The Hartford Farmers’ Market has a new home for the 2011 season. The 2011 season will be the Grand Opening season and will now be located next door to the Stewart’s Shop, at the old Meme and Papa’s Icecream shop. The old Meme and Papa’s Icecream shop is the Regional District Headquarters for Stewarts.

Market Manager Pat Imbimbo and myself walked the property today with Stewart’s District Manager Mark Bruno to work out the fine details. Stewarts is being very cooperative and acting in a very beneficial manner to the Hartford community.

This location is on the short stretch of highway where State Route 40 and State Route 149 share the same roadway. A recent traffic pattern study indicates that over 5,000 cars a day travel this section of highway.

You really could not ask for a better location to hold a Farmers’ Market. The building and grounds are very attractive.

The Market’s operating days will now be held on Saturdays from 9am till 1pm from mid-May to mid-Oct. 2011

Originally, the Market was to open this year and be located at the Hartford Firehouse on Sundays. The Market started looking for vendors in March which turned out to be too late to solicit vendors. A lack of vendors made the Market decide to hold off for a year and get a huge headstart on getting vendors to committ for 2011.

This change of venue also allows the Market to change the day from a Sunday to a Saturday.

Saturdays are the most popular Farmers’ Market day, so this 1 year delay and change of location may actually work out as a win win for Hartford, Buy Local, and the Market. Plus, Stewarts should see a lot of walk over business from the Market to help their sales as well.

U.S. Senator Gillibrand was very helpful and wrote a letter to the President of Stewarts encouraging the idea that the Market locate at their building.

Hartford citizen Theresa Streit  was instrumental in keeping in contact with Mr. Tom Mailey at Stewart’s corporate offices.

Assemblyman Tony Jordan is keeping alive the member item request in the amount of $1,500 if and when the State Budget ever gets finalized.

The future for the Hartford Farmers’ Market now looks very promising and will be a wonderful “Buy Local” experience and destination in the Town of Hartford for a Saturday.

Dana

Hartford Central School’s 7th Grade class is conducting a “Dine to Donate” fund raiser at the Queensbury 5 GUYS BURGER and FRIES on Thursday April 29th from 5pm to 8pm.  20% of purchase with a flyer will be donated to the 7th Grade Trust Fund.

The burger joint is located at 735 Upper Glen Street.

You can get a flyer at the Town Office or from the School.

I particularly like the burger with everything but the kitchen sink on it. It rivals Lulu’s Diner Monster Burger.

Please support the 7th Grade and visit 5 GUYS on that day. Be sure to bring your coupon flyer with you.

Dana

The opening of the Hartford Farmers’ Market has been postponed for 1 year.

The Board of Directors for the Market decided that the Market simply did not have enough vendors signed up for the mid-May opening to make it viable. You only get 1 chance to make a good first impression and having a market open with just 3 or 4 vendors would have been an economic disaster and may turn people away permanently. If we had 8 vendors we might have tried it this year, we would prefer at least 10 for the first year and hopefully get bigger every year. 

The Town Board had been primed to receive a presentation from Market Manager Pat Imbimbo Tuesday night over the Market Budget and funding information. But earlier that day Pat and the Market Board of Directors decided that we waited as long as we could for vendors to sign up and unfortunately we felt we didn’t have enough to make a go of it.. 

At first the Market felt that March would be early enough to solicit vendors but that now appears to be wrong. Many of the vendors that we approached said that they normally commit to a market in January. They would have come to Hartford if they only had known about us in January.

Even though I am the President of the Market’s Board of Directors, I am also the Supervisor and Chief Financial Officer of the town.  The Board of directors, myself included cannot justifiably try to solicit funds from the town when we know in our heart that the market will not succeed this year.

There are boatloads of shopping support from the community but unlike that movie Field of Dreams ,if you build it, the vendors wont necessarily come. 

The Market will remain organized with an active Board of Directors, Market Rules, Application Forms, Market Logo contest, etc.   Instead of attempting a fizzling start for year 2010 we will now have a huge head start for soliciting vendors and funding for 2011. Our goal now is to open mid-May 2011 and operate until mid Oct 2011 for year #1.

Assemblyman Jordan, Senator Gillibrand, and most of the community have been very supportive of Hartford starting a Farmers’ Market. The market now asks you to continue your support into next year.

Dana

The Hartford Farmers’ Market is well on its way to becoming a reality.

A core group of persons that have showed interest from the very beginning met to draft Market Rules, Market Budget, Market Vendor Application form, and create a Board of Directors.

A press release has been issued to all the local papers announcing that the Market has been created and will be open Sundays 10am to 2pm from mid-May to mid-Oct. at the Hartford Firehouse.

The Hartford High School Graphic Design class is creating a Market logo.

Year 1 will be a little unusual because nothing tangible really exists yet.  By year 2 the Market should be running full ahead and the Board of Directors will be elected by the member vendors of the market.

A “Member Item” funding request has been made to Assemblyman Tony Jordan’s office but the State Budget mess leaves this request up in the air for now. Unfortunately the market does not have the luxury to wait. It will need start up money sooner rather than later. At the upcoming Town Board meeting on 4/13/10, The Market Board of Directors will request year 1 start up funds to get the market off the ground.

The Board of Directors for the Market year 1 are; Dana Haff – President (since this whole thing was my idea anyway), Pat Imbimbo – Market Manager, Andrea Wade – advertising & promotion, Emily DeBolt – Secretary/Treasurer, and Patty Happy – Board Member. 

If you support this market, please come to the Town Board meeting at 7pm Tuesday 4/13/10 and let us know.       Dana

Today I received a phone call from NYS Ag & Markets. I was informed that Hartford was awarded a $24,000 Farmland Protection Planning Grant.  The application for this grant was done during the planning process of our current Comprehensive Review (Master Plan) with the help of Consultant Brandy Saxton. 

This grant is to develope an agricultural and farmland protection plan and should not be confused with an implementation type of grant which is designed to buy up the developmental rights of farmland.

The Town Board will need to appoint a 5 or 7 member Agricultural Advisory Committee made up of Hartford Farmers.

The town will also need to contract with a consultant experienced in drafting these type of plans. The Ag Advisory Committee and the consultant will then work closely together to draft up a plan.

As per the Ag & Market website, Farmland protection plans should identify the location of farmland proposed to be protected, the value of that land to the local economy, the value of the land as open space, consequences of possible conversion and the level of conversion pressure on the proposed land.

Dana

Washington County Tourism has a new website www.washingtonnycounty.com . This site is still under construction until it is sufficiently populated with events and links to businesses. A link to this site is provided via our Town of Hartford website under “Pages”. If you have a Hartford event or tourism related business please go to this website and populate it. On the bottom right side of the site you will find “Link your Business” and “Post your event”. You will find forms to fill out that will allow the site to link people to your website.  Some events that you might not think of as tourism events really are. A church supper for instance would qualify for the event calendar. It is also a good idea for you to list your business with google business . This way when a tourist wants to plan their itinerary through the County Tourism website, your location will pop up on a map. Some functions of the website do not function yet, that is because there has not been enough businesses yet signing up to populate the site and provide info. This is sort of like “what came first, the chicken or the egg?”. Well, if you have a Hartford Agri-business for example, put your egg in the basket and the county will come up with the chicken.  Dana

Governor Paterson recently signed into law a new initiative enabling you to receive alerts  when a moderate or high level sex offender moves into an area of interest to you. It is called NY-ALERT. It will also notify you of weather alerts, highway emergencies, Amber alerts, etc. It can be fine tuned to alert you just for Hartford if you want to narrow it down to your local region. 

I signed up for the alert and it took me about 15 minutes of fiddling around until I got all the alerts I wanted. I chose the whole town of Hartford plus a distance circle of some miles around my house which took in small parts of neighboring towns.

The alerts can be sent to you via email, cell text, pager, fax, etc. You create the custom notification system you want used.

In order to create and account (no charge) and sign up for this, go to www.ny.gov/governor/and choose the various options available. The NY-ALERT website is provided by the NY State Emerg. Mngmnt Office (SEMO).

Dana

Normally, during Americade week some bikers just roar through town on their way to somewhere else.  Americade is getting so large that the organization needs to offer activities away from Lake George that the bikers can participate in.

So, they are planning a Scavenger Hunt, much like a Poker Run and asked me if Hartford would like to participate. This Scavenger Hunt will get the bikers to actually stop in town and take a minute to look around.

Three businesses (Lulu’s Diner, Dave Hick’s Sporting Goods, and Pole Valley Players Club) will have a special stamp to punch the bikers cards with. The bikers need to go to at least 8 out of the 10 towns participating to get their cards stamped.  On the last day the bikers return their stamped cards to Americade in order to qualify for some grand prize.  Americade will provide Red Banners for the businesses to help the bikers find them, along with a unique stamp.

The rules for the participating businesses are that they need to be biker friendly (decent size parking lot), serve no alcohol, and be open 9am to 5pm during Americade week.

The town most likely will not see much business from this scavenger hunt but it might help in the future for a biker to know where a local diner is, or where they can buy some gloves and bullets, or where they can rent some clubs and a cart.

Americade this year will run from Monday June 5th to Friday June 11th.

Dana

Did you know that there is a local food pantry located in the Baptist Church on Main Street? Local volunteers served over 1600 people in 2009. From 2002 to 2008 the number of families who used the pantry increased by a factor of 10 and the number from 2008 to 2009 increased by 30%.

The Hartford Central School National Junior Honor Society (NJHS) is teaming up with the local volunteers at the food pantry to do a yearly food drive. Each month the NJHS will collect various items at the school and then deliver the goods to the food pantry to help those in need.

Boxes will be placed through the school so please send any items you think could help those less fortunate. The NJHS will designate 2 items per month, but will not turn anything away. For the month of March the NJHS will be collecting tuna fish and paper towels.

Please help those in need. If you have any questions please contact teachers Megan Capone at [email protected] or Mercedes Barnard at [email protected]           Dana