Anonymous has left the following comment on the post "Gowanus Whole Foods: At Last Night's CB6 Land Use Committee Meeting":
The question---Why did Whole Foods buy land next to a toxic waterway?---was the one question that the Whole Foods team did not prepare for with dismissive answers for the community.The long pause and answer that was offered---that the decision was made by a predecessor---was a dismissive yet revealing answer.No one at Whole Foods will take responsibility for the mess that Whole Foods finds themselves in with this site! Their team at this meeting has been given the job to get the zoning plans approved—what ever that takes. They will be the predecessors to the Whole Foods team that will have to deal with the local flooding that will contain all matters of sewage debris (especially E. coli with some nasty numbers after it). The successors will face the real problems. And when the Community Board calls a meeting to ask why cars can't get up and down 3rd street, or even in and out of the store, the next Whole Foods team can answer that it is all due to decisions made by their predecessors.
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1 comment:
This comment is unfair and paints a biased, unfair picture of the Whole Foods development and their hearing and application. It is even somewhat irresponsible of you to highlight this for those who come to your blog for news and facts.
The fact is that the question that was asked was one which was unanswerable; it is akin to asking why we choose to live close to a train station, or mere yards from the Gowanus Canal. Whole Foods has been diligently cleaning up their site, and this has taken much longer than they anticipated. The awkward silence that filled the room was simply bad PR on Whole Foods' part after being ambushed with a juvenile, sensationalist question.
Their choice of siting in proximity to the canal is also 100% unrelated to the reason why they were before the Committee, and even less related to the issue of future traffic on 3rd Street.
* It should be noted (for readers and commentators) that I serve on the Committee and voted AGAINST their variance application, but only for reasons related to the land use factors before the committee, not unrelated issues.
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