New York generates some 18 million tons of construction debris every year, a lot of it coming from New York City as old towers come down, new ones go up, and wealthy residents perfect their townhouses. All of that waste — bulky concrete, chunks of wall and ceiling that may be contaminated with lead and asbestos — has to go somewhere. If things are working as they are supposed to, most of this ends up in a licensed facility that can properly process it. But in December 2019, a pile reaching more than ten feet high ended up next to Frank Eighmey’s front steps.
Eighmey has lived in Ulster County almost his whole life, most of it in a little hamlet inside Woodstock called Shady. In 1986, he bought his grandmother’s bare-bones campsite, converted it into a two-bedroom red farmhouse, and stayed put: His wife Pam moved in shortly after, and the couple raised their kids there. “We knew everybody’s name on the whole road,” Frank, a bus inspector, said. The couple now dote on their granddaughter in the same house where Frank’s grandmother doted on him. Life was peaceful.
Then Vincent Conigliaro moved in next door. Frank and Pam didn’t know Vincent all that well but had been friendly with his parents, Sal and Louise. “They were on the call list for my kids,” Pam said. “If they got home from school and I wasn’t here, they were to go up there.” So the Eighmeys didn’t think much about it when Vincent and his wife Gina took over the house after Sal passed, and they didn’t make a fuss when the couple brought in a contractor around the end of 2019 to relevel their lawn, even though they lost a bit of their view in the process and had to deal with the noise of the dump trucks coming and going. It was only when Frank and Pam noticed that the material being used to fill the slope of the lawn wasn’t dirt or sand — the kind of thing you’d see in a project like this — that things started to feel off. The trucks coming and going looked like they were carting remnants of a wrecked building: bricks, asphalt, pieces of plastic, even ceramic pipes. It started to pile up. “The wall of debris grew every day,” Frank told me.
But this also seemed like an easy enough thing to remedy: There are laws regulating where you can put this sort of waste, and those laws are particularly strong in Woodstock, which has a history as a mecca for hippies. According to town code, it’s illegal to dump any kind of construction materials in Woodstock, period. Further simplifying things was the fact that Woodstock’s town supervisor, Bill McKenna — exactly the guy to talk to about this kind of thing — happened to live just down the road. If 200 loads of what seemed to be actual construction junk could be trucked into the Conigliaros’ lawn, then 200 loads of debris had to be trucked out. “We had our trust in our town government,” Frank said. “They were going to take care of us.”
But more than four years later, the debris is mostly still there, and locals have taken to calling the land next to Frank and Pam’s house the Shady Dump. The fight over this once-bucolic stretch of road has managed to suck in the entire town of Woodstock, with small-time politicians, multiple hydrogeologists, and neighbors all caught up in the drama. They had chosen life in a small town because it was supposed to make things simple. But there was apparently nothing simple about trying to clear a small mountain’s worth of trash off your lawn.
The source of the debris wasn’t a mystery. The Hudson Valley is familiar with illicit construction dumping, and it turned out the Eighmeys already knew of the person behind the dump trucks moving around 10 Church Road at all hours of the day: J. Karolys & Son. Joe Karolys, a contractor, had been all over the local news that year after being charged by the nearby town of Saugerties for operating three illegal dump sites. (He would soon be sued again, this time by the state attorney general, for his dumping practices.) As one local contractor told me, “Karolys was notorious in the area.” Dark-haired and jowly, his response to the raids by the state Department of Environmental Conservation was to moon a reporter, a photo of which was published in the local news. (Attempts to reach Karolys through his lawyers were unsuccessful.)
The Eighmeys, and a growing number of their neighbors, suspected that the recent press and legal scrutiny had left Karolys looking for places to disperse his dump sites, but McKenna said he told them the government couldn’t do anything until they had actual evidence of what was going into the Conigliaros’ property — a long and bureaucratic process that involved dispatching the building inspector from the town. But in August 2020, the proof the Eighmeys needed tumbled onto their lawn. Heavy rains washed part of the dump onto their property, just a couple dozen feet away from their well. The Eighmeys brought in a hydrogeologist named Paul Rubin to assess the situation, and he quickly wrote up a report noting that the dump, which contained concrete slabs and bedrock that originated from New York City, was a risk to the Eighmeys’ well and six neighbors’ wells farther downhill. “He told us, ‘You should not be drinking this water,’” Frank said. Rubin also pointed out that the aquifer that provides water to the whole town ran underneath the Conigliaros’ house, making the potential risk to the water supply that much more urgent. It all seemed kind of audacious, Rubin told me: “It’s unbelievable that someone would pile this up full of waste right on your property line.”
Soon enough, the Woodstock Environmental Commission (WEC), a volunteer group appointed by the town board, was on the scene, too. ”It did not take a Ph.D. in environmental engineering to understand that what was going on there was very wrong,” according to Alex Bolotow, a member at the time. A small coalition was forming — lifers like the Eighmeys were arguing alongside classic Woodstock performance-artist types and relative newcomers like Bolotow. The town board and the Conigliaros, they all agreed, needed to take care of business.
The town charged the Conigliaros and Karolys with 200 counts of illegal dumping each, one for each truckload, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. In a surprise twist, Vincent threw in with the Eighmeys and the town, agreeing to testify against his wife Gina and Karolys in exchange for getting his charges dropped. He wasn’t the bad guy, Vincent claimed. He had also been victimized. As Vincent told it, he had paid Karolys up to $200,000 to landscape his lawn, only to have him fill the property with trash and, allegedly, steal his wife. “My wife and Mr. Karolys engaged in a little affair that I didn’t know anything about ’til later on,” Vincent testified. “The dirt got out of hand.” (Gina did not respond to phone calls.) Vincent’s daughter, Francesca, gave a witness statement to the same effect: She claimed she had heard her mother talking with Karolys about dumping “contaminated” material. How was Vincent to know a thing like that? “You could be sleeping at night and some truck comes by and dumps radioactive material on your property; it now is your problem,” Vincent said in a more recent call. “I didn’t do research on the guy, unfortunately.”
The case was settled at the beginning of 2022. The charges against Gina Conigliaro and Karolys were dropped from 200 counts of illegal dumping to one, for a fine of just $1,500 each. In the courthouse parking lot, McKenna told the Eighmeys that this was exactly what they needed to get it cleaned up. While the Shady neighbors, Bolotow, and even Vincent questioned the reduced charges, they were cautiously optimistic that things would now move forward. “When we walked out of the court, we were assured that that was a really good thing,” Frank said. It was not.
Responsibility for removing the dump was ultimately left to Vincent, who opted to do the removal himself rather than get charged by the town for it. He sued his wife and Karolys, claiming the work would cost him $800,000. That fall, he submitted a one-page document to the town describing his plans. He said he would make a stockpile of the waste in the backyard. From there, he would separate out the big pieces of construction debris and remove them. Once the rest of the fill was “tested to be good,” Vincent’s plan read, it would go into the ground.
A second hydrogeologist hired by the Eighmeys described Vincent’s plan as a “cartoony document” and sent a letter to the town warning that, with most of the fill still in the ground, the water remained at risk. The town, and specifically Bill McKenna, was unmoved. McKenna called the water concerns scare tactics and said he had been in touch with the DEC, which hadn’t seen any problems with the plan or even the dump itself. “From my perspective, I went to the state agency in charge of dealing with this, and they were extremely confident that there was no issue here,” McKenna said.
The DEC later released a letter asserting that a visual inspection of 10 Church Road, along with a review of the results Vincent sent in, presented no “evidence that hazardous waste is present at the site or that any pollutant is present at a level considered hazardous to the environment.” It also stipulated that the site itself sat outside of its authority. Still, the agency’s conclusions differed from the scientists’. Asked for comment, the DEC distanced itself from the case, explaining that it has very specific guidelines for what kind of construction debris falls under its jurisdiction — it has to be pulverized and “unrecognizable” — and it didn’t find anything like that at the site. “They basically said it’s up to town, and we can’t do anything about it,” Rubin, the hydrogeologist, said. “There’s no scientific basis.” (“That letter is a jurisdictional analysis by DEC as to whether it had authority to regulate the site,” the Eighmeys’ lawyer said. “That’s all that letter was.”) The town signed off in April 2023, and Vincent started removing truckloads of debris, returned the slope in his yard to its original state, moved the rest of the debris to a new pile, and called it a day. For Vincent and McKenna, the saga of the Shady Dump was settled. “There’s a statement that came out that there’s no scientific proof that the dirt in Woodstock is causing any problems,” Vincent said, noting that he had complied with what the Town of Woodstock had asked him to do.
But none of it made sense to the Eighmeys and their neighbors. It was illegal to dump construction debris in Woodstock, and yet most of it was still there, buried in Vincent’s yard. “This was how they were going to clean up, just move stuff to the other part of the property?” one former WEC member told me. “You gotta be kidding me.” Rubin, the Eighmeys’ original hydrogeologist, believed that Vincent’s sampling of the debris had been far too limited to conclude no further action was needed. (Vincent claims his testing met what was asked.) Even the four samples he pulled had shown the presence of substances like lead, pesticides, and PFOS, which the DEC had found in Karolys’s other dump sites. The town’s wells were potentially at stake; didn’t it seem worth it to go to the extra trouble of being thorough? Rubin also felt the DEC’s letter was missing something critical: Something might only rise to the regulatory standard of “hazardous waste” if it has specific concentrations of contaminants. But hazardous substances — like the kinds present in the Shady Dump — are still a problem even if they don’t meet a specific legal level, Rubin said. He sees the dump as something of a ticking time bomb. “Whether or not it officially meets their hazardous-waste criteria, once contaminants are present, they’ll leach downward every time it rains,” Rubin said. “There’s no question about it.”
The Eighmeys ended up filing two lawsuits against the Town of Woodstock and Vincent. One suit claimed that since January 2023, they have tested their well three times, and the results show “slow but measurable changes”: increasing levels of arsenic and zinc and the detection of fluorene and nitrite for the first time. Now the Eighmeys and other neighbors drink only bottled water. (Vincent believes the Eighmeys’ well issues are from a septic-tank leak.)
At this point, the fight around the dump centered squarely on McKenna. A contractor by trade, he had served as town supervisor for four two-year terms and on the town board for even longer. During that tenure, he had garnered a reputation as a bit of a hothead: He called one political foe an “asshole” and, during at least one radio interview, compared his opponents in the town to January 6 rioters. His critics say he runs an old boys’ club and prefers backroom deals to public meetings. “I have a lot of great qualities, and I have some bad ones,” McKenna said of his managerial style. “We all do.”
Bolotow, then-chair of the WEC and one of the initial people in the group who had come to check out the Shady Dump scene, became one of McKenna’s primary enemies. Bolotow moved to Woodstock with her now-estranged husband, the disgraced photographer Terry Richardson. She ran a local environmental-reuse store in town and had become involved in local politics. She could dish it right back to McKenna when meetings got tense. “When you say nothing more can be done, what you really are saying is that you are refusing to do anything more,” Bolotow said during one such exchange with the town supervisor. (“Thank you,” McKenna replied.)
Their tensions came to a head last spring, which also seemed to be when most of the town, and almost everything related to the dump, started going off the rails. That April, McKenna called Bolotow into his office and, in Bolotow’s telling, proceeded to yell at her for continuing to pursue the issue. He then declined to renew her status as chair of the WEC, allegedly on the grounds that she had sexually harassed a town-board member by sending an email that contained the word “boobs” in it. (The email in question read, “We are not looking for vague assurances that the owner is ‘expected’ to clean it up sometime in the spring. I expected to get boobs in the summer after 8th grade and, yet, I am still waiting …” McKenna says that Bolotow “mischaracterized the whole event.”)
Things started to take a dark turn. Vincent’s daughter Francesca called out Bolotow on Facebook for being married to Richardson (they’re currently divorcing), writing, “It is a shame to have two people accused of sexual harassment living in Woodstock. That is far worse than any amount of C&D [construction and demolition debris] anywhere.” Meanwhile, Karolys had been arrested and charged with first-degree manslaughter when a man was found beaten to death on the side of the road after hitching a ride with Karolys and his son. (As he was awaiting trial, Karolys told the Times-Union that he was actually a victim of a public vendetta against him “because of this whole illegal-dumping thing.”)
But everybody seems to agree that things got craziest during the election for supervisor last summer. Some of the Shady neighbors figured that maybe if they couldn’t get rid of the dump, they could get rid of the man in charge of getting rid of the dump. McKenna had not had a serious challenger in years, but the neighbors threw their support behind his opponent Bennet Ratcliff, a fellow town-board member, who blasted McKenna over his handling of the case. McKenna’s supporters claimed his opponents were spreading misinformation — McKenna’s campaign slogan read, “Facts Matter!” In a local paper, one McKenna supporter even branded Ratcliff as an outside professional politico for his ties to the Clintons and work in Honduras. At one town-hall meeting, McKenna called the assembled crowd “babies” for speaking out of turn and threatened to call the police. Still, McKenna beat out Ratcliff in the primary by a small margin and ended up easily winning reelection, as is so often the case with small-town incumbents.
Now the fate of the dump is in limbo. The scientific advice that the neighbors have gotten is that their water — and the town aquifer — will be contaminated eventually. The state recently won a judgment to get Karolys to clean up his three Saugerties dump sites but has said it has no jurisdiction over this particular dispute. In the Eighmeys’ first lawsuit, the judge found that the town had violated its own fill-and-grading law — one that McKenna himself passed after the initial dumping to prevent future problems — in issuing Vincent the cleanup permit. The judge voided the permit but didn’t order the town to remove the dump, saying that it’s up to the town to enforce its own laws. The town has said it’s already done its job. Vincent is hoping everyone will move on. “I just have a hard time because they won’t let it go. It’s like they have no other things to do in life.”
Frank Eighmey had planned to retire this year, but he kept working to pay for all the legal fees. Some weeks, he works up to 20 hours of overtime. The couple even started a GoFundMe to help cover the costs of their lawsuits. (On Facebook, McKenna called the fundraiser a “scam,” though said he later apologized.) This wasn’t the quiet, neighborly life they had planned. The bureaucratic contortions, the absurdity of it all — it was all beginning to feel like a bad dream. “I want to wake up and not have to worry about anything,” Pam said.