SamPratt.com

Quotable King

There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

— REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Full circle

A recent post (and one of the more eyeroll-worthy comments) at The Gossips of Rivertown brought to mind a drive down to Saugerties about 10 years ago, when I was on the board of Clearwater. Andy Mele was President, we went down to check on how repairs to the Sloop were going. When the boat-builder heard I was from Hudson he got a rueful look on his face.

“Hudson,” he said, with some bitterness. “Strange place. I wanted to move this business there some years ago, but it fell through.”

So what happened?

“I thought I had a deal to buy some land from the City on the south end of the riverfront. But the City’s lawyer kept delaying the sale, and at the last minute they turned around and sold it to someone else.”

Did he remember to whom Hudson sold the land instead?

“Yes, it was St. Lawrence Cement.”

In short, it would appear the City of Hudson is now going through all this mishigas just to get back acreage it already owned years ago... either the same land it sold to Holcim (then called SLC), or else adjacent to/overlapping with it.

Instead of a several huge controversies, Hudson could have had a traditional, high-end boat-building business on its waterfront—creating jobs, and apprenticeships, and educational opportunities.

The only people who make out in all this endless cycle of blunders are the lawyers. No wonder some of them have a “real love” for Hudson.

T-U: TCI heading north?

A reader points out an article in The Albany Times-Union (linked below) saying that embattled PCB handler TCI of NY may be looking for a new home to the north. The T-U quotes “local officials” as saying the company, whose Ghent facility was destroyed in an inferno last August, is working with the Rensselaer County IDA—and has scoped locations in East Greenbush, Rensselaer and Schodack:

http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/TCI-mulls-new-plant-4464861.php

Many Columbia County residents would heave a big sigh of relief, much as Ulster residents did in the 1980s, when fires at TCI’s original Newburgh plant drove the company up here.

Dust busters

Thanks to the vigilance of Riverkeeper—which filed a complaint about the facility at Cementon across the river from Germantown—Glens Falls Lehigh Cement has been fined $50,000 by the State for allowing leachate to seep into the Hudson River.

The Kingston Daily Freeman reports, however, that the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation will forgive 20% of the fine if Lehigh takes steps to correct the problem within three years. Riverkeeper’s complaint goes all the way back to 2007.

The Lehigh plant no longer manufactures cement from scratch, but rather blends portland cement produced elsewhere with imported slag, a waste from the iron industry. Residents banding together under the rubric of the Germantown Neighbors Association have challenged the facility’s permitting and management over the past decade.

Required public notice of political meeting