Yes, dear reader, just in time for the holidays, the busiest time of the year: The "Gowanus Green" Draft Environmental Impact Statement Scoping Session. Gowanus Green is the name of the proposed housing development on the highly toxic Public Place site.
Thank you to C.O.R.D. for letting the community know by sending out an email.How about our public officials? No emails or notices from any of them. Community Board 6 sent out the info just yesterday.
How can the community give comments or feedback on the proposal for Public Place if it has not been properly notified and given access to the environmental document in a timely fashion? And all of this the week before Christmas. How many local residents will realistically have time to study the document and show up at the hearing?
Pardon me for asking. but could the timing be any more convenient?
So, again, thanks to the members of CORD. From their email:
To: Elected officials and community groups surrounding the Public Place site
From: Gowanus Green Partners
We wanted to remind you that a public scoping meeting for the Gowanus Green proposal (aka Public Place) will be held on Tuesday, December 16, 2008, at 5 PM at Brooklyn Borough Hall, 2nd floor auditorium (the Court Room), located at 209 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201. HPD
is the lead on the proposal. The environmental documents are available for download on the HPD website at:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/html/developers/Gowanus-Green-proposal.shtml
We hope you will join us at the scoping session and provide your thoughtful comments and feedback on the proposal there, and in writing until January 23, 2009.
Related Post:
No Love Canal Here: Defend Gowanus
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3 comments:
Time to examine Community board members more closely. WHo do they represent? I wonder.
The timing of this event is a deliberate move to prevent the real public opinion from making it even more "off the record". Here the city is giving away Public Land that is designated for public recreation use. Of course they need to do this in the most obscure way possible! They would have scheduled this on New Years Eve if they could have just to make sure no one from the community could come to express a public opinion.
The worst part of all this is that the HPD master mind for all this just got a big promotion out of the city.
So what do those of us do who need to run off to our kids schol preformance tonight?
The kids need this land for park use after they remove the ikky stuff. We don't need any more housing in the marked today...
Technically, the only requirement for publicizing public scoping meetings is that they be announced in the City Record, which barely anyone reads. DEIS hearings must be announced in a newspaper of general circulation. I know from personal experience that DCP takes advantage of this narrow requirement and does the bare minimum. If people are angry about this, they should pressure the City to go above and beyond the letter of the law or lobby for the law to be changed. A public review process is meaningless if the public cannot easily engage.
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