For a story in today's paper, Wall Street Journal reporter Joseph Avila made the trek from Manhattan to Middletown to spend some quality time with one of the Catskills' most notorious movers and shakers: Dean Gitter, the developer who's been pushing for over a decade to build a resort complex near Belleayre Mountain.
Avila interviews plenty of locals for the piece: Fleischmanns business owner (and village trustee) Ben Fenton, staunch resort opponents Scott Gould and Julie McQuain of Hardenburgh, and Middletown supervisor Marge Miller.
Since Gitter first began laying plans for the Belleayre project, it has been a hugely divisive issue in the surrounding towns of Hardenburgh, Shandaken and Middletown. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that there's some hyperbole being tossed around:
"It would basically cannibalize the existing villages that we have right now and would wipe out existing retail in our villages," Mr. Gould said.
Not to be outdone, Gitter -- who, the story notes, has a "sometimes prickly personality" -- retorts to critics:
"It's not strip mining, it's not fracking, it is none of the usual environmental atrocities," Mr. Gitter said. "It's skiing and its golf. In the process, we have been chewed up for 13 years at a cost four times what it cost us to assemble the land."
