The Register-Star reports this morning that our new, very expensive comprehensive plan will be late: "Hudson's draft comprehensive plan delayed until June."
According to the original schedule for the comprehensive plan, which can be found here, the draft plan was due in February 2025, and the final plan was to be completed by April 2025.
In commenting on the delay, Melissa Lee, principal of Public Works Partners, the consulting firm doing the Comprehensive Plan, said her group "was ensuring that the draft plan would fully align with the city's goals, and the goals of city residents." The article quotes the mayor's response to the delays:
Hudson Mayor Kamal Johnson said Thursday the draft of the comprehensive plan was in its final stages, and will be shown to the plan's steering committee first.
"Then it will be presented to the [Common] council and everyone else," he said. "It's pretty much finished, it just needs all the key stakeholders to look it over. It'll be available soon."
One wonders who the "key stakeholders" are. The names of members of the steering committee can be found here.
COPYRIGHT 2025 CAROLE OSTERINK
Tom and Kamal’s “Project 2035.” An expensive consultant’s dream, done in secret by a committee hand selected by them alone in an attempt to codify their legacy and haunt us for decades. But just like all the comprehensive plans in the past, they’ll go straight to the filing cabinet, never to be seen again. See how the current Planning Board scoffs at any mention of previous plans when citizens speak about scatter site housing or the waterfront plans.
ReplyDeleteAnd guess who’s on the committee? Surprise, surprise—Hudson’s very own Robert Moses, Randall Martin. Never since Moses was there ever a public official that held so many appointments and power without winning one single election.
Interestingly enough, Peter Spear made a video today about city board appointments and making the process more transparent so that we can attract talent, new ideas and stop the cronyism.
🚨 The survey has several issues:
Delete1️⃣ - Sample size is barely significant; by just 10 respondents.
2️⃣ - Biased sample; they pushed the sample to surrogates
3️⃣ - Measurement Bias: leading and framing errors
Melissa Lee and her team are also not answering questions or sharing OUR (because this belongs to Hudson) primary data with us. "Researchers" do this when they P hack or hide qualitative responses.
📉 The funniest thing about this is their data lead person is not a stats or quant expert, but literally an MFA / creative artist contractor who lives in the area and who signals on his social media ideological alignment with "Facebook Mayor" Kamal.
💅 [Put another way, they spent more money on making pretty graphics with a liberal arts major, than getting the survey and analysis done, and asking neutral non-leading questions]
🚸 In one of their "community" events at the school that was supposed to be "listening"... they started the day by putting up a slide and said something like: "10 year plus Hudson residents are unhappy, and housing is unaffordable for them"
And then opened the "conversation" with " we are here to listen"... we have no preconceived views... we are neutral.
🤥 This was also the event where Facebook Mayor Kamal repeatedly insisted that there are no apartments available in Hudson under $4k, and where Theresa Joyner said the City water is contaminated with lead, and that is what explains HCSD performance.
It is hysterical. Their initial data also showed that actual tax payers and homeowners, and the Bangladeshi community are vastly under-represented in the survey.
This survey, and every form, and the whole data set, and a video of the public "listening" events, should be packaged and used as a case study for College Statistics majors of what not to do.
~
🦜 Calling this survey ‘comprehensive’ is like calling an Olana weekend birdwatcher the FAA( Federal Aviation Authority); nice sounding, perhaps, but not remotely qualified to guide public flight.
~
⁉️ Why was Kamal's gf Michelle "Housing Justice Director" guiding this project so closely, at every session, and as the primary marketing agent.
If the Police Chief, or the Fire Chief, or DPW Head, was as involved as Michelle was then the town would question if they were using the survey in a self-serving way.
Of course Kamal and Michelle were hoping to use this "survey" to rubber stamp their pre-decided path for Hudson on housing with "community" blessing.
🎯 Instead, this Survey shows his
1. Financial mismanagement
2. His capture by ideological and Dem insider consultants
3. Lack of numeracy, ethics, and data driven administration
Melissa - this is incredibly shoddy work. And you charged this poor City more than $200k. You should be ashamed of yourself. We are still waiting for the original data. And you and Kamal owe me $40. You owe every resident the $40 you took out of our pockets for this boondoggle to pay for your LA/NYC lifestyle.
Kamal - still waiting for you to answer us on the $4k apartment rent claim or admit you lied, repeatedly, even after being fact checked by a live Zillow/Zumper search, in a public setting on a mic in front of the Fair Housing Director (who did not correct you) and the Chair of the Planning Board (who did not correct you).
p.s. For folks keeping score at home... City Hall has delayed by a month the release of the list of tax delinquent properties... is Kamal giving a buddy of his time to get off the list?
p.p.s This survey is now delayed... are Kamal and Michelle's consultants fudging the numbers once they realized that real quantitative experts will review and prove they just "cleaned up" data.
Tune into the Parking Study Committee meeting later this month (if it doesn't get canceled) and see how many months the 3 phases of the kiosk project will each have to be pushed back or if any of the kiosks will appear this year as planned. That huge project, designed to increase parking revenue by quite a bit starting this year, also entails a paid consultant.
ReplyDeleteThe rooftop that the residents of Hudson is paying for: https://www.instagram.com/p/DJ2Q9TiyVGk/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
ReplyDelete