40- The Blind Leading the Blind

This evening at a Woodstock Planning Board meeting, the board and representatives from RUPCO, including the executive director, discussed comments on and adjustments to the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS).

The FEIS concerns all kinds of effects from the project. While this review goes on, the board also is reviewing the SITE PLAN. The site plan review and the FEIS review are two parts of one large project.

Four weeks ago, the board held a hearing on the site plan and special use permit. Citizens were permitted to speak about the site plan, which is anything ON the 28 acres that have been designated as the "project site."

The intersection of Playhouse Lane and Route 212 is quite a way down the road from the property, and is not considered part of the site.

During the meeting, one board member, Paul Henderson, brought up a letter from the State Department of Transportation, addressing an issue at the intersection of Playhouse Lane and Route 212. For the purposes of this blog, the contents do not matter, except that the concern was entirely about traffic at the intersection.

In order to steer Paul Henderson's concern away from the agenda at hand, none other than Guy Kempe said to the others that this issue is covered in the site plan review. There was some doubt at the table, and Kempe confirmed it. I have the whole thing on video, but for right now, do not have the capability to extract that short clip.

It's bad enough that Guy Kempe still doesn't know the definition of the "site plan," but what's worse is that after 5 years or more, neither does anybody else on the planning board, at least not well enough to be able to differentiate between the site plan and the environment around the site.

After I turned off my video camera, I approached the board members, those who remained. I asked them to tell me whether the intersection of route 212 and Playhouse Lane was part of the site plan, or outside the site plan, and therefore belongs in the EIS. One board member, David Corbett, didn't know. Paul Henderson thought he knew, and Paul Shultis Jr. tried to figure it out on the spot.

I asked Paul Shultis Jr. to define the site plan. He said "the twenty-eight acres," which is true.

Why do I make such a big deal out of this?

Because.

Because, the community relations guy is allowed to mislead planning board members.

Because the planning board doesn't know the definitions it is supposed to know.

Because the planning board let itself steer an agenda item onto an inappropriate agenda, and off the appropriate one.

Because the town board wants the planning board to consider this intersection as part of the project, but the planning board considers it to be outside of the project. (I concluded this after Jeff Moran, town not-so-supervisor, told me to give a printout of this blog to the Planning Board, since the Planning board is lead agency on the RUPCO project, even though the Planning Board is not interested in this important intersection.)