Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Ear to the Ground

On Monday, Mayor Tiffany Martin Hamilton reiterated the news of the first meeting of the Downtown Revitaliation Initiative Local Planning Committee. The announcement began: "The first meeting of the DRI Local Planning Committee, at 6 p.m. on October 19, will be led by Co-Chairs Matthew Nelson and Tiffany Martin Hamilton, with assistance from our planning consultant, Stantec. . . ." 

Today, a reader alerted Gossips to this information, found on the Stantec website: "The Keystone Pipeline is a "bullet" pipeline--stretching 3,460 kilometres from Alberta to Illinois and Oklahoma without any intermittent supply or receipt points. At Stantec, we're proud to have been part of its development. . . . We started this project in 2005 and are still working on it today."

This seems vaguely reminiscent of 2001, when Saratoga Associates was working with the City of Hudson to formulate its comprehensive plan while at the same time working with St. Lawrence Cement to help make the proposed behemoth cement plant more palatable to the residents of Hudson.
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3 comments:

  1. Stantec is a huge international firm, and it would be pretty easy to find such conflicts among their projects. Everything rests on who you are working with. Saratoga is quite small, so it's easier to generalize its values across the firm.

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  2. I wonder if Stantec was awarded contracts to work on other DRI's around the state? Seems odd that Hudson wasn't afforded the opportunity to choose the consultant ourselves.

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    1. Hudson was, I believe, given the choice of three pre-approved firms by Empire State Development. Hudson, or the representative for Hudson (whoever that may be) chose Stantec. Side note-Stantec seems to have a pretty big portfolio with a large spectrum of projects under their belt. I don't think it would be hard to highlight a problem area or two if you wished to conflate the DRI with an unrelated environmental issue to drum up a sense of outrage.

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