Here is a video of that portion of the ZBA meeting. It runs about an hour and twenty-five minutes. Click on the Google video button for a full albeit fuzzy screen. The first half hour or so is devoted to establishing a time line for future hearing dates and brief filings. After that it picks up a little as Attorney Koff begins to present the case of the 42 residents who seek relief from the alleged unpleasant living the conditions with which they are forced to live as neighbors of the landfill. Utilizing a PowerPoint presentation, Michael Fedora serves as a witness on how the living conditions near the landfill have changed since 1990.
Also at issue is whether the use of the landfill has changed. One board member opines that the landfill as originally designed took in trash and that today it continues to do so. However, that description is like comparing the Serio’s Market on State Street in Northampton to its competitor Super Stop & Shop on King Street. Basically both establishments sell food, but the similarities end there, more or less. It can be argued that due to scale the two grocery establishments have quite different impacts on the community. If Serio’s decided to expand twenty-fold, they would have to satisfy a myriad of conditions as put forth by the city through its permitting and zoning processes respectively. Critics of the landfill zoning enforcement basically are arguing that the city failed to undertake these processes when expanding the uses of the landfill, which was converted from a local trash dump into a regional waste and recycling management facility around 1990.
Video coverage courtesy Northampton Redoubt.
After several failed attempts to upload the ZBA landfill zoning enforcement hearing in its entirety to Google Video, I uploaded it to the PCF website as a Windows Media file. The link is provided here and is also on the PCF landfill page at paradisecityforum.net. It is quite large at over 300 MB as that portion of the meeting was an hour and twenty-five minutes long. I suggest saving it to your computer. If you use a dial up connection this would be prohibitive unfortunately. I will be providing a dvd of the hearing to both the DPW and Citizen’s United for a Healthy Future, and possibly the two public libraries in town. As well, I will continue to address upload problems with Google Video until they are rectified. Thanks for your patience.
