This week, the Columbia County retail landscape will be dotted with stacks of the new environment issue of Our Town, the Claverack-based quarterly. Along with articles by Dave Gargill of Harper’s Magazine and Germantown filmmaker Barbara Ettinger, the issue includes a lengthy piece by Yours Truly, titled “The Bullet We Dodged,” on the occasion of the imminent fifth anniversary of the victory over St. Lawrence Cement.
Rather than delving much into the elaborate strategies, tactics, fundraising, day-to-day labor, organization, legal maneuvering, and other minutiae of this grinding battle, the piece focuses on the role of people power in our against-the-odds success. We were huge underdogs when this began, with most giving us less than a 1% chance of winning. Among those whose contributions are mentioned in the piece are:
Al Cook, Alan Hamilton, Alex Matthiessen, Alex Sagady, Alice Platt, Ally Anderson-Spivy, Andrea Smallwood, Ann Birckmayer, Annie Leibovitz, B. Docktor, Barbara Ettinger, Bob & Monica Mechling, Bonnie Sanders, Bridget Rockwell, Bud Mann, Carole Clark, Carole Osterink, Cassandra Danz, Chet Stark, Chloe Zerwick, Chris Pfister , Christopher Burge, Claire Oravec, Craig Fitt, Cyndy Hall, Cynthia Richardson, Dave Staats, David Kermani, David Rubel, Deb Novack, Deborah Bowen, Diana Jelinek, Dick Donovan, Dick Jenrette, Don & Marnie MacLean, Don Christensen , Elizabeth Nyland, Ellen Thurston, Ellsworth Kelly, Enid Futterman, Fran & Vinny DeGrazia, Frank Aultman, Gabe Miller, Gabi Hermann, George Wislocki, Hannah Hanani, Hannah Williamson, Hillary Hillman, Howard Brandston, Ian Nitschke, Ira Marks, Jay Rasku, Jeff Monkash, Jennifer Arenskjold, Jim Schermbeck, Joan Hintermeister, Jock Spivy, John Ashbery, John Davis, John Isaacs, Kate Kerin, Katy Hubener, Ken McCarthy, Laura Skutch, Lisa Durfee, Lynn Davis, Maiysha Kramer, Martha Lane, Martina Arfwidson, Marty Davidson, Mary Sanchez, Michael Brown, Michael Vertetis, Mitchell Gaynor, Moisha Blechman, Nancy Gordon, Neil Carman, Nicholas Blechman, Pamela Kline, Patrick Manning, Paul Swedenburg, Penny Wheat, Peter Jung, Philip Glass, Phyllis Herbert, Richard Blumenthal, Richard Katzman, Rudy Wurlitzer, Ruth Piwonka, Sally Drummond, Sarah Griffen, Steve Kaufman, Stu Kaufman, Sven Huseby, Tarquin Cardona , Thomas Teich, Tom Mabley, Travis Kline, and Warren Collins.
Though the piece runs well over 7,000 words, this list still barely scratches the surface of the contributions by the thousands of people who took the time to (and the risk of) getting involved, when faced with a fight-or-flight situation, and an adversary prepared to spend nearly $60 million on advertising, astroturfing, consultants, lobbyists, lawyers, payouts and public relations. Frankly it would have been cheaper for them to simply buy the whole City of Hudson, before the controversy spread across the whole Valley and far into New England.
And now five years later, all that herculean effort by so many people has now been put at risk by the likes of Linda Mussmann, Cheryl Roberts and Rick Scalera, with a dangerous plan to reindustrialize the Hudson Waterfront and give SLC’s parent company, Holcim, many of the very same waterfront goodies they were denied back on April 19th, 2005, by the New York State Secretary of State. You can also all about the new struggle at HudsonWaterfront.org.
Back in March 2006, Metroland covered the kick-off meeting of the Hudson Common Council’s newly-appointed Waterfront Advisory Steering Committee. In light of more recent Waterfront developments, the kindest thing that can be said is that the current situation is not lacking in irony.
The story was subtitled “Citizens of Hudson are given the opportunity to reimagine their waterfront,” and covered “what Linda Mussmann, chair of the Waterfront Advisory Steering Committee, hopes will be a series of meetings meant to guide and shape Hudson’s Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan.” The rest of the article included the following passages... which can only fill the mouths of those who remember the optimism and energy of those initial meetings with the bitter taste of wormwood:
- The room filled with more than 100 residents who buzzed with excitement over the chance to construct a waterfront district. The energy in the room was palpable as members of the Common Council, Mayor Richard Tracy and Department of State Coastal Resources specialists Bonnie Devine and Nancy Welsh took their seats. Applause erupted frequently as officials welcomed the crowd.
- Said Mussmann, “To have an opportunity to have access [to the waterfront] is a big thing. It always seems to have a fence in front of it or a barge of an industrial plant...”
- While the LWRP’s history is a long saga, [Basilica Industria developer and former LWRP Subcommittee Chair Patrick] Doyle says he is now focused on the future. “It’s all in the past. It’s a new age now. It’s about unifying the community, opening up the process.”
- Mayor [Dick] Tracy agrees that giving the community a voice is the key in moving the LWRP forward. “They have been denied the opportunity to offer input for too long,” he said.
- What may have really sparked the turnout on Wednesday, however, is the recent defeat of the proposed St. Lawrence Cement plant. Hudson residents seem to realize they have a chance to take control of what they so nearly lost.
- According to Mussmann, the delay surrounding the LWRP has stemmed from a number of different pressures. “In my opinion,” said Mussmann, “Many government officials knew about it but the public wasn’t informed. In terms of openness it was handled in a less public way than I think was helpful to this city. . . . There was also some lag time because of the huge cement plant that was potentially coming to our shores. People were awaiting the result.”
- The Secretary of State’s April 2005 decision rejecting the St. Lawrence plant declared that Hudson’s current waterfront zoning is “far too broad and does not recognize the value of the waterfront as a historical, cultural, commercial and recreational zone for the city.”
- Members of the public brought up simple suggestions such as acquiring signage to let people know Hudson has a waterfront and connecting the waterfront to downtown. Others worried about eyesores such as prominent power lines and towers on St. Lawrence property abutting the waterfront. Some expressed hope for a museum or a research center[,] a bird sanctuary or some other kind of environmental center, free of development. DOS representatives reassured participants that these are the kind of decisions that would be made by the community as a whole.
- Robert O’Brien, president of the Common Council, and Mussmann both stressed that the goal is to get as much community input as possible.
- “It’s an opportunity to re-create this area in the way that the citizens of this community would like to see it happen,” [Mussmann] said, “and it’s the first time they’ve had the chance.”
The extraordinary irony is of course that Mussmann, along with City Attorney Cheryl Roberts, became in 2007 the principle advocates of ignoring public input, and instead using the Waterfront plan to permanently ensconce or even expand the cement company’s blighting industrial presence next to public parks, recreation areas, small boat launches, habitat restoration projects, and appropriate commericial development such as restaurants, kayak rentals, marine supply, and the like.
So it’s no wonder they decided to erase all traces of the March meetings of the WASC from the narrative of public input on the draft plan. That glaring bit of historical revisionism has been brought to the attention of the City and State in Save the South Bay’s 32,000-word submission of comments on the schizophrenic and short-sighted draft LWRP currently under consideration.
A health and safety expert (who himself had a devastating accident in a Toyota several decades ago) is taking a tire iron to those hyping the #2 car company’s recent woes.
Writing in the L.A. Times’ Wednesday opinion pages, Michael Fumento of the Independent Journalism Project notes that
although Toyota had almost 17% of total U.S. car sales in 2008, it accounted for merely 8% of total claims for deaths and injuries in the first quarter of that year, according to NHTSA. Edmunds.com found that while Toyota was third in U.S. car sales from 2001 through 2010, it was 17th in NHTSA complaints. Thus, even if every sudden-acceleration complaint proved valid, Toyotas are among the safest cars made.My own experience owning 2005 and 2010 Prius models has been entirely positive. While averaging around 50 mpg, I’ve had no service issues whatsoever—just routine maintenance. When the recent brake recall was announced, I took the car straight to a dealer, who performed a completely painless (and free) 20 minute software upgrade. End of story.
Moreover, some of those reports surely could have been driver fault. To err is human; to blame errors on external factors is even more so.
Those engaging in Toyota schadenfreude conveniently forget that hardly a month goes by without some car being recalled for a small or large fix. Last fall, for example, Ford had to recall 4.5 million vehicles—the largest in the carmaker’s history:
“A faulty cruise control switch can leak hydraulic fluid, overheat, smoke and then burn, and risks causing a fire even when the ignition is turned off, parked and unattended, the NHTSA said.”
Oops. Anyone remember that one? Was the President of Ford forced to commit virtual hara-kiri in the press to atone for his company’s sins?
Of course not. But when it involves Toyota, we can count on the major media to highlight even the most minor and fixable problems, which when investigated often turn out to be the result of driver error, not vehicle design... Especially if any complaints involve the Prius, which seems to inspire the same sort of resentment among conventional car owners as the mere existence of vegetarians inspires among some of our flesh-chewing friends.
Marilyn Bethany interviewed me about the problems with the plans for the Hudson waterfront at Rural Intelligence—click here to read the Q&A.
But what I’d really appreciate you doing is to click through to Hudsonwaterfront.org and take action right away to help ensure that a greener, more sustainable, and more economically-beneficial plan gets enacted.
Spotted in today’s Register-Star interview of the owners of the newly-renovated Blue Stores restaurant in Livingston:
“I want to restore Blue Stores to its terra-like splendor.”
For the record:
But frankly, my dears, the Register-Star doesn’t seem to give a damn about typos.
Some recent postings here prompted a longtime local resident to share a copy of an old 1984 Hudson Valley Magazine article entitled, An Oil Refinery in our Backyard (There May Soon Be One in Hudson, on the River).
Its authors, Mary Beth Pfeiffer and Robert Miraldi, could not have imagined the extent to which their piece would underscore for future generations how the more things change in Hudson, the more its politics remain crude and unrefined.
First proposed in 1983, the Octane Petroleum project would have entailed a refinery, some 22 storage tanks holding up to 25,000 barrels of oil, and the discharge of some 2.6 million gallons of wastewater annually—all sprawled over 9 acres at the Waterfront, including parts of the river itself, 1.2 acres of which would have been landfilled.
Here are just a few of the more eerily familiar factoids and quotations which have been repeated, in so many words, in later and current controversies:
Fast-forward to 2010, and we have the New York State Department of State again contemplating a deeply-flawed new Waterfront plan for Hudson. That plan has been in the works since about the time the Octane Petroleum project was finally shelved in the late ’80s, with Hudson officials such as Linda Davidson acting to the bitter end as if the refinery idea was still viable and in play.
As previously reported here, concerned citizens and activists were also subjected to an almost endless stream of press releases and abuse from then-HCDPA director Edmond Schorno, as well as other City leaders such as Cemetery Commissioner Mark Salomon—who pronounced himself “thoroughly disgusted” with refinery opponents, arguing that they “oppose everything” and nothing would “satisfy” those “not interested in the well-being of our local citizenry.”
The full Hudson Valley article may be downloaded in PDF format by clicking here..
