Public hearing remains open

By Ashley M. Casey

Associate Editor

On the eve of the first day of school, residents of the town of Cicero packed into the auditorium at Gillette Road Middle School for a public hearing on a proposed bus garage off South Bay Road. The Cicero Planning Board postponed the public hearing from Aug. 7  to Sept. 4 to accommodate the hundreds of people who showed up to the hearing, exceeding the fire code capacity at Cicero Town Hall.

More than 30 residents spoke, urging the Cicero Planning Board to reject the proposal.

Before the public had their say, the planning board allowed project engineer Greg Sgromo to make a brief presentation on One Remington LLC’s proposal to purchase the former EJ USA and Syracuse Castings site at 6177 South Bay Road and turn it into a bus garage. Gregory and Colin Cleghorn of One Remington LLC plan to lease the space to First Student Inc., which serves the Syracuse City School District.

First Student is currently located in the Inner Harbor in Syracuse but must find a new location as its lease was not renewed.

Sgromo said the updated proposal includes more landscaping, modified driveways and a reconfiguration of bus storage to reduce noise. He said developers are “currently in the process of adding onto the traffic study.”

“Our additional traffic is very small,” Sgromo said of the proposal’s projected impact on traffic, adding that the bus garage is expected to generate three times less traffic than the Dunkin’ that was built.

As for afternoon traffic around GRMS, which is 0.3 miles away from the former Syracuse Castings site, Sgromo said there would be “nothing of significant interference.”

Despite Sgromo’s assurances, Cicero residents expressed their skepticism.

Nate Riley, Democratic candidate for Cicero Town Board, called Sgromo’s presentation a “farce” and noted that traffic is “something Cicero is already infamous for.”

“It does not appear to me that this planning board has been given a full, transparent accounting of the impacts of this proposal on our residents. Some of the people pushing this bus barn have misrepresented the facts, and you should not reward those misrepresentations,” Riley said.

Riley also criticized the developers’ claim that the bus garage would be home to 150 jobs, generating 50 jobs immediately. He said the Indeed.com job listing does not have any residency requirements.

“There is no guarantee that a single Cicero resident will get a single job out of this bus barn proposal,” Riley said.

In addition to increased traffic, Riley said, snow and trash could accumulate during the winter and could ultimately end up in people’s yards just 400 feet away from the site.

Resident Barbara Evanoff focused her comments on the negative health effects that could come from exposure to diesel emissions.

“The diesel exhaust being generated here is a complex mixture of thousands of gases and fine particles and contains more than 40 toxic [materials]. These include many known or suspected cancer-causing substances, including benzene, arsenic, nickel, formaldehyde and nitrogen oxides,” Evanoff said. “Long-term exposure to diesel exhaust particles poses the highest cancer risk of any toxic contaminant evaluated by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. Acute effects of diesel exhaust exposure include irritation of the nose and eyes, lung function changes, respiratory changes, headache, fatigue and nausea. Chronic exposures are associated with cough, sputum production and lung function deficits.”

Evanoff said elderly people, children and those with chronic heart or lung disease are “especially sensitive” to the effects of diesel exhaust exposure.

In addition to the risks associated with diesel fumes, Evanoff said she is concerned that snow melt runoff from the site could exacerbate drainage issues.

Don Keegan, associate superintendent for business services for the North Syracuse Central School District, weighed in at the public hearing as well.

“The North Syracuse Central School District’s primary concern is getting our kids to school on time and safely,” Keegan said.

The NSCSD has about 145 buses and uses a “triple-tripping” system — separate bus runs for high school, middle school and elementary school students.

“Between the hours of 6:30 and 8:30 in the morning and then again between 2 and 4:30 in the afternoon, we have between 16 and 36 buses on the road on South Bay between Thompson [Road] and the 81 overpass,” Keegan said. “Other than what’s been presented tonight, we’ve not seen a traffic study, so we can’t really comment on the impact. However, we would like to see a thorough study done because we, too, share concerns about the traffic and its impact on our ability to get kids to school on time and safely.”

Brian Angrick, a Cicero resident and NSCSD bus driver, said he used to work for First Student and is “100% against this proposal for this site.”

“Their business model is to send a representative to a town, acquire a contract, lease, rent, buy a space, move into that space, use it, and at the end of that contract when they lose it, they move out. They leave that building abandoned,” Angrick said of First Student.

According to Angrick, First Student has left its current bus garage in Syracuse’s Inner Harbor in disrepair.

“They have pretty much run that terminal into the ground. They’ve done very little maintenance,” he said. “At times, when the bathrooms become unusable they’ve actually put porta-potties out in the yard for the drivers to use.”

Angrick estimated the 188 buses in the First Student proposal will use 500,000 gallons of fuel per year.

“I have seen zero on that site plan that includes any kind of containment for a fuel spill. There is drainage to swampland and a creek, and how would a fuel spill be mitigated should a fuel spill occur?” Angrick asked.

Since First Student is a contract carrier, Angrick added, the company could accept non-school contracts such as wine tours, which means buses might not return to the garage until after midnight.

Planning Board Chair Mark Marzullo said he has received numerous emails, letters and phone calls about the proposal and noted that about 3,300 people have signed a Change.org petition opposing the project.

“We seriously are interested in the input you have,” he said. “Although it’s scary, it did do one really nice thing: it brought the community together.”

The Cicero Planning Board next meets at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 18, at Cicero Town Hall. Visit ciceronewyork.net/meetings/ to view agendas and minutes.