Vernon Environmental Commission did its job

I am aghast at the comments that Mayor Shortway gave to a reporter. He wants to get rid of the Environmental Commission. Right now he is the boss, so I guess he can do what he wants. But he cannot use environmental activism as an excuse. We did our jobs.
I am the Land Use Board member and Liaison to the Environmental Commission, which I guess if he has his way, will no longer exist. At every LUB meeting as the Environmental Liaison, when environmental concerns were not addressed by our Town Engineer and Planner, I raised questions and if these questions meant that changes to an application were needed then the entire LUB hashed out the adjustments. But we are very lucky with our present Engineer and Planner; they don’t miss much.
Since our now mayor was never part of the audience at one single meeting between 2011 and 2015 of either LUB or VEC he would not know this. Further quite obviously he never listened to any of the recordings of the LUB meetings or even the recordings of the VEC meetings, and I have to say that because if he did listen to the recordings and still said what he did, then that would make Mr. Shortway a liar, and I don’t want to believe that. Furthermore, especially because he is the mayor he should not be telling reporters or anyone for that matter things that are just not true.
The recordings of the VEC meetings prove we did go over the applications to the town, we reviewed the open space inventory at least once a year, the required yearly reports to the township were given. For Mr. Shortway to say we have gone astray is outrageous, especially since it appears he has no knowledge of how we did hash out applications at the EC meetings.
Again, our LUB and VEC recordings can very easily prove that every word he spoke in that article is untrue; and it very well appears he didn’t bother doing any homework on this subject. Nowhere in the town code is it required that written reports be given on applications reviewed. But we did review all the applications in front of the LUB/EC and when there were environmental issues they were addressed with our recommendations. Again, we did our jobs.
Furthermore, if this were his concerns, why would he not call me as the Liaison and ask me any questions regarding his grave concerns. His agenda is a trail, did he come to us and see if we could work together? No he did not.
It is my belief that this is not about our doing our jobs, but this is about a money grab. The almost $1,000,000 in the open space trust fund.
Diane Wexler
Vernon Township