35- RUPCO Responds Via Very Special Messenger Guy

Last night, I attended a Woodstock Planning Board meeting. RUPCO was not on the agenda. The agenda concerned the town parking lot on the Comeau property. I brought my video camera because I thought there might be a discussion of passive solar lighting, and this interested me for reasons having nothing to do with RUPCO. There was no such discussion, however, I did not know this, and I videotaped about an hour of the meeting anyway, in case the discussion started at any point during the discussion of the parking lot plans.

Instead of what I was there to tape, I taped something else of interest, concerning RUPCO. Everything of a visual nature that I am about to describe is captured on my video of this meeting. And the audio of the first thing Guy Kempe said to me, inches from the camera., is also on the tape.

During the taping, Guy Kempe, RUPCO's community relations person, enters the meeting room. That was about 43 minutes into the taping. He stands just to the side of my camera, and takes off his coat. He sits down in the audience at minute 44. At minute 70, he gets up and crosses in front of my camera, and stands in front of me and to the other side of where his seat is. At minute 71 of the tape, he crosses back again and starts to rummage through his briefcase. Later in minute 71, Guy Kempe approaches me and my camera. My camera was on top of a high filing cabinet, on a miniature tripod. My face was about one foot from the camera. Guy Kempe rolled up the three sheets of stapled paper that he had pulled from his briefcase, and stuffed them between the legs of my tripod. He whispered to me, "That's for you." Still in minute 71, Guy Kempe sits back down in his seat.

At this point, I read the papers he had placed in front of my face. One paper was the letter that I responded to yesterday, both in the blog and to the Planning Board, in a letter. Another sheet was a ridiculous letter concluding that there is no need for a left turn lane into Playhouse Lane from eastbound Route 212, but we already knew this would be the only possible conclusion. The third letter was from an engineer at Creighton Manning, and addresses directly, and with my name referenced, my comments from the Public Hearing on the site plan and special use permit, held January 14th.

At minute 74, I left my post next to my camera, and walked over to Guy Kempe, who is once again sitting in his audience seat. Guy Kempe and I discuss, on camera, for about three minutes, the contents of the papers that he had delivered to me moments earlier. At minute 77, I leave the frame, and at minute 78, I close the camera and leave the meeting room.

I am new to video editing, and am at this moment trying to extract some of the video footage from last night. When I do this successfully, I will post the relevant parts on this blog, but I don't know when that will be. For now, all I have is a very long and large video, which is too cumbersome and mostly uninteresting to foist on this readership.

But getting back to the substance of Guy Kempe's delivery:

Believe it or not, and by this time, if you have been reading my blog, you should believe that RUPCO has stepped in it big time. The more we bring the hazards of the Playhouse Lane & Rte 212 intersection to light, the more readily does RUPCO admit that there is something wrong there, and they actually think that just because this planned death trap is not on their "site," it will be fixed by other interested parties, simply because OTHERWISE, their plan is nice and safe.

I will save my line by line commentary for the next post. Suffice it to say, right here, that Guy Kempe's solution to the unsafe intersection of Playhouse Lane and Route 212 is to cut into the Playhouse Plaza parking lot, creating parking that is parallel to the road.

While this is a good idea, it also constitutes a taking of private property, which is illegal. So, in summary, RUPCO wants to take parking away from viable businesses that depend on their parking spaces, in order to subsidize their project.

If the town does come in and condemn this parking lot, and then pay the businesses a fair amount for reducing their parking lot by about 50% (my rough estimate,) considering that virtually all of the business at this place is drive in business, this limits the business by half, and payment for that half of business, every year the business is in business is a huge burden on the town. So, in effect, RUPCO is assuming that the town will somehow manage to destroy legal business in Woodstock, at the taxpayer's expense, so that RUPCO can build affordable housing and then have its for profit, wholly owned subsidiary make money from it.

Wake up, Town of Woodstock.

Stay tuned. Images of the engineering letter and line by line commentary are coming up later today, or maybe tomorrow.