State Senator Joseph Addabbo stunned civic leaders in March when he announced that he supports lodging homeless veterans at the Cooper Avenue site. Up until that point, the plan was to lobby the city for remediation and a school campus there. Although the city has claimed that the site is too contaminated for a school and refuses to do a thorough environmental review because it has no plans to remediate the site (that would be too expensive),

Addabbo seems to feel that allowing people to live there is acceptable. His attitude is that “if it is going to happen, it may as well house veterans.” A lawsuit was filed in an effort to stop it from happening, but much like Andy Hevesi, who was the first to declare back in July 2014 that this was a “done deal,” Addabbo appears to have thrown in the towel. It’s bad enough that many of our veterans suffer from contamination-related issues such as Agent Orange poisoning during the Vietnam War and chemical warfare agents during more recent conflicts; they don’t deserve to be thrown into a warehouse on contaminated land here at home.