Carole Osterink reports in her blog The Gossips of Rivertown about the Wed. Apr. 27 meeting of the Columbia County Board of Supervisors Public Works Committee that discussed the purchase of the old Wal-Mart building, the addition to the county courthouse to make the building Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant, and the sale of the Ockawamick school. Osterink says the board moved forward with a loan to the Capital Resources Corporation (CRC) that would enable CRC to pursue their plan to purchase and rehab the abandoned big box store as county offices. "CRC needs $80,000 for an additional deposit payment due sometime in June and $500,000 for architectural programming and design," Osterink writes, implying this was approved at the meeting. "Kinderhook Supervisor Pat Grattan abstained from the vote to move the resolution forward because there was no information about architects," she writes, but says she (and Board Supervisor Roy Brown who was at the meeting but kept mum) knows that Urbahn Architects of New York City was hired through a public process to, "assess the space needs of county departments, analyze interdependency among departments, compare options for providing suitable office space, and identify a preferred option." Osterink also reports that the plans for an addition to the Columbia County Courthouse to make it ADA compliant are complete. Public Works Commissioner Dave Robinson, she reports, said the county will apply for an exemption from review by the Hudson Planning Commission and the Historic Preservation Commission. At the end of the meeting, Osterink reports, Greenport Supervisor Ed Nabozny said a resolution needed to come out of the Public Works Committee to put the Ockawamick building on the market immediately, which was was proposed, and accepted unanimously. Read the entire story in The Gossips of Rivertown.