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No Docks in the Bay!!

Mark Terry briefed the Town Board yesterday with a one-hour Power Point presentation showing about 88 reasons why there should never be another dock in the bay. For the last 5 months, He has been gathering, at great expense and effort, habitat maps showing that ducks, plover, terns, turtles, horseshoe crabs, fiddler crabs, blue claw crabs, clams, mussels, scallops, sea grasses of various types and many other forms of marine life cannot exist any longer if we build another dock. People on boats have been out sampling the sites where docks may wish to be built, divers have been counting marine species and the results are in: No more docks.

I was invited on July 3rd to the meeting of the task force charged with producing this amazing report. We were all informed that we would be notified of the next meeting. There was never another meeting held, and when I asked Scott Hillary in early September what the status was, and what was the schedule, I was told I would be informed and there was nothing new happening. In actuality, they had been preparing for a presentation to theTown Board the very next day! I got wind of it too late to attend. The public input was not wanted and obviously not needed. Then the moratorium was running out and had to be extended, which fit perfectly into the plan of delivering the final product to the Town Board in the dead of winter when our waterfront owners and users are elsewhere. Mark Terry and Scott Hillary, took every Stephen Ressler action right out of the play book from his April meeting entitled ENVIRONMENTAL AND AESTHETIC IMPACTS OF SMALL DOCKS AND PIERS, developing a Science-Based Decision Support Tool for Small Dock Management. (see the post about that in April) The Power Point presentation, though I have not seen it, is, I am sure, supposed to be a decision support tool to make it easy for the Town Board to ban docks. No matter that the science is biased. No matter that there is no real need for the ban in the first place. No matter that the Trustees have been capable of handling dock requests since permits were first required. No matter that the town’s resources, now diminished and rapidly declining, could be better allocated to solving real, rather than perceived, problems. Thank goodness the Town Board is elected and accountable! Perhaps they can see this is a sham and a waste of time, effort and money.

About "Janet Deluca"

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