Last night’s “Town Meeting” on the Newman PDD application was intended to be a non-political event and I think we succeeded in keeping it that way. The meeting was sponsored by PDDG which bills itself as a “non-political” group in the sense that it does not support candidates for public office.
As has become apparent in recent days, not all members of PDDG support the political campaign or positions of their founder and supreme leader, and yet somehow the group is still able to function. Three of the four Supervisor candidate’s showed up although I was the only one that did much talking.
I mainly tried to answer questions that people had about the process and point out where particular issues might be addressed at next week’s public hearing. I did not want to venture my own opinions about those issues since they are already pretty well known and there was no lack of kindred souls who were fully capable of framing those issues.
I was a little disappointed by the absence of town board candidates or any members of the current town board. To be fair, however, perhaps they felt it was inappropriate to attend this meeting, since they are the ones who will be sitting upfront next week.
I did venture the opinion that the timing of next week’s hearing, just a week before the election, was suspicious and intimated that perhaps things were being pushed forward so that a “lame duck” town board could take some action before leaving office.
An approval of the PDD zoning by the town board, before the town planning board finishes the SEQR process, would clearly be premature, but it wouldn’t totally surprise me if they tried it. Finally, I was glad to see a half dozen SUNY students in attendance at the meeting, even though they didn’t say anything.
