As the days get shorter and shorter, and we move toward the longest night of the year, here's what is happening.
- On Monday, December 11, the Common Council holds its informal meeting at 6:00 p.m. The meeting is a hybrid, taking place in person at the Central Fire Station, 77 North Seventh Street, and on Zoom. Click here to join the meeting remotely.
- On Tuesday, December 12, Hudson Community Development and Planning Agency (HCDPA) holds its monthly meeting at 5:00 p.m. The meeting is a hybrid, taking place in person at the Central Fire Station, 77 North Seventh Street, and on Zoom. Click here to join the meeting remotely.
- At 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, December 12, the Planning Board holds its regular monthly meeting. The Colarusso haul road is on the agenda, and it is expected that the Planning Board may finally get around to some serious deliberation about the application without further input from Colarusso's attorney, John Privatera. The meeting is a hybrid, taking place in person at the Central Fire Station, 77 North Seventh Street, and on Zoom. Click here to join the meeting remotely.
- Also at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, December 12, the Hudson City School District Board of Education holds its monthly meeting. The meeting will be livestreamed on YouTube. Click here, then click on "Live," to view the meeting. The agenda for the meeting can be found here.
- On Friday, December 15, the Historic Preservation Commission meets at 10:00 a.m. At this meeting, it is expected that a proposal for dealing with the limewash illegally applied to 501 Union Street will be presented. The meeting is a hybrid, taking place in person at the Central Fire Station, 77 North Seventh Street, and on Zoom. Click here to join the meeting remotely.
More ominous than Colarusso's potential truck numbers are the potential numbers for the next landowner who follows Colarusso.
ReplyDeleteFor now, the numbers reported by Colarusso are derived from expected barge numbers, if anyone still takes their claims at face value. But the next landowner who may benefit more from this road than Colarusso, what's their upper limit for trucks? It will be whatever the road can bear, which is something the Planning Board's SEQRA review was supposed to study.
Once Colarusso has mined all of the aggregate from Becraft Mnt., the future will see another kind of mining there and vessels other than open barges to transport mined materials by water. All will require the same two-lane haul road now under review. Again, the SEQRA review for the CUP was meant to consider this.
In all likelihood the future owner of Colarusso's lands will be Holcim US, formerly known as LafargeHolcim which was itself a renaming of "Holcim (US)" from an earlier incarnation as St. Lawrence Cement.
The best argument for the return of Holcim (/St. Lawrence) is found in Colarusso's easement deed for a parcel still owned by Holcim beneath the future "haul road" in the Greenport portion. A key condition of the easement specifies that "no cementitious products" may be transported via Holcim property. In other words, once Colarusso's aggregate runs out and the far more valuable limestone for cement-making is exposed, then we should expect a new owner and an entirely new mining operation.
If today's Planning Board approves the "haul road" (a technical term which would henceforth engage NYS's permissive mining laws) thanks to the Board member's failure to anticipate the inevitable shift to cementitious mining and everything that that entails, then future Hudsonians pondering their over-industrialized riverfront will know who to blame, and why. (Only a failed SEQRA process would overlook the long-term adverse consequences of a proposed action - particularly a review which neglected years of public comments, still in the active record, which warned of the easement's "cementitious" clause.)
Perhaps the greatest benefit of the road to Colarusso will be a substantial increase in its property value. By fixating on Colarusso's operations alone, we're lulled into missing the longer-term consequences once the circumstances have changed, as we know they must.
Just as no studies were conducted on the *maximum* volume afforded by a two-lane "haul road" (which is incredibly stupid given the road's potential!), admittedly there was no study of the potential traffic by using the existing one-lane road in both directions of travel, as envisioned in the waterfront program (LWRP) and its associated zoning amendments.
ReplyDeleteFor NYSDOS attorney William Sharpe who was advising the authors of the LWRP, it was an educated guess that trucks taking turns on the causeway for "ingress and egress" would supply their own limiting principle (see Hudson Code, at 325.17-1 D(1), D(2), F(2), F(2)(j), F(3)).
It's a good guess, though, given the alternative of focusing on truck numbers in a state which is clearly mining-friendly.
The question remains, why would anyone in their right minds totally disregard the City's already adopted limiting principle as memorialized in the 2011 LWRP and its amended zoning?
Please, can someone answer to this insanity.