Special Bd. of Aldermen — 10/26/15 Page 25
In this case, we do just want to make clear tonight that without the support of the City, we don’t intend to move
forward in this direction with the developer. Like Melissa said, we want you to understand that this is a really
unique situation, this isn’t something we see all the time. We want to make very clear to you that this is, and |
hope we’ve done that tonight, that this is addressing more than just the Mohawk Tannery Site. It is addressing
these other parcels that otherwise would go untouched by EPA.
You could speak to the State and Robin Mongeon from DES is here tonight, but those properties are
considered protected. You could never re-develop on them as they are now. We are hoping that this
developer is coming in to give the City an opportunity to do that. That said, and | don’t mean to be
inconsiderate, it is really not up to us and it doesn’t, we want to see this happen because we care about
communities we work in. At the same time, if we have to backtrack and go back and list this on the NPL, that
is what we will do. Like Melissa said, likely we will come up with the same solution. And I’m not trying to say
that like we’ve heard that we are throwing this solution at you, but that is, in all probability, wnat is going to
happen.
So we just want to make that abundantly clear that this process is not considered an NPL proposal listing,
however it is very similar to the process that we would go to. And we would probably come up with the same
solution, but in this case it wouldn’t be addressing these other properties, there would not be a developer on
board, these properties wouldn't likely to be able to be reused and as Gerardo just mentioned it could be
decades from now before you see anything happen there.
So | apologize for sitting back and being blunt, but we just really wanted to make sure that we got that across.
The other piece is that Alderman Lopez asked a couple of times about responses to the comments that you
made and we certainly weren’t ignoring or not responding to those, but they were taken as part of the public
comment, which as Gerardo mentioned, we will be responding to in a package when we do come out with the
action memorandum.
| would encourage you to just understand that we are here for you, we are happy to talk through any of this, we
know it a lot of information to take in. But we do want you to understand that we are here now with the
developer in this potential opportunity to move forward on the site. We can’t speak for him obviously but our
understanding is that this is a financially limited and potentially time limited depending on when decisions are
made; so just to make that very clear. Thank you very much for having us here tonight, we hope it was really
helpful.
Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja
Thank you. So to follow up on your comment about you are here for any questions we have. If a member of
the Board of Aldermen had a question or wanted further clarification, who would they contact and how would
they go about doing that to make sure their comment, like Alderman Lopez about his comments were just
there, whether he wanted them to be part of public comment. | think maybe people didn’t realize that they
would have to wait until March to get responses. So if they wanted more immediate responses how would they
go about doing that?
Ms. Dumville Those comments were just counted as the public comment period and stated so in e-mails to a
number of people including community members. You are welcome to pick up the phone and call Gerardo or
myself anytime with questions. Alderman McCarthy has my e-mail address as does Sue Lovering who helped
set this up. I’m happy if you’d like to share that around with everyone.
President McCarthy
| would suggest that if you have questions, get them to Sue and have Sue give them there and then we can
make sure responses get sent to the full Board and published so that we all have the same information.
