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Why Ban Foam Food Containers? The Recycling Plan Bloomberg Doesn't Want


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NEW YORK — Foam makes up one half of one percent of New York City’s total waste, takes decades if not centuries to biodegrade and can end up polluting waterways. And it could cost the city millions a year to recycle.

A push to ban foam food containers sold in the city, spearheaded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s legacy-conscious administration, has spurred opposition from industry including from the world’s largest manufacturer of foam cups.

The Dart Container Corp., through an intermediary, spent thousands on local political races in this year’s historic elections, including on the campaign of a failed candidate for Manhattan borough president. The councilman, who lost to Gale Brewer in the BP race, is now sponsoring a new bill that would render the proposed ban null and void.

“We had to engage. There’s so many lies being told, so we had to engage and be part of the political process,” said Michael Westerfield, Dart’s director of recycling programs, of the company’s political contributions. “And we’ve provided full disclosure on everything we’ve done.”
 
The company has also hired lobbyists and worked to make sure their opposition is known to key members of the City Council, which is considering legislation backed by the Bloomberg administration.

In many ways, the opposition to the proposed ban has changed the conversation, with a revision of the legislation before the Council requiring the sanitation commissioner to explore recycling opportunities initially for a year seen as a compromise. But Dart Container Corp., has dismissed that compromise. It instead backs Councilman Robert Jackson’s competing bill that would outright redefine foam as recyclable.

With mere days left before a new mayor and City Council take their places in City Hall, there is little time for the outgoing Council to move ahead on any legislation. The foam legislation could be voted out of committee this week.

To Recycle Or Not To Recycle

Expanded polystyrene foam starts out as small white beads and are transformed into everyday goods familiar to many New Yorkers. Coffee cups. Take-out clamshells. School lunch trays. Disposable picnic plates.

“Something that we know is environmentally destructive, that is costing taxpayers money, and that is easily replaceable, is something we can do without,” Bloomberg said in February’s State of the City. “Don't worry: the doggie bag and the coffee cup will survive just fine.”

While many, including city officials, refer to the foam as Styrofoam, the name is a trademark that belongs to Dow Chemical Co. and isn’t used to produce those items that the mayor and Council would ban with Intro 1060-A. The proposed law itself isn’t as concerned with all foam goods as it is with foam goods used as “single service articles.” There would be no ban on foam used for shipping products, only on foam used for eating or drinking.

New York wouldn’t be alone in banning foam goods. Seattle, San Francisco and Portland all have existing bans, as do smaller municipalities across the country, on expanded polystyrene foam.

The problem is no one can agree on whether or not foam is actually recyclable.

The original sponsor of the bill backed by the mayor’s office says no, despite what Dart Container might say.

“Dart has a lot of skin in the game. I would expect them to defend their product,” said Brooklyn Councilman Lew Fidler told the Gotham Gazette before a committee hearing on his bill on Nov. 25. “I wouldn’t expect them to spread the misinformation that they have spread. If they felt they could defend their position without misleading people, they would have.”

Dart contends otherwise, and that it’s been recycling foam since 1990, although never in a city as large as New York. Westerfield repeatedly questioned the honesty of supporters of the bill and their understanding of the product — much less its recyclability.

In a heated exchanged between Westerfield and Fidler during the hearing, Westerfield referenced an Oct. 9 meeting organized by the Black, Latino and Asian caucus to discuss the bill.

“The first thing you said is, ‘I want you all to know that foam is not a plastic,’” Westerfield told Fidler. “If that’s the type of research that you conduct, if that’s what your findings are, I’m sorry but we’ve got to disagree with you.”

The city plainly argues that foam used for food service cannot be tossed into a recycling bin. That much is true. New York City currently asks residents to toss those used containers into the trash bag. In fact, even clean foam is currently not recyclable in New York City. Polystyrene goods are classified as no. 6 plastics, identifiable by a small number on the bottom of most containers.

Deputy Mayor Cass Holloway, testifying at the late November Council hearing, argued that the city doesn’t have the infrastructure to collect, sort and re-process foam.

Even a state of the art recycling facility being completed in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, cannot currently handle expanded foam. Managed by Sims Municipal Recycling, the 11-acre, $110 million site at the 30th Street Pier was designed to process the city’s recyclable plastic, metal, and glass.

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Tom Outerbridge, general manager for the Sims site, admitted at last week’s hearing that the site cannot recycle expanded foam, at least not right now. Outerborough testified the facility wouldn’t be able to handle foam, favoring a ban that would require manufacturers to use conventionally recyclable products.

Outerbridge testified that he wasn’t opposed to a provision in Fidler’s ban bill that would give the sanitation commissioner sole oversight over a year-long pilot program to explore recycling foam.

While the Sims facility cannot currently recycle expanded foam, it’s not to say that the city can’t repurpose the foam — even dirty foam. Dart Container, one of the country’s biggest producers of expanded foam goods, has arranged a deal with an Indianapolis company willing to pay $160 per ton of waste that the city currently can’t recycle itself.

Plastic Recycling, Inc., would purchase both dirty foam and other no. 6 rigid plastics that the city considers non-recyclable and currently end up in landfills. The plastic containers used for salads, coffee cup lids and the ubiquitous red Solo cups, would all be collected with the foam, which by itself is often considered too lightweight to be profitable for most recycling companies.

Once Sims sorts and collects 20 tons of no. 6 plastics — both dirty and clean — the waste would be taken by rail to the Indiana facility, where it would be washed and repurposed back into pellet form. The contract would be guaranteed for at least five years, with penalties for pulling out of the agreement even after the allotted five years.

Conflicting Information

Ahead of the late November hearing, Capital New York reported that a lobbying effort by Dart Container had successfully included the year-long delay on the ban for the foam industry to prove it could recycle EPS products. Public records show that Dart hired former councilman Ken Fisher now of Cozen O’Connor Public Strategies and Mercury Public Affairs at a total cost of $120,000.

But Westerfield told the Gotham Gazette that Dart had nothing to do with the year-long delay.

“Absolutely not, and they didn’t work with that on that compromise either,” he said. “If they would have worked with us there would have been more objective criteria.”

Westerfield argued a one-year study of New York City’s ability to recycle foam wouldn’t be a sound investment considering the final decision lies not with the Council that voted on the bill but on whomever the next sanitation commissioner under Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio — who has come out in support the ban — may be. Even then, the ban bill doesn’t outline any standards or methods by which the merits of recycling foam are measured.

It would take at least six months to get a recycling program fully working, according to Dart representatives, which would include installing equipment at the Brooklyn facility. Dart briefly implemented one part of the program as a trial, temporarily outfitting the location with a sorting device to pick out foam goods.

At the hearing, the city called that short pilot a failure and not viable for New York City, while Westerfield passed around a small vial of foam pellets he said were the result of the sorting machine’s dry run.

The conflicting information from the administration and the foam industries have already proved frustrating to some Council members.

Manhattan Councilman Robert Jackson and Brooklyn Councilwoman Diana Reyna introduced a competing bill on the day of the hearing to counter Fidler’s. Currently, city law doesn’t allow polystyrene foam to be considered recyclable. Intro 1205 would redefine the law to include it as recyclable waste, effectively nullifying the need for the administration’s proposed ban.

“Quite frankly, I’m not sold on the administration’s messaging,” Jackson said to Holloway at the hearing. “I say to you, deputy mayor, that if we can recycle it, I’m ready to recycle it instead of outright banning it.”

Both Jackson and Reyna, members of the BLA caucus, were at the meeting with administration and foam industry representatives in October. However, Jackson appeared not only unconvinced but upset with the administration during the hearing.

Jackson told the Gotham Gazette that the administration had given him conflicting information about foam’s recyclability during the caucus meeting, where Gonen presented on its behalf. The term-limited councilman from Harlem said that he’s convinced that it is recyclable.

The Bloomberg administration has called those arguments a distraction.

The Money Behind Foam

Unsurprisingly, Dart Container supports Jackson’s bill. And, beyond its own lobbying activities, the foam company also indirectly supported Jackson’s recently failed bid for Manhattan borough president.

The New York City Campaign Finance Board lists a bevy of donations totaling $38,525 from Ariane M. Dart, listed as a homemaker in Sarasota, Florida.

Ariane is married to Robert Dart, CEO and one of two brothers heir to the Dart Container Corp. The couple sits on the board for the Dart Foundation alongside Robert’s mother Claire and elder brother Kenneth, the company’s chairman.

The brothers have been embroiled in tax evasion controversies since the 1993, when they both renounced their American citizenship and moved to the Cayman Islands after the Internal Revenue Service found they had charged millions in personal expenses to the family company.

The Dart Foundation, created in 1984, reports having given hundreds of thousands of dollars to nonprofits and educational programs over the years, including Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

Ariane Dart was listed as donating three times to Jackson for a total of $3,850, as well as seven City Council campaigns and Sanitation committee chair Letitia James, who won her race for the public advocate’s office. James, despite being a sponsor of the foam ban bill, received $2,650 from Dart.

Immediately after last week’s hearing, however, Jackson said that he hadn’t made the connection between the donation to his campaign and his anti-ban bill. Jackson said he remembered being put on the phone with a woman from Florida who donated to his campaign, but to discuss an entirely different issue.

“It had nothing to do with this whatsoever, in my opinion, because my conversations — if that’s the same woman — my conversation was about education,” Jackson said, adding that the foam ban hadn’t been raised to his attention until September or October. “Had not one iota to do with recycling or Dart or any discussions.”

Jackson’s campaign also benefitted from a $12,948 independent expenditure paid for by the Restaurant Action Alliance, an Albany-based organization that has mobilized local small businesses against the foam ban.

The mailer — paid for on Aug.  3, almost two months before the BLA caucus briefing where Jackson said he felt misled by the administration — explicitly quotes the Councilman in opposition to the foam ban, featuring photos of smiling business owners of color using various foam containers.

The alliance’s website, which touts more than 18,000 member restaurants, was first registered in April 2013 to the American Chemistry Council, a chief opponent of the foam ban. Campaign finance records also show that ACC allocated $824,500 to the alliance between April and May, but the Jackson IE mailed out was its only listed expense.

A representative for the ACC told the Gazette that the balance of the contributions was spent on “outreach and education on the significant fiscal impact of the proposed ban for local restaurant owners.”

“I don’t know who the restaurant alliance is funded by,” Jackson said, indicating that testimony from alliance members about a potential increase in packaging costs is real regardless of who mobilizes the owners.

He said the foam ban is being rammed through the City Council at the last minute. “This is another type of legacy that the Bloomberg administration is attempting to do,” he said.

One Last Push

In a letter dated Oct. 8 to Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty from a Dart Container representative, the foam company provided a timeline of events from March through July, detailing meetings it had with Deputy Sanitation Commissioner Gonen and Sims facility representatives.

Dart argued that it believed “that Mr. Gonen has interfered with our contract negotiations with Sims and is misleading members of the New York City Council,” and that Councilman Fidler had misinformed fellow Council members.

The Bloomberg administration repudiated the allegations.

“They are false and meant as a distraction from the fact that polystyrene foam is a devastating pollutant infecting our parks and waterways while never biodegrading and that it has been classified as a carcinogenic health hazard by the National Institute of Health,” wrote Bloomberg spokesman Jake Goldman in an e-mailed statement last week.

Styrene, from which polystyrene is derived, is “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen,” according to a 2011 report from the NIH’s National Toxicology Program.

The report does point to previous studies on how certain foods can leach styrene depending on a number of variables, yet mostly focuses on worker exposure to styrene during the manufacturing process and cancer testing on animals exposed to the chemical.

However, the NIH reported that the source for the general population’s greatest exposure to styrene is one long banned by Bloomberg and the Council: cigarette smoke.

The Council’s sanitation committee meets one more time before the next Council moves in, its final hearing scheduled for Dec. 9. If the committee votes it through, the foam ban could go to a floor vote the following day or at the final stated meeting on Dec. 19.

Seventeen of the 51 Council members are currently on-board with the bill, giving the Council members and mayor two weeks to get more votes to ensure it can make it to Bloomberg’s desk for one last signature, keeping his promise from February.

But Fidler holds that his bill is more than just another notch on the mayor’s belt of public health feats.

“This is not a rush to the mayor’s nanny state,” Fidler argued at the hearing. “This is actually a rush toward the future, for the protection of the Earth, for our environment, for people who work in this industry.”

A Year After Superstorm Sandy, Turmoil Continues On Staten Island


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Until October 30, 2012, Dorothy Nolan lived with her husband in his childhood home in Fox Beach, a four-block subdivision of the Oakwood Beach neighborhood of Staten Island. Comprised mostly of bungalows constructed between 1930 and 1950, this was the kind of neighborhood where people stuck around, worked on their homes, and passed them down to their children.

The Nolans began renovating their home in 2008, piece by piece, as they could afford it. In the summer of 2012, they finally finished the last project – a back deck.

But the Nolans’ enjoyment of their renovated home was brief — and ended when Hurricane Sandy plowed into the city last fall. Nolan described her family’s harrowing experience in a letter to Governor Cuomo.

“We were trapped by flood waters that rose so high so quickly that we barely managed to escape up into a small crawl space in the attic of our home,” she wrote. “We struggled to stay calm for the almost 12 hours that we were there, watching the water levels rise to over 8 feet in our home, ending just below the ceilings, and the space we were hiding in.”

From the crawl space, Nolan said, “We could hear each wave come in. You would hear a crash and dishes breaking and everything moving.”

When they emerged from their attic on the morning of Oct. 30, they found “everything was in a big pile. It was like a snow globe, like someone shook the house.”

A year later, the turmoil wrought by the storm is far from over for Nolan and her neighbors on Staten Island’s southeastern shore.

Median incomes in this area, known as “mid-Island” hover around $73,600. Some displaced homeowners are still paying rent on temporary housing while making monthly payments on mortgages and water bills. Others are faced with insurance payments that cover only a fraction of the costs to repair their homes. City and state relief programs promise to make up some of those differences, but applicants have yet to hear whether, and for how much, they qualify.

While some people have borrowed from retirement funds or family members in order to begin rebuilding, a surprising number have signed petitions asking for buyouts. Still others are waiting until they have more answers from the government before deciding whether to rebuild or relocate. Many living on Staten Island’s storm-ravaged shores agree that moving on has been almost impossible.

“We Can’t Take a Beating Every Year”

In neighborhoods like Fox Beach, where every home was damaged during Sandy, the buyout choice was clear. Since the 1980s, single-story bungalows have increasingly been joined by attached-home developments, and wetlands have given way to concrete foundations. Around the Nor’easter of 1992, residents experienced their first bad flood and began to agitate for better flood protections and less development. Many neighborhoods did not have storm sewers, and relied on vacant land to soak up storm water. “We've hardscaped those sponges, so that they no longer naturally slow down the impact of that incoming surge," William J. Fritz, a geologist and president of the College of Staten Island, told the Huffington Post last November.

Although the Army Corps of Engineers installed some berms and other measures in 2000, some of those protections began to come undone by 2008. New developments also continued to increase. Then, in 2011, Hurricane Irene brought up to 5 feet of flood water to this part of Staten Island.

Of course, that was nothing compared to Sandy, which sent up to 15 feet of water across the streets of the mid-Island. “Some people had just finished renovations from Irene. This storm was a knockout punch,” said Joseph Tirone, founder of the Oakwood Beach Buyout Committee. Shortly after Sandy, Tirone began signing people in and around the subdivision onto a petition asking the state to buy them out and return their land to nature. As of last week, the borough president’s office reported that over 1,000 people had signed up for buyouts.

“We can’t take a beating every year,” said Dimitri, a resident of a townhome development a few blocks from the Lower New York Bay. Ten years ago, Dimitri and his neighbor, Alex (both preferred only to use their first names), purchased townhomes here, thinking if the city had permitted his development “it must be safe.” Now, he is concerned that owners who rent their townhouses have not properly abated the mold creeping along shared walls. In addition, he worries that if his development cannot be raised, his insurance rates will spike exponentially.

Dimitri is certainly not alone in this concern. This past Friday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg released a joint study by the city and the RAND Corp. on the impacts of new FEMA flood maps and changes to national flood program regulations. The study found that updated FEMA maps will consider thousands of new properties in New York City in the floodplain. Moreover, the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012, which is set to go into effect this month and which phases-out subsidies, will cause rate increases ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 for those properties that are below new flood height requirements.

With such issues in mind, the state announced a pilot buyout program in February, which eventually included 418 properties in Oakwood Beach. The program offered 100 percent of pre-storm home values and stipulated that it would keep the land undeveloped to serve as a natural flood barrier. Out of the 418, 300 homeowners, including all but three Foxbeach residents, signed up.

Meanwhile, the city put forward its own acquisition plan, promising to redevelop acquired land to be more storm resilient and offering post-storm home values plus a relocation bonus. On Oct. 7, the state signed off on its first buyout, a two-bedroom home in Fox Beach. Three days later, the city publicized its first acquisition – this time, the home of a woman on Staten Island’s southernmost shore, who had lost her husband and daughter in the storm.

A week later, Staten Island City Council members James Oddo and Vincent Ignizio came out with some surprising news – the city had decided to turn its acquisition program over to the state. Exactly how the consolidation will affect buyout terms remains to be seen.

“The city and state are still in discussions regarding the acquisition program, the MOU has not been signed and the details have not yet been finalized,” said Barbara Brancaccio, a spokeswoman for New York Rising, the state program managing New York’s relief efforts.

Oddo, however, has reported that all buyout-eligible homes will now be acquired at pre-storm values.

“Every day is Oct. 30”

Meanwhile, after protracted struggles with insurance companies and a year of depleting their savings, more and more people are deciding that buyouts are their best option.

Jackie Parker, a nurse at the VA Hospital in midtown Manhattan, has lived on Staten Island for over 30 years. Although her Midland Beach house is 15 blocks inland, she got 12 feet of water during Sandy. “I still freak out every night,” Parker said.

She was able to move into the top floors of her home shortly after the storm, and just last month, her bank received an insurance payment to make necessary repairs to the first floor. Parker said that while the bank will release the payment in full directly to her contractor, neither it nor the insurance company will agree to inspect the work once it has been completed.

Parker is not comfortable paying for work in advance without some kind of accountability. “I’m scared to do it,” she revealed. Feeling “disenfranchised” by her experience, she recently signed a buyout petition.

Parker is one of the lucky ones. “I don’t know anyone who has received a fair payment from their insurance,” said Dee Vandenburg, president of the Staten Island Taxpayers Association. She went on to describe the situation of one man she knows whose “house was completely wiped off the foundation … The insurance company keeps telling him they can’t find his house. He keeps saying it’s gone.”

In the vast number of cases, insurance offers are far lower than estimated repair costs. “A lot of people are only getting half of their policy. So they’re getting $125,000 but they need more like $250,000,” said Nicole Romano-Levine, president of the New Dorp Civic Association. According to Romano-Levine, insurance payouts are based on national averages far below the costs of construction in New York City.

Even the Nolans, who recently received a buyout offer, are still reeling from their nightmarish experiences with insurance companies and various bureaucracies.

Because they had paid for flood insurance, FEMA only offered them Small Business Administration loans and provided them with small, short-term rent stipends. They had a $100,000 homeowners policy to cover the contents of their home, but were initially declined all of this coverage. A few months ago, they finally received a flood insurance payment but by this time they needed that money to avoid defaulting on their mortgage.

Adding insult to injury, the city’s Rapid Repair program turned their water and power on without their knowledge so they received several utility bills even though they had not lived in their home since Oct. 29.

Nolan said she has spent hours every day over the past year dealing with such issues. “Frankly, every day I wake up is Oct. 30 to me because I have to start the day pulling the files and sending emails all over again,” she said.

Red Tape and Rumors

A city program, Build it Back, in particular, has received much criticism for its extended trails of red tape, response times, and lack of transparency. More than 5,000 Staten Islanders have registered for the program, which vows to help eligible applicants make up the difference between insurance payouts and costs of repairs. Since it launched in June, only a handful of people have heard back from the city to schedule home evaluations, the next step in the process. Build It Back spokespeople explain that lengthy federal reviews required for each project have delayed disbursements, a situation made worse by the federal shutdown earlier this month.

In the meantime, the definition of who can be considered “eligible” remains unclear. In the absence of information, rumors fly, fueling fears that the mid-Island’s lower middle and middle incomes will be too high to qualify for relief programs. “The people out here are firemen, policemen, sanitation workers, MTA workers. They can’t afford to not get this help” said Vandenburg.

Another key uncertainty concerns the future of development in the mid-Island. For years, mid-Islanders and local experts have tried to bring attention to the dangers of an increased trend towards subdividing of lots and infilling vacant land, especially in wetland areas.

While Mayor Michael Bloomberg has famously vowed not to back away from waterfront development, Cuomo told an audience at the College of Staten Island in February that “there are some places that Mother Nature owns.” However, the state only intended to prohibit rebuilding in areas it designated as “enhanced” or “very high risk.”

Now that the city and state have combined their acquisition programs, it is unclear how much of that land will be redeveloped. So far, Oddo has emphasized a provision to acquire properties with the intention of selling them for redevelopment. “That gives us the best chance to be transformative, to take a community and build a better housing stock, while giving people in that area the right, if they want, to come back and live in that housing stock,” he said at a press conference.

In that case, much depends on the enforcement of zoning and building regulations. And that could depend heavily the upcoming election next week.

So many questions and so few answers will make Oct. 29, an already difficult day, all the harder.

A number of memorial events will be held throughout the Island, but Vandenburg predicts that a lot of people will opt to commemorate the day privately. “Lives were ripped open,” she commented. “Everybody’s nerves are still frayed.”

City Promises 'Broad-Based Outreach' To Communities To Prepare For Future Storms


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The city has decided to reconvene two community advisory task forces that weighed in on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s multi-billion dollar plan to protect the city from future extreme weather and the effects of climate change in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, the city’s resiliency director told the Gotham Gazette/AdaptNY in an exclusive interview. The task forces will resume meeting this fall.

Daniel Zarrilli, the city’s director of resiliency, also said yesterday that there would be “broad-based outreach” to some of the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods as part of a Department of City Planning study that will examine “how we can ultimately build more resilient communities.” The study will examine issues such as the city’s building codes and the new national flood insurance maps.

The announcements come as the city fields criticism about community involvement in its climate change planning process as detailed in an investigative report by Gotham Gazette and AdaptNY, a digital news platform.  

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One of the task forces to resume work, made up of elected officials and community board chairs from the areas of the city most impacted by Sandy, had met monthly in the five months leading up to the release of the mayor’s plan in June, Zarrilli said.
 
A second task force was “composed of community organizations from the impacted areas, which the community boards were also heavily involved in,” Zarrilli said. He noted that “in some cases they [the boards] hosted the briefings and brought together local leaders.”

As part of a special investigative report, Gotham Gazette/AdaptNY surveyed 11 of the 18 community boards representing districts hardest-hit by Sandy.

In part 1, we documented how half of the community boards that represent the hardest hit areas do not feel they and the city are communicating well on rebuild and resiliency questions, despite the city’s intense focus on these issues. Part 2 zeroed in on the concerns of a half-dozen of the boards, which confront issues ranging from storm surge protection to soaring flood insurance rates to the demise of storm-battered businesses.

A More Democratic Process

The city’s 59 community boards, the most localized form of representative government in New York, currently have a non-binding vote within the city’s land use review process.

Some boards have argued that they should be more formally integrated into the city’s climate change planning process. Said Jonathan Gaska, the district manager for Queens CB 14 in the Rockaways, “Our big concern was there was not an official community board process — no ULURP [Uniform Land Use Review] process, no hearings. They didn’t treat us like a government body that represents 130,000 people.”

Zarrilli said that arguing that the city has not been listening to the boards is “not quite right. We’ve been out and responding to community boards,” Zarrilli said, referencing Gotham Gazette’s/AdaptNY’s reporting. “Every neighborhood is different.” He added that some of the boards were equally concerned about whether all the city’s resilience proposals could even be funded.

When asked if the community boards had a legitimate place at the table in terms of planning for climate change, City Councilwoman Gail Brewer of the Upper West Side said, "of course", but argued that the boards needed more support to participate fully in complex infrastructure and land use questions.

Brewer stressed that the boards had an equally important role in terms of identifying and serving the city's most vulnerable populations in the event of another major storm. "They know the neighborhoods, the city does not," Brewer said, adding that the Council would be passing legislation on Wednesday requiring that a centralized list of vulnerable populations be made available to emergency and first responders.

The Bloomberg administration’s highly-detailed report, A Stronger, More Resilient New York, released in June, outlined dozens of strategies for making the city more adaptable to extreme weather patterns, from storm surge barriers to green infrastructure.

The document includes over 200 initiatives designed to rebuild the five sections of the city that were particularly hard hit by Sandy — Lower Manhattan, south Brooklyn, south Queens, the Brooklyn-Queens Waterfront, and the eastern and southern shores of Staten Island — and increase climate resilience citywide. It was intended as a long-term roadmap that could be used by future administrations.

The report was prepared by the city’s Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency.

The Bloomberg administration maintains it has made an extensive effort to solicit community involvement as it rebuilds from Superstorm Sandy and plans for future storms, and argues that this engagement will continue. “We heard lots of good feedback,” Zarrilli said yesterday. He said turning the initiatives proposed by the city into reality would require more outreach to the public.

“Each one of those is going to take its own path towards implementation,” he said.

Zarrilli said that it was impossible to comment on whether the next mayoral administration would consider expanding the role of community boards in the city’s ongoing resiliency planning process. A spokesman for mayoral front-runner Bill de Blasio said that the Democrat did not have a position on the issue, nor had he indicated a position on engaging community-based organizations generally speaking in climate change planning efforts.

But de Blasio does support “formalizing” city collaboration with community-based organizations as emergency first responders in the event of another catastrophic storm.

The public advocate’s office released a report in June which maintained that community-based organizations “represented an under-utilized resource” in the city’s ongoing efforts to prepare for the future impacts of climate change. “Hurricane Sandy revealed the latent weakness in New York City’s efforts to reach communities in need and providing vital aid,” the public advocate’s report went on to say. “The city must take immediate action to establish partnerships with CBOs and ensure they have the necessary support to assist communities.”

While Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota could not be reached for comment on community involvement, his on-line “policy book” calls the city’s SIRR plan “commendable.” Lhota states that he would continue work on the city’s “ambitious” plan to create a system of flood barriers, which will “protect New York City’s critical infrastructure and vulnerable neighborhoods,” if elected.

The Need for Follow-Up

After the city stopped gathering information for the SIRR report in May, it no longer appears to have engaged the community boards or other local groups as systematically. The city moved on to finalizing its analysis, disseminating the results, and trying to get projects off the ground. A number of community boards in the hardest-hit districts have been looking for ongoing follow-up and raised a wide variety of issues with Gotham Gazette/AdaptNY.

Zarrilli said the boards have had an ongoing channel of communication with City Hall via the community affairs unit of the mayor’s office.

But Gaska of Queens CB 14 in the Rockaways said he did try to follow through with questions on local concerns. “Did we speak with the Community Affairs Unit? Absolutely. Did they communicate it to City Hall? Who knows.”

“I wish that it was a much more collaborative effort,” he continued. “One of the most important tenets of planning is you keep the stakeholders involved, and that really didn’t happen …. Democracy can be ugly and time consuming [but] that’s the process we have.”

However, other boards reported better communication with the community affairs unit.

Gigi Li, who chairs CB3 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, said that her board has an “open line of communication” with the community affairs unit. She said that, both through the unit and by participating in the advisory task force, “some of our concerns have been addressed”.

Li said that CB3 “would have liked” more involvement with the city on resiliency planning questions since the release of the SIRR report, but added that there has been more opportunity for dialogue in the last two to three weeks.

Moving Forward

Community boards in the hardest hit areas told the Gotham Gazette/AdaptNY they are searching for more effective ways to insert themselves into the climate change planning process.

The boards also have the unique quality of being part of government, even as they are also considered part of the local community.

Courtney Smith, the Municipal Art Society’s resilience and community engagement project manager, pointed out that neighborhood-based planning was not a focus of the SIRR report but maintained that community boards “are a critical part of the rebuilding process.”

“Regardless of any government-driven rebuilding process, to be sustainable and relevant, communities must be the drivers of the community plans and be involved in the decision-making that directly affects them,” Smith said. “Many residents have lived in these impacted neighborhoods for decades, and are experts on the conditions and experiences in their neighborhoods.”

But it will be the next administration’s task to decide how to integrate community boards into the city’s planning process.

The stakes are high. Forty-three New Yorkers died during Superstorm Sandy. Thousands more lost their homes or businesses or were temporarily displaced. The Bloomberg administration estimates that Sandy cost New York City $19 billion in losses. And climate change marches on.



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Gotham Gazette: 
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Gotham Gazette: 
City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years