Kingston's New Mayor on the Pilgrim Pipeline: "Not So Fast!"

This thing is a bad idea all around. Good on our new mayor and the common council for stepping up to fight its construction:

KINGSTON >> City aldermen have voted to forward formal objections to the New York State Thruway Authority being one of the agencies leading the environmental review of the proposed $553.2 million Pilgrim pipelines project.

At a Common Council meeting Tuesday, aldermen said it would be a conflict of interest for the authority to share responsibility for the review with the state Department of Environmental Conservation. The vote was 8-0, with Alderman Doug Koop, D-Ward 2, absent.

“I’m really proud of the Common Council for stepping up at a very late date,” said Alderman Brad Will, D-Ward 3. “This was brought to us by nonprofit organizations that have been good watchdogs.”

Aldermen had been given a letter from Mayor Steve Noble, who wrote that he declined to accept the Dec. 21 declaration by the two state agencies for shared responsibility over the environmental review.

The gist of the mumbo jumbo, iirc from by days covering town planning boards, whenever you build something that will have a potentially negative impact on the local environment, what is known as a "listed action," there needs to be a lead agency to coordinate the process. In this case it's the Thruway Authority who says it should be that designee.

The mayor and common council are arguing, and rightly so in my opinion, that the Thruway Authority doesn't have the know-how to do the job adequately:

“The Thruway Authority’s very narrow expertise in highway use policy and regulation does not provide an adequate basis to justify the authority’s serving as a co-lead agency in an environmental review,” Noble wrote. “The Department of Environmental Conservation itself discourages co-lead agency because of the potential for disagreement and this case does not merit an exception. (The) Department of Environmental Conservation has advised in the past that language in the regulations that provide for the Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner to choose between agencies and the plain reading of the regulations themselves preclude the use of co-lead agencies.”

Noble added that the “Thruway Authority continues to have an apparent conflict of interest in overseeing the environmental review of the project that if approved would result in its receipt of revenues from Pilgrim (pipelines) project from fees charged ... for use of the right-of-way.”

The mayor goes on to cite a host of environmental concerns, most of which have to do with the fact that the pipeline will cross a number of rivers and streams, at least some of which provide drinking water to municipalities. These municipalities must have their concerns addressed.

Of course, some would argue that this kind of pipeline would be a huge improvement over the bomb trains that transport the volatile Bakken Crude to refineries. I have a track less than a half-mile from my house, so this concerns me directly.

But there's a third option: get rid of all of it. Stop pumping Bakken Crude out of the ground. It's as simple as that. And the lower gas prices go, the more likely it is that this third choice will be the one that wins the day. As oil prices plunge, it becomes less and less economically viable to extract difficult-to-reach crude oil. You're not going to spend $100 recovering $10 worth of commodities, right? But if that commodity sees prices go up significantly, then it might make sense. Currently, as I'm sure you've noticed, gas prices are as low as they've been in a long time. This trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

A new energy paradigm is beginning to emerge. The pipeline, and the bomb trains, are relics of the old way of doing business. I'm glad virtually all of my local elected officials realize this and are taking action.