Foes of Albany-area rail yard shift efforts
(The following story by Eric Anderson appeared on the Albany Times-Union website on October 6, 2009.)
STILLWATER, N.Y. — With the Halfmoon Planning Board giving its approval last week to a proposed $40 million intermodal yard, opponents of the project are looking to Stillwater for relief.
Pan Am Southern, a joint venture of Pan Am Railway and Norfolk Southern, plans the yard on the site of the former Boston & Maine Railroad freight yard. It's part of a $140 million project that also would prompt upgrades to the former Boston & Maine line between the Capital Region and eastern Massachusetts.
The Halfmoon Planning Board was the lead agency in the state environmental quality review of the project. Several Halfmoon residents had sought to have the intermodal yard's main entrance for trucks shifted farther from their homes.
But the project was approved without the shift.
"We are not done yet," opponents said on their Web site, www.movethebridge.com. Should Stillwater decide its planning board needs to review the project, "there must be a public hearing and we can then voice our concerns to our planning board members directly."
Efforts to reach a spokesman for the group Monday weren't successful.
But Daryl Cutler, an attorney for Stillwater, said attorneys and town engineers, as well as Stillwater's building department, are seeking to determine whether the project would have to go before the planning board.
State environmental quality review "does not dispense with the need for site plan approval," Cutler said. "It is a step in the site plan approval."
Meanwhile, work hasn't yet begun on the project, which includes a vehicle distribution center and a container transfer operation.
Railroad officials couldn't be reached for comment.
When the project was announced in July 2008, railroad officials had hoped to have the car distribution operations up and running by January 2010, with intermodal shipments following in April.
The facility is projected to eventually employ more than 80 people.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
