The President’s fading red lines

Benny Avni

Red lines aren’t what they used to be.

President Obama warned beleaguered President Bashar al-Assad on Monday against using Syria’s chemical weapons. Problem is, Assad’s apparently already violated an earlier Obama ultimatum.

Meanwhile, China threatened last week to prevent some vessels from traveling in one of the world’s busiest commercial shipping lanes — a move that risks crossing another oft-stated American red line.

Start with Syria. Obama, who’s reluctant to get involved in the civil war there, nevertheless said in August that if Assad’s chemical arms are “moving around or being utilized” — well, that “would be a red line for us.”

Fast forward to Monday: “The use of chemical weapons is and would be totally unacceptable,” Obama said.

Why the shift from “move” arms to “use” them? Well, Assad apparently already moved them. According to numerous credible reports, this week someone started to move the weapons around and prep them for use.

Obama, who’s mulling naming a new national-security team, clearly needs time before deciding how to handle the danger.

And a major danger it is: Syria may well have the world’s largest stash of chemical weapons. As the central government crumbles, major weapons of mass destruction could end up in the hands of al Qaeda, Hezbollah or other unsavory actors.

In other words, the August red line was drawn correctly. Now someone (Turkey? America? NATO? Israel?) must obliterate or at least secure Syria’s chems — or the whole region goes boom.

Now to the Pacific, where Washington has long declined to take sides as major players there clash over rights to fish or ocean-drill for oil or natural gas. Friend or foe, America’s stance on these escalating territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas was simple: Solve it. Use diplomacy or international mediation. Don’t expect us to take sides.

Those talking points contained one exception: Our navy, the world’s largest, will guarantee freedom of navigation in the region. If shipping lanes aren’t open for all — well, that’s a red line for America.

But China Daily and other Beijing media reported last Thursday that as of Jan. 1, police in China’s southern province of Hainan will be allowed to board and seize control of foreign ships that “illegally enter” Chinese waters.

Chinese waters?

On Beijing’s maps, Hainan province included several islands that are also claimed by Vietnam. Meanwhile, at least five countries are clashing with China over sovereignty in other flashpoints across the South China Sea. And China, Japan and Taiwan similarly lock horns in the East China Sea.

Obama has long promised to turn his attention to the Pacific, now facing a host of transitions. The economic balance of power is shifting Beijing’s way; Japan faces a national election on Dec. 16 — and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is consolidating power with his family’s usual missile-firing antics.

In Beijing, meanwhile, Xi Jinping, who just assumed power as Communist Party chairman, is intent on translating his nation’s rising economic clout into military dominance. China just introduced its first aircraft carrier (and last week even tested launching a plane from it), and is upgrading its garrisons across the South China Sea.

Yes, Beijing’s current military doctrine is (asEdward Chenof Taiwan’s Institute of America sums it up), “We’re not firing the first shot but we won’t let the second shot take place.” Yet the new policy in Hainan inches ever closer to violating that policy by initiating hostilities.

That is, of course, if Obama sticks with our stated “red line,” a cornerstone of US policy in the Pacific for decades. And Pacific Asia is the region Obama says we now must cultivate (albeit with fewer aircraft carriers, which he compares to outdated “horses and bayonets.”)

Regardless of Obama’s “pivot,” America’s leadershipremains indispensible in both the Pacific and the Mideast.

So as 2013 nears, China and its neighbors wonder about America’s commitment to freedom of navigation; Syria and its neighbors wonder if chemical weapons will finally force America to intervene — and the mother of all red lines, on Iran’s nukes, is yet to be drawn.

Friend and foe alike wonder which of all these declared and undeclared ultimatums will force Obama to finally act in his second term — and which of America’s red lines will fade to gray.

Twitter: @bennyavni

Have a comment on this PostOpinion column? Send it in to LETTERS@NYPOST.COM!

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The business behind the artist: Miami’s art gallery scene still evolving

This week, thousands of art collectors, museum trustees, artists, journalists and hipsters from around the globe will arrive for the phenomenon known as Art Basel Miami Beach. The centerpiece of the week: works shown at the convention center by more than 260 of the world’s top galleries.

Only two of those are from Miami.

While Art Basel has helped transform the city’s reputation from beach-and-party scene to arts destination in the years since its 2002 Miami Beach debut, the region’s gallery identity is still coming into its own.

“Certainly Miami as an art town registers mightily because of the foundations, the collectors who have done an extraordinary job,” said Linda Blumberg, executive director of the Art Dealers Association of America. “I think there’s a definite international awareness there. But the gallery scene probably has a bit of a ways to go. That doesn’t mean it’s not really fascinating and interesting.”

The gallery business, especially where newer artists are concerned, is a game of risk, faith and passion. Once a gallery takes on an artist who shows promise, they become an evangelist on their behalf, showing their work in-house and at fairs, presenting it to museums and curators and potential collectors and bearing the cost of that promotion.

For contemporary artists, most galleries take work on consignment, meaning they get a cut of as much as 50 percent when works sell. While local art galleries have been growing in number and popularity in the last several years — just try to find parking during the monthly art walk in Miami’s hot Wynwood neighborhood — even some of the area’s top art dealers say that while business overall is good, they struggle in the local marketplace.

“Our problem is that we have to do lots of art fairs in order to connect with the market that we need to connect with to sell the work that we have,” said Fredric Snitzer, a Miami-Dade gallery owner for 35 years. “The better the work is, the harder it is to sell in Miami. And that ain’t good.”

A handful of serious collectors call Miami home and store their own collections in Miami, including the Braman, Rubell, Margulies and de la Cruz families. But outside a relatively small local group, many gallerists say, their clients come from other parts of the country and world.

And some gallerists point out the troubling reality that even the powerhouse Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin could not stay open in Miami for more than a few years.

“The fact that big galleries have not been able to sustain their business models in South Florida tells you we’re obviously not at this high established point,” said gallery owner David Castillo. “It’s not like we’ve arrived, let’s sit back and watch Hauser & Wirth open down the street.”

Still, Miami’s gallery business has come a long way since the early 1970s, when a few dealers on Bay Harbor Island’s Kane Concourse were selling high-end pieces but the local scene was hardly embraced.

Virginia Miller, who owns ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables, first opened in 1974 to showcase Florida artists, though her focus soon added an international scope. She and other longtime observers credit several factors for Miami’s transformation, including the community’s diversity, the establishment of important museums, the Art Miami fair that started 23 years ago, the presence of major collections and, of course, Art Basel Miami Beach.

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Son of slain Miami Gardens car wash owner: ‘He put his own life before someone else’

When Dameion Peart got the phone call from his uncle, he didn’t believe it. He drove to his father’s Miami Gardens car wash to see for himself. He hoped the news wouldn’t be too bad, or maybe the shooting happened someplace else.

He pulled up, saw flashing lights and police tape, and knew it was true.

His father, Errold Peart, had been trying to protect a customer Sunday afternoon from armed robbers at the car wash he ran at Northwest 191st Street and First Place.

The robbers turned their gun on Peart, killing him.

“He put his own life before someone else,” his son said.

Now, Peart’s family began the unexpected task of planning a memorial. He was five days away from his 60th birthday.

He won’t get to see his daughter, Mishka Peart, 23, graduate from the University of Miami’s medical school.

“It’s just sad,” Dameion Peart said. “It was unnecessary.”

When the community heard of the shooting, they started dropping by the scene. They were the ones who lived nearby, longtime customers and friends, each with their own tale of how his father had helped them through the years.

They talked about the times Peart, 59, didn’t charge for carwashes to people short on money. They told Dameion Peart, 32, how his father would give money to people who needed help paying for water and electricity, never asking for the money back.

They shared stories about people who couldn’t get jobs because they had convictions — until Peart gave them work.

One of the younger employees told him it was Errold Peart who convinced her to go back to school.

“He was a very good, kindhearted person and a good father at the same time,” Dameion Peart said. “The community where his business is located, he really helped them out here.”

Errold Peart hailed from Jamaica, where he played cricket and worked at one point at a school for problem children, his son said. He eventually came to the United States, where he continued to play cricket for the USA national team.

Peart represented the USA in five matches at the 1990 International Cricket Council Trophy in the Netherlands, where the batsman was the team’s leading scorer, ESPN reported. The USA made it through the first round that year before losing in the second, according to ESPN.

At first, Peart worked with an airline, his son said, but later decided to open his own business.

He started the car wash more than a decade ago, his son said. He chose the location because it was near a busy stretch of U.S. 441 and near Florida’s Turnpike, the Palmetto Expressway and Interstate 95.

“It was like a landmark,” Dameion Peart said. “Everyone knew him.”

But Peart worried about safety.

“He didn’t like guns. But every year, around this time, for the past three years he got held up at gunpoint and people tried to rob him,” Dameion Peart said. “The last time they even followed him home.”

So Errold Peart got a concealed weapons permit.

On Sunday afternoon, he noticed a pair of young men trying to rob a customer. Errold Peart went out to try and stop it, his son said, only to be shot himself.

The men ran away, leaving behind the customer and a bleeding Peart.

Miami Gardens Police still were looking for the suspects on Monday.

Anyone with information is asked to call Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers at 305-471-8477.

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‘The Daily’ doomed by dull content and isolation

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It was too expensive. It lacked editorial focus. And for a digital publication, it was strangely cut off from the Internet. That’s the obituary being written in real time through posts, tweets and online chats about The Daily, the first-of-its-kind iPad newspaper that is being shut down this month.

Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp. said Monday that The Daily will publish its final issue on Dec. 15, less than two years after its January 2011 launch. The app has already been removed from Apple’s iTunes, where it once received lukewarm ratings.

The Daily had roughly 100,000 subscribers who paid either 99 cents a week or $ 40 a year for its daily download of journalism tailored for touch screens. But that wasn’t enough to sustain some 100 employees and millions of dollars in losses since its launch. At the time of its debut, News Corp. said The Daily’s operating costs would amount to about half a million dollars a week, or around $ 26 million a year.

When News Corp. launched The Daily, it was touted as a bold experiment in new media. The company hired top-name journalists from other publications, such as the New York Post’s former Page Six editor, Richard Johnson, and said it poured $ 30 million into the newspaper’s launch. Now, the company is acknowledging that The Daily no longer has a place at News Corp., which is being split in two to separate its publishing enterprises from its TV and movie businesses.

Murdoch said in a statement that News Corp. “could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term.” Some employees are being hired in other parts of the company.

Critics say The Daily’s day-to-day mix of news, opinion and info-graphics wasn’t that different from content available for free on the Internet. And despite a high-profile launch that drew lots of media attention, the publication failed to build a distinctive brand. There was no ad campaign touting its coverage and stories weren’t accessible to non-subscribers, so it didn’t benefit from buzz that comes from social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Trevor Butterworth, who wrote a weekly column for The Daily called “The Information Society,” says the disconnect between the app and the broader Internet curtailed its reach. He was laid off in July when the publication shrank from 170 workers to about 120. As part of the purge, The Daily cut its dedicated opinion section and dropped sports coverage in favor of using a feed from its News Corp. sister outfit, Fox Sports.

“Stories weren’t widely shared or widely known,” says Butterworth. “It felt like I was writing into the void.”

When it launched, The Daily was meant to take advantage of the explosion of tablet computer sales, and the notion that people generally read on them in the morning or evening, like a magazine.

But each issue came in a giant file — sometimes 1 gigabyte large — and took 10 or 15 minutes to download over a broadband connection, which is unheard of for news apps, says Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter.com, one of the first community blogs on the Internet.

Because the stories weren’t linkable, The Daily didn’t benefit from new Internet traffic that would have come from content aggregators like Flipboard and Tumblr.

“They ignored the obvious, which was the Web,” Haughey says. Although many people are foregoing buying a laptop for the lightweight convenience of a tablet, the day hasn’t arrived yet when all online access will come through apps rather than the Web. “Maybe in five or 10 years, the Web will be less important,” he says. “For now it seems like they were missing out.”

It may also have been a problem that News Corp. launched The Daily from scratch into an environment where readers tend to gravitate toward trusted sources and established brands. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey, 84 percent of mobile device users said a news app’s brand was a major factor in deciding whether to download it.

One of the intangible challenges The Daily had was standing out in a sea of online journalism, both paid and free. Some national newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have carved out a niche with informed coverage of sometimes complex topics and have gained paying digital subscribers by limiting the number of free articles they offer online.

Gannett Co., which publishes USA Today and about 80 other newspapers, has succeeded in raising circulation revenue at local papers by putting up so-called online “pay walls,” taking advantage of the fact that there are few alternative sources of coverage for certain communities.

Without a unique coverage niche or a local monopoly, The Daily was caught between two worlds.

By being digital-only, the publication didn’t have a defined coverage area. It was “in competition with everybody and everything,” says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. Yet it failed to carve out its own niche in that larger universe, he says.

“Its lack of editorial focus played a role,” Benton notes. “It was sort of a pleasant, middle-brow, slightly tabloidy mix of news and features. And there’s lots of that available for free online. I would imagine if ‘The Daily’ were starting again now, they would invest more in establishing their brand identity early on.”

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Kristen Chenoweth Dating a Former Bachelor Star Jake Pavelka

Kristin Chenoweth has a surprising new beau!

Video: Jake Pavelka Dishes on his Chippendales Gig

The singer/actress, 44, confirmed to People Magazine that she is indeed dating a somewhat infamous alum of the Bachelor franchise, Jake Pavelka.

"We have been spending a little time together," confessed Chenoweth of her budding courtship with Pavelka, 34.

Related: Kristin Chenoweth Talks On-Set Injury

People reports the couple has been dating since meeting at an event in October.

Chenoweth adds she has a new-found gusto for life, following her devastating head injury on the set of The Good Wife in July.

"I've realized life is short," she said. "I want to do things that make me happy."

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Spreading the wealth — and choking US growth

The Issue: The battle in Washington over taxes and spending, and their impending economic impact.

***

It’s interesting that many people continue to think that President Obama wants a settlement to avoid the fiscal cliff. He doesn’t (“Growth Is All That Matters,” Editorial, Dec. 1).

He wants to go over it and then use the resulting complaints to reduce taxes on those making less than $250,000 and restore social spending cuts. Then, presto, he becomes the tax-cutter-in-chief and defender of the poor and middle class.

Obama couldn’t care less about economic growth. He cares about wealth redistribution and equality of outcome.

Republicans need to take this to heart and deal with him accordingly. Sean McDowell

Atlanta

Obama wants to raise taxes on the wealthy.

He speaks out of one side of his mouth of millionaires and billionaires. Out of the other side, he cites families making $250,000 as rich. Something is very wrong with this picture.

Melanie Coronetz

Manhattan

Republicans should make a pledge to see if liberalism works. It could bring great benefits to the country for years to come.

If four years of taxation on job creators and spending on unions bring this country to its knees, as it most certainly will, it will be worth it to gain a clear answer on liberal policies once and for all.

Let Obama and the liberals have their way, so they’ll own the results of their policies.

Steve Gidumal

Orlando, Fla.

Republicans should agree to raise income taxes on individuals making $1 million and couples making $1.5 million — the real rich — combined with an agreement by the Obama administration to use zero-based budgeting for 2014 and the rest of the term.

Zero-based budgeting would provide a true cost of government that could establish a baseline for how much entitlements would need to be adjusted.

At the same time, Republicans should explain on television why raising taxes during an economic downturn is a bad idea because it reduces consumer demand and that America’s debt problem comes from overspending, not low tax rates.

Max Rugemer

Oakton, Va.

The “party of no,” “obstructionist” Republicans should handle the current budget deal the Democrats put forth exactly the same way they did with Obama’s health-care deal — zero involvement — if they want to galvanize the base and make big gains in the 2014 midterms.

Alan Alberts

Thornton

Surely, the fiscal cliff is meaningless to Obama and the Democrats. They extended the Bush tax cuts, rather than making them permanent, and then went on a $6 trillion borrowing, spending and regulation spree with impunity.

They intend to raise taxes beyond merely letting the tax cuts expire on Jan. 1, which, coupled with the coming costs of ObamaCare, will decimate businesses, jobs and the middle class.

America has already been deceived, betrayed and pushed off the fiscal cliff. A hard landing and a deeper recession are dead ahead.Daniel Jeffs

Apple Valley, Calif.

I suggest a referendum on whether tax rates should be raised for those with high levels of income and that eligibility to vote on this referendum be restricted to those who actually paid income tax the preceding year.Don Murray

Manhattan

Now that Obama has laid out his opening bid for negotiations, here’s an idea for House Speaker John Boehner: On the revenue side, he can call for the elimination of state and local income-tax deduction.

That’s about $50 billion per year and hits the blue states the hardest. It should be no problem, since they voted for higher taxes anyway.

On spending cuts, how about $6 trillion over 10 years? Start with cutting Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and Education, and the balance can go to entitlements. Based on the balance of Obama’s bid, this is equally balanced.

Brian Daniel

Manhattan

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The business behind the artist: Miami’s art gallery scene still evolving

This week, thousands of art collectors, museum trustees, artists, journalists and hipsters from around the globe will arrive for the phenomenon known as Art Basel Miami Beach. The centerpiece of the week: works shown at the convention center by more than 260 of the world’s top galleries.

Only two of those are from Miami.

While Art Basel has helped transform the city’s reputation from beach-and-party scene to arts destination in the years since its 2002 Miami Beach debut, the region’s gallery identity is still coming into its own.

“Certainly Miami as an art town registers mightily because of the foundations, the collectors who have done an extraordinary job,” said Linda Blumberg, executive director of the Art Dealers Association of America. “I think there’s a definite international awareness there. But the gallery scene probably has a bit of a ways to go. That doesn’t mean it’s not really fascinating and interesting.”

The gallery business, especially where newer artists are concerned, is a game of risk, faith and passion. Once a gallery takes on an artist who shows promise, they become an evangelist on their behalf, showing their work in-house and at fairs, presenting it to museums and curators and potential collectors and bearing the cost of that promotion.

For contemporary artists, most galleries take work on consignment, meaning they get a cut of as much as 50 percent when works sell. While local art galleries have been growing in number and popularity in the last several years — just try to find parking during the monthly art walk in Miami’s hot Wynwood neighborhood — even some of the area’s top art dealers say that while business overall is good, they struggle in the local marketplace.

“Our problem is that we have to do lots of art fairs in order to connect with the market that we need to connect with to sell the work that we have,” said Fredric Snitzer, a Miami-Dade gallery owner for 35 years. “The better the work is, the harder it is to sell in Miami. And that ain’t good.”

A handful of serious collectors call Miami home and store their own collections in Miami, including the Braman, Rubell, Margulies and de la Cruz families. But outside a relatively small local group, many gallerists say, their clients come from other parts of the country and world.

And some gallerists point out the troubling reality that even the powerhouse Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin could not stay open in Miami for more than a few years.

“The fact that big galleries have not been able to sustain their business models in South Florida tells you we’re obviously not at this high established point,” said gallery owner David Castillo. “It’s not like we’ve arrived, let’s sit back and watch Hauser & Wirth open down the street.”

Still, Miami’s gallery business has come a long way since the early 1970s, when a few dealers on Bay Harbor Island’s Kane Concourse were selling high-end pieces but the local scene was hardly embraced.

Virginia Miller, who owns ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables, first opened in 1974 to showcase Florida artists, though her focus soon added an international scope. She and other longtime observers credit several factors for Miami’s transformation, including the community’s diversity, the establishment of important museums, the Art Miami fair that started 23 years ago, the presence of major collections and, of course, Art Basel Miami Beach.

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Miami-Dade proposes spending $1.5 billion over 15 years to cure sewer system woes

Six months into negotiations with federal regulators over Miami-Dade’s aging sewer system, the county has come up with a $1.5 billion, 15-year plan to rebuild pipes, pumps and sewage treatment plants that in some cases are almost 100 years old.

County leaders devised the proposal in an attempt to fend off a federal lawsuit, and potentially millions of dollars in fines, for not abiding by the federal Clean Water Act. The county also has proposed replacing or repairing a good portion of the 7,500 miles of sewer lines that regularly rupture and spill millions of gallons of raw waste into local waterways and Biscayne Bay.

Before any work is to begin, the Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency — which put the county on notice in May — must accept the county’s terms. The plan, referred to as a consent decree, also must be endorsed by a majority of county commissioners. That could come as soon as late January or early February.

One of the largest repair jobs would be a $555 million reconstruction of the controversial wastewater treatment plant on Virginia Key. Entire concrete structures would be rebuilt, and pump stations and electrical systems would be replaced. The plan calls for spending another $394 million on similar fixes to two other wastewater treatment facilities, in Goulds and North Miami.

Another $408 million would be spent replacing and rehabbing the county’s 1,035 pump stations, and miles of transmission lines that run to and from the plants.

The plan has already garnered some criticism.

The Biscayne Bay Waterkeepers, clean-water activists who filed to join the federal action against the county, say spending hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild on Virginia Key is a waste, because the spit of land is likely to be under water within 50 years.

The group points to a recent study by the journal Science that showed the polar ice caps in Greenland are melting at three times the rate originally believed. They also say a climate change compact Miami-Dade agreed to with three other counties — which accepted a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study that shows sea levels will rise 3 feet by 2060 — shows the Virginia Key plant could be in peril.

“Doubling down on Virginia Key the way they’re doing it is just stupid,” said environmental attorney Albert J. Slap, representing the Waterkeepers. “There’s not a dime in it for armoring the plant, or raising it. It’s on a barrier island.”

Doug Yoder, deputy director of the county’s water and sewer department, didn’t dispute the Army Corps findings, and said the county could abandon the Virginia Key plant for a new plant on the western edge of the county if federal regulators make such a demand.

“We certainly don’t want to spend a lot of money fixing up a facility we’ll soon abandon,” he said.

Most of the costs for the overall plan will be covered through county revenue bonds, Yoder said, meaning a future increase in water rates and debt service bills. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez has been warning for months that rate hikes are in the offing.

To meet demands from the feds, the county also must abandon by 2027 an outflow system it now uses that dumps up to 120 million gallons of sewage each day miles offshore. The county has until July 2013 to come up with an alternate disposal method.

A project cited in the new plan that had not been publicly addressed previously is the installation of 7,660 linear feet of sewer mains in an industrial area just below State Road 112 and between Northwest 27th and 37th avenues, which now depends on septic tanks. The job of hooking up local businesses there to county sewers would cost a little over $2 million.

Federal regulators began talks with Miami-Dade in May after a series of massive raw sewage spills released more than 47 million gallons of untreated human waste throughout the county. DOJ and the EPA, along with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, sketched out the 78-page consent decree.

Four times between October and December 2011, the sewage treatment plant on Virginia Key alone ruptured, spilling more than 19 million gallons.

The county also has agreed to pay a $978,000 fine for past spills within 30 days of the plan being accepted, with about half the money going to the DOJ and the other half to the state.

DOJ spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle declined to comment Friday.

In October, the county denied 12 permit applications in the Coconut Grove area by businesses that wanted to install sinks, toilets or showers. The county said it was imposing a moratorium on new sewage outflow from a Coconut Grove-serving pump station.

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Dennis Quaid Officially Files for Divorce From Wife Kimberly

Despite an attempt to salvage their rocky marriage in April, actor Dennis Quaid has officially filed for divorce from his wife of eight years, Kimberly Quaid. 

Related: Dennis Quaid's Wife Files for Divorce

In court filings obtained by ET dated November 30, Quaid blames "irreconcilable differences" for the pair's split, listing their date of separation as October 1, 2012. Joint legal and physical custody has been requested of the former couple's five-year-old twins Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace.

Last March, Kimberly filed for divorce explaining in court papers that the marriage had "become insupportable because of discord or conflict of personalities." A month later she withdrew the divorce papers so they could work on their marriage.

The pair married in 2004. It was the third marriage for Quaid, who was married to Meg Ryan from 1991 to 2001, and actress P.J. Soles from to 1978 to 1983.

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NY’s future: a tale of two towns

The news that the state Department of Environmental Conservation is taking another three-month extension on issuing rules to allow “fracking” in New York means more folks in my town will be losing their homes — and more still may lose hope.

In recent years, the town of Conklin has been hit by more than a few blows. The first was a major flood in 2006; the second, felt across the nation, the 2008 financial collapse. The third was another major flood last year that ravaged our town. Combined with the 2006 flood, some 250 homes were destroyed.

But our own state leaders have put another obstacle to Conklin’s dreams: the ongoing moratorium on natural-gas development, which leaves our community missing out on a host of opportunities.

This, when just one mile from our town sit the three most productive gas wells in Susquehanna County, Penn.

In 2008, unemployment in New York state was just 4.7 percent. Today, it’s 8.2 percent, well above the national average — and it’s a lot higher here in the Southern Tier.

In Conklin and neighboring towns, decent jobs are hard to find. With the rising costs of groceries, health-care and gasoline, it’s a constant struggle to keep homes and farms in the family.

So many locals ask why our state keeps putting the brakes on an industry looking to invest here.

For almost four years now, landowners, operators and laborers alike have been awaiting the state’s release of its final rules for natural-gas development. That the state missed its own Nov. 29 deadline for action — a year since the last public hearing on the draft rules for drilling —means delay that will directly lead to more foreclosures on my residents and neighbors trying to hang on to generations old-family properties.

This is not being “short-sighted” as Gov. Cuomo said not long ago on the Fred Dicker radio show. People around here want clear action on a state responsibility — we’ve already had years of expert study.

Here in Conklin we only have to look next door for evidence of what we’re missing — to Windsor, right across the Susquehanna.

Relatively small investments in natural-gas infrastructure development are already helping communities in New York. In Windsor, a new compressor station is providing new revenues for schools and decreasing the burden felt by taxpayers — some $30 million in new revenue and a tax-rate decrease of 5.8 percent, to be exact.

Recently, Leatherstocking pipeline expressed interest in developing a new natural-gas distribution line in Windsor. The local school district alone could save as much as $220,000 a year by using local, cheap natural gas for heat. Indeed, all residents will have the chance to save money heating in the winter for the foreseeable future.

The difference between Windsor and Conklin couldn’t be starker — and it just scratches the surface of what delaying investment in New York has meant. Plenty of other communities would like to see these same localized benefits come to their town — for Conklin, it could mean our survival.

Unfortunately, Albany’s stall on fracking has put a chokehold on development. Companies seeking to invest here and across Upstate New York opted to invest hundreds of millions, billions even, elsewhere.

Our state is at an economic and energy crossroads. The failure to take action on natural gas is making our whole region look more like Conklin, when our future could look more like Windsor.

New York state has invested almost four years and 10,000 taxpayer-paid man-hours in studying something that’s being done safely all across the rest of the country.

There’s still a real chance to adopt the draft plan, with some of the strongest safeguards in the nation, and allow safe natural-gas drilling here.

Will Gov. Cuomo ever lead? We’re counting on him to move New York ahead, not backward.

Jim Finch is the Conklin town supervisor.

Have a comment on this PostOpinion column? Send it in to LETTERS@NYPOST.COM!

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