New Haven Independent

Tuesday’s Dwight Central Management Team Meeting focused on the hazards of vehicular exhaust and pushing the hospital to give cancer center employees alternatives to straight-up car commutes.

Lynne Bonnett (pictured) and Robin Schafer of the New Haven Environmental Justice Network told a crowd of 50 people from Dwight and West River about the hazards of vehicular exhaust from the cancer center, specifically a proposed parking garage at Lot E (a block bounded by Legion Avenue, Frontage Road, and Dwight and Howe streets).

Yale-New Haven has already shown it’s ready to compromise. It made a commitment to encourage 10 percent of the center’s employees to get to work without driving their cars. It dropped requests to build two other garages and has reduced the size of the Lot E garage from 1,343 spaces to 845.

Still, neighbors and environmentalists seek more relief when the center’s extra 400 employees, and patients, come rolling into town. Bonnett and Schafer warned the crowd of two toxic air emissions — ozone and particulate matter — where New Haven is already over acceptable levels defined by the state Environmental Protection Agency. A litany of other hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) found in car exhaust haven’t been tested since 1999, they said.

Schafer didn’t have to tell the crowd the effects of the airborn toxins — asthma, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Many already knew firsthand. Dwight resident John Jones (pictured) said doctors recently told him he has chronic pulmonary disease from breathing in “pollutants.”

“It’s old folks like me who suffer from this,” said Jones, who is 62 and does not smoke.

‘We’re not anti-cancer center, but like the lady said, we are anti-vehicles,” he said, with emphatic arm gestures. “Once you get a garage, it’ll be there forever — it’s like getting a mountain and sitting it there. We can’t never move that mountain.”

But “they’re not going to have the proper facilities for these people” without a parking garage, protested Jim Cullinan, a Chapel Street shopowner. “These people are going to be dumped into your street, my street, all over town… I think to eliminate the parking garage is naive.”

Most people in the room decided the best avenue is not to block a parking garage but to take a hand in traffic “demand management” — negotiating for more alternatives to single-car commutes, like shuttling services, bike-friendly facilities and encouraging car pools. A traffic management plan will be revealed at a public hearing on May 15.

Residents are ready to mobilize. “If they come up with something that we don’t like, we gonna have to hit the dirt and protest,” said Jones.

“If we don’t have our voices heard, we’re going to be living with a Carbon Monoxide necklace,” said Dwight Central Management Team Chair Curlena McDonald (pictured). Holding a photo of her granddaughter, she rallied the room to protect their own grandchildren. “Because we don’t necessarily have a whole lot of money, we don’t feel like there’s a lot we can do … but we need to mobilize.”