The Wine Wars: The Town of Chatham's Board Rewrites its Agenda and Another Lawyer Joins the Party
Once again the town changes its website and agenda, but only after it was called out for not being transparent.
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.
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.
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.
