WESTERLO — A Facebook post containing significant misinformation about Westerlo’s draft comprehensive plan has been making the rounds on social media over the past week, causing outrage among countless users over the town’s Comprehensive Plan Committee and its supposed desire to ban motorsport-friendly trails in the town, most of which are situated on private land. 

The post, written by Westerlo resident Betty Filkins, wife of Westerlo Town Board member Richard Filkins, reads in part: “Town of WESTERLO snowmobilers, 4 wheelers and/ or trail riders who live in the town of Westerlo must pay attention to the proposed new comp plan (on town website) for which on Sept 7 @ 6 PM at Westerlo Town Hall is the last public hearing before the board approves the final version - the 5 remaining ‘writers’ of this plan want to make all trails in the town NON-motorized.”

There are two serious flaws in the post. 

The first — an error of omission — is that comprehensive plans, no matter how strongly they’re worded, are not legal documents and do not have any direct influence over town law. In fact, they’re more like news articles, in that they’re written on a foundation of research and community outreach, they’re reviewed by an overseer (in this case, a town board and the interested public), and upon publication, they serve as a point of reference, informing town officials and residents about the nature of their community so they can make intelligent decisions. 

And, like that in a news article, the information in a comprehensive plan can be ignored as easily as it can be put to use. This means that, even if the comprehensive plan Westerlo ultimately adopts does implore the town to “make all trails in the town non-motorized,” as Filkins phrased it, that’s only meaningful if this or another Westerlo Town Board chooses to heed the plan’s advice, in which case there would be additional public hearings and opportunity for community input. 

The second and most critical error is that Westerlo’s draft comprehensive plan does not actually convey that the town should alter existing snowmobile trails — and it is nearly impossible to interpret the one section regarding a non-motorized trail system (i.e. one not for motor vehicles, like snowmobiles) otherwise.

The comprehensive plan’s suggestion to the town regarding non-motorized trails is this: “Construct, promote, and maintain a multi use, non motorized trail network for hiking, mountain biking, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, and horseback riding.”

The plan also lists an action item to go with this objective: “Offer incentives to landowners who provide recreational access such as liability protection and/or tax incentives.”

In other words, the plan proposes building a new trail system, one that would not interfere with any existing snowmobile trail at the town park.
Comprehensive Plan Committee Chairman David Lendrum, himself a snowmobiler, confirmed The Enterprise’s interpretation this week. 

“We proposed with the comp plan that the town look into making a loop through the park, which would not affect the snowmobile’s preferred path in any way,” Lendrum said. “On the hypothetical side, if the path was preferred for non-motorized use, it would be left snow-covered in the winter for skiing and snowshoeing. We are only talking about a mile-long loop throughout the park.”

Lendrum also said that “the ‘trail’ through the park is not a trail, but the snowmobiles just ride up through the field to get to the gas station. It is a trail because someone packs a path when they first go across the field and everyone else follows.”

All other trails in the town, Lendrum said, are on private land, “except a few corridor trails on the very northwestern fringe of town that are mapped and connect with larger trail systems.”

Misinformation age

Despite its flaws, Filkins’s post has been shared nearly 50 times from her own page as of Aug. 24, and it was shared another 116 times when a different user posted a screenshot of Filkins’s original text. And from each of these shares there may be one, two, three, or infinitely more shares, bringing the post to eyes far beyond the stretches of this small, rural town. 

The effect is obvious. In the comments section of Filkins’s original post, while some users simply request additional information, others jump to outrage. 

“This is more like a commie plan,” wrote Lisa DeGroff, chairwoman of the Westerlo GOP, in one comment. In another, she wrote, “All ATV and snowmobile riders should show up [to the public hearing] — helmets ON. That will send a HUGE message without having to say a single word.”

Although it’s not clear whether this assembly of helmeted riders will actually take place on Sept. 7, similar calls have been made in the past, in other Hilltowns about other issues, and to outstanding effect. 

In 2019, Berne Supervisor Sean Lyons, a Republican, shared a confidential email from one of his Democratic board members regarding the behavior of Berne Deputy Supervisor Dennis Palow, a Republican and an Army veteran, with conservative talk radio host Melody Burns, who wrote on Facebook that Berne Democrats thought of Palow as a “mass killer” and were “labelling all Combat veterans as being damaged and killers” — both of which are verifiably incorrect. 

Her post helped bring some 50 people to the small Berne Town Hall to show support for Palow under false pretenses, far more than would have shown up for a typical meeting. 

More recently, in Rensselaerville, a large group of residents and out-of-towners descended on that town’s similarly tiny meeting hall last year after word spread on social media that a resident there had asked the town board to denounce the Confederate battle flag by way of a non-legally binding resolution. 

Although the call to action in Rensselaerville was less centralized than in Berne and now in Westerlo, it was clear that many who spoke in support of the flag misunderstood what was being asked of the board. While resident April Roggio hoped the board would issue a statement condemning the flag and the racism it’s inextricably tied to, much of the language that night encircled notions of an outright ban. 

In the abstract, incidents like these prove that a well-informed social media post distributed among a community acting in good faith can drive civic engagement, the likes of which are highly desired in the Hilltowns, where sparsely attended meetings (the COVID-19 pandemic notwithstanding) have this year translated into virtually no choice between candidates for voters, outside of Berne, come November. 

In practice, though, the crowds driven to Hilltown town halls of late are largely driven by misinformation, often about a sensationalized topic, giving these bodies politic an appearance not unlike the “rough beast” described by W.B. Yeats in his apocalyptic poem, “The Second Coming,” a creature which lumbers to its destination “with a gaze blank and pitiless like the sun.”  

(It’s worth noting that not all instances of popular uprising in these rural communities have such grim implications; The Enterprise has covered a number of crowdsourced donation efforts that have garnered thousands and thousands of dollars for individuals and families who have been caught in difficult circumstances.)

Misinformation like that which has populated local town halls with overwhelming crowds is widespread on Hilltown community pages across social media, and especially prominent on the Facebook walls of individual Hilltown residents (or non-residents, in some cases). 

This, obviously, is not a unique problem, though Hilltown governments may be especially susceptible to the threat of a misinformed public, considering this public’s unique composition. 

The average median age across Berne, Knox, Westerlo, and Rensselaerville is 47.4, according to census data, and about 20 percent of residents are older than 65. Both figures are higher than their counterparts statewide, where the median age is 38.8, and 16 percent of residents are older than 65. Although no formal data exists for the age of those who attend Hilltown government meetings, a casual observer is likely to find that the majority are middle-aged, and many are past retirement age. 

Studies show that older people are more likely to spread misinformation than those born in the late 1990s, who grew up as digital natives and have thereby developed a technological and cultural savvy that protects them from the treacheries of the internet (though exceptions abound). 

“This relationship holds even when we condition on other factors, such as education, party affiliation, ideological self-placement, and overall posting activity,” wrote one research team in a 2019 study on the spread of fake news. “It is robust to a wide range of strategies for measuring fake news ... Further, none of the other demographics variables in our model — sex, race, education, and income — have anywhere close to a robust predictive effect on sharing fake news.”

This group ultimately found that people over the age of 65 were seven times more likely to share fake news — defined in the study as “knowingly false or misleading content created largely for the purpose of generating ad revenue” — than people in the youngest age group.  

Of course, the definition of fake news employed by the study does not account for the kind of misinformation that was spread through engagement with Filkins’s original post, nor does it account for information that’s fundamentally accurate, but decontextualized to the point of being useless or even harmful. Both, by their nature, are likely more prevalent than traditional fake news, and harder to detect, disguised by good intentions and the intimacy of friendship, digital or otherwise.

Betty Filkins’s view

When The Enterprise spoke with Filkins by phone this week, she described her concerns in a way that was more specific than how she published them on social media, and, in contrast to her post, she demonstrated an understanding of the nuance of the plan’s specific goals and how comprehensive plans work in general, but nevertheless had concerns about how the language might be interpreted in the future, concerns that public hearings are designed to address. 

The Enterprise asked Filkins how she felt about her role in spreading incorrect information, and she said that, after her post had been shared and people began reaching out to her privately, she would explain to them, “It’s just the wording. We just want them to change the wording so that it covers everything.”

Of any plan snowmobilers have to show up in their helmets, per DeGroff’s request, Filkins said, “That would be a little ridiculous,” though no such sentiment can be found in any of the comments Filkins wrote under her own post. 

However good Filkins’s intentions may have been as she aired her concerns on social media, and however much of her post’s inaccuracy relates to clumsy expression rather than ignorance or malintent, it’s had an undeniable impact on those at the center, like Lendrum, no matter how things play out at next month’s public hearing.

“I have had people reaching out to me at the [Altamont Fair] and knocking on my door and meeting me in my driveway to ask why I would get rid of snowmobiles and ATVs,” Lendrum told The Enterprise this week, expressing, too, frustration over being labeled a communist, and other politically weighty, hate-fueled terms. 

“With all of the 55 MPH roads around here,” Lendrum concluded, “it would be nice for people to have a place to go to walk. As a snowmobiler myself, I can’t believe I am dealing with this nonsense.”