On May 12 the Planning Board closed the Williams application for their tasting room. They never filled out those forms any ways. On June 14 there is a petition from the community to the NYS Liquor Authority.

I have it on good authority the William are appealing thru the 305-a process.

Section 305-a is the right-to-farm statute. It exists because every agricultural district in New York eventually fills up with people who moved next to a farm and then resent it for farming. The law says a town cannot unreasonably restrict a working farm operation. Not “shouldn’t.” Cannot. Unless public health or safety is on the line. A vineyard tasting room is not typically a public health threat. It is, at most, an inconvenience to a neighbor who didn’t read the deed.

The Process:

A farm owner files a written complaint with the Department of Agriculture and Markets. There’s a form. Bureaucracy demands its tribute. The complaint lays out the local law in question and why it’s choking the farm operation.

Department staff review it. They look at the zoning restriction, they look at the farm, and they decide whether the town has overstepped. If it has, the Department doesn’t sue first. It calls. It tries to get the town to fix the law voluntarily. This is the diplomatic phase, the part where everyone pretends reasonableness is still possible.

If the town refuses, the Department stops asking. It issues an Order under Section 36, compelling compliance. New York courts give these Orders deference. Translation: when this fight reaches a judge, the judge tends to side with the state’s agricultural expertise over a town board’s zoning preferences.

There is precedent that matters here. The Department has already ruled, in another case, that capping parking at fifteen spaces and demanding a traffic study for a blueberry u-pick operation was unreasonably restrictive. A small farm doing small retail, strangled by paperwork designed for something bigger. That’s the shape of these cases. Towns don’t usually ban farming outright. They suffocate it with conditions.

Here’s the part that should worry the Williamses’ opposition more than it apparently does: 305-a protects the farm operation. The ZBA’s argument is that a tasting room, wine sales, and event activity aren’t farming. They’re commercial retail wearing a flannel shirt. If Ag and Markets agrees with the ZBA’s framing, the whole appeal evaporates. If Ag and Markets decides tasting rooms are simply how a modern small vineyard sells its product, the town loses control of the conversation entirely.

Which means the real fight was never about grapes. It’s about who gets to define what a farm does for a living.

I have a FOIL request into Ag & Market.

Even I ask myself why I post my column in the Chatham Community Board. After all, no one likes me, just ask Mr. Kleinbaum. Now not to put too fine a point on it, but as Chatham is a town of some four thousand people, Mr. Kleinbaum’s assertion — speaking as a trained data scientist — is statistically courageous. Data, evidence…not sure about the rest of you, but I’d want a lawyer who had a handle on the concept. Apparently the bar is lower here.

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Of course, no one reads me either, which makes me kind of foolish. What is puzzling to me is how I am so often corrected by those who don’t read this column. Could it be that these naysayers are fibbing? Or is the fibbing more of a culture? In Chatham, I’m beginning to think it’s infrastructure.

Ms. Bowerman logged on to Facebook the other day. She tossed me a sort of odd compliment: appreciates my writing chops, but my facts are…what? Alternative ones? Kelly Conwayesque? From a woman defending Donal Collins, the irony has a certain perfume to it.

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Last night’s ZBA meeting was, once again, a bruising evening for the Williamses and the tasting room they so badly want. We will get to the bodies. They are still warm. But first, transparency, that civic virtue the Town of Chatham keeps promising and keeps misplacing.

Board member Lisa Semenetti has been pushing for it. Earnestly. And yet the person whose job it is to post the relevant correspondence before a meeting, a duty the town’s own website advertises with a straight face, simply did not get around to it. I cannot tell you why. I can tell you that I got the letters, scanned them, and loaded them last week. Perhaps the worker bees at Town Hall are logging too many hours on Facebook. Perhaps they couldn’t locate the documents. It is, after all, very hard to find anything when your head is parked up the supervisor’s backside.

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So, thanks to that lapse, the room sat in obedient silence while Howard, attorney for the Williamses, got caught up on the matter. The opposition’s letters fi…

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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 glitteri…

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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.

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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 the altar.

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While this is a reprieve for the community, it is not a long-term solution. There remains a lot that seems...unsorted? Unresolved? Let’s just use the term undone.

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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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