Larry is on target. He also has fewer typos.

I was on the other side of these things, at DCP, for years, and helped to prepare them for Departmental actions. The whole thing was hijacked within minutes after it was enacted, and there is a whole land use/environmental bar just looking to earn fees on the suits. The only question is whether or not someone is willing to pay.

Sure an analysis should be done. But the SEQR process is poisoned, and anything good for the environment should be exempted. After the pilot is up and running, there will be real information to analyze. No set of assumptions you can come up with would be as accurate. (And no analysis could be all encompassing enough that it could not be litigated as insufficient.) Try it, and it if doesn’t work, get rid of it and try something else.

How could the analysis be challenged in court? I can come up with a million ways, you perhaps more. For example, might the imposition of the fee cause some businesses to relocate corporate campuses on the exurban fringe? And would people then also move to that fringe to be closer to the job opportunities? What effect will that have on open space and water quality? Got that in your scope? Defend it in court.

Meanwhile, what is those significant change in transport in the area in the past 20 years? EZ-Pass. Before EZ-Pass, the bridges and tunnels were the bottleneck. In recessions, the modal split for auto (NYMTC Hub Bound) would go up, as people abandoned the transit system and took advantage of the additional capacity to drive. In an expansion, the traffic would back up at the bridges and tunnels until people couldn’t stand it anymore, and the transit share would rise. Post-EZ Pass, more people can get through the bridges and tunnels at peak (in NY, with free bridges, that’s the only time they are used), so the choke point has shifted to the streets.

So, what was the scope of the EIS for EZ-Pass?

Hey Bloomberg, if you don’t hire me to do an analysis with your assumptions, the other side can hire me to do an analysis with their assumptions. And if I hang onto that AICP certifcation, I can always make a few bucks by providing client-friendly testimony in court.

Nope, I can’t do it. But that makes me very, very strange.

Remember, the analysis won’t be valid if the impact would be what in fact would be a congesion pricing pilot were implemented, because the worst case probably isn’t what would occur.

And since Dutchess County is part of the affected area, how much will be charged to describe the land use of the affected area, present, future without the action, and reasonable worse case?

It may not also come through that traffic entering Manhattan north of the pricing zone would be captured by the river to river cross
Manhattan cordon.

If our website wasn’t a victim of endless repair, you could read the 5 page backup, which makes the case that the need for a CEQR determination is irrefutable but that it may be able to be done via an Environmental Assessment Statement (an EAS)that examines only the key issues at a level of of detail equivalent to that in an EIS. In past years, Konheim & Ketcham, prepared EASs for the nation’s, three largest hospital construction projects, which were largely traffic and parking studies, two in six months and one in under a year. (K&K is not taking on new business.) The main difference is that an EAS is not subject to public scrutiny of an EIS to attempt to keep it honest. However, because the community was involved in the three projects cited, beginning with an extensive alternative site analysis, they had confidence in the data, the assumptions and the results. In this case, Community Consulting Services would provide that technical oversight pro bono. as we do on so many other impact assessments, provide thr City makes the data available and embarks on collecting more adequate data–as London has done. More to come.

People get ahold of well intentioned rules and make them ridiculous, then organize to fight their repeal to make money. EIS consultants, led by AKRF, have fought to get more and more stuff thrown into the EIS. If one client lets it in, they can tell the next that they’ll testify the EIS is inadequate if it isn’t included. So the thing expands.

There was some success in beating it back, but mostly through the expansion of what qualifies for a negative declaration. Once you are in the EIS process, it’s still absurd.

Business has a right to complain. But this is something politics has done to us, and politics is the boss of government, so what can they say?

Meanwhile, everyone just breaks all the zoning/traffic laws anyway.

Incidentally, in another example of enviro review absurdity writ small, just yesterday, Bloomberg started work on the Hudson Greenway connector between 83rd and 91st st. That project was delayed by at least five years by absurd environmental analysis demanded by the State DEC, including a complicated computer modeled “shadow study.” Working on that project opened my eyes to some of the well intentioned, but still ridiculous enviro regs that businesses and govt agencies have to contend with.

I’m talking about changing the statue to simply exempt something from the entire process. It has been done multiple times.

Everyone who has ever participated knows what the whole EIS thing amounts to. If the EIS from Konheim and Ketchum would by 10,000 pages, the EIS from AKRF would be double that.

The city could simply game the assumptions to get a “neg dec” or “no impact” after wasting volumes of paper and perhaps years of time. And the opponents could sue and tie the thing up even in the assumptions are valid.

“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Ask Bob Alpern (sp), environmental planner at DEP (retired now), what he thinks of it.

How valuable will it be? One of the requirements, to be legally defensible, is a “description of the affected area” for land use. That’s right, without a detailed description of the entire area affected, not overall but each and every bit of it, the EIS is legally invalid. And what is the affected area? Arguable, the New York Metropolitan Area.

Fools think I’m making this up? I once spent weeks working overtime to prepare hundreds of tables and write hundreds of pages of text to produce a multi-volume description of the land use of New York City, for a zoning proposal that was later withdrawn! Knowing it was completely worthless and would never be read! And they aren’t going to let that document be reused either.

Let’s just say given what I got paid and the rate at which I work compared with just about anyone else I have ever met, something tells me such a document from Konheim and Ketchum will be a wee bit more expensive.

Ah, but at least that doesn’t require field work. How about an interection analysis of every intersection both inside and within five miles of the CP border? How can the effect of the proposal be imagined (word used intentionally) without it?

It’s s–t like this that drove me out of city planning (is that all it is? yes!) and the public sector once and for all. I’m in a low aggravation job now, but just hearing about it drives me nuts years later.

And it’s all in the name of altering THE ENVIRONMENT! Isn’t that exactly the kind of thing that SEQRA was created for? If not an EIS for something like this then what would you ever do an EIS for? Who knows what potential effects might be identified in an EIS — anyone scared to find out?

And don’t buy for a minute that this is really just a three-year program that could go un-renewed, after all that money to implement it. Forget it — the only thing that would change is that the fee would go up, just as it does for everything in NYC every 1-2 years.

Guess what — the state legislature has the power to amend the law and exempt congestion pricing, or at least at three-year test of congestion pricing, from SEQR. And whenever it wants something big to happen — the repair of NYC schools, new schools, LIE upgrades on Long Island — it usually does.

Failure to exempt is tanamount to a no. We might get congestion pricing, or we might get a no. But we will not get both an EIS and congestion pricing in the new five years.

But I have to wonder — why did Bloomberg wait so long to introduce this plan? He could have done it right in the first term, with a much better and longer public outreach campaign, stronger arguments and maybe time for an EIS and any legal challenges. But now we’re left defending a great idea supported by a strategy that is less than ideal.

Might as well not bother.

And someone said it right — there is no EIS required for existing conditions.

If they do this, an EIS could be required for a bicycle lane, with each one costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare, plus litigation costs. You heard me right.

What is the impact of that bicycle lane on 9th Avenue on taxis? Might more pedestrians be injured if bikes are drawn there? How about the economic impact on stores of more difficult delivieries? Might a bike lane cause the displacement of less affluent people from Chelsea, because it will attract affluent people to the neighborhood?

For $500,000 Konheim and Ketchum will provide a legally defensible answer in several volumes. Their testimony in court in the subsequent lawsuit is additional. And, to be legally defensible, they will assume the “reasonable worst case.”

Have any of you every written (sections of an) EIS? Have any of you ever had to write defenses of one in court? WELL I HAVE AND I KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON!

That said, Larry Littlefield makes a strong tactical argument: Mr. Bloomberg’s naked claim that this is an “experiment” might succeed in court — but it shouldn’t. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on transit improvements, cameras and software and collecting a substantial revenue stream (to which politicians could easily become addicted) are not “experiments.” Judges might might well conclude that the experimental fig leaf does not cover this project.

The environmental assessment process may be a pain but scuttling it will hurt us more in the medium term.

Meanwhile, your “reasonable worst case” analysis will find that if you do absolutely anything all life on earth will be extinguished.

Shh! Don’t give away our Leader’s secret plan!