Day: December 18, 2019

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That Property Down In Coeymans

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albanyweblog.com: That Property Down In Coeymans

Of all the ridiculous messy stinking problems that former mayor Jerry Jennings left current City of Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan to clean up when she took over City Hall, disposing of the three adjacent parcels of land owned by Albany in the Town of Coeymans in the southern part of Albany County has perhaps been the most persistently odorous. Well into her second term, Mayor Sheehan continues to spend way too much time trying to find some way to dispose of this frightful waste of City taxpayer money. Perhaps the mayor’s efforts may finally be heading for a sanitary resolution, unfortunately we can’t yet say for sure.

Now, I don’t want anybody’s eyes to glaze over, so here’s the quick read teal deer version of the history behind this sordid mess. Shortly after taking office as mayor in 1994, Jennings started buying up 363 acres of fallow farmland, woodland and wetlands in Coeymans with City of Albany taxpayer money so that he could plant a gigantic garbage dump that he expected would be enormously profitable. That’s right, a garbage dump. Anticipating those profits, he eventually paid three Coeymans landowners the ridiculous sum of $5.2 million of taxpayer cash for land that was worth maybe, at most, half a million dollars. Maybe. What landowner would refuse such inflated offers? Of course they sold him the land.

All the Species Declared Extinct This Decade

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All the Species Declared Extinct This Decade

Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island tortoises, died in 2012. George’s story is the perfect extinction story. It features a charismatic character with a recognizable face, an obvious villain, and the tireless efforts of naturalists.

The population of the Pinta Island tortoise species was decimated by whalers hunting and eating them during the 19th century. Zoologist József Vágvölgyi discovered George in 1971 and brought him into captivity. No other Pinta Island Tortoises have since been found. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared the species extinct in the wild in 1996, while researchers attempted to breed George with other tortoises to at least preserve his genetic material. But George died—of natural causes—sparking news stories about his life and legacy, which media outlets continue to cover to this day.

But George’s story is not a typical story. Perhaps a better mascot of the extinction crisis is Plectostoma sciaphilum; a small snail, called a “microjewel” for its beautiful, intricate shell, that inhabited a single limestone hill in Malaysia. During the 2000s, a cement company wiped the hill off the map for its valuable resources, rendering the “microjewel” snail extinct.