Foster's Remediation Complete. Now What?

At the Common Council Public Works and Parks Committee meeting on Wednesday, DPW superintendent Rob Perry reported that, after ten years, the cleanup of the brownfield that was Foster Refrigerator was almost complete.

Photo by Gibson

Perry reported that the area was being hydroseeded, and yesterday morning when Gossips visited the site it appeared that process had been completed. The grass will start sprouting in about a week.

What remains is for the City to decide what to do with this newly remediated parcel. In April 2012, Mayor William Hallenbeck had the idea of using the site for a dog park. Dog park advocates were enthusiastic about the possibility for several reasons:

• It is several thousand square feet and is already surrounded by a fairly new six-foot chain link fence.
• There is ample space to create separate areas for large dogs and small dogs.
• It is large enough to ensure that dogs can exercise there and not just use it to relieve themselves.
• The site is not located in a high-density residential area where neighbors might be disturbed by barking dogs.
• There is ample room for parking.
• The site has an existing water supply. 

But alas, in 2012, the City had no money to clean up the site. In 2015, when the Department of Environmental Conservation undertook to clean up the site, at a cost of close to a million dollars with a 10 percent match from the City, the site was being eyed for a parking lot and entrance way to the hiking trails that were part of the Columbia Land Conservancy's Concept Master Plan for North Bay. Now that the site has been cleaned up, it is not clear what it will be used for. 

At Wednesday's Public Works and Parks Committee meeting, Alderman Eileen Halloran (Fifth Ward) asked Perry about potential uses for the site. His answer indicated that it could be used for just about anything so long as the use involved building up and not down into the ground. Given that, in this city desperate for affordable housing, someone is sure to suggest it could be used for some kind of housing development, no matter that it would be adjacent to a manufacturing plant and the waste water treatment plant. Gossips, however, is of the opinion that it would make a perfect dog park.

Dog owners in Hudson have been advocating for a dog park for close to a decade. Last year, Mayor Tiffany Martin, nearing the end of her term in office, decided to make good on the promise of a dog park and determined in October that the best location for a dog park was the underutilized Charles Williams Park. A dog park had, after all, been part of the original plan for the park.

The people who live in the five houses adjacent to the park vehemently protested the plan to site the dog park there. In December, the Common Council passed a resolution opposing creating a dog park in Charles Williams Park and calling on the mayor to "explore constructing a dog park at another location within the City of Hudson." In the discussion preceding the vote on the resolution, Rick Rector, then mayor elect and First Ward alderman, said, "I don't think we can completely erase [Charles Williams Park] as a possibility, because there are not a lot of possibilities, but I will as the next mayor convene a conversation with the community about the best possible place to have a dog park." 

The resolution was vetoed by then mayor Tiffany Martin, who asserted that she had determined Charles Williams Park the logical choice, "after evaluating every available green space owned by the City of Hudson." When the mayor's veto message was received by the Council, it was January, and there was a new Council and a new mayor. The Council did not vote to override the veto. Instead Council president Tom Depietro observed that the mayor who had vetoed the resolution was no longer the mayor and promised, "The entire issue will be revisited by the Council and the mayor."

We are now eight months into the terms of the new Council and the new mayor, and the topic of the dog park has not been revisited in any public way. Let's hope when it is the newly remediated brownfield that a previous mayor identified as the possible site of the dog park will be among the green spaces owned by the City of Hudson under consideration. In Gossips' opinion, it would be the best possibility.
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