Wednesday, May 12, 2004

The situation in King's Park - how they got 270 acres of land on the North Shore for 7.5 million dollars (albeit apparently without a subject-to, though the developer didn't seem to be able to answer that question) - is still questionable. the $40 million dollar environmental remediation bill makes it more plausible, except that it's a brownfields site so they can theoretically get a large grant from the state to pay for the cleanup. Don't really know much about it.

Who decided on the name "brownfields", anyway?

In any case, the plan the developers presented was actually very nice and seemed like quite a nice compromise between what the town wants (who the fuck knows what they want; they certainly don't), and what is economically reasonable for the developers. (you can see it, as I mentioned earlier, on their website.

Sure, they were parading around crap like "Look, we're going to build you a beautiful new fire station!" when you know that the town board probably told them "Liste, you're not going to get the zoning you want unless you build us a new station", but hey, whatever.

The guy doing the presentation was a little condescending, and quite politically incorrect ("We don't do senior housing because it's depressing. Who wants an entire cohort of 55 year olds growing old together?" or "We're going to move the psychiatric center out of the way to here, in the woods. It will be more peaceful for the committed people. I'm sure they'll appreciate it") but for the most part, I thought he explained things fairly well (like why the increased population wouldn't mak traffic worse on 25A - because traffic is as bad as it can possibly be on 25A already).

On the other hand, the townsfolk against the plan (the ones who were at this meeting and being quite vocal about their displeasure - and so entirely rude! There is no excuse for interrupting and screaming during a meeting that a potential developer is holding out of courtesy to you - this was, after all, NOT a town hearing. It was a prsentation by the developer that they did just for the townsfolk) handed out a flyer with all kinds of points made against the project. It was the most horrendously written piece of garbage I've ever seen.

I will copy the most confusing one below. If anyone can decipher and translate into coherent english what they;'re trying to say, please let me know.

11. The architect said there would be a jitney to drive residents to the LIRR station, implying that would result in less impact on traffic than would conventional development. However, less than 10% of the work force takes the train. Optimistically assuming that this project would attract more LIRR users than the town as a whole, the project would still generate far more traffic. Say 15% of the residents would use the LIRR (not realistic considering the current and likely future service). That would mean roughly 500 LIRR commuters, and 3000 vehicle trips each peak hour. Development under existing zoning would be about 160 trips. Even if the nw urbanism village numbers were lowered by 50% to account for retirees, low income and traffic are called for by zoning plans.



HUH???!! What?

Furthermore, here is point #8:

8. A second premise is not correct. The architect said the jitneys would take rsidents to the Rail Road station. This was to imply that the high density would not cause much traffic congestion. However, only 5 to 10% of Kings Park residents use the LIRR.

Is that fundamentally different from 11? Have I lost my brain???

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