PLAYING BY THE BOOK
The inner vault of the Sibley Library at the EastmanSchool is a cool, arid room housing
rare books and manuscripts. When visitors walk in, they often ask to see the
oldest thing in the collection. Archivist David
Peter Coppen is happy to oblige.
He pulls down the Rochester Codex, a book written between
1070 and 1103 in southern Germany.
Its heavy, cream-colored vellum pages contain treatises on the arts of the
Middle Ages, including one on music by Hermannus Contractus, the premiere
German music theorist of his day.
This amazing volume arrived in Rochester
in 1929 in the arms of librarian Barbara Duncan, who was sent to a Berlin
auction with a ton of money and the order, “Buy something that we can talk
about!”
Visitors are always impressed by its pristine condition,
Coppen says.
They’re even more excited, however, when he opens the second oldest volume in the Sibley
collection, the Admont-Rochester Codex. This manuscript, which dates back to
between 1170 and 1103, includes writings by Odo, Abbot of Cluny; Berno, Abbot
of Reichenau; and, again, Hermannus Contractus.
“In my eight years at Eastman, I’ve shown this book to
visitors with varying degrees of erudition,” Coppen says. “From medieval
scholars to non-musicians, they all have the same general response.”
They gasp and go silent when they see what’s drawn on the
back page.
It’s a human hand.
More than a simple sketch, it’s one of the oldest known examples
of the Guidonian hand, a system used in Medieval Europe to help singers learn
music.
Each portion of the hand represents a note. The lowest is
indicated by the tip of the thumb. The highest, three octaves up, is
represented by a spot on the back of the hand.It’s named for its inventor, Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo (born
around 991), who also developed solfeggio, the “do-re-mi”
scale.
Nearly a thousand years ago, someone traced his hand on a
piece of paper. There it is. You can see it.
“People are awestruck,” says Coppen.
— Brenda Tremblay
BUDGET BUSTING
Four people.
That’s how many showed up to speak on December 7, at the
only hearing on the 2007 MonroeCounty
budget prior to the CountyLegislature’s
vote.
That vote was to take place on December 12, as this issue of
City Newspaper was going to press. But given the Republicans’ strong control of
the legislature, the vote would be almost a formality. And given the small
interest in the budget hearing, the public may not care.
Maybe there was a low turnout because everyone trusts the Brooks
administration to create a great budget. Or maybe people don’t believe that
their input would make a difference.
But there could be another reason: that hardly anyone has a
good handle on what’s in the budget. For the first time in recent years, the proposed
budget was released after the fall elections. That left scarcely a month for
the public to review it, ask questions, and make recommendations before the legislature’s
deadline for voting on it.
Dr. Jeff Kaczorowski, executive director of the Children’s
Agenda, suggested as much at last week’s hearing. Kaczorowski is one of a few
in the non-profit sector who reliably provide analysis of the budget at the
annual hearing. This year, he said, he’d only just finished his analysis the
morning of the hearing.
Kaczorowski had mostly kind words about the budget itself.
But he did say that the county relies too heavily on foster care, which, he
said, is neither the most effective nor the least expensive way to serve most
children.
Kaczorowski also said that the county doesn’t have enough
staff in Child Protective Services. Since 2003, child-protective reports have
risen by 14 percent, he said, while staff levels have remained the same. In
July 2005, the scalding death of 2-year-old AJ Gibson made headlines. While
investigations found that the county wasn’t directly to blame, the state
faulted it for lax oversight. And according to a survey of child-protective
caseworkers earlier this year, many caseworkers blamed the oversight problem in
part on inadequate staff levels. The average caseload for investigators in 2005
was 25, more than double the recommended 12.
Criticism from Jim Volpone, head of the Civil Service
Employees Association (the union with the most county employees), paralleled
Kaczorowski’s.
“We’re getting to the point where we believe the county is
losing money because of the lack of staff,” Volpone said. Without enough staff
to properly evaluate applications for social services, he said, staff members
often make mistakes. Sometimes they approve benefits that ought to be denied,
which costs the county money. Other times they deny benefits that should be
granted. And if those residents are eligible for the benefits, they often apply
again. That creates additional work.
Prior to the public hearing, Budget Director Bill Carpenter
discussed the proposed budget before members of the legislature’s Ways and
Means Committee. It was mostly a boilerplate presentation, but the question and
answer session between administration officials and legislators revealed one
interesting tidbit.
The county has cited a $24 million revenue item that
balances the budget. In the budget document, mention of the sources of this
money is vague. County officials have identified a few of them, including the
sale of electricity generated at the Mill Seat Landfill and the leasing of
bandwidth on the Pure Waters Districts’ fiber-optic network. (At Thursday’s
hearing, county officials acknowledged that they’re also considering selling
the county’s tax liens.)
What’s interesting is that in the case of the Mill Seat
electricity and the bandwidth, officials admitted that the money would come not
from the sale or lease of those assets, but from “securitization.”
Rather than directly selling the energy from Mill Seat or
leasing the excess bandwidth, the county would sell off the rights to the
revenue stream for a lump-sum payment. Then, instead of receiving payments each
year from those who bought the energy or leased the bandwidth, depending on how
the deal was structured, the county would get a single payment, next year, from
the sale of the rights to each of those revenue streams. It would use those
single payments to close the 2007 budget gap. And it wouldn’t receive revenue
in the subsequent years.
“It’s a classic one-shot financing technique,” said Finance
Director Steve Gleason.
Based on unsolicited bids, Gleason said, county officials
estimate that they could fetch between $13 million and $16 million for the sale
of tax liens.
By selling the rights to the revenue from the Mill Seat electricity
for the next 10 years, the county could get between $3.7 million and $4.3
million. And selling the rights to the revenue from a 10 or 20-year lease of
the fiber-optic network could net between $10 million and $20 million,
according to Gleason.
That would total more than the $24 million needed to close
the budget gap. “It is our hope that we don’t have to exercise all of these
revenue opportunities,” said Gleason.
Whether they do use them all or not, they’ll be in the same
position next year. While these one-shots close the budget gap this year, they
do nothing to address the continuing growth in expenses.
Gleason, Carpenter, and Maggie Brooks herself all use that
problem to push their chosen solution — a sales tax hike coupled with a
mechanism whereby the state takes most of the county’s sales tax revenue and
pays its Medicaid bills. But important partners like the City of Rochester
and many towns and school districts in the county aren’t on board with Brooks’
plan.
— Krestia DeGeorge
RITE-AID REVISES PLAN
A plan to build a bigger Rite-Aid at the corner of Monroe
Avenue and Goodman Street
is back.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll succeed.
“It certainly is a better plan than the one we saw in the
summer,” says City Zoning Director Art Ientilucci. But that’s far from a
ringing endorsement.
“We have to remember it’s relative,” he cautions. “The plan
we reviewed earlier this year was certainly very substandard.”
The major change in the new plan is that the Rite-Aid
building now goes all the way to the corner of Monroe and Goodman. In previous
iterations, it was set back anywhere from 20 to 25 feet.
The new plan preserves the façade of the old Monroe Theater,
which currently houses Show World. It also preserves two houses on Amherst
Street that would have been demolished under the
previous plan, and it includes more window exposure on Monroe
Avenue.
It’s now up to the city, and Ientilucci in particular, to
decide whether the plan requires an Environmental Impact Statement. The
decision to require one last time killed the project, Ientilucci says. And
while he didn’t say which way he’s leaning on this version, his description of
the EIS is telling. The decision to require one doesn’t hinge just on
traditional environmental issues like soil, water, or air quality.
“It’s traffic, it’s historic resources, it’s neighborhood
design,” Ientilucci says. If the city does require an EIS, the developer, Fred Rainaldi,
will have to submit one before the plan can move forward. And the EIS will be
subject to a public hearing. If the city doesn’t require an EIS, Rainaldi will still
need to seek special permits and variances from the Zoning Board and Planning
Commission.
“I would say the earliest it would get to them would be
February,” says Ientilucci.
Meanwhile, HighlandHospital‘s plan to build a four-story parking garage on South
Avenue is already in the EIS phase. Ientilucci
says he expects that the hospital will have the statement prepared sometime in January.
The city is requiring an EIS mainly to get the hospital to explore alternatives
to its current design.
“I’m confident that they can come up with a design that will
work for them and work for the neighborhood,” he says.
— Krestia DeGeorge
THE GUILD AND GANNETT
The Democrat and Chronicle newsroom union has overwhelmingly
voted down a contract offer that the paper’s management has described as its
“firm, final, and best.”
The Newspaper Guild of Rochester rejected the contract by a 51 to 4 vote on December 1.
What happens next? This is where things could get
interesting. When the company announced the “final” offer a month ago, the
union was taken a bit by surprise since, officers said, talks had been
improving. But the “firm, final and best” language paves the way for Gannett to
declare an impasse and impose the contract.
In a one-page communiqué to its membership, union leaders
told editorial staff members after the vote that they hoped the lopsidedness of
the vote against the contract worked to their favor.
“The Guild’s bargaining committee will formally notify the
company in a letter today and stress that the overwhelming margin (93 percent
of the vote against the proposal) demonstrates the need to return to the table
to find a middle ground on outstanding differences,” the letter read. The Guild
will also ask the company to keep a federal mediator, which it just recently
admitted, at future bargaining sessions.
The company hadn’t said previously whether it would seek to
impose the contract, releasing only terse, single-sentence statements about its
long-running dispute with the Guild. (It’s company policy not to comment on
personnel issues.)
D&C spokesperson Tom Flynn e-mailed this response to
City’s request for a comment on the contract vote: “A decision on that contract
was entirely in the hands of its membership. We have nothing more to say at
this time, out of respect to our employees.
— Krestia DeGeorge
HELP WITH THE SEARCH
Expect to hear a lot more about filling the region’s
highest-paid public office. The Rochester School Board is launching a program
to involve the community as it looks for a replacement for Superintendent Manuel
Rivera. In surveys mailed to more than 15,000 randomly chosen parents, the
district will ask for input on qualities needed in a superintendent. About
5,000 copies of the survey will be sent to community leaders, and anyone can
fill out the survey online at the district’s website: www.rcsdk12.com. The
surveys will be mailed in January.
The School Board’s search committee will also hold a series
of public input meetings. The first two are scheduled for Wednesday, January 3,
and Thursday, January 11. Locations haven’t been determined.
— Tim LouisMacaluso
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2006.
