Gov Patterson Flexes His Veto Muscle

If you happen to keep up with Long Island politics, you would have heard about the battle over building a truck-rail yard in Brentwood. The proposed truck-rail yard is to be built on part of the property where the former Pilgrim State Hospital currently sits.

Gov. Patterson has supported this project as he sees it as a viable way to help decrease the reliance on trucks & the traffic they bring to the island. The bill he vetoed would have killed any plans for such a facility as it called for the property to be added to the Oak Brush Plains Preserve. Elizabeth Moore of Newsday has more on this story with the report she filed earlier today:

Gov. David A. Paterson has vetoed a bill that would have killed plans for a truck-rail yard on part of the former Pilgrim State Hospital property in Brentwood by adding the land to the Oak Brush Plains Preserve instead.

Paterson says he believes environmental reviews should continue on the proposed Long Island Truck/Rail Intermodal, or LITRIM, which would reduce truck traffic by 156,000 truck trips per year by shifting more freight to the rail lines. That would reduce carbon emissions by 3,448 tons, since trains use less fuel than trucks, he said.

“Enacting this bill would end this process and forever block the only opportunity to build LITRIM at Pilgrim, a project that may have enormous benefits for the residents of Long Island in improving congestion and air quality,” the governor wrote in his veto message, delivered to lawmakers Thursday.

Click here to read the entire article.

The battle over this project comes from your typical neighborhood residents crying about any sort of development. The mentality in many of the suburbs in the tri-state area is of the selfish kind. Once they find a neighborhood to call their own, damn to anyone who attempts to bring in anything that could help the overall population of a region. It is all about what it does or does not do for their desires. Yet one could safely bet that many of these same people are of the green mentality & wanting to help the environment. Well if that is the case, why go against a project that would clearly help out the environment? They can’t have it both ways….

xoxo Transit Blogger

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