ESD Board Chair: no public comments received. But I did send a comment, noting limited window for public comment. (Not the first time comments were ignored.)

So yesterday the board of Empire State Development (ESD) held its monthly board meeting.

I thought Atlantic Yards should've been on the agenda, but they apparently had more pressing business.

As shown in the video below, Chair Kevin Law, at the outset of the meeting, stated, "I'd like to note that the public was given both an opportunity to attend the meeting--but I think we have all staff here... We also gave the public an opportunity to provide written comments to all the Agenda items today and, as of this morning, we have not received any comments from the public regarding today's Agenda."

Not quite. There was a very limited opportunity to comment, but I did submit a comment a day earlier, with appropriate lead time, as shown in the screenshot above right, pointing out the absurdity of allowing fewer than 2.5 hours to peruse the Agenda and send a comment.

 

The meeting announcement stated, "Members of the public may submit comments on the Agenda items in writing to ESD@esd.ny.gov by Noon on Wednesday, March 22, 2023." 

 

I wrote:

As a journalist and as a citizen, I point out:
--public comment on Agenda items is required by noon today, thus requiring commenters, assuming they have an opportunity to peruse the Agenda (+Materials), to comment before the ESD directors' discussion of those items tomorrow. That requires clairvoyance.
--even under those strictures, there should be a meaningful opportunity to see the Agenda (and the Board Materials). As of 9:30 am today, nothing was posted beyond a Media Advisory for the meeting. I noticed the Agenda+Materials, a 328-page document, posted at 9:56 am, so it was apparently posted sometime between 9:30 am and 9:56 am. Do the directors think a span of fewer than 2.5 hours is sufficient to comment on such a document?

If they were splitting hairs, my comment was not on any of the individual Agenda items but very much of a comment on "today's Agenda." And it was the kind of feedback that you'd think a government agency should take to heart.

  

Past problems

This wasn't the first time that comments I sent mysteriously disappeared.

As I wrote in June 2014, faced with clear evidence--my own public comment, in real time--that the court-ordered Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for Atlantic Yards was not complete, given the failure to acknowledge at least one submitted comment, the ESD board asked no questions but simply ignored the issue and then offered rubber-stamp approval.

I also noted that, in November 2006, the ESD board--then known as ESDC--approved the Atlantic Yards Final Environmental Impact Statement as complete but later had to re-approve a revised version that acknowledged numerous comments from Prospect Heights resident Raul Rothblatt that had been ignored.

A day after my June 2014 post, ESDC responded--somewhat dubiously, to my mind--that "your May 6, 2014, email had been quarantined, and thus had not reached our email inbox. Unfortunately, the email response that you received from staff confirming receipt of your three emails was sent in error."

Two weeks later, my comment, and the explanation for its absence, was addressed in ESDC Board Materials. However, the "quarantine" explanation didn't account for the fact that I also had sent my comment directly to an ESDC staffer.