This afternoon, Farmers and Families for Livingston and Claverack responded to that article. Click here to see what they had to say.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Keeping on Top of the Energy Highway
This afternoon, Farmers and Families for Livingston and Claverack responded to that article. Click here to see what they had to say.
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"Undergrounding requires less, not more, ROW. Think of the width of a trench versus a transmission tower footprint" - Families and Farmers for Livingston and Claverack
ReplyDeleteAll the way back in October, long before anyone - including our asleep-at-the-wheel city officials - knew that one of the plans was to run the entire southbound conduit across the City of Hudson at the level of 7th Street, the proposal was to bury all of the transmission lines underground in Hudson.
(An aside: this since-superseded plan was current with the Common Council's deliberations whether or not to move the HPD to the Finnish Line building, which is right next to where the excavations were to take place. If the city already had a Conservation Advisory Council, then we'd have had foreknowledge of these plans. In fact we just missed a bullet by virtue of being totally unaware, and we still don't have a CAC.)
So, what was the width needed to bury the transmission lines along 7th Street, say between Warren and Union? About 15 feet?
After that, what's the ROW from Union Street down alongside the railroad spur, finally to wrap around The Basilica? Probably about the same: 15 - 20 feet.
The Families and Farmers are onto something here: "Think of the width of a trench versus a transmission tower footprint."
Basically there's a few things to remember.
ReplyDeleteWe live in a capitalistic country.
All companies, corporations are in business to make a profit, especially for their share holders & to keep their multi-million dollar paycheck & bonuses.
Imagine no towers on the riverfront south & west of Hudson.
Just how do those Europeans run their power lines underground anyway?
And ain't those Nat'l Grid kids based in England?
Get a piece of paper. Write this down "white man speak with fork-ed tongue" Now go stick it on your fridge door.
When the Common Council came up with language to express solidarity with the Farmers and Families for Livingston and Claverack, the aldermen knowingly passed on an opportunity to support burying the lines beneath the river. (That's one of the proposals which is still on the table.)
DeleteThanks to the power of attorneys, it's customary for aldermen everywhere to have to grovel before legal bureaucrats before this or that language can be asserted on behalf of constituents. This case may be no different, and it's fair to interrogate this specific lack of vision in the council's transmission line resolution - a resolution which actually had nothing specific to Hudson in it.
One attorney who's since become the city's principal counsel happens to live in Greenport, immediately next-door to where these welcome excavations would have taken place.
Was the council's failure to foresee a future with no transmission lines across the river really the result of one attorney acting out of self-interest? How else could the aldermen have acted so stupidly, which they certainly did.
What was this same attorney's motive last year, when he volunteered his notoriously wrong opinions about the history of Standard Oil in the South Bay? It was some form of self interest, and we pawns had better get used to it.