From Democratic Candidate for City Council in Cranston’s Ward 1, Steve Stycos:

FREE SAMPLES

Tammy Watson of Mazie’s Organics will offer the Pawtuxet Village Farmers Market’s first cooking demonstration Saturday starting at 10 AM. Tammy, who lives in nearby Washington Park, makes organic prepared salads and does catering. This is her first year at the market and she sells vegan cashew cheese spread, mung bean and tahini, wheat berry and honey and chic pea and feta cheese salads in 8 and 16 ounce containers.

Saturday, Tammy will make veggie rolls and quinoa stir fry with produce from our farmers. Stop by, try a free sample and consider buying some of Tammy’s salads for next week’s lunches.

CVS

Plans for a CVS drugstore at the corner of Broad Street and Norwood and Warwick avenues will be discussed Wednesday July 21 at 4:30 PM in the Cranston High School East Auditorium. Last week’s meeting of the site plan review committee was brief as CVS asked for a continuance because they received a city traffic study minutes before the hearing began.

Neighbors are focusing on several issues, including 1)opposition to a 24 hour drive through, 2) improved architectural design to avoid the ugly big box look, 3) parking lot design to encourage pedestrians to use sidewalks and discourage cars from cutting through from Broad to Norwood to avoid the light, 4)reduction of parking spaces by ten, to the number required by city ordinance, to improve landscaping. 5)maintenance of the 11 foot wide sidewalk on Norwood Avenue, 5) lighting and signs.

At the brief July 7 meeting, Mayor Fung voiced opposition to a 24 hour window. The other issues were not discussed.

Interested persons are urged to attend the hearing. More information is available at http://respect4edgewood.weebly.com/

AIRPORT HEARING

The Federal Aviation Administration will hold a hearing on its plan to expand one of T.F.Green Airport’s runways, August 17 at CCRI in Warwick. The expansion plan comes despite objections from the City of Warwick and airport emission problems.

To reduce its carbon dioxide emissions, Great Britain’s Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government recently cancelled plans to build a third runway at London’s Heathrow Airport and additional runways at two smaller London airports.

“The emissions were a significant factor” in the decision to cancel the runway-building plans, Teresa Villiers, Britain’s minister of state for transport, said in an interview with the NY Times. “The 220,000 or so flights that might well come with a third runway would make it difficult to meet the targets we’d set for ourselves.”

“We recognized that just putting more flights and more passengers into the skies over southeast England wasn’t worth the environmental costs we’re paying,” she said. “We decided to make Heathrow better rather than bigger.” In developed countries, emissions from aviation are growing faster than those from nearly all other economic sectors, the Times reports.

The British government has calculated that aviation emissions accounted for just 6 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2006. But it concluded in a report that aviation could contribute up to a quarter of those emissions by 2030.

Registration for the hearing opens at 5:30 PM and the hearing will begin at 6 PM.

See you Saturday at the market.