Looks like those backward downstate New Yorkers are at it again. First, there was the successful High Line that reused a defunct Manhattan rail line as a public park, and now the Walkway Over the Hudson, the newest NYS park, which opened to the public on October 3. They even got Empire State Development grant money to help make it a reality.

A New York Times editorial describes it as “the latest example of the new kinds of infrastructure- for tourism and recreation- that are reshaping the Hudson Valley.”

Could something similar be done with the Skyway, if it’s ever decommissioned as a vehicular roadway? I’ve wondered about it.  Some local folks think it’s worth considering, before spending tens of millions of dollars to tear it down and stuff all the scrap into our already bulging landfills.

And besides, the Skyway is part of our history.

Then again, maybe it’s just that people from downstate aren’t as afraid of heights as we are.

The national debate about drilling in natural areas is heating up locally as the U.S. Energy Development Corporation, located at 2350 North Forest Road in Getzville, NY, proceeds with plans to develop five new wells in Allegany State Park.

Recently, NYS Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, Larry Beahan, and other concerned citizens have been turning their attention to the state park, as they did over a decade ago when the Pataki administration was moving toward selling timber rights in the park. Back then, former 10,000 Maniac Natalie Merchant hopped on the bandwagon and public opinion swung against the lumber industry.

Now, Hoyt is spearheading efforts with the NYS Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation “to forever protect Allegany from commercial logging and oil and mineral mining.”

Just as pro-drilling forces are losing their perkiest national cheerleader in the form of ex-Alaska Governor Sarah (Drill, baby, drill!) Palin—their case is further compromised by U.S. Energy Development Corporation’s recent rebuke from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, for their activities just south of Allegany State Park, across the state border in McKean and Warren counties.

On July 10, the department issued a cease and desist order to U.S. Energy “for persistent and repeated violations of environmental laws and regulations. The order prohibits the company from conducting all earth disturbance, drilling and hydro-fracturing operations throughout Pennsylvania.”

Over a period of just two years, beginning in August, 2007, U.S. Energy chalked up 302 violations of the Clean Streams Law, the Dam Safety and Encroachments Act, the Oil and Gas Act, and the Solid Waste Management Act. U.S. Energy is the owner and operator of the wells in the Alleghany National Forest in Pennsylvania, which borders Allegany State Park in New York.

According to the order, one third of the violations have been corrected, but the civil penalties for those violations have not been resolved. Among the many violations cited by the DEP are the unpermitted discharge of residual and industrial waste into the ground and the waters of the Commonwealth.

In Pennsylvania, U.S. Energy has had to “cease all gas and oil well activities including, but not limited to well stimulation, well drilling, road construction, pipeline construction and any other related well activities” in the state until the DEP notifies them in writing that they have complied with all the obligations of the order. They must also stop all “earth disturbance activities” except those necessary to fix the damage they’ve already done. View the cease and desist order here.

Prior to the park’s official designation in 1921, the area was widely drilled for oil, including the first oil well in New York State, which was completed in 1864. While the state controls the surface rights to the park land, private interests have been unwilling to relinquish ownership of what lies beneath to this day.

One bill supported by Hoyt would create a sunset provision for privately held oil and gas interests beneath the park.

U.S. Energy spokesperson Matt Iak confirmed that they have access to mineral rights in Allegany State Park, and that they are “going through the various channels” to make those wells a reality.

However, a spokesperson for the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation had this to report: “U.S. Energy has never applied for drilling permits in Allegany State Park. That being said, they have been drilling wells on a regular basis in other parts of Region 9 area (Western New York), and DEC does receive drilling applications from them on a regular basis.”

When asked about the Pennsylvania DEP order, Iak said, “It’s premature for us to make a comment. I can tell you that we’re both working with the same interest at heart, and it’s in very good spirit right now.”

He would not respond to any particular charges included in the order. “I’m not saying I don’t want to respond. I’m not in a position to respond until they give you the final word on what’s going on, and I think you’ll have a different opinion at that point in time.”

A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania DEP said that “the scope and magnitude” of U.S. Energy’s violations “is not commonplace, and that’s why we took the action that we did.”

Last Friday, a court case brought by the International Bottled Water Association and Nestle Waters of North America was decided by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Griesa. The result puts New York’s recently passed Bigger Better Bottle Bill (BBBB) legislation on hold until April 1, 2010. Read Griesa’s order here.

Here’s the NYPIRG press release where they call upon Governor David Patterson, Senate Majority leader Malcolm Smith, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to do something about it. After all, these three were presented awards from 50 environmental groups on Earth Day for enacting the law.

Now that photo-op has come and gone, and big, corporate lawyers have succeeded in scuttling the measure for another year at least, throwing the state budget out of whack by an estimated $115 million.

Click here to read a statement from the Bottle and Can Redemption Association (BACRA), one of the green industries that was counting on the BBBB legislation to keep struggling redemption centers afloat.

To add another layer of weirdness to this whole mess, here’s a story from the New York Post, painting Senator Antoine Thompson’s office in a less than favorable light.

I had hoped to put something about this in today’s print edition, because it sounds pretty cool to me: This Saturday at the Main Place Mall is the first Buffalo Niagara Green Expo. The event kicks off Buffalo Green Week, which ends next weekend with the American Solar Energy Society Conference at the Convention Center.
Essentially, the Green Expo is a trade show, in which dozens of vendors will demonstrate their energy-saving, renewables-sourced, carbon-footprint-reducing products and services: electronic waste recycling, green roofing materials, hay bale construction, etc.

There will also be planning and advocacy groups, too, ranging from local artists Ran Webber, with his adaptive reuse plan for the Skyway, to Buffalo First, which promotes locally owned businesses and local-sourcing of goods and services. The expo will “feature dozens of local businesses and organizations who will have information for the whole family on how to go green in your home, business, community, school and career,” says Heather Zeisz, a spokesperson for State Senator Antoine Thompson, the event’s primary sponsor.

Zeisz told Artvoice that climate change is “the number one threat to our environment” and that Thompson introduced legislation last month that would authorize the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to regulate greenhouse emissions in the state. New York State.  A similar bill passed the Assembly last year but died in the Republican-held Senate.

Yesterday I was talking to a couple friends from City Hall about the Stevens family, who want to purchase a slew of city-owned lots on Wilson Street for an urban farm. The city’s economic development chief, Brian Reilly, has said he won’t approve the purchase of those lots because he hopes that someone might want to develop them—specifically, to build new houses there. (Reilly suggested that Habitat for Humanity already had their eyes on the lot, although Chris Byrd at In Da Buff learned yesterday from Stevens that Habitat would he happy to change their plans to accommodate an urban farm.) Though there are thousands of city-owned vacant lots, Reilly said it’s difficult to string together so many adjacent parcels as exist on Wilson.

That seems like nonsense to me, and my two friends from City Hall—both of whom live nearby the proposed farm—agreed.”It’s really an alley street,” one guy said. “It’s not really not the best place for a new housing development.”

“Why would anyone want to build houses there?” said the other guy. “Why are we building houses at all when we have 20,000 vacant housing units in this city? Can we just stop and figure out what it is we’re doing?”

I considered that: a moratorium on new-builds in the city until such time as we have a comprehensive housing plan. Who are we building new houses for? I don’t believe that anyone chooses the suburbs over the city because they like the houses out there better. Everyone I know who makes that move does it for better schools, and despite the housing. For low-income families stuck in substandard housing, a better answer than subsidized new-builds might be to improve the housing stock we have; there’s rehab money going unspent by our neighborhood housing agencies, and there’s more money than ever coming down the pike for weatherization and rehab grants and loans thanks to the federal stimulus package.

New in-fill housing  is a part of any housing strategy, though I would argue that throwing up new-builds on a street like Wilson would be wasteful, another example of the scattershot, developer-driven approach that yields suburban-style houses that often are vacant and near worthless just 15 years after their construction. (I would also argue that we should not subsidize market-rate or above housing at all; those who can afford a $200,000 house don’t need any help.) Our city planners need to pick neighborhoods for new housing carefully, building on strengths, and ask developers to adhere to design standards consistent with existing houses, lots sizes, and uses. In neighborhoods that aren’t marked for in-fill—and I don’t see why that barren stretch of Wilson Street should be—we ought to be open to creative uses for vacant lots.

In the meantime, maybe we ought to stop building new houses in the city until we’ve figured out what we’re doing. Because if our city government is considering blocking the sale of city-owned lots to a family of farmers because maybe someday someone will build some houses—likely with public subsidy, many of which will likely be vacant and crumbling in 15 years, possibly in need of demolition, if past housing projects are any measure—then our city government is nuts. Make them do some soil studies, to be sure there’s nothing toxic buried there. Then give them the land for a dollar per lot plus closing fees.

On Wednesday, March 4, Governor David Paterson visited Niagara Falls for a “town hall meeting” at the Doris Jones Family Resource Center on Ninth Street, just around the corner from the Highland Avenue industrial corridor and down Hyde Park Boulevard from the federally designated atomic weapons employer  Titanium Alloys Manufacturing.

As a gift, Mayor Paul Dyster gave Governor Paterson a bag of tomatoes from the H2 Grow hydroponic tomato facility on Pletcher Road in Lewiston Porter, operated by Modern Disposal, Inc., whose waste stream generates a portion of the hot-house heat through the recycling of gasses generated at their adjacent landfill.

The seven-acre, glass-enclosed complex is located directly across the road (100 yards or so—see images below) from the US Department of Energy’s “temporarily-permanent, good-enough-for-now and for 200+ years with plumes” radioactive waste storage facility, called the Niagara Falls Storage Site. The NFSS is located within a 12-square-mile piece of land once secretly known as the LOOW—the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a location with an eerie and checkered past of military-industrial projects that fill filing cabinets and boxes at the US Army Corps of Engineers offices in Buffalo and whose nasty byproducts fill holes on the Lewiston lake plain.

Discoveries of past “black” or not fully documented projects, activities and wastes at the site seem to happen with some regularity in what are known as “data gaps.”

H2 Grow in foreground.

*Note: Original Manhattan Project era split roadways designed to keep trucks carrying explosives and or radioactive substances separated by one-way lanes to lessen the chance of an accident, critical or otherwise. The underground utility and supply lines for this hydroponics facility were dug across legacy Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission lands (among other historic past .mil users).

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The NFSS (shown on the map above and below) is one of the world’s largest single-source repositories containing the cancer-causing radioactive isotope radium-226—a prodigious generator of other radioactive substances along its decay chain half-life of 1,600 years, including the Nobel gas radon-222, a strong alpha-particle emitter and known cause of lung cancer. In just a few short days, radon-222 changes back to a solid substance and falls back to the ground in what’s called a radioactive daughter or progeny. And that’s only a part of the decay process involved in just that one isotope of radium.

These radioactive decay cycles, producing numerous progeny, have been going on continuously since the 1940s at the Lewiston Porter military dumps. That’s simply a physics fact.

There are many other isotopes at the site that decay and have produced hundreds of radioactive daughters and progeny ,including the “products of fission” and “hot particles” mentioned by Army Corps of Engineers personnel in this September 2008 Army interview, each isotope having its own chemical, physical, and environmental properties, half-lives, characteristics, affinities, and “habits.”

Even though being raised in a artificial root-laden hydroponic medium, tomatoes are well known to take a part of their nutrients/moisture from the surrounding atmosphere and to be receptive to absorption through their outer skin, leaf and vine structures.

Landmarks, legends, and landfills

Out in the desert of Nevada north of Las Vegas, on a desolate stretch of road, sits the infamous “black mailbox” (actually painted white), the only landmark leading into an area of the highly secure base known as the Nevada Test Site–(NTS)–the location of past U.S. above and below ground atomic tests (not-so secret because of sound and flash), Tenopah Test Range (flight and munitions), and the supposedly nonexistent and controversial “Area-51.”

Here in Niagara County, a lone white mailbox (pictured below) marks the main entrance to the once top secret, 12-square-mile, Lake Ontario Ordnance Works complex, on its own desolate stretch of Pletcher Road in Lewiston Porter;  now it marks the 191 acres designated by the U.S. Department of Energy as the Niagara Falls Storage Site (just out of view to the left).

WNY's own "secret mailbox."

Building 401 of the Niagara Falls Storage Site, across road.

Gate closed, restricted access leading into the 191-acre NFSS.

The NFSS is the fat-bottomed, T-topped rectangular shape on the government radiation survey map below. The dots/spots represent historic and remaining radioactive and chemical contamination.

See 2008 chemical/radiological analysis diagrams below.

*Note - Incomplete listing

Please also see:

Niagara Gazette front page tomato story day of Governor Paterson visit.

Audiocast and slideshow of town hall meeting from Niagara Gazette.

See the end below about the gift of H2 Grow (LOOW) tomatoes from Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster to Governor David Paterson [POLITICAL NOTEBOOK: We hear the words, we need more action.]

What others have said.

Enjoy  that  salad,  Governor!

All around Hoyt Lake in Delaware Park, one can see signs that the seasons are changing. Shakespeare Hill offers the following warning. (click on any image to enlarge)

Another sign cautions against a different winter pastime, no matter how tempting the big open lake may appear.

Here’s a recent sign reminding you who to thank for the Delaware Park Pathways: David Paterson, Governor; Carol Ash, Commissioner of New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation and State Historic Preservation Officer; Byron W. Brown, Mayor. All part of a 1986 Environmental Quality Bond Act Project. In the background, it looks like the lake is ready for a cleanup. The sign, however, appears to be in excellent shape.

And last but not least, my favorite. The most beautiful, colorful, and positive among the bunch. Also possibly unauthorized and illegal, so get out and enjoy these tell-tale signs of spring before they’re gone.

In other, unrelated-to-David-Archuleta news:

• North District Councilmember Joe Golombek will open a discussion next week on whether Buffalo might benefit from a city manager form of government. In that form, a (0ne hopes) professional city manager is hired by the legislative branch, and the office of mayor becomes largely ceremonial rather than adminstrative. The notion is that the political acumen that’s required to be elected mayor of a big city does not necessarily guarantee the adminsitrative experience and skills required to run it. Golombek has invited Darnell Earley, city manager for Saginaw, Michigan and president of the International City/County Management Association, to speak at next Tuesday’s meeting of the Buffalo Common Council’s Legislation Committee at 2pm.  At 7pm, Early will speak in the auditorium of the Buffalo Historical Society.
• I’m no fan of Erie County Executive Chris Collins, but I think he got a bum rap on the Volland Electric contract. And I admire his response: He has instructed all the companies in which he has a stake to refrain from bidding on county work.
• Battaglia Trucking and Demolition, down on Seneca Street, has applied for a modification of its solid waste managememnt permit from the New York State Department of Environmental. The modification would raise Battaglia’s capacity from 3,800 tons of waste per month to 1,600 tons per day. Battaglia also wants a new, 13,000-square-foot building and increased operating hours. A letter from DEC to Mayor Byron Brown, asking the administration to help determine who the lead agency in the environmental analysis of the request ought to be, was filed with the Common Council today. Expect the Seneca-Babcock neighborhood to, um, react. More on this and other South Buffalo waste yards later in week.

Two years ago, Artvoice published a cover story about the Bigger Better Bottle Bill (BBBB). The measure, which has passed a couple of times in the State Assembly, only to die on the Senate floor, is back again with more momentum than ever. In essence, the bill expands the existing nickel deposit on carbonated beverages to include the non-carbonated variety. Supporters argue the measure could generate anywhere from $118 million to $218 million for the state next year, while cleaning the environment and encouraging green business. Last week, Connecticut passed a similar law.

This is the first time the common sense measure is being considered since the departure of Republican Senator Joseph Bruno, who was deeply beholden to soda and supermarket lobbyists.

Consider this email sent two years ago to some local bill opponents by attorney Steven W. Harris, of Featherstonhaugh, Wiley, Clyne & Cordo, LLP, a firm that lobbied against the bill back then:

“As Yogi Berra once said…”it ain’t over ‘till its over”, but the Senate has officially rejected the Governor’s Expanded Bottle bill proposal during today’s negotiations.  While I won’t say that it is impossible for it to resurrect itself in the next few hours, it is very unlikely that this will be discussed further.  You can now all take a collective sigh of relief (or stop holding your breath).  The governor will reintroduce this proposal as a Governor’s Program Bill so I will still be busy the rest of session.  We can talk about what all this means in Florida in two weeks so see you all then!”

This Friday (March 6), the new Chair of the Senate Environmental Conservation Committee—Senator Antoine Thompson—has scheduled a public hearing on the BBBB at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society (25 Nottingham Court) from 10am-12pm. The hearing follows another one in the State Capitol building in Albany on Wednesday (March 4), also sponsored by Thompson.

You can learn more about the issue by visiting the Container Recycling Institute Web site and find out how to take action by visiting NYPIRG.

State Senator Antoine Thompson

Last week we met with State Senator Antoine Thompson, a second-term legislator who seems to have positioned himself well to direct a great deal of public investment into Western New York in the next couple years.

Thompson was co-chair of the Senate Democrats’ campaign committee (the first African-American senator to hold that post), and so played a key role in winning the Democrats their first majority in both houses of the state legislature in decades. In reward, Thompson was made deputy majority whip and chairman of the Senate’s Environmental Conservation Committee. That committee steers a lot of capital, and even more money will likely flow through it in the next two years thanks to the federal stimulus package.

So we thought we’d better talk to the chairman to hear his plans. The full interview will appear in next week’s print edition, but I thought I’d share just a little bit of it today:

Antoine Thompson: The Youth Conservation Corps is a program that was started in the 1980s. It was generally funded by the feds, but the state never put a dollar in the program. Now, with the federal stimulus, the Department of Labor is going to put more money into the Youth Conservation Corps, which is going to hire thousands of kids and young adults in the state. But the state still wasn’t going to put any money into it to promote working in parks, dealing with everything from weatherization to recycling in communities, a whole host of things that can promote conservation,—in addition to working with youth bureaus across the state. AmeriCorps is a great program. Wouldn’t it be logical to expand that effort with an environmental focus, where young people who go through a successful program like AmeriCorps can then apply for Youth Conservation Corps money, and those young people would then be trained in conservation, doing conservation projects in cities towns and  villages all over the state?

That program’s my baby, so I’m really pushing to get $30 million in the budget  to go with whatever federal money comes in.

AV: You mention federal stimulus money, some of which will be directed toward developing renewable energy, creating so-called “green collar” jobs, and other environmental projects. How specifically will your chairing the committee that will consider these projects benefit Western New York?

Antoine Thompson: First of all, I never try to promise more than I can deliver, but I always try to deliver more than I promise.

Most of this money is going to come in chunks to various parts of state government. When we talk about waterfront revitalization money, my committee is the committee that allocates $27 million a year in waterfront revitalization money. EPF. So when we talk about getting money out of the state for waterfront revitalization, yours truly will be the one who’s working those meetings and deciding how much of that money can come to Western New York.

Read more next week.