Locally, we continue to struggle against the special interests. Approval for a concrete plant in a densely populated neighborhood in Cranston was slipped through last March. There will be a rally on Tuesday, October 10, from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm, in front of City Hall. Someone, please bring a bullhorn! We hope the Mayor will be available to discuss the issue. I like the comments made by one resident:
Members held a rally Sept. 10 near the proposed facility, and they plan to gather again Tuesday, at City Hall, to urge Mayor Stephen P. Laffey to intervene.
“Hopefully he’ll be there, and we’d be delighted if he’d come down and talk to us,” Frank Mattiucci, president of Cranston Citizens for Responsible Zoning and Development, said yesterday. “We might be able to ask him once again if he’ll pull the permit on this thing.”
The Mayor would do well to take heed of a recent accident in Boston in which a concrete plant malfunctioned and spewed gray particulate matter all over a nearby school bus parking lot. From the article published September 29 in the Boston Globe:
A malfunctioning silo at a Charlestown cement company spewed a massive plume of dust yesterday, sending 61 bus drivers to hospitals with minor respiratory problems, coating about 60 school buses in a nearby parking lot with gray powder, and scrambling the afternoon bus ride home for thousands of students.
School officials said they could not use any of the buses in the Charlestown yard, approximately one third of the fleet. Buses had to be rerouted citywide, and buses scheduled for athletic events were redeployed to transport students home throughout the evening.
Michael Contompasis , interim superintendent of the Boston public schools, warned families to prepare for significant delays. Schools in northern parts of Boston were likely to be affected the most, officials said.
Work crews planned to clean the buses last night and alert parents by telephone if buses would be late this morning.
The dust came from Lafarge North America, whose six silos tower over the firm’s Charlestown plant. According to officials, the dust collection equipment on top of one of the silos malfunctioned at about 12:45 p.m., causing it to spew onto the adjacent bus yard operated by First Student, a Cincinnati-based company that transports 32,000 students in Boston.
This is why Citizens for Responsible Zoning and Development exists — to ensure that places like concrete plants are put in areas zoned for them, so that potential accidents do not jeopardize the health and safety of our community. Can you imagine if the new batching plant on Marine Drive malfunctioned and gray matter was spewed all over children playing soccer in the adjacent CLCF soccer fields?
Kmareka.com 
The folks over here in the Forest Hills section of town have been fighting Domestic Bank for years. The common theme is commercial versus residential zoning.
see… http://www.cranstononline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1611&Itemid=0
and… http://www.cranstononline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1622&Itemid=0
Hate to be contrary, Andre, but the theme is the interests of Money vs. the interests of the peons, I mean citizens of Cranston.
Where is our Mayor on this? And people still claim he’s ever had the good of Cranston in his heart?
The way this was slipped in under the radar is an outrage.
I’ll be there. Thanks Kiersten. As a planning board member in Lincoln, I get concerned that we citizens, peons as Klaus says, are really losing power to control what happens in our neighborhoods. And if you really need a bull horn, let me know.
Both of these issues are in Ward 2 (the heart of eastern Cranston).
A person may start to think that Cranston City Hall is far more interested in protecting the people in western Cranston but very easy to start exploiting eastern Cranston for commercialization.
Thanks, Patrick. The bullhorn thing is a little joke. When the schools cut middle schools sports in Cranston and the kids had a rally in front of city hall, the Mayor came out with his bull horn and led them all over to the superintendent’s office to continue things. They say turnabout is fair play…
This rally is being sponsored by the Cranston Citizens for Responsible Zoning and Development (CCRZD). A sound system is planned for speakers but bullhorns are good too – so thanks!
Kiersten, if not already done, can you link to our website: http://www.stopcranstonconcrete.org – and thanks for getting the word out. Rita
Got it Kiersten. Not living in Cranston means it take me a little longer to get things;-).
If you don’t like business expanding in your back yard, then don’t buy or rent right on the edge of an area that is ZONED INDUSTRIAL! No wonder businesses are reluctant to move to Cranston. They try to grow their business in an industrial area and all the politicians take the easy route and join up with the angry mobs.
Its the “flood-victim” mentality all over again!
George, I would agree that people are responsible for checking out where their property is in relation to industrial zones. What convinced me of the problems of the Cullion Concrete location was the Google map which shows so clearly that there is no buffer zone whatsoever between this industrial project and the neighborhood abutting. Industrial zones that are producing cement need a buffer zone.
When I learned more about the piece of land — that it was on a flood plain in an area that has been previously flooded by the Pawtuxet River, I became concerned for this aspect of environmental hazard.
Further, this issue is complicated by the fact that the zoning board reviewed an application for a warehouse — not an industrial batching plant — to be located on Marine Drive. Then Cullion amended their application to the DEM. This process did not allow the community to properly understand the scope of the project or raise objections.