Last month I wrote a letter to the Town of Chatham. The new policy promised it would be shared. In writing. “The Town announces that all correspondence submitted to the Town Board will now be considered public record and included as part of the official Town Board agenda packet.”

It wasn’t.

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I said so. I also wasn’t surprised. And the moment I posted on the Chatham Community Board, Tammy Shaw was quicker to draw than Doc Holliday. The town has “procedures on correspondence.” “There has to be a cut off date to be added to each agenda or they would be revising agenda repeatedly.”

You’d think she was drowning in a million emails. There were six. Six missives, dribbled in over a month. And we all know what the agenda actually requires. Someone scans it. Someone posts it. Nobody is putting a paper to bed. There is no running into the pressroom screaming to stop the presses. The revising-agenda-repeatedly crisis exists only in Tammy’s telling. Besides, it’s not like people have to discuss the letters. They just have to provide them.

This month there’s more emails. Eighteen pieces of correspondence. Eight of them about transparency and ethics. 44%. I’ve read several. People share them. People still don’t believe they’ve gotten an honest word about Bashford Road, or the conflicts stapled to it. Be a Donal Collins loyalist if you like. Pretend there’s no there there. The transparency problem doesn’t care what you pretend.

Here’s the sketchy part. The policy says the correspondence goes in the packet. The town wrote the rule and then broke it in the same breath.

What we got instead is a grid. Names and subjects. A menu with no meal. The letters sit in town hall and in the senders’ outboxes, right where they can’t do any damage. Hand them to the public before the meeting and the public comment portion turns into something real. An open, frank reckoning between citizens and the people who work for them.

But Fox Hill Vineyards was built in the dark. Donal’s hand was on the switch the whole way. Now that the thing is nearly done, don’t hold your breath waiting for him to flip on the lights. Besides, there’s more pressing business. Hudson Valley Homets Youth Softball Program Resolution is far more important than ethics and transparency.

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

Before the swashbuckling, western-riding Dr. Bilinski opened Waldorf Farm, it was known as Dutch Acres. It was then, as it is now, a farm. What many don't know is that the previous owners had a side hustle. They raised ring-necked pheasants. This was the 1970s and there were little to no turkeys to hunt, so bird hunters managed with squabs and these beautiful birds. The problem with pheasants is twofold: they are not native and don't have any real skill at keeping away from native predators, and second, they don't really blend in, thus compounding the first issue. Point being, pheasants didn't belong in North Chatham any more than a commercial wine venue on Bashford Road. Well, they learned that pheasants didn't take; it was no harm, no fowl. I know, bad pun. Sadly, the residents surrounding Fox Hill Estate and Vineyard will not get such a break as a pretty bird. Nope. This "farm's" folly will be more permanent.

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New York State has issued E.F. Williams L.L.C., trading as Fox Hill Estate & Vineyards, a farm winery license, effective that day and good through July 31, 2029. Edwin F. Williams and Cherie R. Williams are named as the principals. And here is the detail the neighbors may not yet have absorbed over their morning coffee: the state did not hand these two a coupon to sell a bottle of wine. It handed them a trousseau.

A farm winery license, under New York’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Law, is not permission. It is a portfolio. Manufacturing, retail, tasting, tourism, all of it bundled and beribboned and delivered at once. Albany rarely does anything by halves once it has decided to do it at all.

Begin with the manufacturing, because it sets the scale of the ambition. The license lets the winery produce wine, New York State-labeled mead, and New York State-labeled cider on the premises, somewhere between a statutory floor of fifty gallons a year (a spirited weekend, where no doubt daughter Riley will be warbling) and a ceiling of 250,000 finished gallons (a serious industrial concern with a serious industrial payroll). Which is to say that 509 Bashford Road is now, in the eyes of the state, a factory dressed in the gingham of a farm.

Then come the tastings, which is where the parties unfold. The statute expressly authorizes them on the licensed premises, for consumption on or off the property, of whatever the Williamses make and of whatever their fellow qualifying New York farm wineries make. And it does not stop at wine. It waves in qualifying New York beer, cider, mead, liquor, and, in a flourish no lawyer could have invented, braggot, that honeyed medieval ale out of Chaucer’s world, exhumed and rebottled to grace a Columbia County flight. The Liquor Authority’s own guidance confirms the arrangement: the house may sell its own bottles to go, and it may sell the neighbors’ labels too.

The retail reach is wider still. Bottles of the estate’s wine, cider, and mead may go out the door for consumption elsewhere. Cases may go wholesale to the trade, to other wineries and breweries and cideries and meaderies and distillers and wholesalers and retailers, a guest list of the entire licensed alcohol economy. The wine may even be trucked to market without the bother of a separate trucking permit, in the circumstances the statute allows. And because a farm winery may retail the New York-labeled wine, beer, cider, mead, braggot, and liquor of other licensed producers, the vineyard can moonlight, quite legally, as a boutique bottle shop of the whole Empire State.

None of it need be free. The law lets a farm winery charge for its tastings and charge for its tours, monetizing the swirl and the stroll alike. And it may run the gift shop of one’s imagination: food to flatter the wine, local farm products, accessories, souvenirs, artwork, crafts, and clothing. The vineyard as lifestyle brand, tote bags optional but inevitable for the White Coat Entrepreneur.

Then, for the finale, the clause that turns a winery into a destination. New York’s farm winery statute permits the licensee to operate a restaurant, a hotel, a catering establishment, or another food-and-drinking establishment in or adjacent to the premises, subject to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Law, and to pour its qualifying wine, cider, and mead there. Albany has, in effect, sketched the whole enchanting weekend: arrive, taste, dine, perhaps stay the night.

Now a liquor license is not a zoning permit. The State Liquor Authority governs the bottle. The Town governs the ground beneath it. The two do not merge, however much a licensee might wish they would. So the state’s blessing settles remarkably little of what actually matters on the single acre of Valatie’s premire vineyard. Whether that building may be a tasting room under local zoning. Whether the use wants site-plan approval, or a special-use permit, or a certificate of occupancy that fits the plan. Whether there may be seating on the lawn, concerts in the evening, amplified music drifting over the property line. How many bodies may lawfully be inside. Where their cars will go. Whether the restaurant of the imagination complies with the land-use code of the reality. Albany answered none of it.

That is precisely the front on which the Fox Hill fight has been waged, in the unglamorous language of tasting-room and accessory-use approvals. A state license does not settle a syllable of it.

And here the plot, which looked for a moment like a tidy comedy of couple versus zoning board, acquires its third act and its most powerful character. Because the ground at Fox Hill sits inside a state-certified agricultural district, and that is not decorative. Under Section 305-a of the Agriculture and Markets Law, a town may not unreasonably restrict or regulate a farm operation, and it is not the town that decides what “unreasonable” means. It is the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, an agency in Albany that most Valatie residents have never had cause to think about and are about to.

The Department reviews local zoning as applied to the farm. It renders opinions. Its Commissioner can bring an action to enforce them. And the courts have sided with the Department when it found a town’s restrictions unreasonable, siding with it even against zoning that predated the district, deferring to the state’s reading over the town’s. So the drama is not, in the end, a two-hander. There is a third seat at the table, and it belongs to the party that can tell the Town its no does not count. In quarrels over farm operations, Agriculture and Markets can override the Zoning Board of Appeals and the Planning Board, and it frequently does.

There is also, for the connoisseurs of process, the review that never happened. No environmental study attended the enrollment. The State Environmental Quality Review, SEQR, the state’s look at what a project does to the land around it before an agency signs off, was waived by the county. The paperwork simply glided through.

So the open questions now belong to three parties rather than two: to Fox Hill, to the Town, and to the Albany agency that can outrank them both. What the Town has actually authorized at 509 Bashford Road. Whether that authorization stretches to cover everything the shimmering new license permits. And whether, should the Town summon the nerve to say no, the agricultural district lets that no survive contact with the state.

Collins will have his defenders; he always does. Which makes it worth recalling the last time this column took the measure of one of his most devoted: Prew, better known on the public record as Jeanne Veillette Bowerman, the “Democrat” in Trump’s clothing. She recites, at tender length, the legend of her “lifelong Democrat” father, a man whose checkbook somehow found only Republican causes, and of a mother cut from the very same bolt of cloth. It is a seamless performance. It is also, like the vineyard’s paperwork, a costume.

So set down the tasting notes. Strip away the flights and the tote bags and the resurrected medieval braggot. What is left at 509 Bashford Road is a corrupt farce of a “farm,” waved through by a public official who knew everything told no one and chose to feather his nest. Let’s not forget the Williamses will need a farmer. I think we all know who that is going to be. The cork is out, and the guest list was settled in a back room. Donal Collins’s conduct in this affair should not, and will not, be forgotten.

Tomorrow’s town board meeting is going to be interesting.

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

Call it what it is. This isn’t partisan bicker. It’s math.

Two hundred thirty-six people signed a petition against a luxury estate wedged into a protected agricultural district on the strength of a vineyard covering one percent of the property. Forty-six neighbors wrote letters. Not one soul wrote in support. Fact.

The Zoning Board of Appeals said no to the tasting room. Case closed, some thought. It isn’t. The Williams’ own lawyer told the board in May exactly how to route around that no: New York State’s Department of Agriculture and Markets. Unpleasant to report, but true. The lawyer is right.

Meanwhile, the Williams have filed for a Farm Liquor License. And thanks to Donal Collins, who declined to mention it to the board or to the public, nobody found out until later that the plan all along was to fold a lux manse into an ag district under the name Fox Hill Estate and Vineyard. One percent vineyard. Full protection. These are, again, facts, not opinions.

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To its credit, the town says …

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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.

Dep…

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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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