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September 2, 2006
ESDC Agrees to Add Another Hearing After Initial Yards Fiasco
Courier-Life
By Emily Keller
This article about the additional "community forum" is reporting:
Although neither forum is called a hearing because doing so would extend the September 22 deadline for respondents to submit testimony to the [Empire State Development Corporation, (ESDC)] prior to its creation of a Final [Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)], Copen said testimonies given at both will become part of the public record for the project, and that the forums will be similar to hearings.
It's possible the paper went to print before the extension of the deadline for public comment to September 29.
The ESDC was also criticized for scheduling the first community forum on Primary Day, which [ESDC spokesperson Jessica] Copen said was “not intentional.”
The article continues with quotes from attendees who were signed in to speak but were never called.
Carolyn Konheim of Community Consulting Services (CCS) was one of those who was never called to the podium, where she planned to read a testimony critiquing the technicalities of the DEIS, without professing support or opposition to the project. She handed in written testimony instead.
In her testimony, Konheim called the [Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS)] process premature, and said a review of more than 1,000 pages on traffic, transit and pedestrians by CCS – a non-profit corporation that provides technical planning expertise to community leaders and public agencies – “reveals that the DEIS has stripped out at least 30 types of essential data, without which the reader is asked to accept the DEIS conclusions on faith.”
Konheim said that documents that were additionally requested were just recently received and “have been found to have major discrepancies with the DEIS and to be missing key elements needed to verify the impacts.”
NoLandGrab: Konheim and Hunter College professor Tom Angotti both referred to documents that were missing from the DEIS and were just recently provided. This means that the DEIS, which the ESDC adopted, was incomplete, and it was left to the community experts to research the document and provide a list of what studies and documents were missing.
Posted by lumi at September 2, 2006 8:29 AM