meaning during the hardest phases of transition. It gives form to what is otherwise formless. It says — what you are moving through is real, and it is worthy of witness.

I have found this myself. When I left my job at The Spark of Hudson — a role I had poured three years of my full self into — I knew ahead of time I’d have a hard time letting go. So I asked my staff, half-jokingly, to throw me a funeral.

And they did. They invited my community partners. They asked everyone to wear black. They passed the mic and asked people to share stories from my time at Spark. I left that night feeling catapulted into what was next — seen and supported by the people I’d worked closest with, and genuinely better for it.

There are ways to do this as a community, too. A local filmmaker, Karl Frederick Mattson of 542 Films, produced a documentary about The Shacks called Hudson Limits. When Karl and I met for coffee, he mentioned something that stuck with me: the demolition didn’t seem to hit the people he’d interviewed as hard as it hit the broader public. Even as he was talking, I had a sense of why.

Unlike the public, who knew little about the shacks coming down and didn’t get the opportunity to grieve or celebrate, Karl had provided a ritual of sorts for his subjects. Over the course of almost a year, he met regularly with people who had ties to The Shacks, documenting their stories, stepping foot in the same places they had, giving them a space to share, a way of making sense — with a witness — of the change happening to places they loved.

That work — treating the stories of the people around you as worthy of honor — is sacred work. It reminds you that change is not a private affliction. It is the most human thing there is. And when someone bears witness to yours, something shifts: you are no longer alone in it. You are, in fact, deeply connected — to the people around you, to everyone who has ever stood in the middle of something hard and found their way through.

I want everyone in this community to feel that way. I keep coming back to this work. In the cemetery, sitting alongside people as we tend gravestones and remember loved ones. In this writing project, as I try to honor and make sense of a changing Hudson. In individual and group coaching, as I sit with people in the in-between and help them tend what’s ending while something new takes shape.

I’m offering a small group coaching circle called May We Gather for people who want to feel less alone in their transition. In our four sessions together, we’ll share our own transitions, discuss and reflect on models of change, and close with a simple ritual to help ground ourselves within our change. Between sessions, there are short readings and a writing prompt.

I ran this circle over the winter, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had never been part of something quite like it before, but it was something I craved – sharing my most human moments of change with people who wanted to hear about it, people who were going through something similar. Sharing without needing to perform okayness. Getting language for this time of change. Learning exercises and performing group rituals to help feel grounded.

Apply to May We Gather

And I was blown away by how people showed up in that space. By the end of the first session, people had cracked open. The transitions were all different – retirements, new businesses, motherhood, grief – but the feelings were so similar. The group found each other. The rituals were simple but powerful, the readings gave us a shared language. And what I had been craving turned out to be what everyone else was too.

If you’d like to join us for a group like this in May, there are still a few spots left. It meets on Wednesday afternoons from 3 to 4:30pm at The Spark Building. You can check it out here and apply here.

Before I had language for any of this, I was already doing it instinctively.

A few years ago, I decided to stay in my childhood bedroom on Warren Street. The building was no longer the Barlow — it was a new hotel, the Whaler. I checked in on a weeknight, the room under $100. When I asked for the particular room on the third floor and told the person at the desk it was where I had grown up, she responded without hesitation: the building had never been residential.

Gentrify and deny.

It felt like a gut punch — the flippant erasure of my lived experience in the same walls I was standing in. But I got the room. And I spent that night with my journal and Maude White’s Resilience Alchemy deck, pulling cards and sitting with the change around me. I texted my dad. We shared memories back and forth of our Warren Street weekends. Something shifted.

I want to be honest about what shifted and what it didn’t. It didn’t make me feel okay about gentrification. It didn’t make me feel okay that what was once apartments and community businesses is now a boutique hotel. It didn’t erase the sting of being told, in one of my own childhood homes, that part of my childhood hadn’t happened there.

But it made me feel less alone in it. It got legs under me. It let me carry the grief without being swallowed by it.

That’s what honoring does. That’s what witnessing does. That’s what I believe we can do for each other — in small rooms, in cemeteries, in this writing project, in a circle on Wednesday afternoons in May.

It doesn’t fix what’s been lost. But something else becomes possible when you stop rushing past it: a fuller, more rooted life. One that treats what has happened — to you, to the people around you, to this place — as sacred and worth honoring.

The Planning Board is appointed by the mayor and governed by state law. And if you’ve been paying attention in Hudson over the last several years, you’ve seen it at the center of some of the most contentious decisions this city has faced — the Colarusso haul road fight that dragged on for years and ended up in the NYS Supreme Court, and now the redevelopment of Bliss Towers, a $220 million proposal that will reshape public housing in Hudson for generations.

The Planning Board reviews and approves (or denies) development projects — new buildings, subdivisions, site plans, and special use permits. A new restaurant on Warren Street, a hotel, a telecommunications tower, a 276-unit affordable housing complex: before any of it breaks ground, it goes in front of this body.

Throughout this piece, I’ll use the Bliss Towers redevelopment as a case study. I’ve written about Bliss twice already this year — its history and the conditions residents are living in now — so rather than retread that ground, I want to use it here to show how the Planning Board actually works: what it reviews, how it decides, and what it can and cannot do. The proposal has been before the Planning Board since 2024. The composition of that board has now changed dramatically. The stakes have not.

I sat down with Planning Board Chair Ron Bogle at Hudson Roastery yesterday to talk about how he’s thinking about the role and the board’s work right now. His answers are woven throughout this piece.

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Who is on the Planning Board?

The Planning Board is a group of seven people appointed by the Mayor. They serve three-year staggered terms (so roughly a third of them expire each year). They are led by a chair who is also appointed by the Mayor annually. They are unpaid – unlike our elected officials, they do not receive a civic stipend or any form of compensation.

No more than one-third of the board can hold any other public office, and no Common Council members are allowed. All members must complete four hours of training per year to be eligible for reappointment.

The Planning Board chair reports to the Mayor; they meet on the second Tuesday of each month to report on the board's activities. This makes them directly accountable to the Mayor, who can remove any member for cause after a public hearing.

The current members of the Planning Board are Chairperson Ron Bogle, Eugene Shetsky, Nathan Woodhull, Peter Spear, Veronica Concra, Kali Michael, and, as of this week, Sara Black.

Three members’ terms expired at the end of 2025, meaning Mayor Ferris, whose term started in January 2026, has already appointed several members – Chair Ron Bogle, Peter Spear, and Nathan Woodhull. He also appointed Sara Black this week to fill the seat of Gaby Hoffman, who resigned before her term ended.

This demonstrates the power the Mayor has to literally reshape Hudson; four out of seven planning board members were appointed by the newly elected Mayor.

What does the Planning Board do?

The charter and the zoning code give the Planning Board authority over several different functions.

The first is site plan review. Any significant new development – whether it be commercial, institutional, or residential with more than four units – must get site plan approval prior to being issued a building permit. The board reviews parking, drainage, access, landscaping, lighting, and the environmental impact of all new projects.

The board has the authority to approve, approve with conditions, or deny any site plan proposal, and decisions can be appealed to the Supreme Court. The board also has the authority over subdivision approval – any division of land into new lots requires board approval. Further, any streets laid out on private land can’t be recorded with the county until the board certifies them.

Special-use permits also fall under the Planning Board’s purview. These can include telecommunications towers and certain residential uses. One of the more well-known local issues that went to the Planning Board is the conditional use permit for the Colarusso docks, a decision that brought hundreds of letters and public comments.

The Planning Board also receives referrals from the Mayor, Council, and other governing bodies. The charter requires that all major city planning matters – like new maps, public waterfront plans, location of public buildings, etc. – be referred to the board before final action is taken. The Council can ask the Planning Board to report on any land use question at any time. And the board can also initiate its own recommendations and reports on city planning matters.

SEQRA: evaluating environmental impact

Before the Planning Board can approve almost any significant project, it has to conduct an environmental review. This process is governed by the State Environmental Quality Review Act — SEQRA — a New York State law that requires government bodies to consider the potential environmental, social, and economic impacts of projects before approving them.

SEQRA requires the board to systematically ask: what are the potential impacts of this project, and have they been adequately identified and addressed? The answers shape what conditions get attached to any eventual approval — and can delay or fundamentally reshape a project if significant impacts are identified but not mitigated.

The first step is classification. Every project that comes before the board gets classified under SEQRA as one of three types. Type II actions are minor — small renovations, certain routine activities — and require no further SEQRA review. Type I actions are larger projects that are more likely to have significant environmental impacts and trigger a more rigorous review process. Unlisted actions fall somewhere in between and require the board to make a judgment call about significance. The larger and more complex the project, the more SEQRA scrutiny it receives.

For Type I and many Unlisted actions, the board designates itself “lead agency” — meaning it takes responsibility for conducting the review and making a determination of significance. That determination is the central SEQRA question: could this project have a significant adverse environmental impact? If the answer is no, the board issues what’s called a Negative Declaration and the review is complete. If the answer is yes, or might be yes, the board can require the applicant to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement — a much more detailed document that can take months or years to complete.

What counts as “environmental” under SEQRA is broad. The review covers physical impacts on land, water, air, and ecosystems — and also impacts on transportation, noise and lighting, historic and archaeological resources, community character, and consistency with local land use plans. At Tuesday’s Planning Board meeting, board members worked through seventeen separate impact categories for the redevelopment of Bliss Towers, asking questions about everything from brownfield contamination and construction noise to pedestrian traffic patterns and whether the design was consistent with the neighborhood’s historic character.

Bogle described the purpose of the public hearing within this process plainly at that same meeting: “The planning board is a quasi-legal board. The work that we do becomes a public record that will support and defend any decisions that we will be making. What the public hearing does is adds the public’s voice to that legal document.” This is how the board builds the record it needs to defend its decisions — and how residents can formally shape them.

In our conversation at the Roastery, he returned to this idea more than once. “We’re testing the facts. It’s not about my personal opinion — it’s about the facts. And then I judge the facts based on how I understand them.” This isn’t a political body. It’s a quasi-judicial one.

SEQRA is where many projects slow down or stall. It’s procedurally complex, it can require multiple rounds of submission and review, and its standards are set by state law rather than local discretion. That can feel frustrating when the stakes are high and the need is urgent, like with Bliss Towers. Last week, the Planning Board noticed an engineering issue in HHA’s filing that threatened to push SEQRA initiation back a full month. Bogle didn’t let it sit. He asked the engineers to call HHA that same Thursday afternoon. By Monday morning, the problem was solved, just in time so it could still be discussed at Tuesday’s monthly meeting.

“I wanted to not only do that, but also talk about how we did that,” Bogle told me, “because it demonstrates a model of behavior that shows cooperation, can-do, problem-solving.” A month’s delay, avoided. But it’s also a reminder of how thin the margins are in a process this complex — one incomplete document sets everything back.

SEQRA is also, for all its friction, the process that gives the public the most leverage over what gets built — and the board the most meaningful authority to require changes before approving it. The process exists for a reason. Bogle understands that, even when it slows things down.

What does the Planning Board not do?

For all of its authority over what gets built in Hudson, the Planning Board operates within limits. It cannot override zoning or set new zoning rules — it applies the zoning code as written, and if someone wants the code changed, that goes back to the Council. And critically, it cannot be directed by the Mayor or the Council on how to vote on any specific application. The board has to make independent decisions based on the record in front of it — the application materials, the engineering reviews, the public comments, and the SEQRA process. No elected official can tell it how to rule.

That independence cuts both ways. It protects the board from political pressure on individual projects. But it also means that when residents are unhappy with a decision, there’s no elected official to hold directly accountable — the Mayor appointed the members, but the members make their own calls.

That gap — between how the board operates and how it’s experienced by the public — is something Chair Ron Bogle raised directly at the April 8th meeting.

“I think I would reflect that same concern about how we’re understood by applicants and the public in the nature of what we do and what guides our decisions,” he said. “That lack of clear understanding and alignment sometimes creates experiences that feel like conflict — but they’re really not conflict. They’re just a lack of alignment.”

Part of that disconnect, he explained, is that the board is working against standards that aren’t always visible from the outside. “The comprehensive plan is our north star. Every project that we do is measured against the comprehensive plan.” And beyond that, and zoning law, “we really don’t have a lot of latitude. The state has created a very strict process for us to follow… there’s not a lot of margin in terms of our ability to stray outside of that process.”

Even when the rules are clear, applying them isn’t always. At the April 8th meeting, board members debated whether the Bliss redevelopment was consistent with “community character” — a standard that sounds straightforward until you try to define it. Some members pointed out that the proposal replaces an existing public housing complex with another, asking, in effect: how could it not be consistent with a neighborhood it has occupied for decades?

Others raised questions about scale — whether the size and form of the new buildings truly fit their surroundings. And then the conversation shifted. One member raised the Comprehensive Plan and how it asks them to “repair the harms of urban renewal.” That introduces a different lens entirely. What counts as a “harm”? What does it mean to “repair” it — to replicate what exists, move toward an earlier historic pattern? The document is clear in its intent, but applying it requires interpretation. And that interpretation — even within a process governed by law — is where judgment inevitably enters.

Decisions can be appealed to the Zoning Board of Appeals for certain variance questions, or to the Supreme Court for others. The most prominent recent example is A. Colarusso & Son, the gravel and asphalt company with a dock on the waterfront. Colarusso spent years seeking Planning Board approval for a haul road routing heavy trucks through city streets from their Greenport quarry to Front Street. The application ultimately resulted in a lawsuit. In 2022, the Supreme Court directed the Planning Board to proceed with a decision on the application. The board appealed, and the Appellate Division clarified in 2023 that the board was required to decide — not required to approve.

How decisions get made

Applications are submitted online before they are placed on a meeting agenda. Planning Board meetings are public. Applicants present their projects, board members ask questions, and members of the public can comment. That public comment becomes part of the formal record — a legal document that supports and defends whatever decision the board ultimately makes. If you live near a proposed development, or care about what gets built on a particular block, showing up and speaking is one of the most direct forms of civic participation available in Hudson.

Every motion requires the affirmative vote of a majority of all seven members — meaning four yes votes, always. The threshold doesn’t adjust based on who shows up. If only five members are present and the vote is 3-2, the motion fails. Absence isn’t neutrality. It functions like a no.

In November 2024, the board adopted what it calls a “Hard Stop Policy” — meetings begin at 6:30pm and end by 9pm, no exceptions except for public hearings already scheduled for that evening. Anything not reached gets carried to the following month. It’s a reasonable attempt to make meetings manageable and predictable, and it has consequences: in a process that already moves slowly, a project that doesn’t make it onto the agenda in time can lose a month.

Once the board reaches a decision, it has to be filed with the City Clerk within five business days. A copy goes to the applicant. Anyone who wants to challenge the decision has thirty days from that filing to bring a proceeding in court.

Bliss Towers: how the process works in practice

Bliss Towers is a nine-story public housing building at 41 North Second Street, built in 1973, home to hundreds of low-income Hudson residents. The Hudson Housing Authority has been planning a full redevelopment since at least 2021, in partnership with Mountco Construction. The proposal calls for demolishing the existing building and replacing it with approximately 276 units of affordable housing across multiple buildings, in two phases. Total estimated cost: $220 million.

The project has been a long time in the making, but it does not have universal support. Before it ever reached the Planning Board, it moved through the Hudson Housing Authority, the state financing system, and the Common Council — where a Restore NY grant resolution supporting it failed in spring 2024 due to quorum, was revived at a second meeting, and was ultimately not submitted anyway. Questions about scale, the HHA’s management capacity, displacement of current residents, and the future of affordable housing in a rapidly gentrifying city have followed it at every stage.

Now it’s before the Planning Board. At the meeting on Tuesday, April 8th, the board initiated the SEQRA process for Bliss, working through the environmental impact categories in real time.

Chair Bogle described four remaining steps before a board decision is possible: completing SEQRA, a comprehensive design review, an engineering review, and a public hearing. He’s aiming for significant progress at the May meeting. The timeline after that is uncertain, but HHA Executive Director Jeffrey Dodson told the board previously that the project is working against a critical closing deadline of October 2026. Missing that could delay the project by six months or more.

That tension — between the urgency of people living in a deteriorating building and the time it takes to do this process correctly — is not unique to Hudson. But it is acutely felt here. The Planning Board is doing exactly what it’s designed to do: ask hard questions, build a record, and make a decision it can defend. How long that takes, and what it produces, will matter to Hudson for a long time.

The public hearing for Bliss — when it comes — will be one of the most significant in recent memory. It’s the moment when Bliss residents, neighbors, and anyone who cares about the future of public housing in this city will have a formal, legally meaningful opportunity to speak into the record. Bogle understands what that means. “What the public hearing does is adds the public’s voice to that legal document,” he said at the April 8th meeting. “And that’s an important part of how we recognize the importance of lived experience and the point of view of others within our community.” The people who live in that building have been waiting a long time to be heard in a room that can do something about it.

The Planning Board meets on the second Tuesday of each month. Agendas are posted online before each meeting. Decisions are filed with the City Clerk. The meetings are recorded. And when the Bliss hearing is scheduled, it will be posted there too.

Hudson is a small city under significant development pressure and with a lot at stake. The Planning Board is one of the few places where ordinary residents have a formal, legally meaningful role in deciding what happens next. You don’t need to be an expert. You need to show up.

P.S. I’m holding a small coaching group called May We Gather — meeting 4 Wednesday afternoons in May at The Spark. It’s for people moving through a life transition that they would like honored and supported. I ran it in the winter and it was a delight — you can apply at the bottom of the page here. I’m capping it at 8 people, and there are only a few spots left.

Hudson is coming alive.

Daffodils and cherry blossoms are blooming. The bees are back, looking for early-season nectar. A swan has taken up residence at Oakdale. I feel that spring aliveness myself. This week I did a round of spring cleaning at the cemetery. I planted veggies in our backyard. I cleaned out my closet. I feel tender and new, to…

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“The Common Council shall have authority to govern the City, manage its affairs and provide for the protection, security and welfare of the City.”

– Excerpt from the Common Council website for the City of Hudson

Until I started digging into the depths of Hudson’s (very old and very long) charter, I did not have a clear understanding of how our government runs. I knew that the Mayor’s office and the Common Council comprise a system of checks and balances. But after writing about the Mayor’s power last week and discovering it is not a classic strong-mayor government like I’ve heard, I was eager to understand where some of the power I had assumed lived with the Mayor actually lives. This led me to the Common Council.

How the Council Gets Elected

The Common Council has eleven members — also called Aldermen – in total. Two Common Council members are elected in each of Hudson’s five wards, and a Common Council President is elected city wide.

Hudson’s current Council includes Gary Purnhagen and Henry Haddad representing the First Ward; Dewan Sarowar and Mohammed Rony in the Second; Jason Foster and Lola Roberts in the Third; Jennifer Belton and Rich “Trixie” Volo in the Fourth; and Claire Cousin and Dominic Merante in the Fifth. Margaret Morris, who won the Council President race in November 2025, represents the full city.

All eleven members serve two-year terms. Aldermen earn approximately $5,000 a year; the Council President earns approximately $11,000. Both positions come with health insurance. It is, in other words, not a living wage — more of a civic stipend. These are part-time roles typically held by people with day jobs, families, and other obligations.

We only vote for Common Council members within our specific ward. Hudson has five wards, and has since 1855. Per the charter, the wards must have “substantially equal populations as determined by the United States Census Bureau and New York State Law.” This means that occasionally the wards are re-drawn, most recently happening in 2022, to ensure that the population is roughly equal by ward.

This ward structure matters. The demographics of each ward impact who gets elected – and in turn, who gets to represent their ward in how Hudson is governed. The 2022 redistricting process directly addressed this. When census data showed that Hudson’s ward populations had drifted out of balance, it was on the Council to redraw the lines.

They could not simply arbitrarily do so – the Legal Committee had to evaluate the racial and ethnic composition of each ward before redrawing, and even still, a Council Member raised concerns about unintentionally disadvantaging members of the community. The final ward redistricting plan went to a public referendum.

So in short, the Common Council has two members per ward, and one city-wide Common Council President. The Common Council President, the Mayor, and the City Treasurer represent the entire city, and our Common Council members – or Aldermen – represent pieces of it.

Lawmaking: The Council’s Core Power

All legislation in Hudson originates with members of the Common Council.

A local law is the most significant piece of legislation – it’s a permanent, binding rule that governs conduct in the city. Zoning changes, new regulations, and amendments to the charter, for example, all require local laws. They go through a formal process: introduction, committee review, public hearing, full Council vote, and then the Mayor’s signature or veto. They are also subject to referendum – under certain circumstances, residents can petition to put a local law to a public vote.

An ordinance is technically a lesser form of legislation than a local law under state law — but in Hudson’s charter and practice, the two terms are used largely interchangeably.

A resolution is different. It’s a formal decision or statement by the Council, but it does not rise to the level of a law. Resolutions are used for things like authorizing a contract, appointing someone to a board, or expressing the Council’s position on an issue. They can be significant — a resolution authorizing a major contract or a budget amendment has real financial consequences — but they don’t carry the same permanence as local laws, and they don’t require a public hearing.

So how does something become law in Hudson? It starts with an introduction: a proposed local law or resolution can be brought to the Council floor by any Council member or the Council President. The Council President sets the agenda for regular meetings. If something doesn’t make it onto the agenda, it waits. The mayor can call special meetings to move things faster, and so can any three Council members acting together — but outside of those mechanisms, lawmaking is confined by the monthly calendar.

Once introduced, a proposed local law typically goes to committee. The Council has several standing committees, each made up of a subset of Council members, that review proposals, recommend changes, and decide whether something moves forward. The Council President appoints all committee members.

After committee, a local law comes back to the full Council for a vote. Per the charter, simple majority decisions require six votes, two-thirds decisions — like overriding a mayoral veto — require eight, and some decisions, including certain property transactions, require nine. Quorum is tied to vote type as well: the same number of votes required to pass something is also the minimum number of members who must be present for that vote to happen at all. If you need eight votes to override a veto, you also need eight bodies in the room. If you don’t have them, the meeting can’t conduct that business.

Once the Council passes a local law, the City Clerk delivers it to the mayor within three days. Then two things happen simultaneously. The veto clock starts: the mayor has three days to sign or return the legislation with written objections. At the same time, the charter requires the mayor to schedule a public hearing — publishing notice in the newspaper for two consecutive days, and holding the hearing no earlier than five days after the last publication. The mayor must attend and give the public an opportunity to weigh in. Interestingly, these two timelines conflict – the mayor must in some cases decide to pass or veto before hearing from the public.

Once signed, a local law has to be published in the Register Star / Daily Gazette for two consecutive days before it takes effect. Only after that publication does it become enforceable.

Not everything requires this full process. Resolutions can move much faster, with fewer steps and no public hearing requirement. This is how a lot of consequential decisions get made.

The Budget: What the Council Can and Cannot Do

Hudson’s annual budget is produced by a three-person body called the Board of Estimate and Apportionment — the mayor (Joe Ferris), the elected City Treasurer (Heather Campbell), and the Council President (Margaret Morris), each with one vote.

The BEA works through the fall — departments submit their budget estimates, the board reviews revenue projections, and in November the proposed budget goes to the Common Council. At that point, a clock starts. The Council has 20 days to act. If it doesn’t, the budget passes automatically, exactly as submitted.

What can the Council do during those 20 days? It can cut, and that’s it. The Council may reduce any line item that the BEA has set. It cannot increase them. It cannot add new spending lines. It cannot send the budget back to be reworked. The Council’s role in the budget process is solely to trim.

This is a meaningful constraint on Council power. If the Council thinks a department is underfunded or wants to fund a new program, there is no budget mechanism for them to act on that. There isn’t even a simple mechanism to address budget errors at the department level.

The 2026 budget process is a great example of what can happen when something goes awry. The BEA produced a budget proposal in the fall of 2025. In that budget, there were two positions in the Youth Department that were mistakenly listed as vacant – when in fact one was filled by the longest-serving member of the department. The mistake made its way into the proposed budget, and a salary was zeroed out.

The error was not discovered until it was already in the Council’s hands, and the 20-day clock had started. This contributed to the Council’s 8-3 rejection of that budget. But since the Council can only reduce line items and make amendments, it did not have the authority to send the budget back to the departments or the BEA. The Council couldn’t fix the mistake even if it wanted to. The salary could not be added back in. So the Council voted no, but ran out of time to pass any reductions, and the budget took effect by default once the 20 days were up.

I asked Council President Morris about this. “I think the council should be able to send the budget back to the BEA and say, ‘You need to do better,’” Morris told me. “Other government structures do that. The state budget is a negotiation.”

The lesson here is structural, I think. A department made a mistake during the BEA process. The BEA did not catch it. The budget went to the Council with the error. The 20-day window closed, and the Council had no power to correct it. A real person’s job was at risk because of a budgeting error and a charter that offers no course-correction.

Beyond the budget, the Council holds significant authority over how the city’s money actually moves. Every significant expenditure the city makes has to be authorized by the Council first. The mayor signs contracts, but the Council must approve them. Resolutions authorizing contracts — for legal services, construction projects, grant administration, professional services — appear on the Council agenda regularly.

City property is the Council’s exclusive domain too. The mayor cannot unilaterally enter into a lease on city-owned property. The Council must approve it, and the mayor executes what the Council authorizes.

If the Council wants to fund something that can’t be covered within the existing budget — a capital project, an emergency, something genuinely outside normal annual spending authority — it can’t just pass a resolution. It has to call a special election and let voters decide. The Council publishes what it wants to spend and why, and the question goes to the ballot. Even the legislative body can’t authorize extraordinary expenditures without going back to the people.

The Council also sets the salaries of city officers — and can raise them at any time, by resolution, even mid-year. This is how the mayoral salary raise happened during the Johnson administration. The Council didn’t need a budget cycle or a charter amendment. It passed a resolution. That’s it. Which means the Council doesn’t just govern the city — it impacts who can afford to govern it. Salary levels determine who can feasibly run for office, who can afford to stay in it, and whose civic participation the city is actually resourced to support.

Finally, the Council serves as the city’s Board of Auditors — examining the accounts of all city officers, reviewing claims against the city, and authorizing payment. It can subpoena any officer or department to produce records. This accountability function is one of the Council’s most fundamental powers, and one of the least visible.

No money moves without the Council’s vote.

Appointments and Vacancies: The Council Steps In

When an elected office in Hudson falls vacant mid-term — an alderman resigns, dies, or is removed — the Common Council fills it by appointment. The appointment has to happen within a specific window: no fewer than ten days and no more than twenty days after the vacancy occurs. The person appointed serves through December 31st of that year, at which point the seat goes back to voters.

The Council also steps in when an election produces a tie. If two candidates receive exactly equal votes for the same office, the Council appoints someone to fill it — meeting between December 1st and 15th to make that call. The appointee serves one year, and then the seat goes to a regular election. It’s a provision that sounds almost theoretical until you consider that Joe Ferris won the 2025 mayoral race by 41 votes. Elections in Hudson are close. Ties are unlikely but not unimaginable.

There’s also a backstop provision that runs the other direction. If the Council fails to make a required appointment within the prescribed window, the power shifts to the mayor — who can step in and make the appointment themselves. It’s a pressure valve built into the charter, designed to prevent the Council’s inaction from leaving offices empty.

And finally, there’s mayoral succession. If the mayor is absent, incapacitated, or the office becomes vacant, the Council President steps in to execute the duties of the mayor. If both the mayor and the Council President are unavailable, the full Council appoints one of its own members to serve temporarily. The line of succession runs directly through the legislative body.

The Veto Override: A High Bar

The last and most direct check the Council holds over the mayor is the veto override. When the mayor vetoes a piece of legislation, it returns to the Council with written objections. Eight members voting to pass it anyway makes it law — and Hudson’s recent history shows just how high a bar that is.

In 2019, the Council attempted to override Mayor Rector’s veto of a short-term rental moratorium — legislation that had been months in the making and was designed to give the city time to establish regulations for Airbnbs and similar rentals before they further eroded the housing stock. They needed eight votes. They got seven.

That’s often how it goes. The veto mechanism exists, it gets invoked, and it’s hard to pull off. A mayor with strong Council allies can use the veto as real leverage — knowing the votes to override aren’t there. A mayor who has lost the Council’s confidence may find that the veto only delays the inevitable, and that the public record of their objections is the only thing they walk away with. In Hudson, where eleven people represent a city of 5,900 and everyone knows everyone, those relationships are personal. And they shift over time.

The Council President

This brings us to the person who sits at the center of all of it — and who holds more individual power within the Council than any single other member. The Council President is a role worth understanding on its own.

The Council President is elected citywide — the only member of the Council who answers to every voter in Hudson rather than just one ward. That alone distinguishes the role. But it’s the structural powers that make people say what they say.

I sat down with Council President Margaret Morris recently to talk about how she understands the job. She represented the First Ward for four years as a Council Member before running for President in 2025.

When I asked her why she ran, she told me: “There were some things I wanted to see structurally more organized. I respect process. And I wanted to have a council where everybody could feel that they were being heard. People very often will not agree with a particular position that I may take, which is fine — so long as people can articulate where they’re coming from, that should be respected. I wanted to continue to serve.”

When Morris took office in January 2026, she moved quickly to reshape how the Council operates — entirely within her authority to do so. One of the first things a new Council does each year is adopt rules of order — a document that governs how meetings run, how legislation moves, and what the President can and cannot do. Morris used that process to make significant structural changes, and she pointed me to the new rules of order when I asked about them.

The most consequential change was to the committee system. When Morris took over, only two committees were functioning — Finance and Legal. She rebuilt the structure, creating five standing committees: Finance, Safety (covering fire and police), Services (youth and seniors), Code and Infrastructure (public works and code enforcement), and Legal. Every Council member is now required to serve on at least one. Like her predecessor Tom DePietro, she consults with the Council on which committees they’d like to join before appointing them.

“The work gets done in committee,” she told me. “It doesn’t get done at the large council.” Under the previous structure, all departments gave reports at the informal meeting, which could run over two hours. Morris’s view is that meaningful engagement happens in smaller working groups — where Council members can develop expertise, dig into issues, and build real relationships with department heads.

Morris also changed how legislation moves. Under the new rules, every proposed law or resolution must come through the informal work session — held the Monday before the formal meeting — before it can be voted on. She did this so the Council is not always rushing or getting last-minute additions to the agenda. And each proposal must have a named sponsor: a Council member responsible for presenting it, explaining its intent, and answering questions.

“There has to be somebody on the council who knows what this is, can answer questions, can explain why it’s important for us to be doing it,” Morris said. It’s a change designed to prevent resolutions from appearing on the agenda without anyone in the room who can speak to them — something that had happened before.

These are changes to process that are within the President’s authority to make – and it is in part why the Council President’s role is so significant.

Start with the most obvious lever: the Council President appoints every committee member. This means the President decides not just who reviews legislation, but who shapes it before it ever reaches a full vote. Under Morris’s rules, a draft law or resolution can be discharged from committee and brought to the full Council with the petition of three members. Without that, the proposal’s fate is in the President’s hands.

The President also sets the agenda for regular meetings and presides over them. This means that they control what comes to the floor, in what order, and how debate is structured. They can call special meetings unilaterally, the same power the mayor holds. And unlike many presiding officers, the Council President votes on all questions – they are one of eleven voting members.

One more power worth naming, because it came up publicly this spring: the Council President controls who gets to speak at meetings. The charter says nothing about residents having a right to comment at Council meetings. That right exists by custom — and by whatever rules of order the Council adopts each year. Morris’s rules state that public comment happens “at the discretion of the Chair.”

In March, she used that discretion to shut down public comment at a meeting where her own February car accident was being discussed. The Daily Gazette editorial board called it an abuse of power. Whether or not you agree, she was within her authority. The charter doesn’t require public comment. Her own rules give her that discretion.

Then there’s the BEA. The Council President is one vote out of three in the body that produces the city’s annual budget. The mayor chairs the BEA, but the President and Treasurer acting together can outvote them.

And constitutionally, the Council President is first in line to run the executive — stepping in if the mayor is absent, incapacitated, or the office falls vacant.

So is the Council President more powerful than the mayor? I asked Morris directly. “It’s different,” she said. “You have an executive function and a legislative function. And ideally, both parties work together.”

Power, Shared

The Common Council makes our laws, shapes the budget, controls the money, fills the vacancies, and — when it has the votes — can override the mayor entirely. The Council President sits at the center of all of it: legislative gatekeeper, budget co-author, emergency executive, and arbiter of who gets to speak in the room where decisions get made.

I asked Morris what she’d tell someone who wants to stay informed but can’t make it to meetings. “Talk to your representative,” she said. “The role of the representative from your ward is basically to be a representative — to talk to you.” Meetings are recorded, so you can always go back and find the moment that matters to you. But she was practical about it: you don’t really want to wade through two hours to find one agenda item. Better to call your Council Member directly and ask.

I’ve found this to be true. Dominic Merante — who, in a very Hudson coincidence, was my soccer coach thirty years ago — has responded to every phone call. Claire Cousin is proactively communicative with Fifth Ward constituents, both directly and on social media. Hudson’s smallness can occasionally feel like a lot. But the ease of reaching the people who make decisions here is a genuine upside. Your representative is reachable. The agenda goes online before every meeting. The distance between a resident and the room where things get decided is shorter than you think.

A year ago I published my first All My Dead and Living Things piece. When I considered how to mark this day, I thought of you — the folks who believed in and supported me early on. Thank you so much for reading, for cheering me on, and for helping this project take shape.

This first year brought fifty essays, tens of thousands of r…

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When I think about power in Hudson, I think about the mayor.

I remember being a kid, walking Warren Street with my dad, and him pointing out Rick Scalera — Hudson’s mayor through much of the 90s. I felt like I was spotting a celebrity – the person in charge of an entire city. It was a level of power that seemed almost incomprehensible to me then, the way all adult authority does when you’re that small.

Last year, that power became the subject of public debate. A group of private citizens put forward a proposal to change Hudson’s charter. They wanted to replace what they called our “strong-mayor system” with a city manager model — stripping the mayor of most executive authority and making the position largely ceremonial. If their proposal passed, an unelected professional would run the day-to-day operations of the city instead.

I wrote about that proposal at the time. I had concerns — mainly about accountability, and about what it means to hand power to someone no one voted for. But I didn’t fully understand then what “strong mayor” actually meant, or what the limits of that power already were. I just knew I wanted whoever was leading Hudson to be elected by the people, to answer to us.

So I went back to the charter. And what I found surprised me.

How the Mayor Gets the Job

The Mayor of Hudson is elected by general ballot. Every registered voter in Hudson — across all five wards — votes for mayor. This distinguishes the role from Common Council members, who are elected ward by ward. To become mayor, you have to win the whole city.

Terms are two years, and there are no term limits. A mayor can run as many times as they want, and several have. Former Mayor Kamal Johnson served three full terms before losing to Joe Ferris last November. Elections happen in odd-numbered years, on the same cycle as most New York State municipal races, and the winner takes office on January 1st.

Joe Ferris is the mayor of Hudson because 941 people voted for him on Election Day last November. He won by 41 votes. Our city has roughly 5,900 people, and we averaged a 44% voter turnout rate across five city wards — meaning more than half of registered voters didn’t participate at all. The person running our city was chosen by somewhere around 20% of eligible voters.

That’s not a criticism of Ferris, and Hudson is not unusual in this way. Low turnout in off-year elections is the norm across the country. But it’s worth naming, because it shapes how power works here. The mayor governs our city and impacts our daily lives, and only a small subset of people contribute to electing them.

That two-year term is worth sitting with, too. By the time a new mayor has learned the job, navigated their first budget cycle, and built relationships with department heads and council members, they’re already running for re-election — or deciding not to. It shapes what the office can accomplish and in what time.

The mayor currently earns $75,000 a year. During Johnson’s tenure, the Common Council approved a $15,000 raise. The case was made that the mayor was earning less than the city treasurer and some of the department heads he oversaw — a structurally awkward situation that had been flagged by previous mayors. But Johnson received significant backlash for this move, for benefiting from a salary increase.

Either way, the raise outlasted the debate. Joe Ferris now earns $75,000. The salary question was always bigger than any one mayor — it’s a question about who can afford to hold this job and for how long. For a role that is more than full-time, in a city where rents have more than doubled in a decade, that number significantly impacts who can even feasibly run for the role.

What the Mayor Can Do Alone

The charter gives the mayor a set of powers he can exercise without asking anyone’s permission. Understanding which ones are real — and which are mostly symbolic — matters more than the list itself.

The most concrete unilateral power is appointments. The mayor picks the people who run the city’s departments. Some of those appointments are for fixed terms — the City Clerk serves four years, the Assessor six, Planning Board members three. But the more consequential list is the one that serves entirely at the mayor’s pleasure: the Commissioner of Public Works, the Commissioner of Police, the Commissioner of Fire, the Commissioner of Youth, the Commissioner of Purchases, the Commissioner of Grants, and the Harbor Master. “At pleasure” means the mayor can remove any of them, at any time, for any reason, without explanation. The mayor can also hire a City Attorney, and with Common Council approval on the contract, retain outside legal counsel.

Beneath those commissioners sits an operational layer. The commissioners themselves technically hire the department heads who actually run things day to day — the Commissioner of Police appoints the Chief of Police, the Commissioner of Youth appoints the Director of Youth. So when a mayor chooses a commissioner, he’s also shaping who fills the roles beneath them. It’s indirect power, but it’s real.

Except that in practice, the commissioner system is one of the stranger, more antiquated features of Hudson’s government. The positions are essentially unpaid. Commissioners receive a small honorarium, but this is not a job. Most serve in name more than in function, with actual department operations run by the paid professional staff beneath them. The charter gives an unpaid, part-time political appointee the legal authority to hire and fire the full-time professionals running essential city services. Whether that authority is ever actually exercised depends entirely on the mayor who made the appointment and the commissioner who holds the title.

Interestingly, the positions can simply be left empty. When Police Commissioner Shane Bower resigned during the Johnson administration, Johnson didn’t fill the position. The charter didn’t require him to. And that role is still sitting empty today. A vacant commissioner seat means a department operating without its designated oversight — legally permissible but structurally odd.

The removal power extends beyond commissioners, too. The charter says plainly that the mayor may remove any person appointed to any city position at his discretion.

When I asked Ferris about his appointments, he said the biggest factor guiding his selection is what he calls a commitment to civic engagement. “Not just having a vision for the community but an openness to being part of a conversation with the community,” he told me. He’s been soliciting recommendations — in one-on-one conversations and at his ward town halls — before making decisions. “I believe that it is worthwhile for the community to have a chance to weigh in on who will end up serving the community.”

Beyond appointments, the mayor holds a few other unilateral powers. The mayor grants every license required under city law — liquor licenses, vendor permits, and the like. The Common Council sets the rules and the fees, but the mayor issues the actual document.

The mayor has command authority over police and fire, with the power to call out both departments whenever he deems necessary, and to suspend or remove officers for insubordination.

The mayor can investigate anything — examining the books and records of any city officer or department, and subpoenaing and questioning people under oath.

Finally, the mayor signs everything. Every contract, every deed the city enters into goes out under the mayor’s signature (alongside the City Clerk’s). He doesn’t award contracts alone — that requires Common Council authorization — but nothing is official without him.

What’s striking about this list is that it’s almost entirely administrative power. The mayor controls personnel, commands departments, enforces law, and keeps the city running. What the mayor cannot do alone — make law, set the budget, spend money the Council hasn’t authorized — is where the “strong mayor” label starts to show its limits.

What Requires the Common Council

Almost every significant structural decision — the laws, the budget, the money — has to go through the Council first.

Let’s start with legislation. The mayor cannot make law. Every local law, every ordinance, every rule that governs life in this city both originates with and passes through the Common Council. The mayor’s role in that process is reactive: the City Clerk delivers passed legislation to him, and he has three days to sign it or veto it. He can slow things down. He cannot build them.

The veto sounds powerful, and it is leverage. But the Council can override any mayoral veto with a two-thirds vote. In a body of eleven members, that’s eight votes. In a Council that’s organized and aligned, the veto becomes mostly a signal — a way of registering objection and forcing a second deliberation — not a final word.

The budget is where the “strong mayor” framing really starts to wobble. The mayor does not propose the budget alone. Hudson’s budget is made by a three-person Board of Estimate and Apportionment — the mayor, the City Treasurer, and the President of the Common Council. The mayor chairs the board and calls its meetings, which gives him some agenda-setting power. But he is one vote out of three, and the other two members acting together can outvote him.

Once the board produces a budget, it goes to the Common Council, which can reduce any line item — but cannot increase them or add new ones. Power is genuinely shared here, which means the budget process is almost always also a negotiation.

We saw how that could play out in last year’s budget season. When the Board of Estimate and Apportionment — chaired by Johnson — presented its $19.6 million budget proposal last November, the Common Council voted 8-3 to reject it. The stated reasons were a mix of fiscal concern — the budget proposed dipping into the city’s reserve fund below the state’s recommended minimum — and a last-minute error: the youth department had accidentally listed a filled position as vacant.

But per the charter, the Council doesn’t actually have the power to reject a budget outright. They can reduce line items, but they cannot increase them, add new ones, or send it back. A flat no vote isn’t a charter-sanctioned action — it’s the absence of action. And the charter is explicit: if the Council takes no final action within 20 days, the budget is deemed adopted as submitted.

The Council voted no, but by that point only had four days left to pass actual line-item reductions and didn’t. So the BEA’s original budget took effect. The budget eight members had just voted against became law.

Even within an approved budget, the mayor can’t move money freely. Fund transfers under $500 happen without approval. Anything over $1,000 requires the Common Council’s sign-off (note: as far as I understand, these figures have not been updated since at the latest 1973 – $1,000 then is worth around $7,000 now). Every check requires both the mayor’s signature and the City Clerk’s countersignature.

Getting the Job Done

Understanding what the mayor can and can’t do on paper is one thing. Understanding how he actually does the job is another.

Joe Ferris runs the executive office of the City of Hudson with one staff member: his mayoral aide. The person filling that role right now is Tiffany Martin. Martin previously served as Hudson’s mayor. Elected in 2015 as the first woman ever to hold the office in Hudson, she served one term before stepping down in 2017.

The mayoral aide also serves as Hudson’s ADA Coordinator — responsible for ensuring the city complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act, investigating accessibility complaints, and implementing a federal settlement agreement Hudson entered into in 2019. It’s a meaningful legal obligation folded into an already burdened position.

In larger cities, the mayor’s office looks nothing like this. A mid-sized city — like Albany or Troy — might have a chief of staff, a communications team, a director of constituent services, a budget analyst, a grants coordinator. They’re the infrastructure that allows an executive to actually govern: to respond to press inquiries, to draft policy, to track legislation, to show up everywhere he needs to show up and still have something left over at the end of the day. Hudson doesn’t have that infrastructure, and given the city’s tax base, it’s unlikely to get it anytime soon.

Ferris described feeling that gap acutely. “As I’ve met mayors from small cities across the state, I’ve seen the additional staff capacity they have,” he told me. He’s learned to work within Hudson’s constraints — during the new parking rollout, he was able to institute free parking for drivers with handicap plates entirely unilaterally. “It is not every day that this kind of lever of power can be used,” he said, “but they are there.”

What the mayor does have, in theory, is commissioners. Seven department heads serving at his pleasure, responsible for the city’s core operations. Again, most of those positions are unpaid honorariums — people with day jobs and civic commitments who show up when they can. The actual work of the departments falls to the paid professional staff beneath them. Which means the mayor is, in many ways, working without a real management layer between himself and the ground.

I noticed this most acutely watching Former Mayor Kamal Johnson. He was a constant presence in Hudson — at events, at meetings, in community spaces, visible in a way that felt almost relentless. And yet he was consistently criticized for not communicating enough, for not being responsive enough, for dropping the ball on follow-through. I kept thinking: what exactly was he supposed to do differently, and with what resources?

When I asked Mayor Ferris how he spends his days, he put it this way:

“This question got me looking back at my Outlook calendar for the past three months and in a lot of ways, not only are there no typical weeks, there are no typical days. Some weeks are dominated by a specific topic -- the days following the late January blizzard were focused on snow removal and parking. Other days are a mix of meetings with community organizations about upcoming events or issues they’re facing followed by standing meetings with department heads or boards like the IDA or HCDPA that the mayor sits on. It sounds a bit cliche but sometimes there are days that feel like weeks and weeks that feel like months. At the end of each week, I try and make a point to go back over the past five days to assess what we accomplished, what is still in process, and what remains to get done. “

The gap between what we expect from a mayor and what the office is actually equipped to deliver is significant. We want someone who governs well and communicates constantly and shows up everywhere and responds promptly and builds coalitions and secures grants and manages departments and is accessible to every resident who wants five minutes. That is not a one-person job or even a two-person job. And yet that’s the structure Hudson has.

At some point, the question isn’t whether the person in the office is working hard enough. It’s whether the office itself is structured to let anyone succeed.

The Mayor’s Power – And Its Limits

So what did I find when I went back to the charter? Hudson is not a strong-mayor city. It’s not a weak-mayor city either.

The mayor can appoint and remove department heads without permission, command the police and fire departments, and sign every contract the city enters into. But they cannot control the budget, drive the legislative agenda, or operate as a center of power.

Strong-mayor cities — like Kingston or New York City — have mayors with more consolidated executive authority: larger offices, more direct control over the budget process, and vetoes that carry more structural weight. Hudson’s mayor has administrative control without that dominance.

This in-between space can sometimes cause friction here. When people are frustrated with the mayor, they’re often bumping up against the limits of the office without realizing it.

The mayoral salary raise is a good example. Some constituents were furious at Johnson for benefiting from a raise to his own salary. But the mechanism that made it possible wasn’t mayoral overreach — it was the Common Council exercising its explicit authority to raise any city officer’s compensation by resolution. People blamed the mayor, but the tool was the Council’s. It’s the historical pattern of this office, one dictated by the charter — and one that the current mayor has had to reckon with himself.

When I asked Mayor Ferris about charter reform, he invoked a quote from Former Governor Mario Cuomo:

“You campaign in poetry and you govern in prose.” Ferris came into office promising charter reform as a first priority. Three months in, he told me he’s realized the demands of the job make it hard for the mayor’s office to lead that process. “That is why I look forward to the Common Council’s plans to undertake a review,” he said. “I’m excited to participate in whatever that process looks like.”

He did flag one specific change worth considering: a more direct path for the mayor to propose resolutions or local law changes. Currently, the mayor can call special meetings and set the agenda for those — but adding items to a regular Council meeting requires either the Council President’s cooperation or three Council Members willing to back the proposal.

This is why understanding the office matters. If we want to influence what happens in this city, we need to know where the levers actually are.

If you have a problem with something the mayor has done — an appointment, a decision, a priority — you can contact the office directly. The mayor and mayoral aide are reachable. That’s an advantage of governing a city of 5,900 people. You can show up. You can call. You can come to a public meeting and speak during public comment. In Hudson, the distance between a resident and the person making decisions is remarkably short.

But if what you want is a law changed, a budget line added, or a policy created — that’s not the mayor’s door you need to knock on. That’s the Common Council – eleven people, elected ward by ward, that hold more structural power than the mayor does. That’s where we’re headed next.

Corrections: An earlier version of this piece stated the mayor's salary as $85,000; the correct figure is $75,000. It also stated that the mayor cannot propose resolutions or local laws to the Common Council; a former Council president clarified that the mayor can add items to regular meetings with the support of the Council President or three Council Members. Both have been corrected. Thanks to the readers who flagged these!

Last night, the Hudson Bluehawks defeated Tappan Zee 54-45 at Visions Veterans Memorial Arena in Binghamton — and tonight, they play for a state championship. The first in program history!

I was in that gym last night, and I want to tell you what it looked like. Hundreds of Hudson fans in blue and gold packed the stands — many of them there because of the spectator bus organized by Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood and Friends of Hudson Youth. Kids held up giant printed photos of players’ faces. The team had a framed printout of Elijah Walker, a teammate out with an injury, with them on the bench. People of all ages from all corners of our little city were cheering so loud and so hard that it didn’t feel like a high school basketball game. It felt like something bigger. It felt like Hudson showing up for its future.

If you can get to Binghamton tonight, go. The Class A State Championship tips off at 7:45pm at Visions Veterans Memorial Arena. The Bluehawks are playing Westhill, a team traveling from just over an hour away — all the more reason to pack the stands with Bluehawk fans. This is Hudson history. You don’t want to miss it.

The Bluehawks are a big reason this isn’t a full essay this week. Last week I interviewed the coaches and players for a piece that made me fall in love with this program. This week I watched them in Troy, then Binghamton, and I will again tonight — and somewhere in there I also had grand jury duty, a shattered laptop screen (thanks, Cliffy), and a reptile-themed ninth birthday party for Poppy. An extensively researched piece didn’t happen. What I have instead is this: a dispatch, a few local stories I’ve been tracking, and some news about what I’m offering this spring.

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The happenings of this past week — locally and beyond — have me vacillating between joy and despair. As I watched hundreds of Hudson fans in blue and gold rise to their feet for these kids, our country bombed a girls’ school in Iran. As I cheered Keith Robinson into the Section II record books, the Epstein survivors still waited for accountability. As I walked through the cemetery in a t-shirt on our first warm day of the year, ICE disappeared four of our neighbors just outside its gates.

I know this dissonance is a shared experience right now. But it is hard to stay soft to the world — to let ourselves feel the full weight of it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my friend Anna about it, and she called it “the pain of thawing out.” I’ve thought about it constantly since. She said it’s good to unfreeze, to allow yourself to be open and exposed. And I believe her — not only because she’s brilliant and a therapist and a dear friend, but because letting myself feel the hard stuff is what motivates me to show up, to connect, to try to make a better world for our kids. And along with that comes the capacity to feel all the beautiful too.

Paying attention to Hudson is part of how I do that. Here's what I've been tracking this week — topics that will likely become full-fledged essays in the weeks to come.

Short-term rental legislation. Hudson has been wrestling with the Airbnb question for years, and last fall we finally landed somewhere: if you live in your home at least 50 days a year, you can rent it out for up to 60 days. Owner-occupied only. That’s the law.

This month, there was a proposal to double that limit to 120 days. It just got dropped — and the reason is interesting. Of the 13 registered short-term rental owners in Hudson last year, most were only renting 15 to 30 days anyway. The proposal would have affected almost nobody, so the Legal Committee shelved it.

Thirteen licensed short-term rentals in all of Hudson. This immediately makes me wonder: how many unlicensed ones are there? Michelle Tullo, the Housing Justice Director, monitors this, and the Council just asked her office to make it easier for residents to report violations online.

The Hudson / Catskill Housing Coalition is still pushing for a full vacancy study before any housing decisions get made. I think that’s right. It’s hard to create policy without a comprehensive picture of what we’re actually working with. I want to dig into this more — the licensing numbers, the enforcement question, what a vacancy study would actually tell us. Consider this a preview.

The Hit and Walk. On the afternoon of February 20th, Council President Margaret Morris drove over a parking block and into the side of Magic Hill Mercantile on Warren Street. One of the store’s co-founders came outside to talk to her. She waved him off and crossed the street to go to the Maker, where police approached her while eating a salad and having a coffee.

This became common knowledge as two videos of the incident have circulated widely online. On body cam footage, Morris told the responding officer she’d tapped the building after sliding on ice, and questioned whether she was responsible. The building owner picked up a piece of Morris’ car off the ground. The Hudson Police Department handled it as a standard property-damage accident.

Morris eventually issued a statement. Fifth ward council member Claire Cousin gave her perspective: that Morris apologized for wanting to avoid a confrontation, not for causing damage to a local business. Constituents have been demanding accountability, and some have called for her resignation.

Several people have reached out asking me to write about this. For now, I am sitting with it. I care about how our elected officials behave, especially when they have done something wrong. I trust people more when they show accountability for their actions. And I also believe in being compassionate when people mess up. I want to write about this more carefully once the dust settles.

Civic explainer series kickoff. Even though I grew up in Hudson and I consider myself plugged in politically, I still find myself confused about the roles of the various governing bodies: the Mayor, the Common Council, the Planning Board, the Industrial Development Agency (IDA), to name a few. How are decisions made? Who has power? Where are the pressure points for people who want to influence what goes on in Hudson?

I want to start mapping that. If you’re newer to paying attention, or you’ve been watching for years and just want a clearer picture of how Hudson works — this series is for you. I’m writing it for myself too.

Beyond this writing project, I also have some upcoming spring offerings in the same spirit — remembering and supporting each other in Hudson.

Gravestone tending and remembrance sessions — Cedar Park Cemetery, April and May.

It’s warming up, and I’m back in the cemetery! This is for anyone with a loved one buried at Cedar Park. Instead of tending stones alone, I’m inviting you to tend with me. I bring the cleaning supplies, a small altar, tea, and chairs. You bring your person — their memory, maybe a photo, maybe just the ache of missing them. We clean the stone together; I’ll teach you how to do it so you can come back on your own. I walk you through a simple remembrance ritual — some questions, some time to just be there. You leave with before and after photos, a new skill, and the feeling of having shown up for someone you love. Sessions are one hour, with up to three attendees per session. Spots are limited and will be posted soon.

May We Gather — Four gatherings in May

This small group coaching circle is for people who are between things. Last fall I ran a version of this group, and the transitions in the room were all completely different — a new business, retirement, motherhood, the unexpected end of a career. Nothing in common on paper. But the feeling — especially the grief, that particular mushiness of not knowing who you are right now — resonated through everyone. This group will meet four times in May (dates TBD). We’ll share, witness each other, do simple exercises and rituals, and build skills to support ourselves through whatever we’re in the middle of. Readings and writing prompts between sessions. Twelve people max — spots will be posted soon.

I get to do the things I love and call it work. The writing, the stones, the people navigating their transitions. I love all of this, and I'm not taking it for granted.

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If this Substack is useful to you — if it helps you understand Hudson or feel less lost, less alone, or more equipped to show up — please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Every single one of my paid supporters makes a difference as I continue to grow this project!

The season was months away, but Keith had made a promise to himself — he was staying in Hudson instead of going to prep school, and he was going to bring a championship home. All he needed was the Youth Center gym.

He kept calling Coach Tyrone Hedgepeth, his assistant coach, who also happens to be the longest-serving staff member at the Youth Department, where Keith has played basketball most of his life. Tyrone was swamped – Oakdale summer camp was about to begin, and dozens of kids were about to descend on the lake. But Keith kept calling, kept asking to use the gym.

“I said, hey, I got other priorities and you in my way, bro,” Tyrone told me, laughing at the memory.

Keith had said: “I guarantee it’s going to pay off.”

And pay off it did. On Saturday at Harding Mazzotti Arena in Glens Falls, down 28-16 at halftime against Lansingburgh, the Hudson Bluehawks went on a 16-2 run in the third quarter, and Keith Robinson — 23 points, 10 rebounds, 6 steals — sealed with a dunk a 51-46 win that gave Hudson its first sectional title in ten years.

In the stands, everyone who had made the trip was on their feet — parents, family, teachers, students, the whole blue and gold contingent that had packed a spectator bus out of Hudson that morning and made the trip to Glens Falls. They were hugging each other, crying, waving their signs, and cheering for their team.

And then there were the coaches – the trio who has collectively spent decades getting this team to this moment.

Head coach Shawn Briscoe, who has spent fourteen years building this program after coming up through it himself. Tyrone Hedgepeth, assistant coach and Youth Department senior staff, who has been spotting talent in this city’s kids since they were eight years old. Isaiah Heard, assistant coach and Youth Department staff, former community scoring champion, the man a generation of Hudson kids grew up idolizing and trying to beat in pickup games.

The three of them found each other on the sideline and embraced. The moment was years in the making.

“It was just pure excitement,” Coach Briscoe told me. “Between summer and off season, practice, weight room – all of that just culminates into one defining moment of one game. And we did it.”

“When that buzzer went off,” Coach Tyrone said, “everything inside me just exhaled. I needed a moment to myself.”

For Coach Heard, who joined the program seven years ago, it was a homecoming of a different kind. He grew up in Hudson, became the kind of player this city still talks about over twenty years later – the community scoring champion, the one who shaved an “H” into the back of his head, the hometown hero. He led the Bluehawks to victory back in 2003.

What made him the player he was, he’ll tell you, was Gary Dempsey. A mentor who walked with him through his high school years and hammered the fundamentals until Heard’s game became something else entirely.

Now Coach Heard is that person for dozens of kids. He works at the Youth Center in the evenings and lets the kids challenge him, because he understands — the way Dempsey understood — that “iron sharpens iron”. He joined the coaching staff because he wanted to give back in a bigger way.

“I wanted to come back and see if I could make a difference,” he said.

This time he was experiencing a championship as a coach, watching from the bench instead of playing on the court.

“Just to see the hysteria that that brought everyone then,” he said, “and now be a part of it — I think it made us whole for that moment.”

Coach Briscoe, who coached that 2016 team that won sectionals, thought about his seniors. About what it took to get here. About a community that had been waiting ten years for this.

“I am just excited for the community,” he told me. “In today’s times everyone’s looking for something to bring joy to them if they got tough stuff going on at home. Maybe we played a small part in being able to lift them up.”

The community had our own answer to that.

When the Bluehawks returned to Hudson that night, fire trucks and police vehicles were waiting, sirens and lights flashing, to welcome the Hudson team home. Familiar faces lined the sidewalk at the high school — parents, fans, kids who had been at the game and kids who hadn’t, people who came out of their houses when they heard the sirens and didn’t go back inside.

Calvin Lewis, the Youth Department director, heard the commotion and didn’t understand it at first.

“It startled me a bit,” he told me. “But once I put two and two together, I recognized it was to show appreciation for our champs.”

He let that sit for a moment, then said: “Twenty, thirty years from now, we can always point back and say — hey, we knew some of those guys that brought the championship home.”

But here’s the thing about Hudson and these kids: the community didn’t just show up that night. They’ve been showing up for years. In moments of celebration, and in moments that were more ordinary. A lot of that took place in a building on Third Street, kept open, staffed by people who care, free for any kid who walks through the door.

Donate to support the Youth Department

The Hudson Youth Department sits at 18 South Third Street. It’s been there for decades — formerly the Boys Club, then the Boys and Girls Club. On Saturday mornings during basketball season, the gym fills up with children playing in the Youth Department Basketball League, the YDBL. On weekday evenings, older kids filter in for open gym. And many of these older kids are on the boys varsity team.

Almost every player on this year’s championship roster are regular attendees at the Youth Center. They grew up there. They learned to play there. And some even come on Saturday mornings to referee the little kids’ games, set up the chairs, keep score.

Keith Robinson was one of those refs. Calvin Lewis, the Youth Department director, watched as the kids soaked up every moment with him.

“It was just as if you or I were going to watch Kobe,” Calvin told me. “You just see the look on these kids’ eyes in awe, as if they’re in front of a superstar. Which they are.”

The flywheel that produced this championship team didn’t start in a high school gym. It started here, with Tyrone Hedgepeth spotting raw material in a third grader, pulling him into a league, running skills and drills, watching him grow. It started with Isaiah Heard — former community scoring champion, assistant coach, Youth Department staff — showing up in the evenings and letting kids challenge him. It started with coaches who kept showing up, year after year, for kid after kid.

Coach Briscoe understands what the Youth Center has meant to his team.

“The fact that they’ve had spaces outside of school where they can connect over the years,” he told me, “has brought them closer together and allowed us to have that family mentality that we try to preach in our program.”

He saw it most clearly at halftime on Saturday, down twelve, in a game that would end their season if they lost it. Another coach might have raised his voice. Coach Briscoe didn’t.

“It wasn’t a negative halftime,” he said. “It was more of just reminding them of what got us here, and that we were capable of making a comeback. Just reassuring them that we were good enough and we deserved to be here.”

What he didn’t need to do was make them believe in each other. These kids had been trusting each other since third grade. Coach Briscoe said that was the thing that stood out to him most — not the comeback, not the final score, but that his team stayed at each other’s backs.

“Even though we were down by 12, none of our guys were pointing a finger at each other. They stayed positive with each other. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. We just weren’t playing well.”

You don’t build that in practice. You build that over years, in a gym at the Youth Department, in pick-up games and summer workouts, Saturday morning referee shifts, and bell-ringing for the Salvation Army. Coach Briscoe knows that. It’s why, for the last few years, he’s made it a point to send his varsity players back down — to the modified games, to the little kids, to the pipeline that made them.

He learned that from the people who did it for him. Coach Pat Maloy, who stood at the end of the bench with him as a young JV coach and taught him how to see the game. Coach Maloy is still coaching basketball, now for the Little Hawks, and he makes sure to get a few high school players to come speak with his kids. Coach Briscoe also mentioned Coach Derek Reardon, who coached Briscoe when he was in high school and still shows up to support the team.

“The community is so supportive of us,” he said. “So we have to find ways to be supportive of our community. That’s the way it should be.”

The players I spoke with all embodied that idea of giving back.

First, there is Keith Robinson. Keith is averaging 31 points a game this season. He is third on the all-time Section 2 scoring list, one of the greatest players this city has ever produced. But the thing everyone keeps coming back to — his coaches, the Youth Department Staff, his teammates — isn’t the scoring. It’s the character.

“You can rest assured if Keith is there,” Calvin said, “the right things are happening.”

Keith will tell you the character came from the same place the basketball did. From the people who shaped him. Briscoe, who coached him on varsity for five years. Tyrone, who ran the drills and opened the gym and pushed him. And Heard, who was the standard Keith measured himself against long before he became his coach.

“They developed me when I was younger,” Keith told me. “They helped me become who I am today. I’m glad that I won a title under them.”

I asked him what it was like following in Isaiah Heard’s footsteps.

“When I broke Heard’s record, he was the one who wanted me to break it. He didn’t want no one else but me.”

That’s how it works in Hudson — the person ahead of you pulls you forward, and then you turn around and do the same.

Keith feels that responsibility deeply. Not just toward the little kids watching from the bleachers, but toward the teammates he’s grown up beside. Gannon Logue. Eli Conte. The brothers he made this promise for.

Thinking back on when they were down at the half during last Saturday’s game, Keith echoed Coach Briscoe. “We never pointed fingers whose fault it was,” he said. “We stayed together as a group. That’s how we are as a team. We’re brothers. We will never give up on each other.”

Gannon Logue has been playing alongside Keith since they were learning the game together at YDBL. He’s the team’s second leading scorer, averaging fifteen points a game, and he’s been a Bluehawk long enough to understand exactly what Saturday meant.

“Being only the third sectional title Hudson has gotten,” Gannon told me, “first in ten years — it means a lot to everybody.”

With 1:07 left in the third quarter, Gannon hit the three-pointer that gave Hudson its first lead of the entire game. After trailing for the better part of forty minutes, in the biggest game of their lives, it was Gannon who put them ahead.

But if Gannon’s shot gave Hudson the lead, it was Eli Conte who solidified it.

With 1:51 remaining, Eli hit a three-pointer that Lansingburgh never recovered from. It was his only basket of the game. It was also, amazingly, the second consecutive playoff game in which Eli hit the biggest shot on the floor.

When we spoke, Eli talked about the younger kids watching.

“I hope they just get inspired by us,” he said. “I remember when I was little, I watched a lot of basketball. This is exactly what I wanted to do. I hope they work hard to be where we are.”

And then there’s Jadiel Diaz, also a senior, who understood what this season was from the inside.

“Practice by practice, my team — we pushed each other harder,” he told me. “I knew we were going to get far.”

Diaz was right. This team showed up with the grit and determination that Hudson kids are known for. Hudson outscored Lansingburgh 15-2 in the final five minutes. When that final buzzer sounded, the Bluehawks – these kids from YDBL and the Youth Center and skills and drills and pickup games with Coach Heard and Coach Briscoe’s 14 years of showing up for them – were Section 2 Class A Champions.

After the game, Keith found Coach Tyrone on the sideline. The man who had opened the gym in June, who had fielded every phone call, who had watched this kid grow up into the player he is today.

“Tyrone — it was like a dream for him too,” Keith told me. “He wanted us to get there and win again. After the game he was just feeling his emotion, doing the pictures. He was crying with me.”

Tyrone told me what he remembers most about that moment.

“It was beautiful watching them,” he said. “Watching them out there, just jumping and grabbing and holding each other, tears coming from their eyes.”

Coach Briscoe reflected about what this city had poured into these kids — and what these kids had poured back.

“The people who are true Hudsonians do really have a passion for our youth,” he told me, “and they want them to be successful.”

The Bluehawks head to regionals this Saturday at Hudson Valley Community College at 3:30pm, where they’ll face Section 7’s Peru. The season isn’t over. The job, as Keith said, isn’t done.

But this team has already shown us something significant. In a Hudson that has changed, where funding for the Youth Department is challenged every single year, where there are fewer and fewer places for kids to just be, this team showed us what it looks like when you pour love and time and energy into your kids. What they can achieve. A sectional title, yes. But more than that — they built a family. A home. A sense of belonging so deep it makes them feel like they can do anything at all.

Keith Robinson already knows what he wants to do with that.

“I want to know from myself that I made an impact on Hudson and the kids,” he told me, “because I want them to know that they always have a shot at being great. I want to be living proof of that.”

Coach Tyrone summed it up for me.

“If there’s one thing I want the community to know about this team, it’s how passionate and really close they really are. There’s no fronting. One two three: Hudson, four five six: family. That’s what it is.”

This piece turns to the present: the condition of the building today, the redevelopment proposal now before the Planning Board, and the decisions Hudson must make about what comes next.

Bliss Towers today is not the building that child first stepped into in 1973. It is a structure that has carried five decades of use without being properly maintained or fully renewed. It has absorbed thousands of lives, weather, patchwork repairs, and the slow erosion that comes when systems age faster than funding arrives to update them.

A few months ago, I toured the building with former mayor Kamal Johnson and mayoral aide Justin Weaver. We were guided by Mike, the building manager. When we met Mike outside, he was friendly but somber; it was clear he took the task of showing the mayor Bliss’ current condition seriously.

We walked past a security guard and into the elevator. Mike watched for our reaction when it started going up. The elevator scraped as it moved, metal brushing against the shaft in a way you could feel through your feet.

When the doors opened, I hesitated before stepping out. The floor wasn’t level. There was a brief, disorienting sense of vertigo.

The hallway was long, narrow, and fluorescent-lit. The floors bore the marks of decades of wear. In some places, the beams beneath were raised slightly while the surrounding floor had settled around them, creating shallow ridges you could feel as you walked. The walls had been patched and re-patched over the years, the repairs visible beneath layers of paint.

Mike pointed to areas where water had found its way through ceilings and walls. In one unit we visited, the ceiling had opened along a seam and the plaster had peeled back, leaving a long scar where water had run down the wall. Elsewhere, maintenance panels and small holes told the story of repeated attempts to reach aging pipes and wiring.

Mike explained the building’s most serious challenge: asbestos. It lies dormant in the walls, floor tiles, and popcorn ceilings — until they are disrupted in any way. Every time a hole is discovered, asbestos remediation is required. But the cost of remediation often exceeds the value of the unit itself. Instead of repairing the damage, the unit is taken offline.

At the time of my tour, the numbers were staggering: only 84 of 135 units were occupied. The rest were unlivable — they couldn’t be repaired safely or affordably.

Outside, the signs of age were evident too. The playground beside the building was small and worn. Pieces of the play structure had broken off over time. The bridge had recently been repaired, the fresh pine standing out in contrast to the rest of the structure. The basketball court nearby slanted slightly downhill, its asphalt split by long cracks. And yet the space carries the marks of the generations of children who have played there.

Directly adjacent to the court, painted on a bright yellow wall, a mural reads: “HUDSON IS HOME.” Bright silhouettes of people stretch across the wall — children, neighbors, families — a reminder that even inside a building under strain, a community has continued to grow.

For me, seeing the building up close was clarifying. But none of what Mike showed us was new information.

The condition of Bliss Towers has been discussed publicly for years. Residents have testified about it at Common Council meetings. Housing Authority officials have described the same structural challenges in reports and public presentations. Local news coverage has returned to the issue again and again: aging systems, asbestos constraints, and a building whose repairs have become increasingly difficult to justify.

The question of what to do about Bliss has not appeared suddenly. For several years — through changing administrations, complex state requirements, engineering reviews, and narrow funding windows — the Hudson Housing Authority (HHA) has been preparing for a full redevelopment of Bliss Towers and the adjacent Columbia Apartments. The idea has been on the table since at least 2021, when the HHA issued a Request for Qualifications to identify a development partner to help redesign and rebuild the city’s public housing stock.

And now that proposal has been formally presented to the Planning Board, the group tasked with reviewing the project’s environmental impacts, site plan, and design before construction can move forward. Hudson’s Planning Board is composed of seven members appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the Common Council. Three of the current members were appointed recently by Mayor Joe Ferris after he took office, meaning the redevelopment of Bliss Towers is now being considered by a newly constituted board.

That board assessed the Bliss redevelopment proposal at a February 10th Planning Board Meeting, presented by the HHA. HHA chair Revonda Smith began the meeting by sharing her personal experience. She described growing up in Hudson’s public housing, and noted that her parents still live there. Her remarks grounded the discussion in what public housing in Hudson has meant — home across generations.

Alongside her, Jeffrey Dodson, HHA Executive Director, was direct about the building’s condition. Elevators, wiring, plumbing, and facade systems date back to 1973 and have never undergone full modernization.

Fifty years is not, on its own, an especially long life for a building. Many last much longer. But buildings require periodic reinvestment in their core systems to remain safe and functional. At Bliss Towers, those systems have aged in place.

That story is not unique to Hudson. Public housing authorities across the country are grappling with decades of deferred maintenance — with national estimates placing the backlog of needed repairs at roughly $70 billion. Bliss Towers is officially considered obsolete, and incremental repairs are no longer keeping pace with the building’s decline.

But statistics and engineering assessments only tell part of the story. The people who understand the building most intimately are the people who live there — and the Housing Authority staff who work with them every day.

That day-to-day relationship has also shaped the redevelopment proposal itself, which has been informed by residents’ experiences living in an aging building. And for some residents, the pace of the process can be difficult to reconcile with the conditions they face every day.

That tension — between careful process and the urgency of lived conditions — has surfaced repeatedly over the past several years. I think back to a Common Council meeting I attended in May of 2024. Several residents spoke that night, but one comment in particular has stayed with me.

Ifetayo Cobbins, a resident of Bliss Towers, stood up and spoke plainly: “We live in Bliss Towers. You all don’t. The building’s about to fall down… we live there with the half broken down elevators… a tilted building… water draining from the roofs… and you all are saying wait.”

She was emotional and resolute. Her words precise in what they conveyed: exhaustion. Exhaustion with hearings. With process. With delay. From inside the building, urgency does not feel theoretical. It feels structural. It feels like riding an elevator that may or may not work. Like living in a space that shifts beneath you. It is possible to value careful review and still hear what residents are saying when they insist that waiting has costs.

Not every resident expresses that urgency in the same way, but many describe the same underlying reality: Bliss Towers has reached a difficult point.

Larry Decker has lived in Bliss Towers since 1997. When he first moved in, he remembers a stronger sense of neighborliness in the building. “Everybody pretty much got along and looked out for each other,” he told me. Neighbors helped one another with childcare, shared food, and kept an eye out for each other’s families.

Today, he says, the atmosphere feels more strained. But when it comes to the question of redevelopment, his view is straightforward. “I’m all for it,” he said. “This building is falling apart and maintenance is having a hard time keeping it going.”

Larry also shared that residents have already had opportunities to weigh in. “Mountco was there asking tenants for some of their ideas,” he said of an earlier meeting with the development team, Mountco. “Most of them, I believe, have been considered.”

For others, the story of Bliss stretches even further back.

Glenda Lee first lived in Bliss as a teenager. She moved out at 18, later bought a home in 2003, and eventually returned to the building in 2013. Like longtime resident Tyrone Hedgepeth, her family was among the early residents when the towers first opened, and some of her relatives still live there today.

Growing up in the building, she remembers a stronger sense of community. “Back then, it was more loving,” she told me. “We all looked out for each other.”

Her life eventually took her elsewhere. But in time, she found herself returning. When she returned, the differences were noticeable. She said the building felt less cared for than it once had. And yet returning also gave her a new perspective on the place itself.

“I’ve lived in luxury, and I’ve lived here,” she said. “Life brought me right back to where I came from. It makes me appreciate the building.”

But along with that appreciation comes skepticism; she is skeptical that redevelopment will actually happen.

“I hope to see it rebuilt in my time, but I don’t think so,” she told me. “They keep stalling and stalling, letting the building fall down around us.”

For residents like Larry and Glenda, the question is not whether something should be done about Bliss Towers. The question is how it will happen — and what the future of the place they have known for decades will look like.

The current plan for the redevelopment is deliberately phased.

Phase One focuses on building new housing on underused portions of the site — including two four-story buildings (known as A1 and B1) and four townhouses adjacent to and across the street from Bliss Towers — before any demolition happens. The idea is that residents can move directly into these new units on site, avoiding displacement during construction.

In total, the redevelopment would expand the number of units from the existing 135 to approximately 276 once both phases are completed. The first phase alone includes about 166 units, already exceeding the current total. Engineers have designed stormwater systems to accommodate the phased build, and traffic and parking analyses have been completed.

In addition to the expanded number of units, this proposal serves a broader range of incomes than public housing in Hudson currently does. While existing units at Bliss primarily serve households earning roughly 30 to 50% of Area Median Income, the additional units proposed in the redevelopment are expected to be affordable up to 50 to 80% of AMI — a range that translates roughly to $56,000 to $90,000 for a household.

In practical terms, this is housing for people who earn too much for traditional public housing but nowhere near enough for Hudson's private rental market: a staff nurse at Columbia Memorial, a mid-career city employee, a teacher a few years into their contract. It also reaches two-income households — a daycare provider and a grocery store worker, for example, or a home health aide and a warehouse worker — whose combined earnings push them past the deeply affordable tier but still leave market-rate rent out of reach. This housing is an attempt to address a widening gap between wages and rent.

Redevelopment of this size requires aligning funding within a narrow window. Dodson told the board that the project is slated for a state closing window in October 2026, and missing that window could delay the project by six to nine months or more, even as residents live with crumbling infrastructure.

Seven months may sound like ample time to close this deal. But a lot has to happen in that window. A newly constituted Planning Board is receiving a project years in the making, inheriting both its complexity and its urgency.

At the February meeting, Planning Board members acknowledged both realities. The building is deteriorating. Residents are living with the consequences. And yet the decisions being made now will shape housing in Hudson for generations.

Planning Board chair Ron Bogle spoke at length about how the board was approaching the project. While he emphasized the need to move the process forward, much of his comment focused on what kind of housing Hudson builds and what it signals.

“The history of affordable housing in our country is not always a great story,” he said. Early efforts in the mid-century, he argued, often produced “monstrous, institutional structures” that isolated residents rather than integrating them into the life of the city. “If you look at the Bliss Towers,” he said, “you can see that it carries the DNA of the early ’60s affordable housing movement.”

For Bogle, the opportunity before Hudson is to avoid repeating those mistakes. The best contemporary thinking in affordable housing, he said, emphasizes human scale, integration into existing neighborhoods, durable materials, and spaces that feel like homes rather than institutions.

He also framed the issue in moral terms. People living on low wages, he said, deserve places of dignity, pride, and belonging — places that are beautiful and thoughtfully designed.

The intention behind that sentiment was clear: affordability should not come at the expense of quality.

And yet, the comment landed uneasily for some. The suggestion that residents may not be able to “see the beauty of the country around them” brushed up against a familiar issue in housing conversations. When we talk about dignity, beauty, and belonging, whose perspective are we describing — and what assumptions might we be making about the people those spaces are meant to serve?

Whatever the board’s guiding philosophy, the question is who gets to define what dignity looks like – and how it feels from the inside. That’s why I keep coming back to the people who live in Bliss.

For Larry Decker, what troubles him most is not the idea of rebuilding, but what he perceives from outside the building. “I know a lot of people who don’t live here don’t think we deserve a new building,” he said. “They would rather we just move away.”

Glenda Lee has felt that too. “Some people don’t want it rebuilt,” she said. “They don’t want us down there, period.”

Her response to this sentiment: “Where are the people supposed to go?”

That question echoes a tension that has surfaced repeatedly in Hudson’s housing conversations. For years, some have argued that large-scale public housing does not belong in the city at all — that it should be moved elsewhere, perhaps to neighboring Greenport, or replaced entirely by smaller scattered-site developments.

Others suggest that the market should simply be allowed to reshape the city, trusting that new housing will eventually emerge through private investment.

Some of those ideas have merit in theory. Smaller-scale housing integrated throughout neighborhoods can be an important part of a healthy housing system. But in a city the size of Hudson — just two square miles — that approach alone is unlikely to produce the number of homes the community direly needs.

The redevelopment proposal attempts to respond to both the building’s physical decline and the community that has grown inside it. The plan replaces Bliss with smaller buildings integrated into the surrounding neighborhood, and adds shared outdoor spaces.

In doing so, the project would significantly expand the existing housing, ultimately more than doubling the number of units available at the site. And that would have a clear and immediate impact: hundreds of people could live affordably in Hudson without displacing current residents during construction.

This is not the only housing strategy Hudson should pursue. We need homes at many scales and across many income levels. But this project offers something smaller developments do not: the ability to add hundreds of homes quickly during an acute housing crisis.

If Bliss Towers represented an earlier era of public housing — one defined by large institutional structures — the hope for the new development is something closer to a neighborhood: a place defined not just by buildings, but by the people who live there and the community they create.

And yet beneath all of these policy discussions lies a deeper question, one that the residents I spoke to all referenced. Does this community want public housing?

What kind of place does Hudson believe itself to be? A tourist destination? A weekend escape? A city where only people with wealth can afford to live? Or a city where people from many different walks of life can build stable lives?

Because public housing has always carried that weight. It houses people whose fortunes are often shaped by circumstances beyond their control — economic shifts, health challenges, family disruption, systemic inequality.

The question before Hudson now is not simply how to rebuild a structure. It is whether the city believes the people who live there belong here. Not just as residents in a building, but as neighbors, families, and part of the living history of the city itself.

The redevelopment of Bliss Towers will answer that question in ways that will shape Hudson for decades. What happens next will reveal how Hudson chooses to balance its past, the lives of the people who live here now, and the kind of city it hopes to become.