Over the past
few weeks I spent four days in Rochester, drove from the capital District to
Tarrytown in Westchester, spent an afternoon touring industrial parks near
Coxsackie, went to Kingston to noodle on how to create a "Knowledge Network"
among the Hudson River communities with Sustainable Hudson Valley, and in Troy,
learned about Hudson River dredging, while continuing to monitor the progress
of legislation in Albany.
In Rochester (population 207,000) I stayed in
the East Avenue section of the city. For those who don't know Rochester, it's the city's historic grand esplanade -- flanked by expansive
mansions, including Kodak founder George Eastman's mansion, now a leading
international museum of photography and film. Parallel to East is Park Avenue, home to boutiques, trendy ethnic
restaurants, and considerable on-street residential and cultural activity. Of course, not all of Rochester is like this.
Though I
usually take Amtrak to Rochester and Buffalo, I drove this time and a bit to
my consternation (as I am a big fan of rail), it was a fast and easy drive.
This was my fifth trip to Rochester in two years.
My first
meeting was with Eric Van Dusen, Chief Operating Officer of ESF
Coalition Member NeighborWorks Rochester. NeighborWorks assists
families into homeownership and helps to ensure their long-term success as
homeowners. They do do this in or near
communities that have high and stubborn concentrations of poverty. I could not help but ask Eric how
NeighborWorks had weathered the recent mortgage/debt/energy crisis. To my surprise, he noted that stringent rules
and careful selection criteria (read: quality not quantity) enabled his
organization to come through with acceptable default rates with his clients and
their neighborhoods achieving positive outcomes.
We discussed other Rochester issues as well.
Eric mentioned that the City had merged the Housing, Community, and
Economic Development Agencies. He also
told me about a City-initiated strategy called Project Green. The strategy,
in my words, would seek to proactively identify which city blocks in the
distressed neighborhoods could be saved, which might become green (urban
agriculture, trees or park), and which would be rendered site-ready for the
future. Planned shrinkage? It's fascinating.
Roger Brown and Daniel Cosentino of ESF Coalition
member Rochester Regional Community Design Center gave me a tour of
their new exhibition focused on adapting and retrofitting suburbia. It was
thought-provoking. This exhibit showed tactically how a corner gas station can
be aesthetically and productively re-imagined, so as to be a better fit in its
neighborhood context. It showed a similar treatment for the typical tract home.
The exhibit also highlighted larger-scale efforts to re-invent suburban centers
in Florida, Georgia and Maryland. Adapting Suburbia is designed as a traveling
exhibit, and I hope to see presented it in Buffalo, Albany and New York City.
On a Saturday morning I met with Evan
Lowenstein of Green Village Consulting,
who works-part time for Empire State Future, at
a café in the century-old, bustling, Rochester Public Market. We laid plans to redo and upgrade the ESF
website to make it more visual, accessible, and a better resource. Caffeinated, we strolled through the many,
many stands of the large and quite crowded arcade-covered market.
I met and brainstormed with Jennifer
Leonard and Ed Doherty at the Rochester Area Community Foundation. Ed was formerly the head of public works for the City of Rochester, so we
talked infrastructure. With
Jennifer,
RACF President and CEO, I discussed the prospect
of an ESF-led upstate economic/community development policy series.
Also in Rochester I met with the
impressive Lovely Warren, President of
the Rochester City Council, at her "day job', where she is Counsel
in the Office of Assemblyman David Gantt.
We discussed Empire State Future's legislative agenda in Albany, including the Infrastructure
bill, Complete Streets, and Land Banking Authority. We also discussed Rochester and its
future. Ms. Warren suggested that Rochester controls much of
the land that would be part of their Project Green -- unlike other upstate
cities that have lost control of many foreclosed properties to out-of-state
speculators. She urged Empire State Future to meet with the Rochester experts
developing that plan.
At Hogan's Hideaway on Park Avenue, I had lunch
with Paul Haney, a Monroe County Legislator who represents much of the prosperous
and hip Rochester
neighborhoods. Haney first served in the
Rochester City Council in 1974. Later,
he was Monroe County's Director of
Finance. We discussed the state's fiscal problems, the Ravitch "borrow to
reform" plan, and, of course, local politics.
I had sought to meet with Brian
Sampson of Unshackle New York
but he had to cancel at the last minute.
My 250 mile drive back to the
Capital District was uneventful. The
Thruway between Rochester and Syracuse has
sections where the pavement is not so good, and one section that has been
reconstructed completely.
The second installment of the NYS Quadra-centennial
-sponsored Land Use and Environment Task Force met in Tarrytown at the offices
of the Riverkeeper. The Riverkeeper's Alex Matthiessen and Ned Sullivan of Coalition Member Scenic Hudson led the visioning discussion along
with representatives of coalition members Regional Plan
Association, Preservation League of New York State, Pattern for Progress, and
APA-Upstate.
Among the ideas considered seriously by
the assembled group was the strengthening of the Hudson River Greenway
organization to enable it to better lead Hudson River communities into
the future. The idea of having a National park made out of the Hudson Valley seems to have cachet
and considerable interest too. ESF pointed out the legislative efforts on Smart
Growth could also lead to a more economically and environmentally sustainable Hudson River Valley.
I met Rene Van Schaack, head
of the Community and Environmental
Programs Division of the Greene
County Industrial Development Agency (www.GreeneIDA.com) in Coxsackie (village
population 3,000; town - 9,000), located on the Hudson River 20-plus miles
south of Albany. Prior to the IDA Rene worked for 20 years at the local Soil and Water Conservation District. A force of nature, he is the kind of guy who
can convince business park developers and businesses to create muskrat habitat
in shouting distance of the industrial park truck bays. Meanwhile, he and his colleagues at the IDA
actually bring manufacturers into the County.
Serta, says Rene, makes mattresses in
Coxsackie! The IDA has also brought 350 beverage distribution jobs to Greene,
and a supermarket chain's massive storage and distribution center is there as
well.
Van Schaack, a Greene
native with Dutch roots going back generations, showed me two industrial
parks, both of which were large, green fields not that long ago. Of 500 acres
involved, one-third is distribution center and the other two-thirds permanent
-- and funded -- conservation land, wetlands, and bird habitat. Distribution
center revenues are committed for years to both the town and the protected
lands.
His is an interesting model, an improvement by far over what I
understand happens with IDA's in most of the rest of the state. But still, I
wondered, is this a good use of land? Is
this the loss of green fields that Smart Grothers fear? Where did the jobs come from? Are they new, additional jobs -- or
relocations away from employment centers?
Did Greene County have a better
job creation option? We ran out of time
to discuss my questions, but they linger.
I have yet to penetrate, or even visit on behalf of ESF, that part of New York north of Troy but south of Glens Falls. So when I got a
chance to join the Capital District
chapter of the American Planning Association (APA-Upstate is an ESF
Coalition member) for a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discussion of the Hudson River Dredging project, I eagerly attended. At
Browns, by the docks in Troy, I joined 15
planners to learn about this massive and controversial state-of-the-art
environmental remediation. It's pretty much the biggest thing to ever happen in
that area. New miles of railroad track, an intermodal barge and rail facility,
cavernous buildings filled with industrial filtering and dewatering equipment,
and a fleet of barges and dredges -- all to rid a 40-mile stretch of river of General
Electric's highly dangerous PCBs.
This was not an issue to which I had previously paid great attention. I
am not a lawyer and I am not fully up to speed on GE, the courts, the case, the
money, the science or the technical or legal responsibility or blame. That said two thoughts arose within me: First,
how is it that corporations can destroy the value (aesthetic,
practical, commercial or otherwise) of places they don't own -- such as
waterways, water sources or the air we breathe -- and get away with it? Must we not be responsible for our actions
and their effect on others? I don't even
know what a capacitor is, but can making them be so important that it justifies
denying tens of thousands the chance to eat a fish from a nearby river, or
safely wade on its shores forever?
The second question related, to Empire
State Future's mission of revitalization, is what should be done with that
unique, large scale remediation and transportation facility once the dredging
project is completed in five years or so?
Dave King of EPA who presented the lecture suggested
the transport of Upstate apples to Downstate consumers. Ok, I am a big believer in the revitalization
of New York State's agricultural
sector through investment in agricultural infrastructure. But this facility
seems destined for bigger jobs than moving fruit! Having started to remediate
soils moved to the site by barge, why not just keep going up and down river?
The state, maybe with GE as a for-profit partner, could sponsor the
remediation of urban brownfields that are accessible to the New York State Canal System. The soiled soil could be shipped to this modern,
already paid for high-capacity plant, located in a place that needs jobs and
will need them even more when the river dredging is done. The poisons could be purged, or carefully
shipped as they are now, and sent to land-fill burial in Texas. Hundreds of
locations could become site-ready once again.
Sites needing clean-up from New
York Harbor to Utica's east
end to South Buffalo could compete
for state funds and Federal incentives.
With the infrastructure already in place and paid for, with GE as a
capable partner, and with inexpensive transportation on the canal system, the
economics might actually work. Or we could fail to agree on anything positive,
just let the whole thing rust, and then dismantle it and ship it to China and let the
Chinese make stuff with the recycled parts for profit that we can then buy at
Wal-mart...
I also drove to Kingston to meet with a
group of folks trying to create and fund a Hudson
Valley Knowledge Network. The group includes coalition member Sustainable Hudson Valley, the Project for Public Spaces, and Historic Hudson
River Towns, among
others. Paul Beyer of the Governor's Smart
Growth Cabinet participates as well.
Their basic premise is that better land use and development outcomes in
the Hudson Valley will happen if
some of the 100 or so Hudson Valley communities were
able to become familiar with best practices, learn from one another, work with
one another, and be apprised or connected to relevant state resources and
expertise. Melissa Everett is leading the charge.
