COPYRIGHT 2019 CAROLE OSTERINK
Thursday, September 26, 2019
A Month Without a Planning Board Meeting
Gossips learned this morning that the Planning Board meeting scheduled for Tuesday, October 8, has been canceled. Planning Board chair Walter Chatham explained the reasons. Yom Kippur begins at sunset that day, and the status of the applications now before the board is such that it is possible to take a month off: there is no new information from Colarusso attorney John Privatera; the application for a self-storage facility at Fairview Avenue and Oakwood Boulevard is still before the Zoning Board of Appeals; Hudson Development Corporation has until the end of the year to get approval of the proposed subdivision and close on the purchase of the CSX property.
The next meeting of the Planning Board will take place on Tuesday, November 12.
COPYRIGHT 2019 CAROLE OSTERINK
COPYRIGHT 2019 CAROLE OSTERINK
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The cancelled meeting gives us time to question the claim that a SEQR review was already conducted for the causeway.
ReplyDeleteLeft off the preceding sentence is the implied ending: "already conducted for the causeway portion of the project." But the court found that Greenport did not segment its SEQR review, which means that the SEQR review the City is about to conduct is for a separate action.
The State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) doesn't say anything about overlapping infrastructure used by two entirely discrete projects. If anything, the spirit of the Act emphasizes the exclusivity of the two projects' potentially negative impacts; their differences over their similarities.
Compared to that, the advice we're getting from our consultants is very helpful to the Applicant. This advice seems to ignore the court judgement that what we believed was left out of the Greenport review (Hudson's complaint of "segmentation" in our lawsuit) was not left out at all.
Instead, the parts of the project we knew were unreasonably left out were actually totally different projects. So why aren't we treating them as separate? If there was no segmentation then we ought to get with the program.
For SEQR purposes, whether or not two entirely different projects can overlap along the same "private causeway or private road" (§325-17.1.D(2)), and can be studied twice for two different considerations of impacts, to date the potential truck-and-barge numbers and the potential intensification of industrial activities at the waterfront were not studied properly by anyone.
In any event, these are the considerations which must become the focus of the next SEQR review.