Eastchester REVIEW THE
June 16, 2017 | Vol. 5, Number 24 | www.eastchesterreview.com
Court denies Marbledale Road cleanup injunction By COREY STOCKTON Staff Writer
BRONCOS FALL SHORT
Bronxville’s Beth Finley is swarmed by Skaneateles defenders in the Class D state championship game on June 10 at SUNY Cortland. The Lakers topped the Broncos 12-11 in double-overtime to win the state title. For story, see page 15. Photo/Mike Smith
Marcotte secures county Independence line By SIBYLLA CHIPAZIWA Assistant Editor Westchester County Legislator Sheila Marcotte has secured the Independence line in her re-election efforts this year. Marcotte, a Republican who represents District 10, who is running for her fourth term as county legislator against Democrat Damon Maher, of New Rochelle, has also secured the Conservative line for the November election. According to Marcotte, the last time she received an endorsement from the Independence Party was way back when she ran in a special
election to fill the District 10 legislative seat in 2010, which she won. “The Independence Party has a history of endorsing candidates from different [parties],” said Marcotte, 51. “In my opinion, they don’t hold allegiance to one side or another.” The Independence Party has often been viewed as indicator of electoral success on the county level. For her last two re-election campaigns, however, Marcotte had to primary for the right to carry the Independence line in the general election. “They overwhelmingly endorsed me,” she told the Review
about the registered voters of the party. “I literally crushed my opponents.” In 2013 and 2015, Marcotte won MARCOTTE continued on page 8
A Westchester County Supreme Court judge struck down a motion to stop work on the site of a state-supervised remediation and planned hotel development on Marbledale Road in Tuckahoe months after the motion was filed. On May 26, Judge Larry Schwartz ruled that nine Tuckahoe residents did not provide enough evidence to justify the court to stop work on the site while considering a lawsuit those same residents filed last November. In February, the village Building Department issued a permit to begin work excavating a portion of the site; and a day later, the plaintiffs asked the court for an injunction, arguing that more research was necessary before digging began. That initial lawsuit, filed against the village of Tuckahoe Planning Board, the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation, DEC, and the state Department of Health, DOH, argues that each of those agencies made premature decisions leading to the approval of a controversial property remediation and hotel development. Since 2014, the developer, Bilwin Development Affiliates, has intended to turn the site of a former dumping ground on Tuckahoe’s Marbledale Road corridor into a 5-story, 163-room Marriott Springhill Suites Hotel with an adjacent 6,400-square-foot restaurant. But the site, contaminated by decades of dumping, had to be remediated, and was entered by Bilwin into the DEC’s Brownfield Cleanup Program, which offers tax incentives to developers for cleaning up and re-developing contaminated properties. Last July, the DEC released its approved method for remediat-
ing the site, which—alongside the development of the hotel—was approved by the village Planning Board in October by a 3-2 vote without requiring a full environmental impact study. The plaintiffs, some of whom are members of the Marbledale Road Environmental Coalition, which has challenged the scope of the remediation plan for more than a year, claim that the Planning Board should have required such a study to be conducted. But in its ruling, the court said the residents, represented by attorney David Gordon, did not sufficiently show that continuing work on the site would cause irreparable harm, or that their larger case against the various village and state agencies would likely succeed in court. “It was rational for the Village, as part of its lead-agency State Environmental Quality Review, to rely on the expertise of the DEC in approving Bilwin’s project which included a monitoring and remediation plan,” Schwartz wrote. The ruling comes as Bilwin prepares to pour an asphaltcap over the site, completing the remediation process it started in February. The DEC’s remediation plan required Bilwin to dig up and cart off socalled “hotspots” of contaminated soil, backfill those areas with clean soil and then pour a concrete cap over them. When that is complete, hotel construction may begin. According to Village Administrator David Burke, the hot spot removal is about 95 percent complete, and the developer could begin pouring the cap in four to six weeks. Gordon and David Simpson, a spokesman for Bilwin, could not be reached for comment as of press time. CONTACT: corey@hometwn.com