Source: Times Union (Albany, NY), February 8, 2014
Posted on: http://envfpn.advisen.com
Amid growing public pressure, the state Department of Environmental Conservation has reversed itself and will now require owners of a crude oil terminal seeking to expand at the Port of Albany to prepare a way of informing the predominantly poor and minority South End neighborhood of its plans.
DEC’s about-face happened less than a week after an environmental legal aid group and a coalition of elected officials and neighborhood, environmental and civic groups claimed that the agency last year violated its own policies by not requiring Global Companies to do such community planning as part of its bid to add a crude oil heating facility to its terminal.
Chris Amato, an attorney with EarthJustice, an environmental advocacy group, said that DEC Deputy Commissioner Marc Gerstman agreed at a meeting Thursday that Global must file an “enhanced” plan under a decade-old DEC “environmental justice” policy aimed at informing communities of projects prior to approval.
“Requiring the company to file a public participation plan is a major step in the right direction,” said Amato, who was DEC deputy commissioner for natural resources from 2007 to 2011. “We still hope that DEC will do the right thing and require a full-blown environmental impact statement on Global’s operations.”
Asked what was meant by an “enhanced” plan, DEC spokesman Peter Constantakes late Friday referred a reporter to a seven-year-old DEC memo on “tips” for companies preparing plans.
According to the memo, such plans “at a minimum” must:
Identify stakeholders to the proposed action.
Distribute and post written information on the proposed action and the environmental permit review process.
Hold a public information meeting or meetings to keep the public informed about the proposed action and the permit review process.
Establish an easily accessible document repository or repositories in or near the potential environmental justice area.
Provide a report or reports that summarize progress in implementing the plan, all substantive concerns, all resolved and outstanding issues, the components of the plan yet to be implemented and an expected timeline for completing the plan.
Upon completion of the plan, submit written certification that the applicant has complied with the plan and submit a final report detailing the activities that occurred pursuant to the plan.
Constantakes said Global has agreed to conduct the plan. A spokesman for Global did not return a request for comment.
In a letter last week to DEC Commissioner Joe Martens, Amato said DEC failed twice to follow its own policies when dealing with requests from Global — once in 2011 when it allowed the company to double the amount of crude oil being brought in from the Midwest on rail cars to 1.8 billion gallons annually, and again last year when the company applied to build a facility to heat crude oil to make it easier to pump from rail cars before it is shipped downriver on barges.
In both cases, DEC found that the projects would have no negative impact on the environment, decided that a detailed environmental study was not required, and accepted Global’s claim that it did not have to meet environmental justice policies.
“We are pleased that the company will be doing this report,” said Albany Common Council member Vivian Kornegay, who was among those attending Thursday’s meeting with Gerstman. “From the beginning of this, our goal has been to get DEC to give us education on this, so we can give that education to our constituents. But this is not the end of the effort. This is a bigger project than just writing a plan.”
In his letter to Martens, which also went to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his environmental secretary, Basil Seggos, Amato also asked that DEC:
Rescind its November 2012 approval for Global’s doubled oil shipments, which the company claimed to DEC could be done without increasing rail shipments, something that Amato wrote “defies credibility” given an increasing number of rail tankers now observable at the port and elsewhere including “through the heart of downtown Albany and right past DEC headquarters.”
As part of rescinding the earlier approval, require the company to file a full environmental impact statement on its oil terminal operations. Constantakes said this issue was “under review.”
Suspend the DEC review of an application by Global to build a crude oil heating plant at the port that Amato said could be used to process imported Canadian tar sands oil, which thickens in cold weather, making it difficult to pump.
At the port, oil tanker cars are stored close to Interstate 787 and portions of the South End, including the Ezra Prentice Homes, a city housing project where several hundred people live.
As the U.S. extracts more and more oil from the Bakken fields in North Dakota, there is more oil than pipelines can handle, so rail shipments heading East to relieve the backlog are skyrocketing. Oil trains can be more than a mile long and contain more than 100 cars carrying millions of gallons of highly flammable oil. A spate of derailments and explosions have raised increasing safety concerns about such trains.
Last week, Cuomo signed an executive order that directed four agencies — DEC, Health Department, Transportation Department, and Homeland Security and Emergency Services Division — to report by April 30 on state preparedness to handle a potential crude oil spill or resulting fire “by rail, ship or barge.” Cuomo specifically cited “significant expansion in the use of the Port of Albany in the distribution and transportation of crude oil” in his order.