Letter to the Editor:

November 7, 2008

Summit Greenfield should provide DEIS in electronic form
Steve Swirsky

“Providing this mass of material in any format other than a searchable format that the town board members and their consultants and advisors can use for their own study and review of the DEIS, and that they can make available to everyone else in the town who is interested in this study and its content, appears to be nothing more than an attempt to stifle discussion and analysis and to prevent any meaningful public review of what is clearly something that the public has a right to access and comment upon.”

Letter to the Editor: Summit Greenfield should provide DEIS in electronic form
Dear Editor,
I am writing to comment on your article in last week’s edition of NewCastleNOW.org reporting the fact that Summit Greenfield Partners have refused to provide the New Castle Town Board and the citizens of New Castle with their three volume Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) and its 15 separate appendices in a CD or other computer format. See “Town Board’s review of Reader’s Digest property DEIS held up until bill is paid,” NewCastleNOW.org, October 31, 2008.

In pertinent part, your article said: “After the meeting, Summit Greenfield publicist Geoff Thompson explained that his client would not release the DEIS on disc until the town board had examined it and declared it “complete,” at the end of the 45-day review mandated by New York State.

‘During the review process, the town board may ask for a lot of additional information,’ said Thompson, ‘requiring us to make changes to the document. We want everyone to be working from the same document. We don’t want multiple versions circulating.’ Summit Greenfield has also declined to provide town board members with disc versions of the three-volume hard copy.”

Providing this mass of material in any format other than a searchable format that the town board members and their consultants and advisors can use for their own study and review of the DEIS, and that they can make available to everyone else in the town who is interested in this study and its content, appears to be nothing more than an attempt to stifle discussion and analysis and to prevent any meaningful public review of what is clearly something that the public has a right to access and comment upon.

The town board should insist that Summit Greenfield’s filing of the DEIS will not be deemed received unless and until they produce the document and all of its appendices in a format that allows the town to post them on its website and make all of the materials easily accessible in a searchable format. 

It is no doubt unintended irony that Summit Greenfield’s attorney is quoted in your article commenting on what he and his client apparently consider a disservice by the town from what he considers the “erect[ing of] unauthorized barriers that delay public review of that [DEIS]” when the town requires Summit Greenfield to pay it the $400,000 that New Castle has laid out to accommodate the developer’s petition. That pales shockingly compared to Summit Greenfield’s actions that do not delay but in fact seek to prevent the public’s review of the DEIS by keeping it out of the hands of the public.
Steven Swirsky