HomeMy WebLinkAboutKaufman - deerDEIS2.pdf 110 Northway Rd.
Ithaca, New York 14850
December 14, 2010
To the Members of the Board of Trustees
Village of Cayuga Heights
Re: Deer Management Plan, DEIS
Friends:
I offer the following comments as a supplement to the statement I previously submitted in
response to the Village’s Deer Management DEIS. My previous statement raised concerns
about the inapt presumptions and sheer speculation that pervade the DEIS. The present
comments raise more pointed questions about the impact of the deer management plan on the
character of our community and the inadequacy of the DEIS assessment of such impact.
My husband and I moved our family to Cayuga Heights in 1990. We had spent the previous
decade living in the Town of Ithaca, just outside the City of Ithaca, on Ithaca’s West Hill. We
chose to move to Cayuga Heights for its unique residential qualities: its extensive network of
walkable sidewalks, the 30-mph Village speed limit, proximity to the elementary school and a
safe environment for children and pets to roam in, a friendly and competent police force and
other Village services, and, not least, restrictions on firearms that– unlike our West Hill
experience– allowed us to feel safe outdoors in all seasons.
We most decidedly did not move here to live next to, or within hailing distance of, a military
encampment or a slaughterhouse. And yet that is what the Board’s deer management plan is
imposing on us, without any acknowledgement– in the DEIS or elsewhere– of the change in the
character of our residential community that such usage entails.
Rather, the DEIS concludes, blithely, that the primary impact of the deer management proposal
on quality of life in the Village will be a transient increase in the night-time ambient noise level
due to gunshot. That is simply not a full or fair assessment of either the original bait-and-shoot
proposal or the DEC’s suggestion for net-and-bolt slaughter.
If the Village moves ahead with its initial bait-and-shoot proposal, the experience of other
communities suggests that the six to ten bait-and-shoot sites will take on the qualities of a
military operation, particularly if the assurances of safety oversight promised by the Village and
touted in the DEIS are fully implemented. There will, at the least, have to be a pre-shooting site
search (in some communities, by helicopter flyover, in others by police foot search), a police
cordon, night lights, an amassment of the vehicles from which shots are to be fired and into
which the field-treated carcasses and other waste will be loaded. The experience of other
communities also suggests that the process will not be quick or transient, but will drag on for
weeks. Where is the DEIS assessment of this neighborhood impact, or of the costs of
implementing the safety assurances and environmental abatement of bait-and-shoot killing– in
increased police and public works manpower costs, for example, or in the environmental costs of
lighting, vehicular use, yard damage, and waste management, or in the possibility of liability
should Village supervision of operations result in public injury?
Even worse, if the Village chooses the net-and-bolt option, the DEC’s own description– echoed
in public comments by Mayor Supron– is that this process uses the techology of the
slaughterhouse to put the animals to death. I most certainly did not choose to live next to, or in
hailing distance of, a slaughterhouse– a prospect that I find all the more chilling if, as has been
suggested, the net-and-bolt option does not require 500-foot waivers or the minimal advance
notice that a waiver entails. The DEIS assessment of net-and-bolt is minimal; indeed, it
recognizes that the costs– whether financial or environmental is not specified– of such a
program are unknown. Before any such process turns my neighbor’s yard, or my neighborhood,
into a slaughterhouse, at the least some assessment of the horrifying community impact of the
process must be done, and some more concerted attention paid to alternatives and mitigation.
Indeed, in most communities slaughterhouses and firing ranges fall into special zoning categories
reserved for noxious or toxic industries. They are most certainly NOT permissible residential
uses, particularly in the Village, where even non-noxious fences and signs are highly controlled.
I am hard-pressed to see that the DEIS, or the Board, has adequately addressed the noxious
qualities of either the bait-and-shoot or the net-and-bolt option, or their deleterious impact on the
character and quality of life in theVillage. I know I am not alone in finding these options
inconsistent with the residential character of the community I chose to live in, or in finding
abhorrent and unacceptable the prospect of living in a neighborhood where shooting or bolting is
conducted, especially without adequate consideration and/or trial of alternatives.
I once again urge the Board to make a fair and data-driven assessment, not only of the projected
impacts of a deer management plan, but of the specific problems and complaints that have driven
the search for management options, and of the non-lethal approaches that might more
effectively– in cost, in community buy-in, and in long-term sustainability-- address these
problems.
– Karen Kaufmann, 110 Northway Rd., VCH