One thing is likely to happen at the Planning Board meeting on Thursday that relates to the haul road. The new engineer retained to consult with the Planning Board on the haul road project will be there. It will be recalled that Ray Jurkowski, who had been the engineer consulting with the Planning Board on this project, was forced to resign when the Greenport Planning Board demanded that he choose between Greenport and Hudson and he chose Greenport. Today, Mayor Tiffany Martin Hamilton confirmed that the City of Hudson has engaged Barton & Loguidice to consult with the Planning Board on the haul road. Barton & Loguidice is a huge engineering firm, with twelve offices throughout New York as well as one in Pennsylvania and one in Maryland, and lots of engineers, so it's not known exactly who will be advising the Planning Board, but we will find out on Thursday.
If the name Barton & Loguidice seems familiar to Gossips readers, it is because in 2014 they submitted a proposal to do the feasibility study for the Dunn warehouse, earlier this year they submitted an expression of interest in rebuilding the Ferry Street Bridge, and in 2014 some representatives of the firm made a presentation to the Economic Development Committee that taxed the patience of then chair of the committee Don Moore, because it went on three times longer than it was supposed to and did not provide the information the committee was expecting.
Update: Planning Board chair, Tom DePietro just informed Gossips that the new engineer is David Clouser, from the New Paltz office of Barton & Loguidice.
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The new engineering firm ought to advise the City of Hudson that Colarusso still needs to be cited for the illegal expansion of 900 ft. of roadway east of Rte. 9G.
ReplyDeleteGood point, E.J.
ReplyDeleteMr. Clouser should also look at the South Bay culverts.
We were astonished to learn that US Army Corps of Engineers doesn't regulate the causeway's culverts even though the Corps acknowledges the culverts are wholly within the navigable waters of the US.
And even though the Corps regulates construction activities in and over navigable waterways, it doesn't consider proposed construction over buried culverts.
If and when these two, flimsy, home-made, 1930s-era culverts deteriorate, or even collapse under the weight of the increased number of trucks, that's when the federal government will step in, but not before then.
It was this odd loophole dismissing the need for a federal permit which, in turn, dismissed the need for a NY state consistency review, even though the action is in a NYSDOS-designated Significant Habitat.
This means that the damage the culverts may do to the South Bay if they collapse is entirely the concern of Hudson and Greenport.
The project engineer probably knows this, which is maybe why he acted all surprised when the Greenport Planning Board asked to see his cross-sections of the causeway. Why hadn't he shared the profiles before? He replied that he didn't think anyone was interested.
In this same vein, it's interesting to note that the site plan revision of 2017 finally added the word "culvert" (singular), with a small line symbolizing their location. This was long-overdue.
However, the engineer made no note of the addition, as with his other site plan revisions. Because it's customary to annotate all changes in the "revisions" section, and because no culvert appeared on the site plan through all of its many revisions, I think it's fair to assume there's something to hide here.
Perhaps Mr. Clouser will agree to visit the two culverts in a boat in the event the City is denied access to the property. He can access the culverts using our federal navigable waters.