An article this morning by Tom Casey in The Register-Star reports that the City of Hudson is seeking funding “to create a marketing and development plan for several vacant buildings, including the L&B Furniture and McGuire properties, and to create a detailed plan to connect the separated portions of the waterfront from the North Bay to the South Bay.”
In point of fact, the L&B Furniture site (actually renamed LB Furniture before it closed) is hardly a “vacant building.”
The vast space houses plenty of renters, including the highly successful CNC fabrication business Digifab, a metal shop, a recycler, music practice spaces, and more. Indeed, The Register-Star itself published an article by Lindsay Suchow in November 2010 about the revival of the building, entitled “New life at old furniture warehouse.”
(Note: The above correction was submitted as an online comment to the paper’s website early this morning, but it has suppressed it. Apparently the Hudson “community paper” feels free to make obvious mistakes, but does not like them being pointed out.)
The focus of the article is to bemoan the seeming lack of interest in a Hudson grant application, reporting that “on Tuesday, there were no members of the public at the public hearing, which the group stressed needs to change to help take the ideas and proposals to improving and developing Hudson’s waterfront to the next step.” Casey quotes a development official as claiming that
“All the ideas you (the public) provided during the LWRP are now bearing some fruit... So much of that comes out of that public comment, you gave us the foundation, and now it’s step two.”
The official may be making that statement naïvely, or in hopes of changing the dynamic, but its whitewashing sentiment comes across as an affront to those who actually were around for the degraded Waterfront process.
The LWRP was a travesty of public input. One would be hard-pressed to make up a more textbook example of how to undermine public faith in public policy.
The sustained participation and comments of thousands of residents over many years—in public workshops, surveys, hearings, postcards, petitions, emails, letters and more—was cast aside for the South Bay in favor of the demands of a Swiss-owned multinational polluter and a Connecticut-based construction company. The former has racked up millions internationally in fines for environmental and anti-trust violations, and the latter is known for its role in the huge Rowland corruption scandal, and for an explosion at one of its projects that killed six workers.
The architects of the highly unpopular and unresponsive Waterfront plan were former Mayor Rick Scalera, Linda Mussmann of TSL and her real estate attorney, Cheryl Roberts, now a candidate for State Assembly, with the spine-free connivance of Council President Don Moore. Roberts erased records of two well-attended workshops and a 300-person survey from the LWRP narrative, because that input ran counter to her agenda—while incorporting virtually all of the demands of lawyers from Holcim and O&G. (This is what the leaders of the Columbia County Democratic Committee, such as Cyndy Hall and Victor Mendolia, shamelessly trumpet as Roberts’ “environmental sensitivity.”)
And Moore, having tried but failed to block public access to a key draft of the plan, refused to allow any of the 80 people who attended the final meeting about the plan to speak before the Council voted on it.
Meanwhile on the North Bay side, a huge outpouring of support for the Furgary Boat Club was again spurned by Roberts, Moore and the current mayor, Bill Hallenbeck. The Furgarians were evicted at gunpoint by a SWAT team, no less. A widespread local belief is that the eviction of Furgary after 100 years of peaceful stewardship of the North Bay was driven by a plan advanced by the Chatham-based Columbia Land Conservancy—which would be the beneficiary of some of this new Hudson grant funding, , according the The Register’s article.
No wonder then that no one showed up for these hearings. The public has gotten the firm message that their input does not matter, and would be a waste of a citizen’s breath. The current backers of these grant proposals no doubt are operating in better faith than their predecessors. But mix these recent and strong impressions of official disdain with a dearth of publicity about the weekday meeting (announced via obscure public notice), and you have a perfect recipe for the public to stay away, even though the topic is one of keen importance to the future of Hudson.
The public is interested—it just isn’t convinced that the City will listen. It’s up to its leaders to convince people otherwise, by making a serious outreach to groups and residents who have been burned multiple times before.
