As the legal process plays out over a proposed howitzer cannon testing site in the Adirondacks, Friday marks a key deadline. A coalition of environmental groups has sued to stop the permitting process with the Adirondack Park Agency, and now the owner of the proposed Essex County testing site wants to bar members of the coalition from participating in an upcoming public hearing. That's a move members of the coalition have questioned given that the applicant -- Unconventional Concepts and its owner Michael Hopmeier -- have said they don't want the permitting process to move forward, either. The applicant’s lawyer has also filed a motion to bar the interveners from pre-hearing proceedings - to which members of the coalition have until Friday to respond. WAMC's Pat Bradley spoke with the Adirondack Explorer's Gwendolyn Craig, who has been covering the proceedings.
There's two different things going on. We're waiting on his court case to be resolved, where he sued the agency over the hearing vote. It's very significant that the environmental groups have filed this motion to dismiss the hearing. But essentially the groups are saying that Mr. Hopmeier and his attorney Matthew Norfolk have not been following the procedure and the rules and regulations of the hearing. And particularly he was supposed to provide some discovery to the groups and failed to meet the deadline and failed to ask for an extension within the required time period. So they're arguing that he's lost his chance at this hearing to provide the board with more information and therefore the hearing should be dismissed.
How unique is this that we have the environmental group saying we want an end to the adjudicatory process; Hopmeier files a lawsuit to try to end the adjudicatory process. So they all want this ended. But I believe in your article you said for different reasons.
Right. Mr. Hopmeier would like to have the opportunity, at least this this was according to his attorney before the Essex County Supreme Court Judge earlier this year, that he would like to have the opportunity to address these questions again at the staff level. APA (Adirondack Park Agency) staff are the ones that present to the board and say, "Hey, we don't think we have enough information here to make a decision on the permit.” And that's what they did in November. So he's looking for an opportunity to go back and work with them. The environmental groups don't want that. They think that this hearing was his opportunity to provide that information to kind of give him his stay in court, so to speak. And they believe that because the application remains incomplete because he has not provided any more information thus far that the board should vote and just deny it outright. What I'm hearing is that it wouldn't necessarily be denied with prejudice so it's possible he could still bring the application back in some way if that were to happen. But it would be starting from scratch. It wouldn't be working off this old record necessarily.
It sounds almost like a delay tactic if they can't get it eliminated.
Yes and you know we don't have a lot of recent memory adjudicatory hearings to look back on to see like the process for this. And the most recent memory one we have is obviously the Adirondack Club and Resort in Tupper Lake and that one was sort of an anomaly because there was a mediation in the middle. But it is kind of looking to be more complicated in that way than past adjudicatory hearings, which I believe were over a couple of months and usually done relatively quickly. But again, the agency has sort of stopped holding them, so we don't have a lot of institutional knowledge at present making comparisons here. It's been a long pre-hearing process. I mean, we're almost getting to it being a full year. It's a lot of moving pieces.
WAMC's Pat Bradley spoke with the Adirondack Explorer's Gwendolyn Craig.
