Draft Scope of Work for a
Supplemental EIS
Willets Point Development
Statement of Michael B. Gerrard
September 27, 2012
My name is Michael
Gerrard. I am an attorney with Arnold & Porter. I represent Willets Point United and several
of the small businesses that are members of WPU and that would be displaced by
the Willets Point project.
I want to start by
saying that the Federal Highway Administration’s approval of the Van Wyck ramps
was explicitly based on an Environmental Assessment for the prior project. That approval is no longer applicable because
it was for a different project than is now being planned. The FHWA will need to
do a new environmental review for the same reasons that the City is now doing a
supplemental EIS. The supplemental EIS should reflect these additional steps.
The FHWA violated
the National Environmental Policy Act by not doing a full EIS for the ramp
approval for the old project. That violation would be made worse by not doing a
supplemental review. The federal statute
of limitations for challenging such violations is six years, so we have plenty
of time.
We will submit
detailed written comments, but for now I would like to make these eight
specific suggestions concerning the scope of the supplemental EIS.
1. An additional alternative should be studied:
A no-condemnation alternative that would
involve building the project without taking any properties via eminent
domain.
2. The original EIS assumed that all the
businesses could be readily relocated.
Four years later, relocation sites have not yet been found for my
clients and others. The supplemental EIS must acknowledge this reality.
3. Since the
original EIS was written four years ago, new projections have appeared for
future sea level rise in the New York region. The supplemental EIS should
include a new analysis of the effect of sea level rise and storm surge on the
needed elevations for the site and the fill that will be required.
4. The City has a
history of releasing wildly contradictory reports about the traffic impacts of
this project, without ever clearly explaining the reasons for these
discrepancies. The supplemental EIS
should include a table comparing the assumptions, methodologies and other
inputs of the traffic study used there and all the prior traffic studies for
this project, so that readers can understand the differences and draw their own
conclusions as to which, if any, is valid.
5. The traffic
analysis should include point-to-point travel time projections under the various alternatives, including the
no action alternative. Only this way will it be possible to understand the
effect on emergency services, on airport access, and on other essential trips.
Merely presenting speeds and volume-to-capacity ratios does not suffice to
reveal true operational impacts.
6. As we have
pointed out many times before, the assumptions underlying the original EIS’s
traffic studies are deeply flawed. These are discussed in detail in Brian Ketcham’s
testimony.
7. We assume the
project’s traffic projections will be based on the reasonable worst case
development scenario, but that should be made explicit.
8. Finally, the
brief description of the project’s approval process is opaque in giving
statutory citations without describing the actual steps involved in the new
ULURP process. That should be corrected.
