Orange County, NY, Middletown | featured news

NEW PALTZ – The SUNY New Paltz College Council has chosen new names for the buildings in what has long been known as the Hasbrouck Complex.The college is changing the names because of the namesake families’ association with slavery.The changes must now be approved by the Board of Trustees.If they are, the Hasbrouck Dining Hall would be changed to the Peregrine Dining Hall, after the falcons that fly above the area around the college campus. [...]

Assemblyman Colin Schmitt said Thursday he plans to introduce a bill in response to a proposed new village in Monroe that would raise the minimum population and percentage of petition signers needed in New York to create a village. Schmitt, a New Windsor Republican, said he’ll propose raising the population threshold to 2,000 from 500 [...]

GOSHEN - Orange County lawmakers have rebuffed without a vote an administration proposal to spend up to $1 million a year in county funding to help market the Legoland theme park that's being built in Goshen.Legislature Chairman Steve Brescia told the Times Herald-Record on Wednesday that lawmakers won't take up the proposed advertising collaboration, which the county's tourism director and a Legoland representative pitched in a meeting last month but had not advanced yet to a [...]

I step outside the other morning and my heart soars. I see a sight I haven't seen for months: two gray mourning doves flying into the brightening dawn sky. Those are the same sort of birds whose “coo coo coo” call has been echoing over our snowy land.I walk up the hill the other day and see another sight that makes me smile inside: Our trusty old blueberry bush — always the first to bear the sweetest, juiciest blueberries up on blueberry hill — is [...]

WEST POINT — The parents of a 21-year-old West Point cadet fatally injured in a skiing accident raced the clock to get a judge's permission to retrieve his sperm for "the possibility of preserving some piece of our child that might live on."West Point cadet Peter Zhu was declared brain dead Wednesday, four days after the California resident was involved in a skiing accident at West Point that fractured his spine and cut off oxygen to his brain."That afternoon, our [...]

GOSHEN - State Sen. James Skoufis stood outside Dana Distributors on Monday to announce 11 bills he and another senator plan to introduce this week to improve how local boards known as industrial development agencies award tax breaks to businesses to spur economic development.The Woodbury Democrat chose that spot because the Orange County IDA awarded the beverage distributor several hundred thousand dollars in benefits last year for a warehouse expansion it had started four months [...]

I won’t blame you if you don’t read this.If it’s a nice day, take a walk. If it’s another cruddy early March day, read a book.Only if you like to wade into the weeds of electoral politics in New York should you continue.Having already made voting easier, some Democrats in Albany want to end fusion voting under which a candidate can appear on more than one party line on the ballot.Because the two major parties have such a grip on all [...]

Sullivan County town supervisors are calling for the county to share some of the windfall from its surging sales-tax revenue to help ease municipal budgets and reduce taxes.The county is one of 12 in the state that doesn't share sales-tax revenue with municipalities out of 57 counties excluding New York City, according to the New York State Association of Counties.“It’s not like we’re asking for something that’s not the norm,” said Town of [...]

NEW WINDSOR – A public hearing next week will determine the scope of the environmental study for a proposed plant that would turn garbage into an alternative power source for cement-making factories now fueled by coal.The hearing before the New Windsor Planning Board will take place at 7 p.m. on March 13.BioHiTech America says it would handle 150,000 tons of municipal solid waste a year at the 69,000-square-foot plant on land it would buy from the town on Avenue [...]

ALBANY — Starting the year with a multibillion-dollar shortfall will leave New York state with "less and less and less" to spend in the upcoming budget, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday after he and fellow Democrats controlling the Legislature failed to agree on revenue estimates.The inability of Cuomo and the Assembly and Senate leadership to reach a consensus means Democratic state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli must come up with a binding estimate by Tuesday.The governor [...]