Cleaning Up the Sound, Lobsters, Building in Public Waters

The Sputtering Long Island Sound Cleanup … Connecticut is heading toward abandoning the cleanup of the Sound (read this and then browse through the archives from November, December and January for more) but the press largely continues to ignore the story. One exception is the Greenwich Citizen, a weekly that editorialized recently (here) in favor of putting more money in the state’s Clean Water Fund.

Lobsters … Connecticut fisheries officials believe that if fewer lobsters are caught in Long Island Sound, it will help the lobster population rebound from the big die-off in 1998 and 1999. Lobster fishermen, not surprisingly, disagree.

The Connecticut Post wrote about it, here, but reporter Ed Crowder misleads us when he says of the lobster die-off:

Its cause remains in dispute, but many blame pesticide-laden runoff — a legacy of the West Nile virus scare of the late 1990s.

While it’s certainly true that researchers are not absolutely sure of the caused, they reached a consensus of sorts a couple of years ago. Here are some excerpts from a summary of research results:

Warmer water temperatures, low oxygen levels, and related stresses are the likely reason for a massive die-off of lobsters in Long Island Sound in 1999….

… 17 research teams from seven states presented three years of research that points to a period of above-average water temperatures as triggering problems leading to the deaths of 95 percent of the western Sound's lobster stocks. A cold front and winds from Hurricane Dennis stirred up the water in August 1999. A few weeks later, Tropical Storm Floyd brought more than 3 inches of rain and resulting runoff that stressed the lobsters further.

The role of pesticides hasn’t been ruled out but is considered less important:

Investigations into three pesticides sprayed that summer to kill mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus found that at least two of the compounds, methoprene and malathion, would need to be used at much higher levels to kill lobsters. Research on the pesticide resmethrin, however, suggests that it could kill a lobster submerged in water containing .095 parts per billion (ppb), according to Sylvain De Guise, associate professor of pathobiology at the University of Connecticut. Based on water models, it is believed that concentrations of resmethrin reached .39 ppb to .54 ppb in some locations on the bottom, "which may have had lethal effect on larvae and immune effect on adults in Long Island Sound in 1999."

Private Use of Public Waters … On Block Island there’s a major fight over a major expansion of a marina into the publicly-owned waters of the Great Salt Pond, which encompasses a national wildlife refuge and extensive clam beds. In the Providence Journal.

Alpine Idyll

I'll be ignoring Sphere next week because I'll be here instead.




But by all means check back at the end of the month.

Preserving the "Preserve"

How much is the “Preserve” property in Old Saybrook worth? The answer of course is that it’s worth whatever the highest bidder would pay for it. But because the state of Connecticut is interested in buying it from Lehman Brothers to prevent the thousand acres from being developed into houses and a golf course, the answer is more complicated than simply saying it’s worth what it will fetch on the open market.

The problem is that when the state buys land, it must commission an appraisal and then is prohibited by law from paying more than the appraised value (that’s the way it works in New York and I’m inferring from what I’ve read that it’s the same in Connecticut; in New York it’s even more complicated when New York City wants to buy land to protect its upstate watershed: the city is not only prohibited from paying more than the appraised value, it can’t pay less either).

Requiring that the state not pay more than the appraised value seems fair to the taxpayers who are ultimately funding the purchase. But it can be a problem in several ways:

Let’s say a person bought land for $1 million. If the state’s appraisal says the land is worth $800,000, the owner is unlikely to sell at a loss to the state just because the state can’t pay more than its appraisal says the land is worth. The result is a preservation stalemate.

Even if the owner paid less than the appraised value -– let’s say $750,000 for land appraised at $800,000 -- he might think his price was a bargain and that the land is really worth $1 million, and therefore he’d be unlikely to sell for the state’s appraised value.

And if in the meantime the owner is working his way through the approval process to develop his land, each step of the way tends to increase the value of the land. If you paid $1 million for the land and in the meantime the local planning board has accepted your environmental impact statement, you're one step closer to approval and therefore one step closer to making a big profit from your development.

To one extent or another, this is what seems to have happened with The Preserve: the state says it’s worth less than Lehman Brothers says it’s worth: $4.4 million compared to at least $6 million.

The state’s appraisal could very well have taken into consideration the fact that access to the property is difficult, a reality borne out by the DEP’s decision not to allow the developers to cross Valley Railroad State Park to get to their land.

My vote is for Lehman Brothers to regroup, to realize that they made a bad investment, and to work out a deal with the state for the best price they can.

If they’re smart they will counteract their financial hit with a public relations gain by claiming themselves to be heroes for allowing The Preserve to really become a preserve. Galling, perhaps, but I have a feeling the opponents of the development could live with it.

Climate Change and Long Island Sound

The Long Island Sound Watershed Alliance looks as if it has a good program for its April 8 conference, in Bridgeport, on how climate change might affect the Sound. Johan Varekamp, from Wesleyan, and Ellen Thomas, of Yale, will talk about changes to the Sound’s environment. There will also be panel discussions about what the future holds and how to change things for the better. Gina McCarthy, the Connecticut DEP commissioner, will be the keynote speaker.

Since I consider quibbling to be part of my job description, I’ll say that the lineup of speakers seems a bit Connecticut-centric – seven of 10 speakers are from Connecticut, two are from Stony Brook, and I can’t tell from the list where the other is from. But as I said, this is a quibble, and it may be irrelevant.

LISWA emailed a pdf of the program yesterday but I couldn’t find it on the Save the Sound website. Contact Sherill Baldwin for more information: sbaldwin@savethesound.org.

Greenwich Changes its Mind About Lowering its Beach Fees

Greenwich has decided after all that it doesn’t want to make it easier for us out-of-towners to visit Greenwich Point Park. The town’s appalling and exclusionary beach fees will remain the same.

Trouble for "The Preserve"

My general rule of thumb is that when it comes to real estate development proposals, the more Orwellian the name, the worse the development will be for the environment. A subdivision called “The Meadows,” for example, almost surely destroys the meadows it is named after. A condo development called “Soundview” no doubt blocks everybody’s view of the Sound. Even so, it takes a set of brass ones to name a 1,000-acre development featuring 220 houses and a golf course “The Preserve.”

For that amazing level of cynicism we have River Sound Development, a subsidiary of the Lehman Brothers investment firm, to thank. The 1,000 acres that “The Preserve” would occupy is in Old Saybrook, and is described by opponents of the development (who are numerous) as “at the heart of the last and largest unprotected forest and wetland complex on Connecticut’s coast.” (This map is from the Connecticut Fund for the Environment website.)


Old Saybrook officials are apparently ready to rubber stamp their approval. But luckily the best way in to the property – maybe the only way, for all I know – is across the Valley Railroad State Park, which is owned and operated by the Connecticut DEP. I say “luckily” because for River Sound to build a bridge across the park to its land, it needs DEP permission. And last week, Commissioner Gina McCarthy said no way.

“As a result of the uncertainties related to the physical impacts the overpass and roadway system would have on the Valley Railroad State Park, the resulting constriction of the park from its existing 100 foot wide path to a 20 foot wide passageway designed to pass a single train, the potential to further limit the use of this railway to trains of a certain width and height, and the overall negative aesthetic impact such an activity would have on this section of the state park, the Connecticut DEP is unwilling to grant River Sound Development’s request to construct an overpass over Valley Railroad State Park.”

CFE has put McCarthy’s letter on its website, here. And the New London Day wrote about it today, here.

In a statement the other day, CFE said that it hopes the DEP decision will prompt River Sound to begin discussions about a fair market sale of the property to turn it into a real preserve. It’s not clear to me who would be buying the property (perhaps the state) but if I were them I’d be ordering an appraisal and would be on the phone today with River Sound’s attorney.

Blumenthal Says FERC Should Release the Broadwater Plans to the Public

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has asked federal regulators to make public all of Broadwater’s plans for a liquefied natural gas terminal in Long Island Sound. Under post 9/11 federal law, such plans are allowed to be kept secret by the government; anyone can request to review them but the request is granted only if you promise to keep what you learn secret. If you see something in the plans that you perceive as a serious flaw, the only thing you can legally do is tell the government and trust that they’ll handle it correctly. Right.

Blumenthal not surprisingly sees this as absurd. Here’s the Hartford Courant’s report. Personally, I continue to think that organized civil disobedience should be debated.

Going Out of Business in New Canaan

The New Canaan Book Shop, which used to be in the middle of New Canaan’s business district, arranged its non-fiction books by alphabetical order according to title, on shelves you’d encounter as you walked in the front door. And because of the store’s location, virtually everybody who shopped in New Canaan had to walk past it, which made it very convenient to stop in.

I remember this because between the time I signed a contract with Yale University Press to write This Fine Piece of Water, in the summer of 1999, and when it finally got published, in May of 2002, I would occasionally go into the bookstore and find the place on the shelf where my book would be displayed.

Then in April of 2002 a sign went up announcing that the bookstore was going out of business. The owners were a divorced couple, and one of them apparently decided that the best way to cause trouble for his spouse was to force the store to close (or so the employees said).

A week before my book came out, the place shut down for good.

Sometime later a new book store opened in town in a new building in a different location, close to the train station but separated from the rest of the shops in downtown New Canaan by an intersection with lots of traffic turning different ways at different times, making it a pain in the neck for a pedestrian to get across. The rent was also extremely high, even for New Canaan, a merchant with a shop nearby told us.

Elm Street Books never did very well. Last summer the owner of R.J. Julia, a successful bookstore in Madison, Connecticut, took over. She began to promote books heavily, bringing in big-name authors for lectures and book-signings, often in conjunction with the local library, where posters announcing the events would be set up near the main door. I was in the library on Saturday, though, and noticed that there were no posters. Today the New Haven Register reports that R.J. Julia has decided that the rent in New Canaan is too high to make a living selling books, and Elm Street Books will shut down in the middle of March.

Just Resting, Thank You

A seal lying on a dock has to be in trouble, right? Disoriented. Injured. Completely out of its element. That’s what people in New Rochelle thought. For two days they watched as a harp seal lay quietly on a dock near Hudson Park. Finally the police decided to save the poor troubled creature. A cop in a boat cruised toward the animal. But instead of waiting to be rescued, the seal simply slid off the dock and swam away toward Long Island Sound. Apparently sometimes they just need a rest. My friend Ken Valenti wrote about it here this afternoon (and click here to see a photo). Heather Medic of Mystic Aquarium explained it all here two months ago.

Modern, Green and Not a McMansion

In our area, where ugly McMansions designed mainly to demonstrate the size of your salary are the norm, there aren’t many “green” houses being built and there aren’t many “modern” houses being built. But here’s a subdivision, in Berlin, Connecticut, that aims to be both green and modern.

Mooreland Glen will meld modern design and environmentally sound technologies in 35 "high-performance, low-maintenance homes" on High Road amid natural plantings and walking paths.

The price? Expect to pay 700 grand. From yesterday’s Times.

Pushing Connecticut to Clean Up the Sound

Terry Backer, who in addition to being the Soundkeeper also represents Stratford in the House, told me yesterday that state Senator Bill Finch, of Bridgeport, has agreed to introduce a bill in the environment committee that he and Terry hope will put a significant amount of money back in the Clean Water Fund. In recent years Connecticut has cut its allocation for the Clean Water Fund from about $50 million annually to about $20 million, on average – an amount that will force the state to significantly slow down its program to fund sewage treatment plants so they can remove nitrogen from treated sewage.

Terry said yesterday that he thinks $50 million is the right figure for this year too, but that ultimately a committee that oversees bonding will decide. Like the Senate environment committee, the House bonding committee is chaired by a representative from Bridgeport (Bob Keely).

The key, Terry said, is to give the bonding committee the political cover to put up $50 million.

For that to happen, he said, Long Island Sound advocates are going to have to demonstrate that there’s real support for the cleanup of the Sound.

If you go to my archives, on the right, and click through posts from the first two weeks of last month, you’ll get some good background, including the opinions of Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save the Sound and Audubon Connecticut, and you’ll also see Terry Backer’s early thoughts on the issue.

U.S. Attorney Strikes Again: Nails Company for Violations at New Haven's & Norwalk's Sewage Plants

The U.S. prosecutor who is sending Mark Easter to jail for dumping raw sewage from the Fishers Island ferries has also successfully prosecuted the company that runs the sewage treatment plants in Norwalk and New Haven, for treatment violations.

No one is going to jail though. The U.S. Attorney’s office, under Kevin J. O’Connor, agreed essentially to put them on probation for two years and to make them pay a $2 million fine that will go toward water quality improvements and environmental education.

Technically the attorney’s office and the company, Operations Management International, have entered into a “deferred prosecution agreement.” If OMI keeps out of trouble for two years and institutes a bunch of changes in its operation nationwide, they’re off the hook.

What did OMI do in New Haven and Norwalk? To me it seems like their offenses weren’t huge – in fact in Norwalk, the offense seems to have been caused by an eagerness to reduce nitrogen, which is the key goal of the overall Long Island Sound cleanup – but they neglected to report them correctly, and that pissed O’Connor and his assistants off.

The problem in New Haven had to do with chlorine. The treated wastewater that the plant discharges into the Sound must, according to its state permit, contain no more than 1.5 milligrams of chlorine per liter but no less than 0.2 mg/l (presumably this is because too much chlorine could kill micro-organisms in the Sound and too little would be an indication that proper disinfection of the wastewater isn’t taking place).

If the plant operators test the chlorine discharge more often than the permit requires, they must include the additional tests in their regular reports. The plant operators also must make sure that any chlorine test results it submits are representative of the actual chlorine conditions (presumably this is to make sure that if you get a lot of results that show chlorine levels are too high, and one result that shows it’s not too high, you don’t submit that result and try to pass it off as representative).

At the New Haven plant, chlorine apparently was fed into the wastewater manually. But that’s an imprecise method, and chlorine levels sometimes fell out of the 1.5-0.2 mg/l range. Occasionally when that happened, plant managers discarded the samples and directed workers to take additional samples. Unfortunately for OMI, you’re not allowed to do that. The New Haven plant also took samples improperly when they measured biochemical oxygen demand, or BOD, which is a measure of how much dissolved oxygen will be removed from the Sound when organic particles in the wastewater decay.

In Norwalk, as I mentioned, the violation stemmed from an eagerness to do as much nitrogen removal as possible. Nitrogen removal requires that sewage sludge be kept in the plant for longer than it usually would. Bacteria grow in the sludge, and by controlling the amount of oxygen in the sludge, plant operators can control the types and amounts of nitrogen-eating bacteria. Eventually the sludge is taken away (and burned I think, although they might do something else with it) and the wastewater discharged, in this case in the Norwalk River, upstream from the harbor and the Sound.

Apparently in an effort to increase the amount of nitrogen removal, the plant operators kept more sludge in the tank than they should have, and the sludge spilled out into river, more than once. That’s not the worst thing that can happen at a sewage plant, but it’s a permit violation nonetheless, and the Norwalk plant operators compounded the problem by not reporting it.

Managers at both the New Haven and Norwalk plants have been reassigned by OMI. The manual chlorine feeder at the New Haven plant has been replaced with an automated system. OMI also has agreed to give $1 million to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, in New London, to fund an Endowed Chair of Environmental Studies; and $1 million “to the Greater New Haven Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA), New Haven, Connecticut, to fund one or more of specific facility and environmental improvement projects and to the Long Island Sound Fund and/or Study, if funds remain available.”

I should add here that I wrote admiringly and at some length about the Norwalk plant, and in particular of its nitrogen removal program, in the last chapter of my book. One of the managers who was reassigned was Fred Treffeisen, who I singled out for praise and for his commitment to improving the treatment process at a plant that had been neglected for decades.

Here’s the U.S. Attorney’s press release; here’s the deferred prosecution agreement; and here’s the Stamford Advocate story.

And I've written about the wider implications at Gristmill, here.

Ever-vigilant Customs Agents Send a Roquefort Cheesemaker Back to France

Bon voyage ... A cheesemaker from Roquefort who flew into JFK yesterday to speak at a Cornell conference in Manhattan was detained by Customs and then sent back to France because he once protested the industrialization and globalization of the food industry by attacking a sacred icon of American culture – a McDonald’s restaurant. The Times reported:

The reason, one official said, was that Mr. Bové had a record of criminal convictions and therefore was not eligible for the visa-waiver program that allows visitors from many European countries to enter the United States using only their passports.

Mr. Bové, 52, had served time for several protest activities, including episodes where he smashed windows of a McDonald's near his home in 1999, damaged a field of genetically modified rice in 1999, and destroyed a field of gene-modified crops in 1998.

Newsday reported:

Bove … was scheduled to lead discussions titled Fighting the Commodification of Food, and The Struggle Against Monsanto in Europe.

It’s hard to imagine that Bove poses any real threat in America, and I agree that McDonald’s is an abomination, but on the other hand protesters get arrested to make a point and if one of the results is some sort of punishment, you have to live with it. The worst part for Bove, no doubt, was that he had to eat two airline meals in the same day.

Daily Broadwater ... If you’re on the fence about Broadwater’s proposal to put a liquefied natural gas terminal in Long Island Sound because you think it will help make the U.S. less reliant on international energy supplies, read this post on Gristmill and then click on the link it sends you to.

Connecticut Fund for the Environment, by the way, did us the favor of finding the Broadwater application online. Click here to read it.

Monitoring Sewage Plants, Lobbying for the Sound, Reviewing Broadwater

Watching over the city … New York City neglected to have backup generators in place at two of its sewage treatment plants during the August 2003 blackout. As a result, millions of gallons of untreated sewage went into the East River and the Hudson River.

The failure to have backup generators and the sewage spill are violations of federal law. Because the city was already on probation because of environmental violations in its upstate reservoir system, a judge decided yesterday that the federal courts would oversee the city’s sewage treatment system for three years.

I can’t guarantee that this will be good for Long Island Sound, but it’s hard to think of how it could be bad. Four big sewage treatment plants discharge about 800 million gallons of treated sewage a day into the far western end of the Sound. A federal monitor with a skeptical eye might be a good thing. Here’s today’s New York Times story.

Money for sewage treatment … Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save the Sound has been working to try to persuade the Connecticut legislature to put enough money in the Clean Water Fund to allow the cleanup of the Sound to continue. Leah Schmalz of STS/CFE met on Monday with the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities. Another group, the Coalition for Funding the Environment, is working on it too. Leah said:

This last meeting was to get a group together in the same room to start talking about a potential plan -- more to come in the coming weeks!

Broadwater’s review … Last week I wrote that the New York State Department of State will have 60 days to decide if Broadwater’s proposal for a liquefied natural gas plant in the Sound is consistent with state policies for use of the coastal zone. Leah Schmalz sent me an e-mail politely pointing out that I didn’t know what I was talking about:

NYSDOS has 180 days after they determine that they have all of the necessary data and information (NDI) for their review. As of right now, they don’t have the application. When Broadwater gives it to them, they have 30 days to determine if it has the NDI. If so, the 6 months starts when they get their application (not FERC’s). If not, the 6 months starts when they have the NDI. Everything should be submitted into FERC’s record. Appeals must rely on FERC’s record.

Bryan Brown, meanwhile, pointed out that I didn’t give the whole story last week when I talked about the state coastal policies that Broadwater would have to comply with. There are also specific policies for the Long Island Sound coastal area, a discussion of which you can find here.

Over the Weekend: Money for Wrestling but Not for the Cleanup of the Sound? Also, John Behler, 1943-2006

Amann's screwy priority ... When cutbacks in Connecticut’s portion of the Long Island Sound cleanup became news late last year, House Speaker James Amann essentially threw up his hands and said he couldn’t do much about it because funding sewage treatment plant improvements wasn’t a sexy issue.

So what is a sexy issue for Amann, a Democrat from Milford?

Professional wrestling, apparently. At a time when water quality in Long Island Sound has declined to the point where it’s as bad as it was 15 years ago, Amann’s priority in the 2006 Connecticut budget is tax incentives to help World Wrestling Entertainment.

I realize it sounds like I’m making this up, but I’m not. Click here for the details.

Amann will be among the Connecticut state legislators heading back to Hartford for what promises to be a session dominated by the primary need of all state legislators everywhere – the need to be re-elected.

It is these Connecticut legislators, you’ll remember, who voted to cut back on the Sound cleanup. Those cutbacks, according to Connecticut Fund of the Environment, will delay the cleanup for almost 25 years beyond the original 2014 deadline.

Other interest groups are no doubt preparing to lobby for money for their causes. Nothing is truer than that elected officials respond to noise and pressure. Putting money back in the Clean Water Fund for the cleanup of Long Island Sound should be the top priority for Connecticut environmentalists.

Death of a Naturalist ... If you’ve ever used The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Reptiles & Amphibians to look up the identity of a turtle or a snake, you’re familiar with John Behler’s work. He was its co-author, and was also the curator of herpetology at the Wildlife Conservation Society/Bronx Zoo. I first met Behler back in 1983, when I interviewed him for a newspaper story, and I worked with a couple of years ago on a land preservation project. He has a good scientist and a good guy. He died last week, of congestive heart failure, at age 62. His work as a conservation biologist earned him an international reputation, but I was lucky enough to have been in the field with him once in northern Westchester, when he came upon a concentration of reptiles that amazed him. I wrote about it today on Gristmill. Click here to read it.

A Few More Details About the Atlantic LNG Proposal; Cape Wind Gets an Airing at Yale; Did Easter Get off too Easy?

The Howard and Henry show … Long Island’s weekly newspapers, and Google, have come up with a few more details about the Atlantic Sea Island Group LLC (aka Safe Harbor Energy), the company that wants to build a 53-acre island 13.5 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean and put a liquefied natural gas terminal on it.

Long Island Business News reported this, referring to company frontman Howard Bovers who, not surprisingly, reveals himself to have a 53-acre ego:

His consortium includes Henry Steinroth, a former Port Washington resident who oversaw construction of a 600-acre island off the coast of Los Angeles. Other participants include AECOM, a multinational engineering firm, and what Bovers described as a “sophisticated team of investors” assembled by bank Morgan Joseph & Co. Inc.

Unlike Broadwater, which derives heavy backing from Shell, and a proposed terminal off the New Jersey coast sponsored by another engery giant, BP, the Safe Harbor project is from “local people who understand these waters,” said Bovers, who grew up on the Jersey shore.

“This is the Howard and Henry show,” he said.

The Herald, meanwhile, reported:

According to the Web site of Morgan Joseph, a New York City-based investment bank, Atlantic Sea Island Group LLC raised $10 million through private equity placement last September. Exactly how much more was raised by the group was not disclosed.


And Charles Schumer wants to know more, here:

Cape Wind ... The Hartford Courant found its way down to New Haven yesterday to cover a talk at the Yale School of Environmental Sciences and Forestry by Jim Gordon, the head of Cape Wind Associates.

Gordon wants to put 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, off Cape Cod, and the Courant gave him a fair amount of space to talk about his plans without bothering to summarize the opposition beyond saying that rich people in Hyannisport don’t want it.

Was 10 grand too soft?... Mark Easter, the head of the Fishers Island Ferry District and soon-to-be prisoner, apparently had some thrifty saving and investing habits. The Norwich Bulletin reports today that Easter’s net assets are more than $1 million.

Easter, who pleaded guilty to dumping pretty much all the raw sewage from the FI ferries into Long Island Sound and the Thames, is 54 and, with a salary of about $130,000 a year, is the highest-paid employee of the Town of Southold.

Given his bank account, Dawn Kallen, who investigated his crime for the Coast Guard, thinks the $10,000 fine he’ll be paying is too little. The Norwich Bulletin agreed:

The $100,000 fine sought by U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor was closer to the mark given the defendant's wealth.

Fines this low may be seen by some as no more than the cost of doing business, and that's not acceptable.

Broadwater: What's Next

Now that Broadwater has filed its application with FERC, here’s what happens next, as I understand it (and when I say “as I understand it,” I mean as Adrienne Esposito of CCE explained it to me):

-- the Coast Guard will release the safety and security report, in about two months.
-- FERC includes the safety and security report in the draft environmental impact statement, which should be ready in about four months.
-- FERC opens the public comment period when the draft environmental impact statement is released. Adrienne says FERC hasn’t decided how long the public comment period will be but that CCE is pushing for 120 days.

Meanwhile, Bryan Brown reminds me that the Broadwater proposal also must be reviewed by the New York Department of State, to determine if the LNG terminal is consistent with state and local coastal zone polices. Broadwater will be filing with DOS as soon as March, and DOS has 60 days to decide whether the project is consistent with the policies or not.

This document lists and explains the 44 coastal zone polices. I think that as many as eight of them might apply to Broadwater’s proposal.

The Department of State’s coastal resources division has a good track record of deciding that inappropriate projects are inconsistent with the policies and therefore can’t be allowed. The huge housing development that was proposed for Davids Island back in the 1980s and ‘90s is one example; the natural gas pipeline that was proposed to cross from Rockland to Westchester via the Hudson is another. An unanswered question of course is whether FERC can use the new federal energy law to overrule the state or whether Broadwater can use the law to successfully sue to overturn a state decision.

Here are the policies that I think might be germane (I simply cut and pasted them from the web, hence the uppercase letters):

POLICY 7
SIGNIFICANT COASTAL FISH AND WILDLIFE HABITATS WILL BE PROTECTED, PRESERVED, AND WHERE PRACTICAL, RESTORED SO AS TO MAINTAIN THEIR VIABILITY AS HABITATS.

POLICY 9
EXPAND RECREATIONAL USE OF FISH AND WILDLIFE RESOURCES IN COASTAL AREAS BY INCREASING ACCESS TO EXISTING RESOURCES, SUPPLEMENTING EXISTING STOCKS, AND DEVELOPING NEW RESOURCES.

POLICY 18
TO SAFEGUARD THE VITAL ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL INTERESTS OF THE STATE AND OF ITS CITIZENS, PROPOSED MAJOR ACTIONS IN THE COASTAL AREA MUST GIVE FULL CONSIDERATION TO THOSE INTERESTS, AND TO THE SAFEGUARDS WHICH THE STATE HAS ESTABLISHED TO PROTECT VALUABLE COASTAL RESOURCE AREAS.

POLICY 19
PROTECT, MAINTAIN, AND INCREASE THE LEVEL AND TYPES OF ACCESS TO PUBLIC WATER-RELATED RECREATION RESOURCES AND FACILITIES.

POLICY 24
PREVENT IMPAIRMENT OF SCENIC RESOURCES OF STATEWIDE SIGNIFICANCE.

POLICY 25
PROTECT, RESTORE OR ENHANCE NATURAL AND MAN-MADE RESOURCES WHICH ARE NOT IDENTIFIED AS BEING OF STATEWIDE SIGNIFICANCE, BUT WHICH CONTRIBUTE TO THE OVERALL SCENIC QUALITY OF THE COASTAL AREA.

POLICY 27
DECISIONS ON THE SITING AND CONSTRUCTION OF MAJOR ENERGY FACILITIES IN THE COASTAL AREA WILL BE BASED ON PUBLIC ENERGY NEEDS, COMPATIBILITY OF SUCH FACILITIES WITH THE ENVIRONMENT, AND THE FACILITY'S NEED FOR A SHOREFRONT LOCATION.

POLICY 31
STATE COASTAL AREA POLICIES AND MANAGEMENT OBJECTIVES OF APPROVED LOCAL WATERFRONT REVITALIZATION PROGRAMS WILL BE CONSIDERED WHILE REVIEWING COASTAL WATER CLASSIFICATIONS AND WHILE MODIFYING WATER QUALITY STANDARDS; HOWEVER, THOSE WATERS ALREADY OVERBURDENED WITH CONTAMINANTS WILL BE RECOGNIZED AS BEING A DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINT.

POLICY 36
ACTIVITIES RELATED TO THE SHIPMENT AND STORAGE OF PETROLEUM AND OTHER HAZARDOUS MATERIALS WILL BE CONDUCTED IN A MANNER THAT WILL PREVENT OR AT LEAST MINIMIZE SPILLS INTO COASTAL WATERS; ALL PRACTICABLE EFFORTS WILL BE UNDERTAKEN TO EXPEDITE THE CLEANUP OF SUCH DISCHARGES; AND RESTITUTION FOR DAMAGES WILL BE REQUIRED WHEN THESE SPILLS OCCUR.