Four Albany City Council members made what could become a big mistake on Wednesday. Councilors Floyd Collins, Ray Kopczynski, Dick Olsen and Bill Coburn voted not to place in the city charter the debt-limit initiative voters had approved in March. Only Councilors Rich Kellum and Bessie Johnson were against rejecting the voters’ decision this way. […]
I stopped my bicycle on Spring Hill Drive on Tuesday to take a quick look at this field. It looked like a field of rapeseed or, as we now call it, canola. I would have been surer of this if there had been a sign telling passersby what they’re looking at. I’ve long had an […]
“No Coal Exports, We Can Do Better.” That’s what the lawn signs say, and they are right. We can do better than to export coal to Asia or anywhere else. But we won’t. We could do better by using the coal in our country. We have lots of it and it is relatively cheap. We […]
Tom Cordier, holding papers, after Monday’s city council work session. By declaring Albany’s debt-limit charter amendment to have passed, the city council could make peace with the more than 5,000 voters who approved it last month. But apparently it won’t. At a work session Monday, the council majority seemed to agree to go ahead and […]
How come we pay so much attention to sports at the expense of everything else? It’s a question we ought to think about now and then. Television personality Dr. Keith Ablow did just that the other day. He wrote an online commentary on why the behavior of the basketball coach at Rutgers was tolerated for […]
The late Robert B. Parker wrote dozens of splendid detective stories, many of them centered on Boston private eye Spenser. He also wrote three notable westerns. The other day I spotted a new Parker western at the downtown Albany library. How could that be, I briefly wondered, since Mr. Parker died  in 2010. Turns out […]
An empty school, sad to see
In a world full of sadness, an empty schoolhouse may not be the saddest thing you ever see, but it’s still pretty sad. This lament is prompted by the sight of Fir Grove Elementary School in North Albany, vacant since 2011, when the school board was forced to close it as part of a range […]
Tags: Albany School Board, Fir Grove, Greater Albany Public Schools