He Said, He Said
On Sunday morning, an interview with Mayor William Hallenbeck was aired on WHUC. On a radio show called What's Going On, the mayor talked with John Wallace about a dog park, dogs in the cemetery, parking around the hospital, recent grants for new bullet-proof vests and digitizing cemetery records, waterfront development, and mass gatherings. If you missed hearing the show at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday, you missed hearing the show.
On Wednesday morning, an interview with Common Council president Don Moore was broadcast on WGXC. On the radio show @Issue, Moore talked with Victor Mendolia about the Hofstra study, weighted voting, the Hudson Hudson Authority and the governance of Bliss Towers, Viridian and the City's energy usage, and the proposal to hold informal Common Council meetings in places other than City Hall. If you missed hearing the show at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, you can hear it online.
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[From Victor Mendolia's interview, beginning at 52:11:'
ReplyDeleteDon Moore: "If anyone wants to get a good justification for a Conservation Advisory Committee, read the Hofstra report on conservation. They have some - very briefly - some very sound reasoning for a Conservation Advisory Committee. ...
"The first task [is] to do a conservation survey of the city: what are its characteristics; what is it that at a baseline we feel we want to preserve, and what's valuable to us. ...
"I will bring this up at the next Economic Development Committee meeting, which is on Thursday at the Chamber of Commerce at 6:00 [PM], and we will begin to move it forward."
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I agree with Mr. Moore that the Hofstra report is informative, as well as being mercifully brief. There are two pages devoted to conservation; pp. 12, 13.
But while Hofstra's description of CACs is generally applicable, conservation issues in the City of Hudson typically have less in common with the other Columbia County CACs - which are each agrarian in nature - than they do with CACs downriver, and Westchester County in particular. You can't derive that level of distinction from the Hofstra report.
If Hudson's CAC will likely launch with a "conservation survey" which is customary for these things (and Hudson already has a good number of natural history surveys), ultimately our CAC will have less to do what "we want to preserve" than those things we're obligated to be preserve by law already, but at which we fail.
Only consider last year's struggle by residents against city attorneys and others to gain an official admission that the South Bay was once home to a Standard Oil storage and transfer depot. The attorneys along with a number of city politicians had other plans, and were only interested in what they could get away with. Studies by a title company and an engineering firm were conducted accordingly, as ordered by our faux "environmental attorney" Cheryl Roberts.
From the Hofstra report: "Creating a CAC will allow Hudson's city council to delegate many considerations, which will save time, ensure that every issue is fully evaluated, and promote institutional memory."
Good words which have little to do with "[what] we feel we want to preserve," at least not directly.