How to Say No to the Natural Gas Industry Getting a Chunk of Gateway National Recreation Area

If you're not a senator's son or similarly dialed in, you're probably going to have to write a letter. You can do it old school like Joe (two-finger type it out on a typewriter, not a keyboard, and lick the stamps for each individual letter and its envelope) or you can do it new school here. The link is to the online contact form for the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where H.R. 2606, the bill that will not only authorize a gas pipeline right of way through Gateway National Recreation Area, but the construction and operation of a metering and regulating station at Floyd Bennett Field, currently sits.

You don't have to be a poet. You can just write what you feel or if you can't think of anything or chronically suffer from writer's block you could quote Williams Transco from paperwork in 2009 describing why certain alternative sites for metering and regulating site were problematic for the project:
"The construction of a meter and regulating station on any of theses sites would change the use of the property from recreational to industrial land use and be outside the stated purposes for NPS and NYCPR properties."

The stated purpose of the NPS Gateway National Recreation Area which includes Floyd Bennett Field is "to preserve and protect for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations an area possessing outstanding natural and recreational features". Land use has always mattered and it always will matter. A new industrial use of Floyd Bennett Field, which will produce new emissions and greenhouse gases in a park that's supposed to be committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, housed (or conveniently hidden) in restored historic hangars is still an industrial facility after all, (it's just wearing a fancy dress) and it has nothing at all to do with aviation history, nature or recreational use.

Gateway's not Yosemite, but it's New York City's National Park. Fight for it like a New Yorker. Jacob Riis is the people's beach. (google it, I'm not making it up.) Jamaica Bay and Breezy Point are Significant Habitat areas for no short list of species. You don't have to be a senator's son. You just have to be New York loud. Write a letter. Use your voice.

Otherwise, you can just wait for FERC to approve the pipeline and the metering and regulating station, despite all the reasons you can think of that they should not. Say no to the Natural Gas Industry getting a chunk of Gateway National Recreation Area. Say no to H.R. 2606.

My Rockaway pipeline posts: here