Tuesday, October 18, 2011
About the Findings Statement
Common Council President Don Moore announced at Tuesday night's meeting that there was a "snag," the nature of which he did not explain, which prevented the findings statement from being presented at that time. He proposed a special meeting on Thursday, October 27, for the Council to review the findings statement, expressed his hope to deliver the document to the aldermen no later than the end of this week, and offered assurances that he did not intend to have the Council vote on the document without having ample time to review it.
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So then what was that rush to have the Common Council accept the Final GEIS only 5 days after the latest edits? It's nearly a month later and I'm still uncovering the implications of this or that little 'edit.'
ReplyDeleteIt was easy for the GEIS Legal Advisor to claim that those were "simple edits" in order to move the meeting along, but they weren't simple at all, and plenty of citizens sitting in silence knew it.
"Nothing to see here folks."
I'd imagine that the Common Council President believed the whole business was simple after an actual lawyer told him so, but that's the danger of wanting something so badly ...
Five days after the edits, and the public was silenced (or were we just silent?).
For an example of something that's not quite so simple, excising long passages of text may look harmless until you consider that the removal of those specific points may become a tacit admission of something else (and something that's not present because it's all been removed elsewhere, and earlier!)
At 2 AM I sent a lawyer an earlier draft of the GEIS that's no longer available at the City's website, along with those September edits (also no longer available). 87 MGS in all! But you've got to delve and drill and cross-reference between 5 versions/edits of the GEIS to see how they built this thing. It was all a game of Three Card Monty.
Let's hope that this 'snag' has thrown them back on their heels for what the public's been put through.
I will say that people seem to be letting this happen, as if it's a done thing. Is that because it's easier to give up than to get your head around the 'simple' changes?
Well maybe it's not you. This bloated monstrosity of a document is pure obfuscation. A single sentence from the 2009 DGEIS was sent around the Task Force this week asking if anyone knew what it meant? After cutting-and-pasting and rebuilding the syntax, it ended up meaning nothing, and even being something of its own explanation for why it didn't really belong in that section to begin with.
My guess is that the attorney is running out of fingers with which to plug the holes, just as we're busy finding new ones.
(On a constructive note - and maybe just to try and get someone new to talk back for once - what was wrong with the original, Draft GEIS zoning proposal for the South Bay district? We all liked it then, and It's looking quite palatable again. It was only O&G that didn't like it and so it was changed: "because of the public comments"!)