The Town of Geneseo Planning Board will be meeting tonight at 7 pm at the town offices on Millennium Drive to continue work on the Newman PDD application Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Members had a busy weekend reading all the written comments on the Newman DEIS received by last Thursday’s deadline.
Many of the comments were quite lengthy including a total of 131 pages with appendices from Bill Lofquist. He submitted three different documents: one on planning and zoning, one on traffic issues and a third on a number of other issues including dark stores, economic impact and precedent. For links to his comments and a 3-page comment from Corrin Strong see this week’s Preserving Small Towns column.
A number of other lengthy anti-PDD comments were submitted by, among others, Joan Ballard, Sharyn Duffy, Judith Hunter, Joe Marcin, Walter Pond, Brad Swett and Jim Williams, as well as by the Association to Preserve Geneseo (APOG). There was just one, new, in-depth pro-PDD comment, submitted by Lynn Hooker, manager of the Geneseo Heights Apartment. She claimed that her company spends $300,000 a year for remodeling materials and she wants to spend that locally.
The previously published letters of Ted Universal, founder of Keep Geneseo Vibrant and Growing (KGVG) were also included in the record. Many of the letters in support of Lowe’s were quite short and did not provide much analysis. A number of those were also from residents of other towns.
A transcript of the public hearing was released by the town as a 162-page pdf file. It is available here for download. A check of the transcript that was made by “computer-assisted transcription” of the videotape of the hearing shows a number of errors, some of them howlers.
For example, the statement by Corrin Strong that he hoped a “lame duck” board would not try to pass the PDD zoning before leaving office was translated as a “laid duck” board.
The Clarion News Blog 