Catching Up with HDC

Last Tuesday, the board of the Hudson Development Corporation held its regular monthly meeting, and a few things happened at that meeting that merit reporting.

First, the cash poor HDC is soon to have a new source of income. The agency is poised to enter into a lease with Redburn Development to rent a portion of the concrete slab behind The Wick Hotel--what remains of the part of the Kaz warehouse building that was demolished, at Redburn's expense, late in 2017. 

According to the terms of the proposed lease, Redburn will pay HDC $2,000 a month to rent a space that will provide thirty parking spots for the hotel. This income will allow HDC to make the payments due to CEDC (Columbia Economic Development Corporation) on the $200,000 loan that enabled HDC to purchase the CSX parcel. Those payments now amount to $10,000 a year.

In another revenue producing initiative, HDC has discovered that, in addition to the Kaz property, it owns a vacant lot on Mill Street (228 Mill Street), 3.3 landlocked acres on the river side of Mt. Merino, a parcel at the foot of Dock Street that abuts the Hudson Dog Park and the Furgary Boat Club, and two parcels that are underwater in the Hudson River. The greatest attention at the meeting was given to the lot on Mill Street, and it was decided that the lot should be surveyed to determine if it is saleable. 

The board also discussed vacancies on the board. There are currently three, after the resignations of Mark Morgan-Perez, Walter Chatham, and Gregg Carey. Board president Bob Rasner suggested that former board member Chris Jones serve on the nominating committee along with board members Carolyn Lawrence and Nick Haddad.

On a topic related to board membership, Rasner reminded the board that there was a motion on the table to add the majority and minority leaders of the Common Council as ex officio members of the HDC board. That motion had been made by Council president Tom DePietro at the board's October meeting. Currently, the mayor and the Common Council president are the only ex officio members of the HDC board. Once upon a time, the majority and minority leaders did serve on the HDC board, but at the end of 2015, the board amended its bylaws to limit the number of elected officials on the board to two--the mayor and the Council president. At the time, there were nine members of the board and four of them--almost half--were elected officials. The change was made to allow a greater number of community members to serve on the board, but some at the time believed it was an attempt to remove "any voices from the minority communities." In 2015, Tiffany Garriga was the majority leader and Bart Delaney was the minority leader.

At the end of the meeting, Rasner spoke about the goals of the agency when he became chair of the HDC board earlier this year: rebuilding the board and the CSX acquisition. He noted that the goals had been achieved and asked rhetorically: "Now what do we do?" He went on to opine that, to the question of what to do with the Kaz property, "there were no wrong answers" and suggested, as he has before, that HDC might just sell it to a developer because they were not developers. He then asked, again rhetorically, "Does development of this property even fall within our mission?" He offered the opinion, "It doesn't appear that it does."

Because the next regularly scheduled HDC meeting falls on Christmas Eve, it was agreed that the board's December meeting would take place on Friday, December 20, at noon. Amendments to the bylaws, including once again making the majority and minority leaders of the Common Council ex officio members of the board, will be taken up at that meeting.
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