The village planning board held a public hearing on the scoping document which will determine what will be included in the draft environmental impact statement the hospital will prepare for it's plan to add more parking spaces.

Middleton said he had been looking for clarification on the alternatives to the proposal the planning board wants to see included.

He said it is clear now that the planning board wants the hospital to include a parking structure as one of the alternatives. Other alternatives include shuttling employees from remote sites and reassigning staff to locations off the main campus.

The original draft scoping document was written in a manner that made it appear the hospital had reversed itself and decided to construct a three-level parking garage on Mill Street, despite previous statements about the unsuitability of the soil and prohibitive cost. After reading the statement, planning board members believed the hospital intended to construct parking structures that had not been part of the original site plan application.

Middleton cleared up the confusion by explaining the structures were included in the draft scoping document in response to a request from the planning board.

The current draft does not mention a parking structure.

During the public hearing a number of the hospital's neighbors voiced concerns about the impact of the new lots proposed for Bassett Hall and Harrison House.

Noise and increase traffic were two issues mentioned frequently by the neighbors.

"I personally find it very noisy where I live," said Pioneer Street resident Ann Capozza.

Another Pioneer Street resident, Cathe Ellsworth, said, "It's unfair to blame all the noise in the neighborhood on Bassett. It's not fair to say Bassett has to mitigate all that. I would hope you would be realistic in your expectation of what Bassett has to fix. We live in a very nosiy society."

"I agree it's not just a Bassett issue, but Bassett is before us now and is talking about bringing more cars into the neighborhood. This will not solve Bassett's problems," replied Capozza.

Ann Rath told the planning board that a better solution for Bassett to meet its parking requirements would be lots located outside the village; that the additional traffic created by the current plan would be too much for a residential street.

Middleton said afterwards that concerns need to quantified and addressed to eliminate subjectivity and that they will do that in the draft environmental impact statement.

Planning board chairman Paul Kuhn said he will schedule a special meeting to evaluate all the public comments and discuss the draft scoping document once those comments have been typed up by the clerk.