Ear to the Ground
The word is that the Common Council will not be voting tonight on the resolution declaring the sewer separation project a Type II action not requiring environmental review. It is understood that the reason for the postponement is to give the aldermen time to educate themselves on the issue. Meanwhile, two more documents relevant to the project have appeared on the city website: a letter from city attorney Carl Whitbeck, providing case law that supports his opinion that the proposed project is a Type II action; and a letter from Riverkeeper, explaining in considerable detail why the project should not be classified as a Type II action and urging that a full Environmental Impact Statement be prepared.
COPYRIGHT 2015 CAROLE OSTERINK
where iz the columbia land conservancy in all this? do they have an opinion? they have been, or are getting, all the North Bay lands from the city. why the silence?
ReplyDeleteThe objective, to eliminate raw sewage from being dumped in the river when there is a large storm event, is a good one. The problem also raised, that diverted storm water in itself is a form of pollution, is also true. What's worse, storm water with it's contamination, or periodic dumping of raw sewage into the river? Ideally we would eliminate both. If the storm water is only a problem during large storms why not divert the storm water only when the large storms occur. Some large gates or valves could be installed and when water volumes become to much for the sewer plant to handle, the valves could divert the storm water to the river at that time. Once the storm is over, close the valves and normal storm flows will continue into the plant. This would be better than permanently diverting the storm water into the river at all times.
ReplyDeleteThe city's largest CSO study to date suggested something very like your idea.
DeleteThe problem is, the city doesn't want to hear it.
Today, the Common Council hesitated before giving the Office of the Mayor that wish.
Perhaps there will yet be an environmental review, but before that happens there's no place for anyone's ideas.
Help us get the review, then all the best ideas will have their day. That includes some superb older plans which the city has already paid for. (Shh! they're "green.")
The mayor and the DPW are desperate to avoid an environmental review, but the Common Council won't be rushed.
ReplyDeleteType II actions are exempt from review because they don't have significant environmental impacts, or they're "otherwise precluded from environmental review" (SEQRA).
The "precluded" argument was initially favored in the city's engineering reports (2010, 2014), in that the Consent Order supposedly "required" the project.
That approach is now abandoned, and the last traces of a "requirement" are whittled down to parsing the difference between "shall" and "may" (the permit says "shall"):
"[Combined sewers] SHALL be replaced by separate [sewers] to the greatest extent possible"
vs.
"[Combined sewers] MAY be replaced by separate [sewers] to the greatest extent possible"
Call me crazy, but isn't the phrase "to the greatest extent possible" the meaningful qualifier here? If you have to pollute the river - or destroy the village - in order to save it, that's an example of something being Not Possible.
In the case law put forward by Corporate Counsel as a counter to last Monday's Common Council discussion, we're presented with a circumstance in which "the intention [was] to replace the existing sewer lines with sewer lines of greater capacity."
The court judged that this was indeed a replacement of a structure or facility, in kind, on the same site.
"That the replacement is not identical to the original sewer system, and is in many respects an improvement, is hardly surprising ..."
"Not identical" is supposed to apply in our case too, as if courts don't consider degrees of things.
At North Front Street, a 16" pipe that's being "replaced" hasn't been used for decades, and probably many decades.
On the other hand, the 24" to 42" pipe which is meant to "replace" it will be used on an industrial scale, as they say.
On the maps, it also appears that the old and future pipes will be in slightly different locations. But how can we know whether or not the city is cheating SEQRA as long as the public continues to be excluded from the process?
If counsel wants a true parallel, then case law about "sewers" in general may not always resemble case law about CSO issues. In the latter, there's a required procedure, and that procedure was ignored in Hudson. If the court feels that the requirements were egregiously violated, as continues to be the case, then that may become a factor in the judgement.
I hope that everyone's good energy and concern for the North Bay doesn't fall away now, just because the Common Council kicked the issue down the road.
ReplyDelete(On behalf of the North Bay, I'm grateful for all of the above though.)
With the 1st Ward's Alderman Marston stepping down, we're losing our most sympathetic ally on the council.
We'll need concerned residents to revive their scrutiny after a needed break, so please not suppose that the council did anything constructive except hit the pause button.