A Community Divided
Life in Hudson once centered around the cement industry, and its disappearance, along with the creation of strip malls in Greenport, left Hudson with boarded up storefronts for several years in the 1980s and early 1990s. The city began to experience a rebirth about 10 years ago, as antique shops, art galleries, and restaurants moved in, catering to an arts and tourism industry that continues to thrive. The city of 7,524 now boasts a main street with more than 70 antique shops and an ever-expanding coterie of art galleries and performance venues. The owners of many of these establishments fear the out-of-town customers they rely on for a living would stop coming if a cement plant with a 400-foot emissions stack was looming over the city. And some gallery owners say they plan to move away if St. Lawrence gains approval. They didn’t move to the Hudson Valley, they say, to live in the shadow of a belching smokestack.

The company plans to bring cement-making back to the county, almost three decades after the last of a series of plants closed here, by constructing what would be one of the largest cement plants in the nation. The proposed facility would be built on a 2,000-acre property the company owns, with the actual plant, a series of approximately 20 structures, situated inside a limestone quarry on Becraft Mountain in Greenport. With a main stack of slightly more than 400 feet, the plant would also include a 372-foot preheater building and three silos, ranging in height from 188 to 228 feet. The rest of the structures, including an office building, kiln, and coal mill, would range in height from 32 to 132 feet. A conveyor belt connecting the quarry and plant with an industrial docking facility on the company’s riverfront property in the city of Hudson would pass over two state roads at the gateways to the city.

The plant St. Lawrence plans to build in Greenport would produce two million metric tons of cement annually, approximately three times as much product as the aging St. Lawrence plant on the other side of the river in Catskill. A metric ton is equal to 1,000 kilograms, or approximately 2,205 pounds. One reason St. Lawrence has given for wanting to move its operations from Catskill to Greenport is that its limestone reserves are running out at its Greene County mine, and its quarry in Columbia County has 50 to 100 years of reserves left.
Once the Greenport plant is online, cement production would cease in Catskill, though bagging and distribution operations would continue there. Also, any cement kiln dust that St. Lawrence is unable to either recycle into the cement-making process in Greenport or sell would be placed in a landfill at the Catskill site.

Debate in the community over the highly controversial proposal has centered around topics ranging from the reindustrialization of the Hudson River Valley to the impact blasting in the quarry would have on the foundations of nearby historic homes. Hudson’s City Hall has been filled to capacity on several occasions by residents fearful that the plant will lower their property values, harm their children’s health, and ruin any chance the city has to develop recreational and commercial opportunities at its waterfront park. Heated debates over the type of fuel the St. Lawrence would use to fuel its cement kiln have also been heard. The company is seeking permits to burn coal, coke (coal residue), and natural gas, but people who oppose the plant have repeatedly raised fears that St. Lawrence will someday seek to burn tires or hazardous waste, as it has at other plants.

The debate has polarized the community, with each side indulging in name-calling and accusations of “dirty tricks.” For example, area newspapers had regularly received bundles of pro-plant letters to the editor, until it turned out that some of these were forgeries, written without the knowledge or consent of those whose names were signed to them. Anti-plant groups blamed the forgeries on St. Lawrence, while St. Lawrence suggested they were part of an elaborate scheme by plant opponents to make the company look bad.

Recent reporting on the cement plant proposal has generally focused on the divisions between the factions opposing or supporting the plant. An article in New York magazine had both sides of the issue up in arms because of the weight given in the report to the differences in socioeconomics and education between the plant supporters and opponents. Plant opponents have made it clear their ranks include more than just the newcomers, antiques dealers and NIMBYs they are often described as; and some plant supporters are loath to be characterized as good ole boys who own dilapidated barns and pick-up trucks. The truth is that there are doctors, teachers, firefighters, newcomers, old-timers, as well as weekenders, and wealthy folk, on both sides of the issue.

Plant Politics
While such debates rage in coffee shops and bars, the Republican-controlled Columbia County Board of Supervisors, as well as the Greenport Town Board, have opened their arms to the cement company, citing the job retention that would occur if St. Lawrence is able to construct its plant.

St. Lawrence currently has 154 employees in Columbia and Greene counties. That number would increase to 155 when the Greenport plant is operating. Plant opponents argue that one additional job does not justify the adverse environmental impacts the new plant would have on the area. The company counters that it would add $48 million to the area’s economy and generate $20 million every year in direct and indirect compensation for local families; pay $929,000 each year in new, local property taxes and host community fees; and provide other cash payments to local governments totaling $586,000.

Without exception, the elected officials who have come out in favor of the plant have done so with the caveat that their support is dependent on St. Lawrence being able to meet or exceed all state and federal environmental standards. And while they are waiting to see if St. Lawrence can make the grade, members of the Greenport Town Board have come to an agreement with the company, under which Greenport would get $200,000 a year from the company that town officials have said they would use to offset local property taxes. Greenport would also receive funding from the company every year the plant is in operation to conduct air quality testing, and the company would post a $2 million bond against any damage to the town’s drinking water supply. In return, Greenport officials agreed not to challenge the company’s draft state permits or seek party status for the adjudication of any issues involving those permits.

Linda Mussmann, co-director and owner of Time and Space Limited in Hudson, a performing arts space, art gallery, movie house, and cultural center, launched a third-party candidacy for mayor in the city’s 2001 elections. A major tenet of her campaign platform was her strong and public opposition to St. Lawrence’s proposal.

For two years, the leaders of the previous city administration would not say whether they were for or against the plant, Mussmann says. “I really felt it was important that someone honestly say what they thought.”
While Mussmann is not sitting in the mayor’s office today, she believes her involvement in the race “made the candidates have to be more straightforward about what they were supporting.”

As for her own opposition to the plant, Mussmann says, “First of all, it’s simply too big, and I think it will overwhelm the community.”

Targeting her comments at St. Lawrence the corporate entity, as opposed to the people who work for it, Mussmann describes the company as an “economic monster waiting to start up a coal-burning plant that would operate 24 hours a day.” She says that because of its sheer size, the plant would become a politically and economically corrupting force in the community.

Mussman’s view is shared by the more than 2,400-member Friends of Hudson, an anti-plant group, as well as at least 18 other local, regional, statewide, and national groups and agencies, ranging from the Olana Partnership to Poughkeepsie-based Scenic Hudson, Inc., and from the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

Entering the game in January after the state’s public comment period on the plant had ended, Blumenthal raised concerns about airborne emissions entering Connecticut from St. Lawrence’s proposed plant across the state line. He compared the St. Lawrence issue to Connecticut’s court battle against pollution that travels to his state from Midwestern power plants.

St. Lawrence officials have repeatedly asserted that their proposed Greenport facility would improve air quality in the region because its state-of-the-art environmental controls would replace those used at the company’s aging plant across the Hudson River in Catskill. Still, 34 doctors at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson issued a statement predicting increased death, asthma, cancer, and hospitalization rates if the plant is put into operation.

But not everyone shares those views. Patrick Nolan, an employee of the Town of Greenport, heads the Hudson Valley Environmental/Economic Coalition, a group that supports St. Lawrence’s plans. Of the group’s genesis, Nolan said, “it was four of us that felt there was nothing positive regarding the whole project. It was just negative. So we decided to start the group.”

In its first public statement HVEEC emphasized its faith in the regulatory process, and said the project should be dependent on St. Lawrence’s ability to meet or exceed all regulatory conditions.

Nolan says he supports the plant because of the economic stability it will bring to the region. And he defines “region” quite broadly.
For example, Nolan’s job recently took him more than 30 miles away to Watervliet in Albany County, where he had to take a motor that needed to be rebuilt. Nolan quoted a person working at the repair shop who, upon seeing his blue “Support the Plant” shirt, told Nolan that his company does a lot of work on the cement company’s motors. “This is Watervliet that is effected by St. Lawrence Cement,” Nolan says. “I see examples like that every day of how St. Lawrence is tied into the local economy.”

Mary Anne “Mim” Traver, whose grandfather, father, two uncles, husband, and son were employed at the Atlas cement plant, is another supporter of St. Lawrence’s proposal.

“It’s going to be a financial boost for Columbia County in many ways,” says Traver, who served as Hudson’s Common Council president for three two-year terms in the 1990s. “In the school districts, in the retail businesses, in the restaurant businesses, there are many, many people who will profit and will prosper from it.”

Traver believes St. Lawrence has tried very hard to be a good neighbor, by sponsoring youth sports leagues, libraries, and town park projects.
St. Lawrence spokeswoman Ellen Nicholas cites “a variety of benefits that [will] accrue to the Hudson Valley and region at large. The Hudson Valley will retain an organization that provides in excess of 150 good-paying blue-collar and executive jobs.” And Nicholas says $187 million will be pumped into the local economy during the two years it would take to build the plant.

“Additionally, the replacement plant would no longer draw 2.5 million gallons of water from the Hudson River each day, nor discharge any water into the Hudson,” Nicholas says.

An Issue of Health
The impacts St. Lawrence’s new plant would have on air quality and community character, as well as the company’s environmental track record, have been some of the most hotly debated topics surrounding the proposal. With both the company and the opponents using the same emissions figures, and even the same New England Journal of Medicine report to bolster their positions, it becomes almost impossible for the objective observer to see through the haze on air pollution issues.

According to a recent St. Lawrence mailing, the current plant in Catskill, which the company promises to decommission if its proposed new plant is built, is permitted to produce 29,350,000 pounds of emissions annually, but actually produces 15,968,000 pounds. The proposed new plant, St. Lawrence says, would have permits for 19,614,000 pounds yearly, but would “typically” emit 14,356,000 pounds.

St. Lawrence officials compare existing emissions from their Catskill plant to what the company says would be typical emissions from the proposed Greenport/Hudson facility, concluding that there would be a decrease of 1.6 million pounds of pollution each year, or 4,370 pounds a day. In addition to an overall decrease in emissions, company officials say lead and mercury emissions would be cut by more than 90 percent each, and acid-rain-causing emissions of nitrogen oxides would be cut by more than 80 percent.

But plant opponents argue that “typical” emissions cannot be legally enforced. The only meaningful numbers, they say, are the much higher permitted emissions levels. Subtracting the current actual emissions levels from what would be permitted at the new plant, Friends of Hudson concludes that overall emissions could increase by 24 percent, or 3,762,220 pounds a year. FOH says there could be a 184,000-pound increase in emissions of volatile organic compounds, a 7,332,000-pound increase in carbon monoxide and a 72,000-pound increase in nitrogen oxides.

Of all the emissions, soot (or particulate matter) has proven to be the most hotly debated, and most notably, emissions of PM 2.5, which is particulate matter of 2.5 microns or less—roughly 28 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The US Environmental Protection Agency issued restrictions on levels of PM 2.5 in 1997, but implementation of the federal regulations has been held up by industry court challenges, and a standard methodology for testing emissions of PM 2.5 has yet to be adopted by the EPA or New York state.

By differentiating between combustion-related toxic PM 2.5 and PM 2.5 that is found naturally in the rocks that St. Lawrence mines for its cement, the company argues that its new plant could cut total emissions of PM 2.5 by 14 percent and emissions of “harmful” PM 2.5 by 40 percent. The opposition counters there is no such thing as “good PM 2.5” when talking about dust that enters people’s lungs, and cites recent studies showing that the size of small particulates, apart from their composition, can cause a myriad of health problems.

Increases in the amount of soot over a 24-hour period, correlate more directly with increases in death rates from heart- or lung-related causes than do any of the other major pollutants, according to a December 2000 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The article, titled “Fine Particulate Air Pollution and Mortality in 20 US Cities, 1987-1994,” found “consistent evidence” that increased levels of airborne particulate matter were associated with increased death rates. The article cites studies indicating that “more than 50,000 people die prematurely each year from illnesses caused by exposure to fine soot.”

Opposition groups also are hopeful that the state permits St. Lawrence needs to build and operate a new plant could be denied on the grounds that the facility would have a devastating effect on the character and economic vitality of a local community where heavy industry has largely been replaced by tourism, antiques dealers, and second-home sales. St. Lawrence has argued that its project would be an economic boon to the region and that industry continues to have an important role in the Hudson Valley’s diverse economy. St. Lawrence also claims that its opposition has provided no proof that the company’s proposal to replace its cement plant in Catskill with a new one in Greenport would have a negative impact on tourism, the antiques trade, or second-home sales. But plant opponents say a coal-burning plant with a 400-foot smokestack towering over the city would degrade the beauty of a landscape that has drawn people to the Hudson Valley for centuries.
Opponents of the plant also point to what they perceive as the abysmal environmental track record of St. Lawrence and its parent companies, Holnam and Holcim. Friends of Hudson has referred to a number of cases of noncompliance, such as the time Holnam’s cement plant in Dundee, Michigan was fined $576,500 by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality for having emissions of particulate matter that were in excess of allowable limits.

One of the most recent acts of noncompliance by St. Lawrence was reported earlier this year by the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Inquirer reported that “after an investigation in December, the [New Jersey] Department of Environmental Protection found that the St. Lawrence Cement Co. did not report dust-emission data, as required by the state’s Air Pollution Control Act.” New Jersey fined the company $20,550, but St. Lawrence indicated it would challenge the fine and that the alleged administrative violations had to do with reporting protocol and not with emissions and operating standards.

St. Lawrence has tried to keep the focus on its unremarkable compliance record at its Catskill plant, and the state Department of Environmental Conservation looked no further than the local setting when it determined there were no significant enforcement actions against St. Lawrence in New York. Each of the 15 violations at the Catskill plant in the last 10 years carried fines of no more than $20,000. St. Lawrence officials have also said that its parent company Holnam, which has been involved in other violations, would have no day-to-day control of St. Lawrence’s Greenport operation, though the opposition points out that Holnam owns 64 percent of St. Lawrence.

What It All Means
Sam Pratt, executive director of Friends of Hudson, believes the fight over St. Lawrence is really over what the vision of the Hudson Valley should be in the 21st century. One of the group’s toughest battles has been convincing long-time residents that St. Lawrence’s proposed plant will not bring back the economic prosperity the cement industry created here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “We’re not anti-industry,” Pratt says. Rather, he says, Friends of Hudson wants to see green, sustainable industry in the valley that is compatible with everything from farming to tourism. “Desirable industries do not choose to site themselves next to LULUs [Locally Undesirable Land Uses].”
The larger issue for Pratt is that, as he puts it, “if this plant can be sited, then possibly anything can.” He believes that if the Greenport project is approved, it will be hard for permitting agencies to say no to similar projects in Kingston or Peekskill. “If we let this one in, it’s just open season.”

But before St. Lawrence can put shovel to dirt, it must get at least 17 state, federal, and local permits, and to date the company, in large part because of the organized opposition to the proposal, has yet to receive a single permit. And even without the opposition, the road to approval would have been a long one. In order to build and operate a new cement plant, St. Lawrence needs permits from the New York DEC, the Greenport Planning Board, the Hudson Planning Commission, the New York Department of State, the Federal Aviation Administration, the US Coast Guard, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and the state Office of General Services. Currently, the proposal is in DEC Commissioner Erin Crotty’s hands. All the other agencies are waiting for the DEC to complete its review of the project before they begin theirs.

Crotty is currently reviewing a 130-page ruling that was handed down in December 2001 by the two DEC administrative law judges who presided last summer over public hearings and an issues conference, during which representatives of the DEC, St. Lawrence, opposition groups, and municipalities debated whether there are issues that could lead to the denial or modification of St. Lawrence’s draft state permits. The ruling explains what issues the judges found needed further review and which opposition groups should be involved in the adjudication of those issues.

In addition to the ruling, Crotty is reviewing St. Lawrence’s appeal to the judges’ decision, which seeks to prevent any additional review.
The administrative law judges, after reviewing thousands of pages of transcripts and hundreds of pages of legal briefs, found eight issues they believe should be adjudicated, as well as a long list of environmental issues they determined St. Lawrence needed to more thoroughly address in its Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Negotiated by St. Lawrence and DEC staff, the DEIS includes details of St. Lawrence’s plans, as well as how the company expects to mitigate any significant adverse impacts its operations would have on the environment. St. Lawrence’s appeal was considerably longer than the judge’s ruling, and the opposition groups weighed in with their reply briefs to the company’s appeal.

Crotty may take as long as she likes to reach a decision, and while St. Lawrence supporters and opponents alike have speculated the timing of the commissioner’s decision might be tied in to this year’s gubernatorial election cycle, Governor George E. Pataki has said he will avoid creating any undue influence and has not commented on the project. Both state Comptroller H. Carl McCall and Andrew Cuomo, who want to challenge Pataki in this November’s election, came out in opposition to St. Lawrence’s plans, citing concerns about public health.
While the St. Lawrence issue may prove over the next four months to be interesting fodder for political debate in the upcoming races for governor, state Senate, and Assembly, the future of the cement plant proposal will remain in limbo until DEC Commissioner Crotty determines the direction the review of the cement plant should take. n

Joseph A. Brill is senior reporter for the Register-Star newspaper in Hudson and has been assigned to cover St. Lawrence’s cement plant proposal since its inception.