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Holcim Catskill probably gone for good

The Holcim Catskill cement plant officially closed on June 13th. As noted in previous commentaries on the shuttering, most workers were gone months or even years ago, as the plant endured a long series of layoffs and job eliminations.

An article in yesterday’s Catskill Daily Mail contains a couple of interesting tidbits for those wondering if the old beast could spring back to life. While Holcim (pronounced hole-sim, after the French word ciment, as confirmed in these corporate videos) has claimed it will maintain its permits and perform basic maintenance in case they want to reopen, comments from Catskill officials make that sound unlikely.

A Greene County Legislator for Catskill, Forest Cotten, is quoted as saying “Holcim is just not going to stay.”

The article by Doron Tyler Antrim also recognizes what many observers have long understood: Namely, that the Holcim Catskill plant has been falling into disrepair for many years, making it inefficient and unprofitable. Meanwhile, the necessary and significant upgrades to the plant would not only require a major investment, but would also likely trigger a lengthy permitting process under New Source Review (“NSR”)—standards the company might not be able to meet given its location on the Hudson River and in a Scenic Area of Statewide Significance (or “SASS Area”).

Catskill Supervisor Pat Walsh concedes that it would “take a major renovation to get that plant going again,” which Antrim then states “is something Holcim is apparently unwilling to do.”

The Daily Mail also reports, per comments by Greene County Legislature chair Wayne Speenburgh, that the Holcim (formerly St. Lawrence Cement and Independent Cement) site will likely become an “eyesore” like the abandoned Alsen Coal Terminal just to its south. Catskill and Greene County officials might want to consider legislative options to compel property owners to clean up or at minimum prevent further blight.

Antrim’s article also notes that only five former Holcim employees have felt the need to enter the Columbia-Greene Workforce Investment Office’s retraining program. Most of the plant’s workers were gone months or even years ago, as the plant slowly faded away, and workers have moved on to other pursuits.

However, that doesn’t stop former union chief Dennis Smith from attempting to scapegoat outsiders for the company’s failures, in a misleading and inflammatory letter-to-the-editor. Failing to identify his relationship with the company, Smith apparently feels no remorse or responsibility for the many years that this dirty, outmoded plant polluted the lungs of downwind residents in Germantown (and beyond), or poisoned the crops of downwind farms all over Columbia County, or fouled the waters of the Hudson River. And he makes no mention of the numerous fines for safety and environmental violations levied over the years against the facility.

Inevitable and necessary

The closing of the Catskill plant was as necessary as it was inevitable.

Inevitable, due to both the nature of Holcim’s international business model and this particular plant’s challenges. And necessary, to safeguard the health of thousands of downwind neighbors.

As a vast global corporation, Holcim wants to reap big profit margins from very large plants which can dominate their regional markets. They no longer have much interest in running smaller, less efficient facilities with narrow profit margins.

While Holcim failed to build such a plant in Columbia County, Lafarge in Ravena stole a march on its Swiss competitors, and is poised to vastly expand their plant to the north in Rensselaer County. Even if Catskill could expand, Lafarge’s head start would largely foil Holcim’s preferred modus operandi, which is to lock up markets, then bleed them dry. Millions of dollars in fines for price-fixin are, after all, a documented part of their track record.

Moreover, as an older plant with many maintenance and safety issues—having been hit with hundreds of thousands in fines over the past few years—the Catskill kiln was increasingly a drag on the company’s bottom line. Coupled with a national economic downturn—far from being immune to recessions, cement plants closely track building trends—there simply wasn’t much money in that site at that scale.

But any major expansion in scale and technology would necessitate a new permitting process, much ike the failed Greenport one. Despite efforts during the Bush administration to gut NSR (New Source Review), the Catskill plant would clearly be subject to such regulatory oversight. It would again need some 14-20 different permits from local, county, State and Federal agencies.

That would mean a risky new investment of tens of millions on a highly-speculative venture, in a location where citizens had already demonstrated the tenacity and means to mount a prolonged, well- informed opposition. They again could expect a long, expensive, and low-percentage fight against residents all over Columbia, Berkshire, Dutchess, Litchfield, and other downwind counties.

Worse for Holcim, the Catskill location is squarely within the famous southwestern viewshed of Olana, and any expansion there would impact a Scenic Area of Statewide Significance—again, guaranteeing a difficult, stringent review, with many or all of the same 30+ groups which opposed the SLC project to weigh in all over again. And this time, they wouldn’t be starting from scratch, but would have a world of knowledge, contacts, expertise and organizing know-how to bring to bear.

Moreover, the limestone reserves at Catskill would not justify such an investment, even if the permitting were successful.

The Holcim board (and the investors who track its stock) never behaved particularly rationally or cleverly here. But the $58 million they flushed down the drain the last time they tried such a move is hard even for overconfident, negligent corporate officers to overlook.

As for economic development: Again and again, planners and residents and businesspeople here have agreed that the long-range goal has to be sustainable, compatible and contextual projects which complement each other and build upon the strengths of the region.

Most who worked at Holcim (SLC) Catskill knew this was coming long ago, and many moved on to other work already since the multiple rounds of job eliminations and layoffs began about five years ago. Finding a new job is possible; finding a new lung isn’t. The thousands of residents downwind of Catskill are much better off.

Those who now call the closing a “tragedy” (including some, like Linda Mussmann, who once berated this company as an “awful mega-corporation” whose goal is “to take more than it can ever ever give back”) evidently don’t consider it tragic when kids get asthma or grandparents are told they have cancer.

 

In December 2003, Linda Mussmann called St. Lawrence Cement (now Holcim) an “awful mega-corporation” whose "goal" is “to take more than it can ever ever give back.”

Now she considers the departure of that company a "tragedy."

At Catskill, the company was indeed taking from our communities (by polluting the lungs and crops of its downwind neighbors) more than it ever gave back. Meanwhile, they’ve grieved their taxes on both sides of the river repeatedly, while others pay their full share.

The SLC Catskill plant emitted mercury, arsenic, lead and fine particulate matter into the air and water of its neighbors for many years. It was heavily fined in 2008 for some 300 safety violations, putting its workers at risk. It was photographed by Riverkeeper releasing large plumes of waste materials into the river... These were not the actions of a good neighbor.

Other companies bring good, safe jobs to our area without controversy, without dividing people, and without causing others harm. We should build an economy based on mutual respect, not profiting at others’ expense. Naturally, we as a country should “make things.” But we can and should manufacture make things in a manner which doesn’t selfishly and recklessly take other things from others--essential things, like our  health.

Businesses like L’Eurial and Etsy promise as many or more jobs than Catskill ever provided—with none of the downside impacts, none of the controversy, and far more prospects of surviving future economic turbulence. That’s where our focus should be, rather than attempting to reinvent a brief 1950s industrial heyday, which is not coming back, no matter how nostalgic some might be for it.

The other (cement) shoe drops

The Holcim (formerly St. Lawrence Cement) Catskill plant is closing, according to a company press release posted here. The Boston Globe also has a brief report, closely tracking the language of the release.)

Despite empty claims in the past that the cement industry is “recession-proof” (in fact, its fortunes are closely tied to wildly-fluctuating building trends), it was just a matter of time until they shuttered the place. The Catskill plant is inefficient, and too small to deliver the profit margins expected by its Swiss owners. This rapacious company wants to build big, cheap mega-plants (like its St. Genevieve operation in Missouri), not run a more modestly-scaled plant responsibly.

Meanwhile, the Catskill plant has been racking up safety violations and environmental complaints, further digging into their bottom line. With the national economy in a slup over the past few years, those fines have been accompanied by steady layoffs.

And in order to get the kind of profits out of this facility that they really want, the company would have to sink tens of millions into a major new expansion proposal—one that would involve steep engineering, lobbying, legal, consulting, and public relations costs—with a low probability of approval, given the highly sensitive location right on the River. That’s why, in the summer of 2005, I predicted that closure was just a matter of time.

The company is of course spinning this closure as “mothballing,” which seems more aimed at tamping down investor disappointment than a serious threat to reopen someday. Anything is possible. But keeping permits active, equipment and grounds maintained, and the prospect of finding skilled cement workers years later make reopening.

Given their history of abandonment and neglect of their former host communities, more likely is that over time this site will come to look like the derelict Alsen Coal Terminal at Smith’s Landing, or the rusting junk and buried debris found on Holcim’s Hudson and Greenport properties.

Folks in Germantown, it should be said, showed incredible integrity in joining the fight against SLC Grenport. They recognized that the newer, much larger plant would pollute even more than the plant in their view right across the river, and trusted that eventually that bad actor would disappear, too. Now it has, and I’m very happy for them.

Hudson 101: The Cement Plant Battle (Part 4)

[ Click for Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 5 ]

NOTE: This piece originally appeared in last year’s environment issue of Our Town (the Columbia County quarterly), under the title The Bullet We Dodged: How the Cement War was Won.* I’m offering it here in several installments over the next week, in a somewhat expanded form, and with added visuals and links, both for those who lived through the tumultuous years of 1998-2005, and for others who moved to the area more recently—who may wonder what all the fuss was about...

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THE CONVERTS • While much of the media and SLC tried to portray opponents as kneejerk reactionaries, for most, the process of opposing the plant involved a slow, steady loss of faith in the company—paired with increased  trust in opponents’ credibility.

Claverack’s Mary Sanchez, who ran a lively and sometimes profane online chat site known as “Red’s Board”, described her change of stance in terms of the patience and decency of opponents’ responses:

People took the time to answer my questions in a civil and thoughtout manner. Their answers made sense—and—they could be verified with facts. I started to look back at my involvement with SLC. After reading all the information I had found (not been given—but found), both good and bad, I asked myself that question that Jesse continuously asks: “Why is SLC good for us?” I could not think of an answer... I got to thinking that big promises don’t always add up to big “keeps.”

It is my hope that some of the “pro-cement” folks will take some time to really really honestly think about this SLC project. Really think about this Santa Claus of a company promising you all you ever wished for. I do not believe that there can be a Santa Claus if there is no heart.

Santa Claus would never use people.

Santa Claus would never hurt people.

St. Lawrence Cement has no heart, and they use people. They prey on their feelings and they are good at bringing out the ugly in everybody.

It was also on Red’s Board that then-State Assemblyman Patrick Manning (R-Hopewell Junction) had his own epiphany about SLC.

Manning had bashed opponents at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast at Meadowgreens, then got an earful back from disappointed constituents.

He agreed to an hour online chat at Red’s, finally admitting that he would not want a project like SLC in his own town. Gathering his own facts, he consulted closely with doctors such as noted Cornell cancer researcher and Hillsdale resident Mitchell Gaynor, to understand the health implications of living near a major coal-burning facility, and then weighed in regularly and forcefully with State agencies against the plant. Another key public official, Hudson Planning Board chair and later President of the Common Council Michael Vertetis, began as a middle-of-the road plant proponent.

But Vertetis (unlike his former ally, Mayor Rick Scalera) was careful to maintain a civil relationship with plant opponents, and showed an interest in having the City conduct a proper review. At first, many of us assumed that Mike was proceeding cautiously only to ensure that a botched process wouldn’t open the door for a successful lawsuit. But over time, the heavy-handed tactics of SLC (in particular their belligerent attorneys, Bob Alessi and Tom West) tended to alienate more moderate supporters like Mike.

By keeping communication open with folks like Mike, our side maintained the possibility of his voting against SLC’s proposed Host Community Agreement, a package intended to buy the City’s support.

That in fact happened on the same day that Secretary of State Randy Daniels found the project violated New York’s Coastal Policies, dealing a crushing double-whammy to the project on April 19th, 2005.

THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY • Opposition needed to be rooted in more than just environmental arguments.

While some business leaders automatically supported the project without doing any due diligence, others took the time to gather facts and assess the situation. Farmers and realtors (including Steve Kingsley, who generously donated free office space when we were just getting our feet under us) were two early groups with a lot at stake, taking a stand against SLC as a threat to their livelihoods.

Germantowners Nancy Gordon and Paul Swedenburg, whose hightech company HAVE, Inc. is located in Hudson’s former Simpsonville neighborhood, were among the first to step out of ranks with those businesses falling in line behind SLC.

Before taking any position, they invited then-project managers Dirk Cox and Phil Lochbrunner to a discussion with me at their offices. They insisted on an open debate, with both sides present. After considering what they’d heard, Nancy and Paul issued a strongly-argued op-ed, setting forth precisely how the project would harm their business, and the commitment they’d made to employing local people. Richard Katzman, then a major employer in Hudson- Greenport, also gathered his own facts, and after losing confidence in the company, came out against it. He proceeded to underwrite the construction of a giant scale model of the plant, quarry and dock facility, and sponsored telephone polls (conducted by the same firm used by President Clinton and Mayor Michael Bloomberg) showing that by 2002, plant opponents had outnumbered supporters. 

Toward the end of the fight, many of these same business leaders along with others such as Martina Arfwidson of FACE Stockholm, Don and Marnie MacLean of Thompson- Finch Farm, Deborah Bowen of The Inn at Green River, and David Rubel of Agincourt Press, worked with us to craft a Statement of Values for promoting greener, more sustainable development in the region: To ensure continued growth and stability, we need to protect our high quality of life. This includes a healthy environment and workforce, clean air and water, scenic and historic resources, and public enjoyment of our unique natural surroundings. [We conclude] that the overall scale, design, location and impacts of the St. Lawrence Cement facility proposed for Hudson and Greenport pose too great a risk of harming the health, quality of life, and economic viabililty of our region, and therefore it is not the right fit for our communities.

By the time this letter was presented to the State, more than 200 businesses representing over 1,150 full-time and another 450 part-time jobs in the area, had signed on. Their message was clear: in the mid-Hudson Valley, the fate of the environment and the economy are inextricably linked. We were fighting not only to stop something, but also to preserve the possibility of a brighter future.

THE EXPERTS • Citizens’ groups always are held to a higher standard of accuracy than slippery politicians. We knew we had to be painstakingly accurate in our public statements, and to back them up with full documentation and professional confirmations by independent experts.

One such expert was living right under our noses in Claverack: toxicologist and EPA consultant Travis Kline (son of Pamela Kline, founder of Traditions). Kline was asked to speak at an SLC forum, set up by the company in hopes that they’d control the dialogue and make opponents appear marginal and ill-informed.

But the opposite occurred, as major public attendance forced the events to move to a large Columbia-Greene Community College auditorium. As panelists were peppered with tough questions from the well-prepared audience, they were emboldened to step outside the limited scripts SLC expected they’d stick to. Much to the company’s chagrin, Travis made a devastating presentation about the health risks of volatile organic compounds and products of incomplete combustion resulting from the burning of impurity-laden limestone and coal. Calling for a multi-disciplinary risk assessment and test burns, he warned that the existing regulatory process was inadequate to protect residents from harm. By his second forum appearance, SLC had lost control of the dialogue, causing some of its supporters to lose their cool. Four “young guys feeling their oats,” sporting the company’s free blue tshirts, attempted to menace Travis, who was escorted out of the hall for his own safety by State Police Investigator and forum member Gary Mazzacano. These occasional and pathetic attempts at intimidation only made SLC look worse.

While SLC expected opponents to bring nothing to the table, impressive experts were retained to back up our positions during official reviews.

One day in 1999, Hudson art dealer John Davis had a visit from a loyal client named Gabe Miller. Gabe spotted one of our flyers on John’s desk and said: “You really don’t want something like this in your community. I know, because I build these things.” An NYU chemistry professor and senior engineer at Camp Dresser & McKee, among the largest international industrial consultants based in the Northeast, John arranged for Gabe to meet me for lunch at the St. Charles Hotel, whereupon we became the first environmental group ever represented by CDM. His firm’s work was supplemented by Dr.

Alex Sagady, a pit bull of an engineer from Michigan, who represents citizens groups at discount rates. Alex’s preferred method of working was to file Freedom of Information requests with State agencies, then fly to Albany to camp out in the offices of the Department of Environmental Conservation, where he’d invariably find lots of useful information that bureaucrats, such as Project Manager Michael Higgins, had previously “overlooked”.

As our network expanded, similar finds began emerging on a regular basis. One after another, experts came to Hudson to educate our membership in public presentations: Neil Carman of the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club, Florida kiln activist and elected official Penny Wheat, Downwinders at Risk leaders Jim Schermbeck and Katy Hubener, Bonnie Sanders of South Camden Citizens in Action. Sanders, who died the following year, was particularly moving as she talked about her neighborhood’s experience with SLC: “They spread around a lot of promises of jobs and grants for local organizations. They led our church pastors to think that this company would do good for minority residents.

Once they had their permits, we learned that all they cared about was making money. We only gained a very small number of jobs. What we ended up with was pollution that made my grandchild, other kids and our seniors fight for breath, and truck traffic so heavy it shook house foundations. [But] even if SLC stood behind their promises, the hardships wouldn't have been worth it. You can't trust this company, and you don't want them in your area.” The Allies From the start, we knew we couldn’t go it alone. The fight had to be expanded to the whole Valley and into the downwind states of New England. After a lonely couple of years, one by one, more than three dozen groups stood with us—some contributing just their names, others biting off major pieces of the legal fight. 

During one difficult winter meeting at City Hall in Hudson, a group of about five young, purposeful people in outdoor gear strode into the Council Chambers: Alex Matthiessen and his Riverkeeper crew had docked their boat and come up Warren Street like the cavalry to save the day.

Meanwhile, at his office in Pittsfield, my all-time favorite conservation activist George Wislocki, founder of the Berkshire Natural Resource Council, used his decades of contacts and stockpile of credibility to convince EPA’s New England Regional Administrator to issue a stern letter against SLC—and her support was echoed by the Massachusetts DEP and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. Across the river, Athens officials such as Andrea Smallwood and Chris Pfister opened up a western front against SLC by passing a Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan and submitting strong letters cautioning against Hudson impairing the State’s investment in the Village’s newly-restored park and docks along the Hudson. 

THE GO-TO GUYS & GALS • But for all the specialized skills and thoughtful analysis that go into long grassroots battles, possibly the most valuable asset of a citizens’ organization is to have plenty of worker bees ready to swarm out of the hive at a moment’s notice. We weren’t lacking in that department. Whether it was an urgent mailing to get stuffed and stamped, or rounding up auction items for our next benefit party, or needing a small crowd to assemble for an unexpected meeting, or volunteers to help set up for an event, people gave generously and endlessly of their time: Warren Collins, Fran DeGrazia, Bob and Monica Mechling, Diana Jelinek, Dick Donovan, Claire Oravec, Chloe Zerwick, Jennifer Arenskjold, Marty Davidson, Martha Lane, Carole Clark, Hillary Hillman... This list could go on forever, and still be missing important contributions.

We also lost some of our most valued soldiers over the years: the hilariously wise Cassandra Danz (a/k/a Mrs. Greenthumbs); the fearless Bud Mann; artist Hannah Williamson; Phyllis Herbert, who never threw out a single article about the plant; and the ever-ready Vinny DeGrazia, our favorite bartender and raconteur. Their contributions live on each time anyone looks toward Becraft and still sees a hill, rather than a 1,200-acre hole in the landscape.

NEXT UP: The conclusion of this five-part series. Click here to continue...

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* Readers who want to read the full, original OT article as edited by Enid Futterman and designed by John Isaacs can download it as a PDF right away by clicking here. A full, week-by-week chronology of the fight can be found at Stop the Plant.com.

Hudson 101: The Cement Plant Battle (Part 2)

[ Click here for Part 1 ]

NOTE: This piece originally appeared in last year’s environment issue of Our Town (the Columbia County quarterly), under the title The Bullet We Dodged: How the Cement War was Won.* I’m offering it here in several installments over the next week, in a somewhat expanded form, and with added visuals and links, both for those who lived through the tumultuous years of 1998-2005, and for others who moved to the area more recently—who may wonder what all the fuss was about...

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Whenever big projects like the St. Lawrence Cement complex get proposed, citizens are told that the project is inevitable—a “done deal.”

Invariably, the company behind the project is said to be vastly wealthy and influential—politically wired in. Accommodationists starting making lists of tepid compromises, empty concessions which benefit only themselves or their immediate circle. Defeatists sigh that there’s no point fighting, since you can’t fight City Hall. 

But in every one of these controversies, the supposed minority eventually can become a majority, and the people prevailed.

The pattern in each of the fights listed in Part 1 of this series was nearly identical, and went something like this: At first, the press only reported the company line, with Town, County and State officials dutifully toeing it. Jobs, jobs, jobs was the mantra, plus some token assurances that all environmental rules and standards would be “met or exceeded.” The few who dared ask even basic questions were automatically branded as a “strident” or “vocal” minority.

Those who merely expected their politicians and regulators to do a little due diligence before going all in on these projects were given derisive labels. They were CAVE People (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) with BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) outlooks and NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) attitudes.

But as Hudson River bard Pete Seeger likes to say: NIMBY should be spelled with a second “I”, standing for Now I Must Be Involved.

And that’s the answer when people ask how we stopped the cement plant—despite the fact that SLC’s parent was the largest cement manufacturer in the world, despite the initial widespread support of political officials and the County establishment, despite the company’s $60 million expenditure on lawyers, consultants, experts, flacks, ads, mass mailings, campaign contributions, charitable donations, and more— because everyone got involved.

We won because ordinary residents decided to stand up like woodchucks on their hind legs, scent the air, and then burrow in to our own home turf for a long trench war.

If there is another giant controversy in the next decade, the people surely will prevail again; but only because people power is not a passive cliché. It works. There’s no such thing as a done deal when local energies are properly organized and channeled into a focused, comprehensive campaign.

But how does this people power work in practice, rather than theory? The labor leader Cesar Chavez was often asked the secret to his success at organizing farm workers. “First I talk to one person; then I talk to another person,” was his standard reply.

Confused, the questioner would repeat the question. But Chavez would simply repeat: “First I talk to one person; then I talk to another person.”

Eventually the questioner would get that the “secret” of organizing relies not on any trick or scheme, but on the combined talents of many individuals working together as a community—complementing and amplifying each other’s skills, contacts and perspectives.

Naturally, any long campaign has to be constantly guided, shaped, strategized, narrowed, expanded, recast, reinvigorated, and re-imagined along the way. Early on,  grassroots groups often will stumble over simple mechanical obstacles, such as group structure, personalities, fatalism, expertise, exhaustion, funding. But once a group gets its feet planted, and begins defending that home turf by beating the bushes for more like minds, anything’s possible.

What follows is a partial chronicle of those who emerged from the Valley underbrush and made striking contributions to the Stop the Plant cause. Their stories not only deserve to be recorded, but may also inspire the next generation of accidental activists who find themselves fighting the next life-or-death battle for the soul of our region. Naturally, a full portrait of all who gave their time, energy, courage and imagination (not to mention dollars) to stop the plant would be impossible. The victory achieved was an amalgam of countless individual contributors, which transcended any single contribution.

THE LONGTIMERS • Divide and conquer was SLC’s key strategy from the get-go. The company blanketed the region’s airwaves with inflammatory advertising, and filled mailboxes across five counties with what retired Hudson advertising maven Tom Mabley called “commercialized hate mail,” intended to ignite a culture war.

“Don’t let a group of millionaires from New York City deny Columbia County good-paying jobs,” blared one glossy postcard. Meanwhile, the Register-Star churned out vicious, willfully ignorant editorials in favor of their biggest advertiser on a nearly weekly basis—caricaturing plant opponents as elitists attending “wine and brie” parties, while denying that the company’s tens of thousands in annual ads had nothing to do with the paper’s position.

But plenty of local people remembered the bad old days of Hudson’s cement era, when brown snow fell in winter, and widows grieved the early deaths of their breadwinning husbands.

Hudson resident Al Cook, a silver-haired and gravelly-voiced former union chief who led the longest strike in the history of Atlas Cement, was among the first to express skepticism.

Though neutral on the project at first, “Cookie” took a show-me stance, warning that “You can’t trust these cement company bosses farther than you can throw ’em. Their promises don’t mean nothing unless it’s written down.” Others who had lived here all their lives stepped forward. Deb Novack, a realtor and popular local bartender, joined opponents’ steering group after getting tired of hearing too much misinformation bandied about at Melino’s Pub. Hudson matriarch Mary Lou Groll wore “Stop the Plant” buttons on her lapel to counteract some of her own family members’ “Support the Plan(e)t” banners.

Opponents were invited to speak everywhere from the Hudson Rotary Club to the Germantown Lions Club to the Ladies Auxiliary of the Elizaville Fire Department to the basement of St. James Church in Chatham, and no brie was in evidence.

We were graciously hosted by Dave Staats and other members of the Federation of Polish Sportsmen, where our big annual picnic was held each summer. We were likewise welltreated by the ladies managing the former St. Mary’s Academy gymnasium, the site of our yearly winter get-together, drawing over 500 attendees from all walks of life.

So while the company and its allies sought to distort the facts of the project and demean those who would have to live in its shadow, longtime residents stood alongside those who had lived here “only” ten, twenty, or thirty years, proving SLC’s divisive rhetoric just as false as the rest of their far-fetched claims.

THE RESEARCHERS • Whenever I’d spot Elizabeth Nyland opening the door to my office—in her usual long skirt, her hair in a bun, toting an armful of file folders bursting with Post-It notes—I knew that our knowledge of the economic side of the plant argument was about to take another quantum leap forward.

A retired analyst for companies like American Express, living on Route 23B, a couple miles from the proposed stack, Elizabeth focused her forensic skills on the economic claims buried within SLC’s 800-page application. Through the careful work of Elizabeth and others, it became clear that the project wasn’t going to be an employment boon.

The company already had 154 employees in the area, and with the new plant, the total would go up to 155, a net gain of only one new job.

Bit by bit, volunteers like Elizabeth teased these facts out of the depths of SLC’s own documents, turning the company’s own words against it, revealing the contradictions within its claims.

Claverack’s Ian Nitschke, whose deliberate Australian drawl and patroon-like gold eyeglasses were familiar fixtures at our meetings, used expertise developed at the State Public Service Commission to locate more ammunition. Ian dug up 1970s testimony about the failed nuclear project, which spoke to the immense cultural importance of the Hudson Valley, noting how pertinent it was to this new fight. He had also worked closely on challenges to the Athens Generating plant with Laura Skutch, a Sleepy Hollow Lake resident who stumbled across a then-little-known set of regulations: the State’s 44 policies for managing lands within New York’s Coastal Zone. Since the proposed plant would affect designated zones north and south of Hudson, these policies also applied to SLC. In the end, this was the legal handle we turned to stop the plant.

Sign created by Bob Blechman

Taghkanic’s Moisha Blechman, though diminutive and outwardly delicate, brought a fierce and seasoned activist will to the battle. She proposed an idea which no one at first believed would ever come to fruition: writing a comprehensive manual covering every essential detail of the cement project and industry. The idea was to have a single reference source for all the questions that were constantly cropping up. Not only did Moisha complete the project, she obtained a grant to finance printing of 20,000 copies, handsomely packaged with graphics by her son, Nicholas. Though some old Sierra Club rivalries briefly threatened to derail the project, and some allies almost balked at distributing it, in the end SLC: Understanding the Impact proved an indispensable tool for organizing both thought and action, conferring the authority of a book upon the opposition’s research. Knowledge is power, and for citizens faced with a wellfunded and politically-connected adversary, it’s one of the few affordable weapons available—fighting the company’s PR fire with blazing facts.

NEXT UP: Historians, Go-Getters, Creatives, Marketeers, and Converts turn the tide.  [ Click for Part 3 ]

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* Readers who want to read the full, original OT article as edited by Enid Futterman and designed by John Isaacs can download it as a PDF right away by clicking here. A full, week-by-week chronology of the fight can be found at Stop the Plant.com.

Hudson 101: The Cement Plant Battle (Part I)

NOTE: This piece originally appeared in last year’s environment issue of Our Town (the Columbia County quarterly), under the title The Bullet We Dodged: How the Cement War was Won.* I’m offering it here in several installments over the next week, in a somewhat expanded form, and with added visuals and links, both for those who lived through the tumultuous years of 1998-2005, and for others who moved to the area more recently—who may wonder what all the fuss was about...

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At the post office not so long ago, I ran into the internationally-respected lighting engineer Howard Brandston. We hadn’t seen each other much since the end of the cement fight, and embraced like soldiers who once had fought side-by-side in the trenches of World War I.

Like thousands of others, Howard and his wife Melanie had given themselves selflessly to the cement plant fight—passing out signs and gathering signatures, holding meetings at their home, speaking at public meetings, writing detailed and forceful letters to the papers and agencies, raising and donating money to a legal defense fund, helping to craft our strategy, getting their friends involved, and much more.

Seeing Howard again made me consider forming an organization called the VLW—for Veterans of Local Wars, to gather the survivors of the pitched battles which consume this part of the Hudson Valley every decade or so:

• In the 1970s, citizens on both sides of the river challenged a nuclear plant proposed across the river in Cementon.


• In the ’80s, members of SHOW (Save Hudson’s Only Waterfront) questioned the wisdom of letting Octane Petroleum build a vast refinery at the river’s edge. During that same decade, other activists were busy investigating solid waste incinerators slated for Stockport and Stuyvesant.


• In the ’90s, concerned residents exposed a plan for a toxic waste processing plant at the site of the old glue factory in Hudson’s South Bay—since redeveloped as the Basilica.


• And between 1998 and 2005, first residents from Hudson, then from Columbia County, then from all over the Hudson Valley, and eventually countless downwind neighbors from the Berkshires to Maine, all mobilized to challenge the massive, coal-burning, $300 million St. Lawrence Cement “Greenport project.” 

During that nearly seven-year period, it became almost impossible to have a conversation that did not turn eventually to the dryest topic on earth—cement. Two documentary filmmakers who wanted to make a movie about Hudson during this time without mentioning “the plant” gave in, since everyone they interviewed wanted to talk about SLC. Soon enough, they made the cement war the focus of their PBS film, Two Square Miles.

Still, those who moved to the area after April 19th, 2005 may wonder why the plant was so controversial, and considered such a massive threat—not just to Hudson, but to the entire Northeast.

Dubbed “a new industrial city” by Moisha Blechman, the vast, sprawling complex would have featured a skyscraper-sized 40- story tower and a dozen other structures between 10 and 20 stories tall, atop Becraft Mountain, within a mile of the hospital, cemetery and thickly-settled neighborhoods.

From that 406-foot stack would have belched a pollution-laden plume extending as long as six miles, roughly the distance from Greenport to Philmont in a direct line.

This gun to our collective heads would have been loaded with 500 million pounds of coal annually, to pulverize limestone blasted from a 1,200-acre quarry nearly as large as the entire City of Hudson. “Alternative” fuels such as garbage, tires and hazardous waste could have been added to the cauldron— a side of incinerator to go with your cement plant.

The behemoth would have been connected to the Hudson waterfront by two miles of conveyor belts, through wetlands and across three major City entrances. At the waterfront, 700-foot-long Titanic-scaled HudsonMax barges would have constantly offloaded coal, slag, and gypsum, while onloading two million tons of finished cement each year.

Their wakes, fumes and noise would have endangered smaller craft on the river, and chased away residents trying to enjoy the adjacent public park. Meanwhile, back in Greenport, as many as 265 daily truck trips** would have serviced the main facility.

By SLC’s own admission, the plant sought permits to emit up to 20 million pounds of pollutants per year, including greenhouse gases such as nitrogen and sulfur dioxides, heavy metals and volatile organic compounds: arsenic, benzene, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury and more.

The medical staff of Columbia Memorial Hospital, following the lead of Drs. Jeff Monkash, Ira Marks, Michael Brown, Steve Kaufman and Stu Kaufman, concluded that emissions of fine particulate matter (PM 10 and PM 2.5) would result in more asthma among local kids, more premature heart attacks among older residents, and higher incidences of cancer among the general population. The American Lung Association concurred, stating that:

The pollution belched by this coal-burning plant would not only trigger asthma attacks in children and cause serious respiratory problems in seniors with lung disease, it would put at risk the health of those of us who do not currently suffer from respiratory problems.

Worse still, citizens discovered that SLC and its Swiss-owned parent company Holderbank—now called Holcim—had an appalling track record of fines for pollution and price-fixing violations. Whatever promises the company was making, it had broken similar promises to other communities worldwide. (The company had also used slave labor in Europe during World War II, and actively profited in South Africa during Apartheid.)

Indeed, the plant wasn’t opposed only on environmental grounds. Over time, many business leaders and workers alike realized that the project would be the death of any sustainable local or regional economy. By the end, over 200 businesses representing over 1,000 jobs had signed on to the fight with a Statement of Values  [PDF] explaining both their positive vision for a greeneer economy, and how SLC would that economy at risk.

To those who weren’t here, it must seem odd, even bizarre, that this colossally foolish idea wasn’t just dismissed out of hand. Yet when first proposed, the cement plant was considered a “done deal.” And none of the above details would have become known in time to stop the plant, if it hadn’t been for a cluster of fewer than 40 residents, who started to ask the tough questions avoided by the powers that be.

Before it was over, SLC had spent $58 million—over $1,000 per adult in Columbia County—to no avail. In the next installment of this piece on Monday, I’ll take a look at some history of local activism, and begin to explore how this massive industrial proposal was stopped against such long odds.

[ Click here for Part 2 ]

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* Readers who want to read the full, original OT article as edited by Enid Futterman and designed by John Isaacs can download it as a PDF right away by clicking here. A full, week-by-week chronology of the fight can be found at Stop the Plant... I’m currently working on another article for the next issue of Our Town, on the topic of the local media.

**  This number is not much different than the traffic now proposed through Hudson’s South Bay, which certain local leaders now say would require no permits; the Greenport proposal was subject to weeks of grueling hearings on traffic impacts, despite that Town having no zoning.

Sold down the river

Over at Carole Osterink’s new blog, The Gossips of Rivertown,* there are several posts addressing Hudson’s draft Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan now under consideration by the Common Council and New York Department of State.

A little-known fact about the Waterfront is that the southernmost piece along the River was owned by the City until the early 1990s. In an amazingly short-sighted move, Hudson sold this prime real estate for a rock-bottom price to Independent Cement, later renamed St. Lawrence Cement, now known as Holcim.

And to add insult to injury: Several years ago while a member of the board of Clearwater, I was talking with a boat-builder in Saugerties who was repairing the organization’s Sloop. When I mentioned that I lived (at the time) in Hudson, a look of chagrin passed over his face.

“Hudson?" he said. “Do you know that I wanted to move this business to Hudson? I tried to buy that piece of land they had on the river, but they gave me a huge runaround. Then I found out they sold it to the cement company.” (He said the City attorney at the time who headed up the negotiations was Giff Whitbeck, of Rapport Meyers Whitbeck Shaw & Rodenhausen; this would have been during either the last Yusko or first Scalera term.)

So try to imagine what the LWRP would look like today if Hudson had an active-but-low-impact boat-building and repair business on the Waterfront... Imagine how much less “pull” Holcim would have had in its negotiations. And imagine how the presence of such a sustainable business—one which could train local workers in a highly-skilled trade—would add to proposals such as permanently docking the Halfmoon in Hudson.

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ANOTHER HISTORICAL ANECDOTE: Years ago I was told by a prominent member of the Columbia County Sportsmen's Association that at the time the City obtained HUD funding to build what became the hulking L&B factory, the Sportsmen were very concerned about the fate of South Bay. In spite of its degraded state, the Bay attracted (and today still plays host to) a remarkable diversity wildlife, and many sportsmen had worked the area during the nearly two decades that ICC was ignoring it.

This sportsman told me that their organization had negotiated an assurance from the City as part of the L&B deal that nothing would be developed south of a certain point, and that markers were placed in the Bay to identify that line. However, once the cement controversy revved up, this source clammed up, as if he'd been told not to talk to any  plant opponents.

Anyone with knowledge of whether or where such markers were place (or at least what back issues of local publications might be researched to find out more on the topic) can contact me via email by clicking here. The identify of the source of any such tips received will be kept strictly anonymous.

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* The name derives from a 19th Century book of sketches by Alice Neal (not any relation to the 20th Century painter of the same name, to my knowledge). The full text of Neal's book can be read for free online.

Smoggers

 

It's heartening to see that the victory over St. Lawrence Cement (now rebranded as Holcim) is still fresh in Berkshire minds—particularly, that the lesson about regional pollutants not respecting state boundaries is still being applied:

It was with good reason that Berkshire environmentalists joined the opposition to the giant cement plant proposed for construction along the Hudson River five years ago. Had it been built, the plant would have sent an estimated 10,000 tons of pollutants a year into the air over the Berkshires courtesy of the prevailing winds. It's those winds that the federal EPA must take into consideration in enforcing the new standards for smog-causing pollutants it proposed last Thursday. [...] The bucolic Berkshires are in violation of existing smog standards, let alone the new standards, even though the region produces little air pollution. Our smog comes flowing in from the west, just as the pollution from the cement plant would have. There may be areas of the Midwest that have better air than the Berkshires because pollutants from their industries are carried east.