The Planning Board and the Colarusso Review
The Planning Board hasn't met since December 10, when a barrage of protests about a procedural decision provoked then chair Walter Chatham to snap back, "Stop it! Stop it right now! You're pissing me off." Chatham resigned as chair of the Planning Board the next day, expressing in a statement shared with Gossips the hope that "my anger at being berated by members of the audience for trying to do what we are legally charged to do in an open and impartial way doesn't obscure the reality that confronts the Planning Board as Hudson's 'point team' dealing with the haul road and dock application."
This coming Tuesday, February 11, the Planning Board meets for the first time since that fateful evening, with a new chair, Betsy Gramkow, and three new members: Larry Bowne, Stephen Steim, and Theresa Joyner. This morning, Gossips learned from Gramkow that, to bring the three new Planning Board members "up to speed" on the Colarusso applications for conditional use permits, the public hearing would be suspended until March, and at the meeting on Tuesday the board would hear four presentations: Colarusso will present a new site plan and narrative; attorney Ken Dow will explain the decision handed down by Supreme Court Justice Michael H. Melkonian on January 23, 2019, and its implications for Hudson's land use authority; representatives from Our Hudson Waterfront and The Valley Alliance will also make presentations. Each presentation will be limited to ten minutes, after which the Planning Board will have the opportunity to ask questions of the presenters.
Gramkow went on to explain:
Because we want the Board and members of the public to have the opportunity to thoroughly review the new [A. Colarusso & Sons] documents and all information provided by the other three presenters, the Board will not hear public comment at the Feburary meeting. The Public Hearing will resume at the March meeting at which point we will once again welcome and encourage public comments and questions.
Tuesday's meeting will take place at 6 p.m. at the Central Fire Station, 77 North Seventh Street.
COPYRIGHT 2020 CAROLE OSTERINK
Thank goodness we don't have to hear from The South Bay Task Force as well!
ReplyDeleteHudson's unwritten rule: always give the newest voices priority.
Newest voices? The Valley Alliance has been working on these issues since 2006, and its directors were involved with Waterfront planning problems since the late 1990s. OHW is newer, but has gathered a petition of over 1,000 signatories and encouraging tons of public input at meetings. (Did Mr. O’Connor ask to make a presentation, as the VA specifically did at the last meeting?)
ReplyDeleteI can't disagree that it was smart to ask to be a presenter, but for such a small community it seems pompous that asking was a requirement. For instance, because one ever mentioned there'd be this opportunity it's reasonable to conclude that the omission was purposeful.
ReplyDeleteThe South Bay Task Force has been in operation continually since 2010, and no one's studied the South Bay in the detail we have. Only new people don’t know that.
Newcomers are always welcomed, though, and they're needed too.
However, OHW (Our Hudson Waterfront) is not just "newer" than the Valley Alliance, it is new. Gathering 100 million names on a petition wouldn't change that, nor does encouraging public input equate to actual knowledge.
So far, OHW has shown that it is no exception to the rule that without particular and concrete knowledge, people, and especially groups, tend to fall back on generalizations and ideology.
My own emails to OHW correcting some basic factual errors were simply ignored, not a single one of them meriting a reply. My words were civil, so I began to wonder if we were meant to be in competition? Why was actual knowledge - which is rare enough in Hudson - being rejected? Was it even being suppressed? Are social contests more important than the South Bay? Self-importance? Is prestige a factor for some people? Each of these possibilities reeks of hypocrisy.
Ideology, generalizations, and the manipulation of gullible newcomers was never what the South Bay Task Force was about. It works, though, I'll give you that. Next to journalistic marketing, knowledge means almost nothing. Without knowledge, though, a sound strategy is reduced to misguided tactics and misspent energy.
Hudson is as much a ship of fools as it ever was.
(In none of the above am I talking about Mr. Pratt.)
Also, a small correction to Carole’s post: Chatham resigned from the Planning Board shortly after its December 10th meeting ended (at 10:39 pm that day, to be exact), not on the “next day.”
ReplyDeleteI'm starting to be wary of Our Hudson Waterfront. How do their members decide which issues to focus on, and what position to take on these issues? What is their organizational structure?
ReplyDeleteOHW seems to take a general 'industry bad, waterfront pretty' position on Facebook, with an expanded (though vague, perhaps by design) housing and workforce development ideaology on their webpage. Is their Facebook community aware of this 'mission creep?' Have their been any meetings? Who is funding this initiative? Given some of the personalities now focused on the waterfront issue and their dubious history, I'm troubled.
The organization may be on the up-and-up; my conversations with Sam Pratt left me with the impression that he is more familiar with the group and he seems comfortable with them (though Sam, I certainly don't mean to put words in your mouth.) I find OHV too opaque in their presentation to trust their purported mandate to speak on behalf of the community.
I agree John Kane. The substitution of broader issues for a detailed workable waterfront solution sends up flags.
ReplyDeleteAnd though there's much with which I agree on the group's website, principally "reject[ing] the notion that we must sacrifice our waterfront to move dangerous truck traffic from our streets," pray tell, how is this achieved in the real world?
My greatest fear is that, in the end, this group will fall back on the same chestnut which has frustrated every brainless effort in the past:
"The future of the Hudson waterfront belongs to the city's citizens, and the citizens alone."
This quote, from the website of Our Hudson Waterfront, is self-validating hyperbole. It is also patently false.
On its face, it presents the same impossible dream which frittered away the public's limited energies during the critical run-up to the waterfront plan and zoning changes. Some of us likened it to a belief in unicorns, but the fantasy proved irresistible that the city would exercise eminent domain and simply take the waterfront "for the people." Scenic Hudson and the Columbia Land Conservancy were to step in and pay for the property, except that nobody ever asked them if such a thing was possible. It wasn't.
That was in 2011, when enthusiasm for eminent domain was intense and widespread, particularly among those who seldom do more than sign petitions.
In the end, that foolish notion did so much damage that those who still remember it - those who were sidelined at the time - must still be sidelined today. (See previous comments.)
Meanwhile, newcomers are free to reinvent the same fruitless wheel (see above OHW quotation).
"The future of the Hudson waterfront belongs to the city's citizens, and the citizens alone."
DeleteThat got me too. When the RR came through 150 years back they entrapped the entire eastern shore. Wherever they entrapped a bay they had to provide ingress and egress, that's why black bridge is where it is and why the city's fencing off North bay was fowl.
Fisherfolk didn't gather there by design but by default it's not just a place it was the only.
Furthermore, if it is true, how could it be possible that lifelong residents, paying for "improved access" were (at gunpoint) denied same.
So long as the City, the myriad self-proclaimed citizens groups and the affected companies each continue to behave as if they have carte blanche to determine how this plays out, it won't, in fact, play out.
ReplyDeleteA workable, sensible and responsible (ecologically and economically) solution requires the City and ACS to sit down and work out a compromise. The real problem is such a deal would likely require some brokering and neither side mutually trusts the other or, probably, any 3rd party. Another difficulty is the doctrinaire approach to policy implementation that seems to have infected every level of American government, Hudson being no exception. As long as "compromise" is a "bad" word, expect the status quo ante to continue for the foreseeable future.
But every party involved already compromised in 2011!
DeleteThat was when each party sacrificed something to arrive at a stable waterfront plan, however shoddily it was crafted.
When the current owners purchased the property in 2014, they pretended not to know about the new zoning (imagine that!).
Next they put forward a modified plan which undermined the previous compromise, then claimed - as you are now claiming - that city residents refuse to compromise!
Ever since then, by ignoring the city's adopted waterfront plan the new owner has held the city hostage with truck traffic. The company insinuates a false hardship which, in fact, it purchased. Lastly, it's moved the goalposts by expecting a "compromise" which is wholly to its advantage. That's the full picture of what residents are rejecting. The backdrop which makes the demand for compromise ludicrous is that 99% of the 2011 "preferred alternative" is now completed.
No, when the company bought the property it also bought the amended zoning which was tailored to the 2011 compromise.
The Colarussos should have been more careful, or else not assumed they could railroad the previous, hard wrought compromise.
To those who'd now demand an updated compromise, we say caveat emptor!
Why wasn't the South Bay task force invited to have their 10 min ? Perhaps because they have the awnsers that no one want to hear or acknowledge
ReplyDelete