SamPratt.com

The Hudson Waterfront: Decades in the Making

 

Peter Jung and Sam Pratt of The Valley Alliance gave a presentation last night on the past and future of the Hudson Waterfront. The slides of the presentation can be viewed by clicking here. [large file, be patient!]

Pratt reviewed more than 40 years of citizen and official efforts to protect the Waterfront against threats such as an oil refinery, a toxic waste dump and a massive cement conveyor and barge operation.

These struggles, combined with City efforts (such as developing its Waterfront park, the Vision Plan, the Comprehensive Plan, et al.) have secured the opportunity for a healthier outcome which benefit a wide spectrum of Hudson residents.

Peter Jung focused on the promise the Waterfront still holds: the opportunity to deliver economic, social, cultural, recreational and conservation benefits to the whole Hudson community.

The Valley Alliance agrees with the findings of New York’s Secretary of State in 2005 that both the most jobs and the most enjoyment is to be had by creating a Waterfront where heavy, polluting industry does not prevent the success of parks, marinas, stores, restaurants, housing, entertainment, community gatherings and other mutually-compatible uses.

The presentation took place before the Hudson Planning Board, at the City’s central fire station on North 7th Street. Both of the two adjoining rooms were full, reflecting the widespread community concern about A. Colarusso & Sons’ plans to use the central piece of the Waterfront as a major gravel loading operation.

Center seeks to prevent Hudson River oil spill before one happens

Via fabled River activist Bob Boyle: Prompted by a vast uptick in rail and barge transportation of fossil fuels along the Hudson River, the 625,000-member Center for Biological Diversity put the Coast Guard and EPA on notice today of its plans to sue if steps are not taken to address the risks posed.

The group warns of potential harm to “millions of people” in the region due to spill plans which have been rendered “inadequate” by the huge increase in fuels running south down the River—as well as major new storage capacity at sites like the Port of Albany, which handled an estimated “one billion gallons of Bakken crude oil alone” in the past year.

“Given the unprecedented increase in rail and barge transport of oil through the planning area, and given the new products and wastes being transported, impacts to species hold far greater risk than was the case just a few years ago,” the Center writes in its memo to the Federal agencies.

Much of that increase comes from tracking and tar sands extraction in the Dakotas and Canada, fuel sources which the Center says pose even bigger risks to the fish, birds, mammals plants and habitats in and around the river than ordinary crude oil due to differing densities and properties which could make cleanup all the more difficult.

The memo arrives in the context of a protracted review of safety measures related to oil transportation which are supposed to be codified in the “New York and New Jersey Area Contingency Plan for multi-agency prevention of and response to oil and hazardous waste spills.”

The Center further notes that “until formal consultation is complete … harm to any listed species resulting from spill response activities could subject government employees or private workers to substantial civil and even criminal penalties” in the event of a disaster.

Governor Andrew Cuomo “recently signed an Executive Order attempting to address acknowledged deficiencies in the [Plan],” the Group points out. The Order requires “state agencies to petition the federal government to upgrade outdated and inadequate oil tanker safety regulations and further requires state agencies to provide a fresh assessment of the dangers of moving oil by rail through the State” in hopes of averting “a ‘catastrophic accident’ that would seriously damage the state’s natural resources.”

The group’s concerns are not limited only to fossil fuels, but also transport and disposal of fracking byproducts such as “toxic wastewater that must be heavily treated before it can be released into the environment.”

Pete Seeger goes drifting along

Pete Seeger and the Beacon Sloop Club sing Woody Guthrie’s So Long, It’ Been Good to Know Yuh (Dusty Old Dust)

 
When opponents of the St. Lawrence Cement plant were accused of being NIMBYs, I’d always invoke Pete Seeger’s line: “That word should be spelled with an I, for Now I Must Be Involved.” A short remembrance is here from his great admirer Alan Chartock of WAMC.

Valley Alliance vindicated

The Valley Alliance argument that the City, not Holcim, owns 4.4 acres smack in the middle of the Hudson Waterfront, has been vindicated. A new title search grudgingly undertaken by the City has validated the Alliance’s arguments, brought forth last June with the assistance of a professional surveyor and attorney Ken Dow.

As Carole Osterink wrote today,

Of the 9.97 acres that Holcim was offering to the City, with conditions that would be in place for fifty years, 4.4 acres had been illegally sold by the City to Holcim (then St. Lawrence Cement) in 1981. Since the sale was illegal, the 4.4 acres still belong to the City of Hudson. 

Those attending the meeting report that not a single Alderman had anything to say about this news of the City now having 4.4 more prime Waterfront acres to work with. What will the City do with it? When will the people get access to these lands—on Holcim has been squatting illegally for over 30 years?

Germantown plane down in Hudson River took off from Copake

The Register-Star reports that authorities “have tentatively identified the plane that crashed into the Hudson River near Germantown yesterday as a Grumman G-44A, an old amphibious military reconnaissance craft, that left a private air field in Copake at about 4 p.m. Thursday.” (Earlier reports had suggested that the plane took off from Richmor Aviation in Ghent.)

Police are not releasing the assumed pilot’s name, but it is not difficult to ascertain what private airfields exist at that location. This website and others list a “Copake Lake Seaplane Base” and “B Flat Farm Airport” close by each other in the town, each operated by Michael B. Braunstein.

The reference to a seaplane would appear likely to correspond to the “amphibious” craft specified in the article above. Braunstein has two Craryville mailing addresses, one on Golf Course Road, the other on Country Club Road.

Details, details

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.

Quiet flows the Don

According to a longtime member of the Furgary Boat Club, Hudson Common Council President Don Moore has stonewalled that person’s efforts to discuss the fate of the 100-year-old local fishing encampment with him—going silent for over a week, after demanding to know where the member lived, and being told that member resides outside of Hudson.

If Moore, fashioning himself a man of principle, intends to adopt a consistent policy that he won’t discuss City of Hudson issues with non-residents, he may wind up with a long list of people with whom he’d have to stop talking. Don’s Don’t Talk List would also have to include, among others:

• Gary Schiro, head of the Hudson Opera House, who lives in Staatsburg;
• Peter Paden, head of the Columbia County Land Conservancy, who lives in Taghkanic;
• Elena Moseley, head of Operation Unite, Cyndy Hall, Columbia County Democratic Chair, Colin Stair, head of Stair Galleries, and Paul Mossman, head of DSS, who all live in Claverack;
• Todd Erling, Director of Hudson Valley AgriBusiness, who lives in Livingston;
• Ken Flood, head of development for the County, who lives in Castleton;
• Ann Cooper, head of Columbia County Tourism, who lives in Stockport;
• David Harrison, the Columbia County Sheriff, who lives in Austerlitz;
• Sheena Salvino, Director of HDC and HCDPA, and David Colby, President of the Chamber of Commerce, who both live in Athens;
• Cheryl Roberts, Hudson Corporation Counsel, who lives in Austerlitz;
• Giff Whitbeck, Assistant District Attorney, who lives in Greenport;
• Ken Faroni, lawyer for O&G Industries, who lives in Connecticut;
• Donald Stever, lawyer for Holcim, who lives in New York City;
• Chelsea Clinton, who is rumored to be buying a house in Old Chatham;
• Kirsten Gillibrand, U.S. Senator, who lives in Brunswick;
• Barack Obama, President of the United States, who lives in Washington, D.C.

Moore’s (alleged) new law of discourse would also preclude him from discussing concerns with most every lawyer, banker and accountant in town; several Hudson police officers; all of the non-Hudson County Supervisors who represent other towns; all the non-Hudson members of the County Democratic Committee; and about half of the shop, gallery and restaurant owners on Warren Street.

N O T E :  About 10 years ago, when the right to speak at Common Council meetings was finally granted to the public, the Council President at the time briefly attempted to prevent non-residents from speaking at meetings. When the unwise, impractical and probably unconstitutional nature of this idea was decried, the then-President relented—recognizing that nonresidents often have business, family, property and other personal ties to the City which may require discussion. Perhaps Moore wants to turn back the clock, and try that gambit again.

Song Sung Blue

By the author of Sweet Caroline, from The New York Public Library’s digital collection.

Politician gives himself a gold star

Patting himself on the back for a job poorly done, Hudson Council President Don Moore awards himself a gold star in the pages of The Register-Star. The achievement of which he’s so proud? Ushering through a sorry excuse of a Waterfront plan, one which doesn't guarantee Hudson any new jobs, or any meaningful environmental protections, or even a realistic new location for a boat launch... The one thing it does guarantee is plenty of headaches for future leaders and residents alike.

If Moore actually believes any of what he’s written, why have few if any of the concerns that he himself raised in his own March 2010 letter been addressed in this plan?

For example, Moore argued last year that if a certain zoning change demanded by Holcim/O&G were made, the City would lose control over its activity, and (in his words) there would be “no longer any restriction” on their South Bay activity.

Yet exactly that change was made for H/OG—with Moore’s apparent blessing—and now he ignores his own warning. Instead, he attempts to place gauzy halo over a Plan that has gotten weaker with each revision that he’s overseen in office.

If the Council President actually believed any of what he has written, he presumably would not have been so afraid to allow any of the 80+ people in the audience who attended the recent “special meeting” on this plan to speak, before rushing it to a vote.

What was he afraid of, exactly? That if the public were allowed to participate, this carefully-manicured veneer of responsibility might be punctured by actual facts— from both citizens and legal experts, who were waiting to speak?

Moore’s Politiburo-style move was un-democratic and un-American no matter what your position is on this plan. It was conduct ill-befitting any Common Council President, and something his precedessors such as Mary Anne Lemmerman, Mike Vertetis and John Cody never stooped to, even in the midst of other controversies.

As to the tissue-thin “substance” of Moore’s commentary, it reveals that he either does not understand his own Plan, or simply does not want to understand it—because to do so would be to require him to show some political mettle. (Moore has been heard many times to make bilious remarks about Linda Mussmann as a public figure, but his current position on the Waterfront is indistinguishable from hers.)

Moore apparently doesn't want to understand that the issue is not whether such activity stems from the cement, or gravel, or some other industry. If it were garbage hauling, or incineration, the concerns would be fundamentally the same, just with slightly different particulars. The public's concerns have been, for years now, the impacts.

Can Moore look the owners of, say, the Basilica, and tell them that a four- or five-fold increase in trucks running all day past the entrance used by their patrons and workers is not new "industrialization"? Can he tell us that the dust and fumes and noise from such a major increase is not further "industrialization" of the dock area, with no impact on neighbors trying to enjoy the publicly-funded park next door? (If he can, then he is sadly self-deluded, because such impacts have not even been assessed in the shoddy Generic Environmental Impact Statement associated with the Plan, and would likely never be assessed in the future he extolls.)

As a State attorney at the meeting said, as currently constructed the City would not be able to place limits on either trucks or the volume of gravel at the Waterfront. If that is not heavy "industrialization," what is? When attorney was asked after the meeting if Holcim were to increase the amount to the levels of the SLC Greenport Project, could that be limited or stopped under the current Plan, he could not say that it would.

The hard facts are that Holcim and O&G have estimated in a various applications that they intend to increase existing activity from the current baseline 100-130,000 tons per year to 500,000 tons per year, some 4-5 times the current amount. In 2005, the amount was zero. That is a massive increase in industrial impacts by any measure: many more trucks, many more barges, many more rail crossings, much more noise, and much more fugitive dust and fumes wafting over the Waterfront Park.

Yet the latest version of Moore's vaunted plan actually makes it harder to do anything about the industrial impacts, not just to the environment, but to neighboring businesses and public resources. Future Zoning Enforcement officers and future members of the Planning Commission, Zoning Board of Appeals, or Coastal Consistency Board would have neither clarity nor many tools to deal with an ever-escalating situation.

What are the effects of trucks, or a conveyor, or diesel fumes, or fuel spills, or constant barge traffic? How are neighboring businesses or public activities (from kayaking to concerts) or habitats limited or made impossible by severe nearby impacts? Since the 1970s, local and State and even Federal planners have recognized that Hudson's waterfront is very small, and produces "use conflicts" of this kind. Moore prefers instead to stick his head in the mud and pretend that he is not rushing ahead with a plan that gives the City few real controls over these very real concerns.

At the Valley Alliance website, you can see that the group has sent an authoritative legal memorandum detailing the issues with this plan, as well as 24 pages summarizing continued citizen concerns. The Register-Star and Columbia Paper have been provided with both.

402 years ago today

Entry in the September 24th, 1609 journal of sailor Robert Juet, who was aboard the Half Moon as it encountered the flats of the “middle ground” between what is now Hudson and Athens:

The foure and twentieth was faire weather: the winde at the North-west, wee weighed, and went downe the River seven or eight leagues; and at halfe ebbe wee came on ground on a banke of Oze in the middle of the river, and sate there till the floud. Then wee went on Land, and gathered good store of Chest-nuts. At ten of the clocke we came off into deepe water, and anchored.

The five and twentieth was faire weather, and the wind at South a stiff gale. We rode still, and went on Land to walke on the West side of the River, and found good ground for Corne and other Garden herbes, with great store of goodly Oakes, and Wal-nut trees, and Chest-nut trees, Ewe trees, and trees of sweet wood in great abundance, and great store of Slate for houses, and other good stones.

The sixe and twentieth was faire weather, and the wind at South a stiffe gale, wee rode still. In the morning our Carpenter went on Land, with our Masters Mate, and foure more of our companie, to cut wood. This morning, two Canoes came up the River from the place where we first found loving people, and in one of them was the old man that had lyen aboord of us at the other place. He brought another old man with him, which brought more stropes of Beades, and gave them to our Master, and shewed him all the Countrey there about, as though it were at his command. So he made the two old men dine with him, and the old mans wife: for they brought two old women, and two young maidens of the age of sixteene or seventeene yeeres with them, who behaved themselves very modestly. Our Master gave one of the old men a Knife, and they gave him and us Tabbaco. And at one of the clocke they departed downe the River, making signes that we should come down to them; for wee were within two leagues of the place where they dwelt.

The seven and twentieth, in the morning was faire weather, but much wind at the north, we weighed and set our fore top-sayle, and our ship would not flat, but ran on the Ozie banke at halfe ebbe. Wee layed out anchor to heave her off, but could not. So wee sate from halfe ebbe to halfe floud: then wee set our fore-sayle and mayne top-sayl, and got downe sixe leagues. The old man came aboord, and would have lad us anchor, and goe on Land, to eate with him: but the wind being faire, we would not yeeld to his request; so hee left us, being very sorrowfull for our departure.

At five of the clocke in the after-noone, the wind came to the South South-west. So wee made a boord or two, and anchored in fourteene fathomes water. Then our Boat went on shoare to fish right against the ship. Our Masters Mate and Boat-swaine, and three more of the companie went on land to fish, but could not finde a good place. They tooke foure or five and twentie Mullets, Breames, Bases, and Barbils; and returned in an houre. We rode still all night.

 [ h/t Ian Nitschke ]

American Beauty

Forbes has named the Hudson one of the World’s Most Beautiful Rivers, along with the Caño Cristales, the Danube, the Kenai, the Mekong and more... The magazine didn’t, however, manage to find a particularly stunning photo of our river; see their shot here. The more dramatic snapshot above is by Hudson’s own Alphonse Telymonde.

S.P.ecies

The New York State Department of State (DOS) has proposed upgrading Hudson’s South Bay to a Significant Fish & Wildlife Habitat. The Valley Alliance has created a web tool which allows you to simply and directly send an email to DOS supporting this beneficial idea.

Doing so not only will help protect and restore the ecology of this unique area. It may also lead to Hudson developing a more forward-looking Waterfront plan, one with far more economic, social, cultural and environmental benefits than the current draft.

Attached here are the extensive comments I’ve submitted to the State, documenting numerous rare, threatened, endangered and other species of concern which have been identified in the South Bay area—in many cases, by Holcim itself. But you don’t have to be any kind of expert to participate, so please visit the VA’s action page today...