Planning Board Meeting Next Thursday
On Tuesday, Tom DePietro, who chairs the Planning Board, told the Conservation Advisory Council that the Planning Board would not be discussing the haul road at its January 12 meeting because no new information had been received from Colarusso. Since then, there has been change of plan. A discussion of the haul road "Project Narrative" is on the agenda for Thursday's meeting, along with several other things.
First on the agenda are two public hearings, which were supposed to happen in December but didn't because there wasn't a quorum. The subject of the first public hearing is the proposal to transform 214-216 Warren Street, formerly the Savoia, into a hotel to be called the Howard Hotel; the second is the plan to open a cafe, to be called House Rules Cafe, at 757 Columbia Street.
Three new applications for site plan review are expected to be presented: constructing new townhouses at 6-12 Hudson Avenue; converting the building at 886 Columbia Street into six office suites; and plans for 34 Allen Street, the former Allen Street School.
After all this has happened, the Planning Board will discuss the project narrative prepared by Colarusso engineer Pat Prendergast. It will be an opportunity, DePietro told Gossips in an email, "for Board members to voice their remaining questions concerning the document." DePietro went on to say: "Citizens will be invited to speak if they have information or documents not already mentioned by the Board. We encourage written comments for the sake of compiling a clear public record." For all interested in reviewing it, the project narrative is online at the City of Hudson website.
COPYRIGHT 2017 CAROLE OSTERINK
Hudson needs its own "narrative" to keep apace with the project engineer's continuing revisions. Unless the City is very, very careful, small but important items will slip through the cracks.
ReplyDeleteHudson is entitled to know why it received a Short Environmental Assessment Form - the first EAF submitted to the City - when a Full EAF was already completed weeks before.
Due to the FOIL schedule, we may only learn after the upcoming meeting whether or not the NYSDEC provided documents to the project engineer which the engineer was required to submit to the Hudson Planning Board. (To be fair, perhaps it was the State that was negligent.)
Will Hudson contest the landowner's claim about the location of the municipal boundary? The project's site plan situates it nicely for the proposal, but not very nicely for the wetlands. The problem is, the boundary on the site plan doesn't square with where its straight line emerges on Route 9.
These are only some of the smaller questions we should attend to. You think they're too small to worry about? Think again.