Parts of Brandi testimony struck from record

I was surprised how brief Norden's cross-examination was. Ulasewicz didn't ask nearly as many questions as I thought.

Judge O'Connell ended up striking a good amount of the pre-filed testimony of Scott Brandi, who was put on as a witness for the ACR. Brandi is head of a state ski association and offered testimony about how he believes the project will be a viable economic engine and will be marketable.

But his testimony included a whole bunch of statistics. Ulasewicz didn't produce any documents showing where the stats came from, which would be required due to discovery motions Protect attorney John Caffry made back before the start of the hearing. Judge O'Connell gets very upset about discovery issues, ("I LOATHE surprises," he said the other day) and after some deliberation, he decided to strike all the parts of Brandi's testimony that include references to the statistics that weren't supported.

Arguments were made for both excluding Brandi's testimony and putting off his testimony until the discovery motions could be met, but I guess O'Connell decided that he needed to lay down the law instead of extend the hearings a little longer and created a more complete record.

Caffry was upset, because I guess O'Connell just crossed out the parts of testimony that he wants to strike. I didn't see it, but Caffry said it's still readable, which frustrated him because he won't have an opportunity to cross-examine on it or anything like that.

So that made things go a little quicker this afternoon than expected. This group of hearings wrapped up a little after the lunch break, and they're adjourned until June 21. At that point, O'Connell is planning to have made a decision about another motion Caffry made to take testimony from some other ACR witnesses out of the record because of other discovery motion problems. Should be interesting.

UPDATE: Paul Van Cott sent Judge O'Connell a letter on June 10 requesting that he reconsider just putting a line through the testimony and fully redacting it.

"Redacting the excluded testimony will ensure that is it not considered by the Agency Board and it is fully within your authority," he wrote.

Haven't heard whether O'Connell has responded yet or not.

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