Free Republic

Boat counters on the Northway for the Memorial Day weekend say that 89% of the trailered motorboats traveling north into the Adirondacks on Interstate 87 passed the inspection/decontamination station without stopping, according to the Adirondack Council. It is illegal to transport invasive plants, fish or wildlife from one water body to another in New York. The surest way to avoid contaminating one lake, pond or river with species from another is to have the boat inspected and cleaned by trained personnel. New York has installed a network of inspection stations in and around the Adirondack Park. Boat inspections and decontaminations...

GABRIELS, N.Y. — After 17 years of marriage, Joy and Richard Gonyea managed to save enough to trade their trailer in November for a cozy prefabricated home with a room for each of their two children and a pool in the backyard. The home overlooks the pine trees on the edge of their two-acre property in rural Vermontville, eight miles from the secluded state prison where Mrs. Gonyea works. “This home is all we’ve ever dreamed of,” said Mrs. Gonyea, 43, a registered nurse who runs the medical department at the prison, Camp Gabriels, a minimum-security facility in this minuscule...

ALBANY, April 4 — New York State is getting its first fish pathologist. A million dollars is going to jump-start the effort to provide cellphone service along a major highway in the Adirondacks where a Brooklyn man died, unable to get a signal. And the state’s dairy farmers will get $30 million to help them recover from a bad year. There are eight million stories buried in Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s first state budget, which was passed last weekend as the governor squared off with Republicans in the State Senate over education aid to suburban districts and with the health care...