Killing Trees to Save Them

What about the effect of printing environmental impact statements? By Josh Rogers Any green activist worth his weight in flowers has spent hours reading environmental impact statements (EIS). Even though the reports are typically prepared by agencies anxious to start work, they still have info that may derail or kill a project. Some might even pity the applicant who leaves something out. Westway, the grand plan to develop the West Side on top of Hudson River landfill, was delayed fatally two decades ago because officials did not consider its effect on striped bass. A traffic engineer I know who has prepared many environmental statements for the city and who has attacked others for neighborhood activists once told me that he could find holes in any EIS's including those he wrote. The voluminous reports attempt to look at every possible effect of a project on the environment except one: What is the impact of printing environmental impact statements? The final EIS for the Second Avenue Subway project is three volumes long and five and a half inches high when stacked up. Prior to the final report, there were draft versions, scoping documents and revisions to previous reports that were dutifully sent to community board offices, libraries, affected government agencies and others. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority sent out 400 copies of the final report and kept 100, said agency spokesperson Kevin Ortiz, who quite aptly calls it â??one of the biggest public works project in the world. He said putting reports online has lessened the demand for paper versions, which may mean that in the future, the MTA will take a softer line on printing so many hard copies. Some of the previous reports are still in the Community Board 8 office, but the subway project is not even close to being the biggest one in terms of report size. That honor goes to the proposed East River waste transfer station near 91st Street. The bound volumes consume over 30 inches on one of the board"s bookcases. â??They haven"t sent anything for a year. I think they"re done, said Latha Thompson, the board"s district manager, with hope in her voice. The big environmental groups generally shy away from talking about the irony of killing trees as part of an effort to protect the environment. Public policy analyst Charles Komanoff said the tree casualties are â??pretty depressing given that â??gotcha moments in environmental statements don"t come often. The original idea behind the creation of the EIS 40 years ago was to take the politics out of decisions, but the reports fail on that count, he said. â??It"s not a panacea, said Komanoff, who works on reducing traffic. â??At the end of the day, it"s only politics. The statements stay in the city archives long after boards and libraries get rid of them. Thompson said she has received conflicting information on how long she should hold onto an EIS, so she has settled on 10 years. That means she"ll be getting rid of the subway statements in 2014, long before the project is fully built's assuming, of course, that the day will in fact come. Her West Side counterpart, Penny Ryan, does not have reports as long, so she"s not worried about storage space. But still, they do seem to take on lives of their own. â??You"re welcome to come visit them, she offered. Josh Rogers, a contributing editor at Manhattan media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him on Twitter @JoshRogersNYC.