Roger Hannigan Gilson has an article in the Times Union today about the lawsuit recently filed against the Planning Board: "Hudson sued over approval of industrial road to waterfront."
 |
| Photo: Lori Van Buren | Times Union |
Unfortunately, Gilson gets a couple of things wrong. Early on, he states: "The Columbia County-based mining and paving company's trucks have been using the road for years on return trips to the quarry, but it was not wide enough to handle two-way traffic, forcing Colarusso's trucks into state roads that wound through city neighborhoods to get to the docks." In fact, it was trucks heading to the dock that used the private road through South Bay, and trucks returning to the quarry that traveled on Front Street and lower Columbia Street. The reason for this was, as it was explained at one time, that the NYS Department of Transportation didn't want trucks coming off the haul road making a left turn onto Route 9G.
Another error in the piece is a bit more egregious. Gilson claims, "Colarusso had working docks for years before Hudson rezoned its waterfront in 2011." Not true. Colarusso did nothing at the waterfront until they purchased the property from Holcim in 2014. Prior to 2005, when St. Lawrence Cement (later to be called Holcim), in the aftermath of being denied critical permits for the giant cement plant it wanted to build, entered into a deal with O&G Industries to ship gravel from the dock, the dock was used only to receive shipments of road salt and store Coast Guard buoys. Colarusso did not begin its activity on Hudson's waterfront until 2014, three years after Hudson adopted its Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan (LWRP).
The article does talk about the LWRP and the Local Coastal Consistency Review Board. The lawsuit argues that the Planning Board failed to refer the Colarusso application to the Local Coastal Consistency Review Board, as required by city code. The problem is Hudson does not have a Local Coastal Consistency Review Board, and the reason for this is very likely that our LWRP, although adopted by the Common Council, was never approved by the NYS Department of State. Interestingly, as Gossips has explained before, Colarusso seems to have played a role in that shortcoming.
As we were given to understand at the time, the approval of Hudson's LWRP was contingent on fulfilling some conditions, one of which was the transfer of ten acres of land on the waterfront, south of the dock, from Holcim to the City of Hudson. Cheryl Roberts, then city attorney, was negotiating with Holcim's lawyers to make that happen, but those negotiations broke down sometime in 2014. That was because, as Gossips learned in 2016, Colarusso had begun its negotiations with Holcim to buy Holcim's property in Hudson, and Colarusso wanted those ten acres adjacent to the dock to use as a staging area.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CAROLE OSTERINK
The fact that the city's "adopted" waterfront program is binding on the city is arguably more important than a state-approved program. Inasmuch as Hudson was free to make its own misjudgement in this case, no additional involvement of state and/or federal governments would have made any difference to the outcome.
ReplyDeleteAnd though it's true that Hudson has no Consistency Review Board, nonetheless at §325-35.2(B) we read that any agency involved with a proposal is still required to conduct its own "consistency review of actions." Any involved agency must determine whether or not the proposal "is consistent with the LWRP policy standards." In that regard the Planning Board failed miserably.
https://ecode360.com/16032088
Did any Planning Board member consider what it will mean to have a two-lane "haul road" to the waterfront when a subsequent landowner is exporting endless truckloads of raw materials for cement-making? After all, that's the future of this particular mine, and the Board's review was required to consider that.
In another unforced error, the City AND its residents made a huge mistake not pursuing the underwater lands dispute with the NYS Office of General Services concerning the Colarusso dock. Only by sleight of hand was the land beneath the dock added to the iron works acreage in the 1860s. The state knows this but is either corrupt or lazy. And while there's no Statute of Limitations on the purloining of state-owned lands, there might have been a different outcome in this case had that dispute been pursued to its end.