Wednesday, September 30, 2009

What a TerribleTangled Web We Weave . . .

Things just seem to get more complicated every day with the New Hartford Business Park. Now The Town is planning on eliminating the separate Business Park review panel.

This is a good thing. It takes an unnecessary complication out of the system. Now that the Town is no longer the owner of the Business Park, there is no reason to treat development of the Business Park any differently from any other development.

That said, it now (hopefully) should be apparent that no proper environmental impact statement was ever made for the development that is now being proposed and has partially been completed.
NHBP is now privately owned, no longer designed to be a manufacturing site, and now contains additional land. It is totally different in concept from what was proposed in 1999 when the original Environmental Impact Statement was done.

Before approving of any additional construction, the Planning Board needs to demand an Environmental Impact Statement from the developer addressing issues both on and off the site . . . including a potential school bus garage on land the developer traded to the school district in return for the district's support of a PILOT/TIF scheme.

The Town meanwhile, needs to do an environmental review for another change to its zoning code to add the site of the Hartford to the Business Park, and to change its review procedures, and probably needs to explain why the 1999 EIS for the original zoning change is no longer valid.

New Hartford hopefully has learned that things can get really complicated when you take shortcuts.

1 comment:

Caesar Chavez said...

Strike,

What about this article on the Town of New Hartford?

http://www.uticaod.com/news/x576531374/54-percent-tax-hike-possible-for-New-Hartford

What the hell are these people going to do?