There is something fishy about a town agenda that grows three pages between lunch and the cocktail hour. The Town of Chatham’s Town Board packet bloomed from 29 pages to 32 yesterday, a sudden expansion produced not by good government but by a single phone call from a diligent Town Board member who read in this newsletter that a 30-day notice for a bar/tavern liquor license had been laundered through the agenda without the small, decorative detail of who was applying and where.

The phone call extracted the missing piece. A May 6, 2026 letter from Alissa Yohey of Yohey Law, on behalf of Chez Monna LLC, doing business as Old Chatham Country Store, at 639 Albany Turnpike. Names. Addresses. The premises in question. The whole point of a liquor license notice, is in fact, to give notice. To the community.

This is not transparency. This is a finishing-school version of accountability, where the curtsy arrives only after you've stepped on the headmistress's toe.

Meanwhile, in the more glittering and far more litigated theatre of 509 Bashford Road, two letters have failed to make it onto the town’s website at all. They concern the Fox Hill Estate Vineyard, where the Williams would like to convince the Zoning Board of Appeals to grant them a rehearing on the question of whether their wine-tasting ambitions can be made compatible with a residential zone.

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The first letter comes from Mitchell Khosrova, who represents Susan Tanner, the neighbor whose appeal produced the ZBA determination in the first place. Khosrova, dispatching his May 18 missive with the assurance of a man who has read the statute twice, observes that the Williams’ star witness (the property’s later inclusion in Columbia County’s Agricultural District 10) is not the revelation they imagine. The relevant fact, he writes, is the one that existed at the time of the CEO’s determination, and at that moment the property was not in an agricultural district. He also notes that the ZBA’s own resolution already acknowledged the vineyard, the years of plantings, the harvests. The board found agriculture was “clearly not the primary use.” Nothing has changed since.

The more delicious letter is the second one.

Mark T. Sweeney enters as the late and elegant arrival, representing Jeffrey Murdock and Regina Wenzek, two more neighbors who have decided that the boutique commercialization of Bashford Road is not a project they wish to host. His May 18 letter does not whisper. Fox Hill, he argues, is not presenting new facts. It is relitigating the ZBA’s prior conclusion that a tasting room, wine sales, food service, and event-style activity add up to commercial retail, which the RL-2 district does not permit.

Sweeney also reminds the board that a rehearing is not a procedural courtesy. Under Town Law §267-a(12), a member of the ZBA itself must make the motion, and every member present must then vote unanimously to grant it. Not a polite consensus. Unanimity.

He goes further. The ZBA, he writes, already knew Columbia County had approved the property for inclusion in Agricultural District 10. The decision did not turn on the absence of that status. The agricultural designation is not the deus ex machina the Williams require it to be.

And then Sweeney makes the distinction that should haunt the rehearing request.

The ZBA has not forbidden the growing of grapes. It has not banned the vineyard. It has limited the manufacturing of wine, the bottling, the retail sales, and the operation of a tasting room. Fox Hill is free to be a vineyard. It is not free to be a commercial wine destination in a residential district by renaming its retail ambitions agricultural.

The fight, in other words, has never been about agriculture. It has been about whether a residential road becomes a hospitality address on the strength of a few well-tended vines.

Two lawyers. Two letters. One message to the ZBA. Do not grant the rehearing.

The town should listen. It should also, as a matter of habit and decency, put its documents online. The Powell House Press should not be the safety net for the town’s clerical lapses. If a liquor license is on the agenda, the applicant and address should be on the agenda. If lawyers are writing letters about 509 Bashford Road, those letters should be where the public can read them.

The pattern is becoming a personality. Documents arrive late. Names go missing. Important correspondence sits unposted until someone, somewhere, notices and asks. That is not openness. That is damage control conducted in a sweater set.

And poor Mr. Kleinbaum, one imagines, must be verklempt. Wonder why no one’s tapped him to come to their rescue?

Let’s get ready for the next ZBA meeting. In the mean time, since the town hasn’t posted the letters I’ve taken the liberty.

Letter from Mark Sweeney Esq.

Letter from Khosrova Esq.

PS: Just a nod to a few people who just happen to be on the red side of politics who have provided me much of the information used in today’s article. Seems that while many are floating the idea that this is a personal vendetta (it’s not) there are a few roaming the halls over on 295 who are not comfortable with the way Mr. Collins is running the show. All hail the leakers. They’ve always been the booster shot to heal a sick government.

The Town of Chatham is entertaining a new liquor license application. Is it a coincidence that the name and address of the applicant are missing from the 29-page town board meeting agenda? Or is this just more obfuscation at the hands of Donal Collins? Good question. Rumor also has it that there is more legal correspondence missing on the town’s website concerning 509 Bashford Road. Well, let’s not call it a rumor. It’s a fact.

Nicole Saphier keeps chickens. Also rosemary, lavender, hay, apples, and a wedge of forest in New Jersey. The chickens and the lavender are doing important work. They are subsidizing a 16,000-square-foot house with 26 rooms, an in-ground pool, a home theater, a yoga studio, and a dedicated wine room.

That is not a farm. That is a Nancy Meyers film with poultry.

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Saphier is a radiologist, an author, a former Fox News contributor, and President Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general. According to POLITICO, she is also the proprietor of an estate whose 10.35 farmland-designated acres saw their valuation drop by roughly $624,500. The tax on that land, an estimated $7,200, fell to as little as $40.

Forty dollars. Less than a decent bottle of New Jersey wine. (Saphier has a room for those.)

This is the maneuver. Take a luxury estate. Add a few hens. Plant some lavender. Photograph the apples. Invoke a statute written for people whose lives actually depend on weather. Collect the discount.

The same play is now running in Chatham, New York. Well except for the fact that Saphier has more of a farm if you can call it that.

Edwin and Cherie Williams own 509 Bashford Road. It is a luxury estate on a residential dirt road. Less than one percent of the acreage is vineyard. The property has nonetheless been admitted to an agricultural district, and the Williams now want to convert it into Fox Hill Estate Vineyard, a winery and tasting-room destination, over the objections of neighbors who can read a map.

The vocabulary is identical to New Jersey. Vineyard. Farm winery. Agricultural district. Rural preservation. The vocabulary is doing the work because the agriculture certainly isn’t.

The legal architecture varies by state. New Jersey has farmland assessment. New York has agricultural districts and right-to-farm protections. The strategy is the same in every zip code: locate a statute drafted for working farmers, identify the lowest possible threshold of compliance, and clear it with a gardening hobby. The result is a private financial instrument disguised as a public good.

It is a tax dodge with better scenery.

That bargain does not survive when the beneficiary is a radiologist with a wine room.

The Williams have wrapped their project in the language of agriculture. A property with under one percent vineyard does not become a farm because the paperwork says so. A residential country road does not become a commercial corridor because someone learned the magic word at the right moment in a zoning dispute. Calling something a farm does not produce a farm. It produces a brochure.

The tax cost is real, and it does not stay on the applicant’s side of the property line. School districts still need funding. So do the town, the county, the fire district, the library, emergency services, the highway department. When a luxury estate slips into a favored category, the burden shifts. Quietly. Incrementally. To everyone with less land and worse lawyers.

That is the corrosive part. The benefit goes to the property owner with the consultants, the engineers, the land-use counsel, and the time. The cost is socialized to people who do not have those things. The retiree on a fixed income cannot plant six rows of grapes and reclassify her bungalow. The working family on a quarter-acre cannot hire an agricultural attorney. Only the wealthy can play this game at scale, and only the wealthy do.

In Chatham, the politics are inseparable from the land.

Town Supervisor Donal Collins is himself a farmer. This should have made him useful. Instead it has made him decorative. Collins has backed the Williams while maintaining a business relationship with them, an arrangement most public officials would find awkward and Collins appears to find unremarkable.

He is a more skilled politician than he is given credit for. He understands the emotional voltage of the word “farm.” He understands that no one in a rural town wants to be photographed opposing agriculture. And he understands the sleight of hand at the core of this fight: once a luxury estate borrows the rhetoric of farming, the people who object to it are recast as enemies of rural life. The neighbor who simply does not want tour-bus traffic on a dirt road is repositioned as a villain in a documentary about saving the family farm.

It is a very good trick. It is also a swindle.

A public official genuinely committed to farming would be the first to draw the line. He would argue that farm protections are strongest when they are reserved for actual farms. He would understand that every gentlemen’s vineyard admitted to an agricultural district makes the public marginally less willing to defend the real one down the road. He would understand that the abuse of farm law is not a service to farmers. It is the slow degradation of the brand.

Instead Collins has helped erase the distinction.

The injured parties extend well beyond Bashford Road. Real farmers carry the cost. They are the ones who will face skepticism the next time agricultural districts, tax preferences, or right-to-farm protections come up for renewal. They are the ones whose claim on public sympathy is being thinned out by a wine room in Morris County and a tasting room in Columbia County. They are the ones whose lifeline is being treated as a tax-planning technique.

The Saphier case is useful precisely because it is so naked. A wealthy professional. A luxury estate. A minimal agricultural performance. A spectacular tax advantage. The paperwork is clean. The law allows it. The public can still see exactly what is happening.

Chatham should be able to see it too.

The Williams are not strengthening farming. They are weakening it. They are weakening the tax base, weakening the meaning of the agricultural district, and asking a residential neighborhood to absorb the consequences of a commercial ambition dressed up in flannel.

The question worth asking is not whether the Williams found a route through the statute. They did. So did Saphier. The question is what the statute was for in the first place.

If the answer is a working farmer, defend the law and protect the land.

If the answer is a luxury estate, a vanity vineyard, a tasting-room business plan, and a town supervisor doing business with the applicants, then the public is not preserving anything.

It is picking up the check for the Williams and Collins.

Nice gig if you can get I suppose.

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©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | josh@thepowellhousepress.com

Donal Collins, Town Supervisor of Chatham, presents in public as a defender of Columbia County agriculture. The town website says so. The press releases say so. The Fox Hill Vineyards file at 509 Bashford Road says otherwise.

The applicant, plastic surgeon Ed Williams, who has trademarked himself at the United States Patent and Trademark Office as “The White Coat Entrepreneur” and his wife Cherie filed the 303-b paperwork last October to enroll the parcel in Columbia County Agricultural District 10. The filing listed cattle grazing among the property’s farm activities. There is no cattle grazing. There are no cattle.

Northern Columbia County is small. Anyone in town who has driven past 509 Bashford Road can see what is on the land and what is not. So can the Town Supervisor, who happens to share an undisclosed business arrangement with the applicants. He did not flag the discrepancies. He continued to call the project a real farming effort.

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Collins eventually recused. He has not, to thi…

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The Fox Hill Vineyards saga has clocked north of 200,000 reads on Substack and Newsbreak. The numbers tell you something. So do the emails.

Readers keep asking the same questions, the same ones, over and over. When that happens you stop calling it curiosity and start calling it a pattern.

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The headline question. How has a wine project in a town this small snaked its way to the brink of a tasting room and a liquor license without a single nod from the Planning Board. The premise is slightly off. It hasn’t slipped through entirely. But the Williams of Fox Hill Vineyards are standing on the threshold, and if they prevail on their quasi-appeal to the Zoning Board of Appeals, the threshold becomes a doorway.

Split the baby. The Williams owe nobody an ethics seminar. They are using every lever the system permits, some creative, all American. The local government is the party with the obligation. That’s the part worth pulling on.

Enter Donal Collins. Town Supervisor. Filer of exactly one mandator…

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It happened.

Lawrence Howard, Esq., of Shulman Howard & McPherson LLP in Averill Park (yes, Averill Park, not exactly the Cravath letterhead one might hope for at a moment like this) has written to the Town of Chatham Zoning Board of Appeals on behalf of Fox Hill Estate and Winery LLC. Fourteen days after the ZBA voted 4-0 to send Edwin and Cherie Williams’ tasting room dreams into the long good night. They are back at the trough. It is not the right trough.

Howard wants a rehearing. Of course he does. A rehearing is free. The actual legal remedy for a party aggrieved by a zoning board’s decision is an Article 78 petition in Columbia County Supreme Court. That is not free.

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This is the part nobody is saying out loud, so let’s say it. The Williamses live in an 8,300-square-foot pile on 53.7 acres listed at $5.65 million. They have an unfenced pool. An outdoor kitchen. A greenhouse. They have a separate garage they would like to convert into a venue where strangers will pay them money to dr…

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Hope springs eternal, and I count myself an optimist, so let the Planning Board and the Town Board have their moment. The white hats won. The bucolic landscape endures. Donal’s fever dream of milk trucks rumbling down Bashford Road — trucks that, for the record, never existed; he knows this — is, for now, parked.

And yet.

Gabriella, dear: the matter is not closed. The ZBA was bullied into doing the right thing, which is not the same as the right thing being settled. Last week the Williamses, those onward Christian soldiers, presented themselves at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Box number two, checked. The State Liquor Authority was box number one, last month. I told you about that one already.

Here is what happens next. I know because I spent a long stretch on the phone with Ag and Markets this week, and I am not the only one who has.

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The Williamses will return to the Planning Board. Yes, the ZBA has ruled that a tasting room is commercial and therefore incompatible with 5…

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There is nothing quite like the slow-motion humiliation of a small-town official caught in the amber of his own convenience. Donal Collins, supervisor of a municipality that could fit inside a Manhattan city block with room to spare, has spent the better part of a year making FOIL compliance feel like a personal affront. Three missed deadlines. A lawyer dispatched on a Saturday — a Saturday — to insist that no, no, this was not constructive denial of access. My reply? That’s for a judge to decide.

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The documents, when they finally materialized, were almost poignant in their thinness. Karen Carpenter thin, as they say. One mandatory disclosure for 2025, filed in March of 2026. And what it failed to disclose was the one thing everyone in town is already whispering about: the relationship between Collins and the Williams family, who claim 83 acres of farmland — all but the vineyard parcel, conveniently — is worked by Collins himself. Or so the story goes.

This was already simmering beautif…

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As reported in the March 8th post of The Powell House Press, the Chatham Zoning Board of Appeals had decided at the last minute to “delay” their decision on 509 Bashford Road’s tasting room application as accessory use. Specifically, to change what was their initial decision to allow it. Last night the ZBA did just as reported. They changed their decision and said no. They also went out of their way to be sure that the public knew that they made their decision independent of Rick Werwaiss’ public comments (story broken by local reporter Prew) and the fact that during this process the Williamses’ property was included in Agriculture District 10.

Both of these factors, the ones that the ZBA made clear had NO bearing on their decision-making processes, are grounds for the Williamses to appeal through an Article 78 proceeding. They have 30 days to file. Will they? Good question, but a better question is: will they have to? With the protection of Ag and Markets there are now many roads to t…

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Tonight, the Town of Chatham receives the Zoning Board of Appeals decision on whether Ed and Cherie Williams can use their garage for something. Just what that use is? Good question, and now a largely meaningless one.

While this shifting matter has been simmering on the ZBA’s stove, the real meal is already on the table.

How the Williams pulled this off is fascinating and made clearer by the recent posting of public information on the Town’s website. Was it a poorly conceived transparency policy or a survival strategy? It is hard not to think that dumping documents online and hoping no one notices the mess beneath them was part of the survival calculus. Whatever the objective, what is clear is that the more they reveal, the more they expose.

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The new video section is more obscene than what used to sit behind the curtain at the old Video Cave across from the Val-Kin.

What, exactly, was that engineer, the one cosplaying as a Proud Boy, doing before the Planning Board on October 14, 2025? One…

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I wonder at times what happens when a person is elected to office and reason seems to fly out the window. I suppose it’s that same mental switch that allows them to think that if they ignore something or fight against it long enough, it means either it never happened or it’s settled business. We’ve seen it with the Epstein Files, and in Chatham this seems to be the strategy with FOIL requests.

Today the town reached out, as they did over a week ago, to tell me...wait for it...nothing. Not a denial and not the files I asked for in my FOIL request. The emails follow this article.

I was not surprised. After all, this is the strategy that the board is on the record talking about this past January related to another FOIL request. The plan (and a Band-Aid solution at best): delay.

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This is not going to land well in the 12037, well, at least for those who are bothered by the town’s legal meter ticking with more unnecessary FOIL-related costs. Just last week in the town board meeting, the costs, …

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As the town of Chatham waits for the Zoning Board of Appeals to decide if the garage at 509 Bashford Road is appropriate as a subordinate structure — a tasting room for commercial use, for an unlicensed product, in a building with no proof of code compliance, on a hill where a house burned to the ground because the local public safety infrastructure could not pump enough water up a steep grade — some of the townspeople seem confused. How is this happening? And just who is driving this seemingly runaway bus?

It does seem like there’s no Sandra Bullock or Keanu Reeves onboard to stop the bus before it goes boom.

While some of this does seem like it is scripted by Hollywood (at least some of the characters), as we all know life is not a movie. If the stakes weren’t so high and the time crunch not so critical, I’d be knocking on Netflix’s door: “Look, I know Meghan & Harry suck at content but do I have something people will want to binge.”

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I get the impulse to look at all this as just drama…

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It seems that in more recent times America has developed almost an appetite for corruption — a certain tolerance for grift and a reverence for the rich. Toss in characters whose colors and flaws seem plagiarized from Tennessee Williams’ diary: A plastic surgeon and a wife named after a fortified wine, replete with a French twist. A northeast farmer with a Tulane education and the ethics of a bayou politician. A well-meaning collection of town elders who seem perplexed by a growing chorus of discontent from the townsfolk. Indeed, it seems almost literary. But it’s not a literary work; it’s real life. And maybe Chatham never had an appetite for any of this — maybe, just maybe, they had a tolerance. It could be that a desire to be neighborly was mistaken for something else. This could be less Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and more To Kill a Mockingbird, where true justice proves more durable than Big Daddy.

Justice has a biblical tone to it, doesn’t it? But strip away the Johns, Pauls, and the st…

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Editorial Note: The original version of this post contained the wrong link to Resolution 72-24. The corrected link is now live in the article. You can also view it here.

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Writer’s Notebook: My original plan was straightforward: examine the pesticide load that a commercial vineyard in the Northeast would impose on 509 Bashford Road and the surrounding area, a parcel perched on a steep hill next to a DEC-designated wetland, and ask what an agriculturally zoned property can actually get away with in terms of tasting rooms, weddings, and live bands. I also wanted to explore what happened just a mile from the Columbia County border on Jefferson Hill Road in Rensselaer County, where residents are already living through a strikingly similar situation after the Sanford farm transformed into S and S Brewery.

Those stories are still here. But events at last week’s Chatham Town Board meeting blew the scope wide open. What Supervisor Collins disclosed about his own conduct at the county level, and his use of official email to assert that agricultural zoning would not strip the Town of its authority, turned a story about land use into something far more troubling. T…

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This story once had a blast radius. Today, all of the people involved are dead. This is the true story of just how things can happen in Columbia County, New York, because they did. It is more than just a story of small-town justice or the lack thereof. It is about corruption even though well intentioned. And the players involved, well-known names, were not looking for tax breaks or personal profits.

To understand how a woman was killed and the man responsible was charged with manslaughter, but walked free and mentioned only once in a buried blurb in the Register Star, you have to understand what war did to men and the loyalty it bred. You have to understand men who shared a visceral love for their Alma Mater, Union College. And more importantly, you have to know how Columbia County, New York works. When you understand all of this, a back-room zoning deal is like a game of pick-up sticks by comparison.

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While the issues around what I have called “The Wine Wars” seem local, they are anything but. This is not NIMBYism. This is a story about whether one couple with enough money and gobs of persistence can fundamentally alter the character of a historic community, and whether the regulatory system will let them dress up a commercial entertainment venture in the borrowed clothes of agriculture to do it. It is happening in New York’s scenic Hudson Valley, and if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. And it is.

There are many issues, but today I want to talk about four of them: the legitimacy of Ed and Cheri Williams' claim to be farmers and what that means for the tax base and property values; public safety; the pattern of behavior that reveals what this project has always been about; and the product they propose to market.

Dr. Edwin Williams is a facial plastic surgeon. Not a part-time surgeon. A full-time, board-certified, dual-specialty surgeon who operates the Williams Center, a 22…

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Ed and Cheri Williams still want to open a wine tasting room in their garage. The zoning doesn’t permit it. The licensing requirements aren’t met. The neighbors have objected for years. The application has never been complete. And yet the proposal won’t die—because no one at the Town of Chatham seems willing to kill it.

The Williams own an Architectural Digest-aspirational property in Chatham’s RL-2 district—Rural Land 2, a zoning classification whose stated purpose is “to preserve and protect, for the benefit of the town as a whole, the basically rural-agricultural character of the Town.” What they want is to convert their garage into a wine tasting room for Fox Hill Estate & Vineyard. Four hundred grapevines. Fewer than 160 bottles of annual production. And according to their prior submissions, not a drop of it made on the premises—the wine was produced off-site by a contract manufacturer. Or so the town was told, for years, until the story suddenly changed at a public hearing last …

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CHATHAM NY — A public hearing is scheduled for tomorrow, January 22, on Fox Hill Vineyard’s application to operate a wine tasting room on property located in the town’s RL-2 zoning district. The application has drawn opposition from residents who argue the proposal does not comply with New York State farm winery licensing requirements or local zoning law.

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The property in question was purchased as a residential home and is located in the RL-2 (Rural Land 2) zoning district. The property was zoned RL-2 at the time of purchase, meaning the applicants were on constructive notice of all applicable zoning restrictions when they acquired it. After acquiring the property, the applicants planted grapevines with the stated intention of eventually producing wine. However, the applicants have acknowledged that Fox Hill Vineyard does not currently produce grapes in sufficient quantity to manufacture wine at the minimum volumes required for licensure as a farm winery under New York State law. Despit…

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Next week—assuming we make it, which feels less like assumption and more like prayer these days—the good people of Columbia County will gather for a public forum on the Fox Hill Farm and Vineyard saga.

For those late to the drama: Ed Williams and his wife Cheri want to open a tasting room for their vineyard—which isn't yet ready for wine time. But the tasting room? Urgent, apparently. This is, of course, lipstick on the same pig they trotted out pre-COVID—a wedding venue thinly disguised as agriculture, redux of their first attempt to monetize their large home on Bashford Road. The neighbors went to the mattresses over that iteration. But Ed and Cheri—you have to admire the persistence, if nothing else—kept pivoting to new concepts, all of which the neighborhood has rejected with the same answer: This does not belong here.

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In December, the Zoning Board of Appeals met. The Williamses’ lawyer continued his valiant effort to shoehorn his clients’ wishes into something resembling acceptable…

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This is a follow-up to last week’s article on “Fox Hill Estate and Vineyard.”

I attended Thursday night’s zoning board of appeals meeting. There was no decision whether the Williams will be able to open their tasting room. Why? Because there was a lot of confusion as to the property’s zoning. Specifically, if the property is in a designated “agricultural district” it would make it easier for the project to move forward as there would be protection under the NYS Agricultural laws. No one was able to put their finger on the zoning - the irony - it was the Zoning Board of Appeals.

Well, it is not in a designated agricultural zone (see below).

So the decision, which is a matter of law, was oddly punted to a public hearing. So now’s the time to speak up and ask some real questions and revisit questions that have not been answered.

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