The Wine Wars: Readers Want to Know
With well over 200k reads, questions have poured in. Let's dig in.
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.
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 mandatory financial disclosure (recent, singular, silent on the subject of the Williams). The relationship between Collins and the family is undisclosed and undefined, and it is somehow the load-bearing wall of the entire story.
Here is the wrinkle. The Williams quietly moved their property into an Ag District. That move required the blessing of the county Agriculture and Farmland Protection Board. Collins sits on it. The Ag District designation is now the lynchpin of the Williams’ ZBA appeal.
None of this is buried. Extensive FOIL requests turned up the fact that Town Board member John Wapner had raised the conflict question two months before the Williams even applied for the Ag District move. When the town board later asked Collins why he hadn’t reported the county’s action (which the county was legally required to notify the town about, and did), his answer was four words. “He didn’t have to.”
He did. A resolution already on the books (72-24) requires the Supervisor to report county business to the town. This was not a new issue.
What happened. Nobody knows.
The follow-up letters are variations on a single incredulity. Whether ethics rules exist. They do. Tools exist. The town board is now floating new ethics rules, which is the municipal equivalent of buying a second padlock for a door you’ve left open. New tools cannot fix an unwillingness to use the old ones.
The reader response makes sense inside the larger weather. Conflict of interest, government as personal accessory, the routine breach treated as routine. It is the national playbook in miniature.
Locally the noise is partisan. Red versus blue. New board members and their “Democratic agenda.” It is not a partisan issue. It is a compliance issue. The framing is the dodge. (The framing is always the dodge.)
The remaining question is where the Town and County officially stand on a non-factual Ag District application, and on the Supervisor’s conflict with the Williams. Officially, nowhere. Collins eventually recused himself, which is its own kind of admission. The rest is off the record. People are working on it, allegedly. Whether off-the-record diligence translates into on-the-record accountability is the open question. June will tell.
A coda. The Silver Brothers Substack landed this morning. They are the control group. Door-to-door conversations with neighbors. Environmental review. Newsletters that explain things. Land genuinely devoted to agriculture. It is entirely possible to build an alcohol-related farm operation correctly. It just requires transparency, compliance, and community support, none of which can be shoe-horned in after the fact.
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