July 27, 2009   Last Friday, The Journal News posted the Rockland County planners’ rejection of the proposed poultry slaughterhouse on North Main Street in New Hempstead. They called the plant "an incompatible, industrial use that should not be permitted alongside residential properties." On the same Friday morning, Supervisor St. Lawrence, on his WRCR local radio slot, said he would not oppose it, and, in fact, he praised the project as economically advantageous and state-of-the-art, as well. He virtually guaranteed that there would be no brown-air problems on Main Street from this 50,730-square-foot factory.

　
"Ain’t nobody in here but us chickens!"

What Brown Air?
Despite the fact that the County opposes the slaughter/processing plant, the final decision is likely to belong to the Village of New Square. That is, unless one of several things happen:

Judging from St. Lawrence’s response to Friday’s on-air questions, you can count him out, if you’re looking for support.

Robert Romanowski, Republican candidate for Supervisor who will face St. Lawrence in the Republican primary, called in Friday morning and asked St. Lawrence the following question. If the people of Ramapo are overwhelmingly against the slaughterhouse, would you file an Article 78 lawsuit against New Square to test the project in Supreme Court?

St. Lawrence’s response was a curt, "No!"

It was a direct, whose side are you on kind of question, and he sufficiently explained himself. He is the Supervisor of New Square first and of Ramapo second. For those who have doubts, look at who collected signatures on the petitions to get him on the ballot for this fall. And then review whose vote keeps him in office?

He then went on to explain why he thought the project was a good idea.

He assured the audience there won’t be any bad odors because the plant was going to be state-of-the-art. Of course, you can assume that the past history of outrageous building and fire safety violations in New Square would not be relevant to St. Lawrence’s discussion of the merits. (The NY State head of fire inspection said the Village of New Square had the worst record of violations in the history of the State.) As a resident though, you might wonder, can this Village be trusted to provide the necessary environmental controls?

For anyone who has driven by the poultry processing plants for Perdue and Tyson on the Delmarva Peninsula, in Maryland and Virginia, the ultimate question might be, Can anyone prevent the brown-air pollution caused by these kinds of plants?

And the stink is only part of the problem. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have found "evidence of a novel pathway for potential human exposure to antibiotic-resistant bacteria from intensively raised poultry—driving behind the trucks transporting broiler chickens from farm to slaughterhouse." Those are the trucks that would be regularly rumbling down Main Street. You can read "Transporting Broiler Chickens Could Spread Antibiotic-Resistant Organisms" in the Journal of Infection and Public Health at http://www.jiph.org/article/S1876-0341(08)00002-6/abstract. 

Actually, the number of environmental hazards connected with this kind of installation are varied, numerous, and serious. Perhaps the Supervisor should do some reading before dismissing them all with a simple-minded phrase like "it's state-of-the-art."

A second defense offered by the Supervisor to the radio listeners was that there already was a smaller slaughterhouse operating within New Square. Now there’s some specious logic for you. There’s one there, so it must be O.K. Well, it wasn’t O.K. with the County planners. And is the Supervisor saying that the multitude of fire and housing code violations in the Village legitimize the repetition of this kind of building in the future, because they’re there already?

Then, he claimed the Town has no control in New Square. The plant is wholly within the control of New Square. That’s simply not true. The large Adult Student Housing project that St. Lawrence fast-tracked for the old Nike Base on Grandview was built, thanks to him and his board, but it stands empty today, thanks to the surrounding villages who have sued claiming the negative environmental impact the project imposes on neighbors. St. Lawrence has to begin telling Ramapo residents the truth about the political path he has already chosen for this controversial proposal. It's not that the Town has no control over New Square--it's that New Square controls the Town--that is, St. Lawrence and his board. Want a dramatic example of this? Look at how St. Lawrence treated the Hillcrest Firefighters when they tried to open a legal discussion about getting out of New Square. 

Olfactorily Challenged
That Supervisor St. Lawrence has chosen to become an advocate of this catastrophically bad idea should not shock voters—neither those in Ramapo nor those in New Square. This is the political corner he has backed himself into. And now he has little choice but to function as the spokesman for a group that owns him.

What is a little bizarre, though, is that this pattern of bad decisions and policies seem to indicate a dysfunctional sense of smell. After some sizable  donations from a developer in N.J. (North Haledon), St. Lawrence decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to build 650 homes right on top of a Superfund cleanup site. And then there are all those years as Vice-chair of the Sewer Commission, which he spent denying frequent and dangerous raw sewage spills in Ramapo, until the DEC clamped down with fines and a Consent Order demanding $50 million in repairs. And now he’s trying to pass off the brown air from a slaughterhouse as a breath of economic fresh air for Hillcrest and New Hempstead?

Yet despite all this, he does seem to have kept a keen sense of smell for the scent of money. In that part of the fragrance spectrum, he’s a veritable beagle. But the reeking raw sewage in the streams, the chemical toxins under someone's front porch, or the smell of dead poultry hovering over residential neighborhoods in August—to those rank stimuli he seems to suffer from a chronic anosmia (can't-smell-worth-a-damn syndrome).

Michael Castelluccio