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Politics Kills A Greenway


The parks department has quietly shelved a fully funded and planned $1.2 million Staten Island greenway that local residents have worked for many years to get built. Borough President James P. Molinaro, who wields tremendous political power on the island and whose support Mayor Michael Bloomberg needs for reelection, is blocking the project because of concerns that it would limit future road-building options.

The route, which goes through residential neighborhoods, would provide a recreational corridor between the waterfront and the island’s wooded interior Greenbelt, and would also link to a greenway system being pieced together in the borough and throughout the city.

The planned path, called the Amundsen Trailway, mostly follows a wooded strip of land that was set aside by Robert Moses for the construction of the Willowbrook Parkway, which was never built. Three studies conducted over the last two decades determined that building the Willowbrook and another proposed highway, the Richmond Parkway, would not alleviate traffic problems in the borough. The rights-of-way for the two unbuilt parkways make a large "X" that intersects in the heart of the Greenbelt.

The land is still mapped for the roadways, however. Local civic and environmental groups have been trying to get the state legislature to "demap" the rights-of-way and turn them over to the parks department, but these efforts have been opposed by Borough President Molinaro.

Although the Amundsen Trailway has been in the works for years and received all the necessary funding and approvals, Molinaro has put a moratorium on construction in the right-of-way until traffic concerns are resolved. "Right now we’re being asked to hold off until this is looked at one more time," said Thomas A. Paulo, parks department Staten Island borough commissioner. "In any part of the city, it’s very difficult to create a new right-of-way. Before we move forward on having a new use, it’s good to take a look at it." The borough president declined to be interviewed for this story.

Trailway advocates say that the three studies are still valid. "The zoning and land use is what it is. The street use is what it is. Development patterns are what they are. It’s the same as in 1994, 1988, and 1981 [when the studies were conducted]," said John Rooney, chair of the Amundsen Trailway committee of the Richmondtown & Clarke Avenue Civic Association. He said that the huge burst of development the island has experienced is coming from a totally different area. "The predominate direction of traffic demand is opposite from the Willowbrook Parkway corridor."

A LONG ROAD

For decades, residents of the area have envisioned a loop where people could run, stroll or bicycle between two of the island’s well-loved open spaces, the seashore at Great Kills and the hilly woods of the Greenbelt, where it is hard to believe you are in New York City. Where there is now a muddy, uneven footpath through seemingly abandoned land — the kind of place people tend to dump garbage — there would be a properly surfaced and drained bicycle and pedestrian pathway, marked by signs.

Trailway advocates also envision how the route might coordinate with the city Department of Environmental Protection’s Bluebelt storm water drainage system. The area has many streams and wetlands and is prone to flooding. The Bluebelt system preserves and enhances these wet areas to channel, collect, and filter storm water flows, saving the city billions of dollars while preserving open space and wildlife habitat. One recently completed Bluebelt project was finalized to coordinate with the planned pathway.

After decades of effort by residents and the creation of a detailed conceptual plan by the Richmondtown & Clarke Avenue Civic Association, in 1991 the Staten Island Greenbelt Master Plan included the Amundsen route as part of a bicycle and pedestrian trail system in the Greenbelt parks. The trail is also included in the Department of City Planning’s citywide greenway plan (In PDF Format) and former Borough President Molinari’s Staten Island bikeway plan.

The state allocated federal transportation funding covering 80 percent of the trail’s construction and the city approved its 20 percent contribution. In 2001, the parks department released detailed drawings and specifications; by 2003 all the required reviews were completed and permits obtained. It was to be the first section of the Greenbelt trail system built.

Instead, the parks department now plans to construct another portion of the Greenbelt trail system first, a loop circling La Tourette Park. A new section is being added to complete the loop, using funding originally allocated to the Amundsen Trailway. "We are eager to get any portion of this now, because right now it is very difficult to do any kind of biking on the road in Staten Island anymore," said Borough Commissioner Paulo.

Questions have been raised, however, about the feasibility of the additional section because it would go through steep terrain unsuitable for bicycling, as well as wetlands. The new trail also does not provide the long-desired recreational link between the Greenbelt and the waterfront.

Neighborhood residents who have spent years cleaning up the right-of-way and trying to make the trail a reality are discouraged, but have not given up their dream. Chuck Perry is a retired teacher who lives across the street from the right of way and has long been active in the effort. He said, "Look at communities like in Long Island — they have these amenities. This is recreation for the average family, for the average citizen."

Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indicting To Clean Up Newton Creek; Also, Diesel Deaths


In the summer of 2003, a little more than a full century after the publication of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," Basil Seggos and fellow members of the local watchdog group Riverkeeper made their own trip up one of the world's scariest waterways.

Where Conrad chose Africa's Congo River as his exotic setting, the Riverkeeper team chose a destination closer to home: Newtown Creek, the industrial waterway separating Greenpoint and Long Island City. Long known as a dumping site for industrial polluters, the creek had evaded cleanup thanks largely to its remote, secluded nature.

"We had to take a row boat to get into the east branch," says Seggos, noting the presence of a bridge that effectively blocked passage for the 36-foot boat the organization usually uses when inspecting local waterways.

What the Riverkeeper inspectors found when they got to the other side of that bridge confirmed their worst suspicions. Seggos says there was a "huge white plume" of sediment pouring into the waterway from an underwater drainpipe. It wasn't too hard guessing the source of the plume. Immediately adjacent to the spot where the sediment hit the water was a cement plant, Quality Concrete, and subsequent testing proved the sediment to be high in calcium, an indicator of the limestone aggregate used to make concrete.

"These guys obviously had no cheap ability on site to hook into the city sewer lines," Seggos speculates, noting that 80 percent of the businesses along Newtown Creek operate with no city-provided sewer service. "Rather than hook up a treatment system which is what these kinds of companies should do, they were dumping into an old storm line and sending it to the creek for disposal."

Citing state law which forbids the dumping of untreated industrial waste into New York waterways, Riverkeeper filed notice of its intent to sue. The organization held off on filing the actual lawsuit for the winter, however, when Quality Concrete representatives indicated a willingness to clean up the site. When spring 2004 came and went with no observed cleanup activity, however, the group chose an alternate strategy: It invited Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes, Greenpoint Councilmember David Yassky and other notables to climb aboard the patrol boat and see the waterway himself. Again, the boat couldn't make it all the way up the creek, but what Hynes saw was enough.

"He was appalled by the conditions," recalls Seggos. "We passed the case on to him, and he ran with it."

That was last summer. This January, the Kings County District Attorney announced the indictment of Quality Concrete, now doing business as Maspeth Concrete Loading, and its chief executive officer, Constantine Quadrozzi, on 22 felony counts and 20 misdemeanor counts of unlawful sewage discharge. "This indictment sends a message that we will not tolerate these actions," said Hynes in a Jan. 2005 statement to the press.

Although the defendant company is based in Maspeth, Queens, just over the borough line, Richard Farrell, an assistant district attorney who is helping prosecute the case, says the office feels it has the authority to go after the company. First of all, the waterway impacted borders Kings County. As a second reason, he cites "the 500 yard rule" in that any courts usually give both county governments the ability to prosecute anything that occurs within 500 yards of the county line.

Brian Gardner, Quadrozzi's attorney, was unavailable for comment for this article, but in a January statement to the Daily News predicted an out-of-court settlement. "Once we sit down with the DA's office, we expect [the charges] to be fully resolved in our favor and dismissed," Gardner told the newspaper.

Even if both sides find a mutually suitable resolution, Farrell sees Quality Concrete as only the first step in what is sure to be a decades-long effort to clean up a creek that has been an industrial haven since the mid-19th century. Larger problems, most notably a 52 acre ExxonMobil site that contains the remnants of a 17 million gallon oil discharge, promise an even bigger legal fight. Still, the bridge has been crossed, both literally and figuratively, and those on the enforcement side appear willing to take on fresh opponents.

"There are other pollution situations being looked at," says Farrell. "I would not call the Quadrozzi situation the most egregious situation out on the creek."

Diesel Deaths

New York smokers who have to take their cigarette breaks on the cold sidewalk have a new reason to complain. According to a report issued by the Clean Air Task Force last month, truck and bus-borne diesel exhaust can be just as deadly, if not more so, than the second hand smoke that once filled city offices, bars and restaurants.

Titled "An Analysis of Diesel Pollution and Public Health in America," the report pegs the local death rate due to diesel soot at 2,729. That's nearly triple the death rate of the next closest metropolitan area, Los Angeles, which loses 918 people a year to diesel-related deaths. When the report broke down the statistics on a per capita basis, the only metropolitan regions to edge the Big Apple were oil-production centers such as Beaumont, Tex. and Baton Rouge, La.

As a point of comparison, the American Lung Association estimates that second hand cigarette smoke causes 3,000 lung cancer deaths and 35,000 heart disease deaths each year. Local stats are unavailable, but a simple breakdown based on a New York City metropolitan population size of 20 million results in 2,500 local deaths due to second hand smoke.

Peter Iwanowicz, director of environmental health for the American Lung Association of New York and a local spokesperson for the Clean Air Task Force, says the report's primary purpose is to dramatize the lingering health hazards caused by a form of air pollution source most people tend to ignore.

"This is the first time an entity has put together a report that uses the EPA's own modeling database," says Iwanowicz. "I think while most people understand that diesel exhaust is bad for you, but what is most startling is how dramatically it points out the risk."

Also startling is the regional disparity. Iwanowicz credits California for imposing tougher pollution standards on the businesses that generate diesel exhaust. Aside from a few high profile settlements, New York in general and New York City in particular remain a place where many companies still get away with aging equipment and excessive idling, he says.

"What we're calling for is a more aggressive plan of action," Iwanowicz says, noting that the EPA's current plan to force transportation companies to employ cleaner-burning engines in new vehicles doesn't go into effect for another two years. The plan leaves it up to local governments to regulate the retrofitting of older, dirtier engines which the task force estimates could take up to 30 years to eliminate from the nation's roadways.

Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum, disputes that 30 year estimate, and notes that the study used to estimate exhaust particulate volume dates back to the mid-1990s and thus fails to take into account pollution-limiting technologies implemented over the last decade. At the same time, however, he supports the report's call for more aggressive enforcement of anti-idling laws and the establishment of funding programs to underwrite an industry-wide engine retrofitting program.

"We want people to do retrofitting," says Schaeffer. "We want them buying technology. This isn't your classic industry vs. environmental group story. I happen to think we can get a lot more done working together than communicating by press release."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Gates And The Water Filtration Plant


"THE GATES"

Is it "the first great public art event of the 21st century" (Michael Kimmelman's review in the New York Times) or something resembling a construction site or car wash (New York Daily News)? "An opportunity for self-examination and transcendence," (letter to the New York Times or a work of art "of joy and beauty that [has] no purpose whatsoever" (the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the Gotham Gazette) ?

Whether it is art or a "colorful spectacle," as former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern described it in an essay posted on his New York Civic site, the Central Park installation, "The Gates," is a celebration of the park itself.

During the quarter-century since the artists first proposed "The Gates" (three mayors vetoed it), the park itself was beautifully restored. On February 13, when the fabric panels were unfurled on orange gates winding through the wintry landscape, the park was ready. As New York Times columnist Joyce Purnick wrote, "If there really is a time for everything, this is the time for 'The Gates.' Spend a moment in the park and it's apparent. The installation has transformed the park into a public party."

It has also been a bonanza for the city, which has a special web site for the event. People have come from all over the world to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude's latest work. Before the installation, the city predicted it would generate an estimated $80 million in business and $2.5 million in tax revenue.

As with previous Christo installations, the visitors become part of the experience of the work. In this way, the event is true to Olmsted's democratic vision of the park as a place where people of all social classes come to enjoy themselves, and reminds us how much the city needs such public spaces. The parks department estimated that one million people came to the park on the first four days, 450,000 on the first Sunday alone - far more than the typical crowd of 65,000 in February or even of 250,000 on a balmy spring Sunday. And that inevitably raises the question, if all these people can come to the park for "The Gates," why wouldn't the city allow half that number to gather last August to exercise their right of free speech, another long-cherished function of the city's public space? (It is true, though, that hardly a visitor to "The Gates" strayed onto the grass.)

The other essential part of the installation, of course, is Central Park itself. Walking through the corridors of gates under panels snapping like flags in the wind, or looking from an elevated vantage at the serpentine orange-lined paths, the viewer inevitably looks more closely at the artistry and natural beauty of the park. For two weeks, at least, all eyes are focused on the city's great work of landscape art and one of the most significant public spaces in the world.

VAN CORTLANDT PARK UPDATE

The city has begun clearing the site in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx slated for the construction of a water filtration plant, even as several lawsuits to stop the plant are working their way through the courts.

After a decade-long fight over building the plant in the park, state and city elected officials approved the use of parkland for the facility last year in exchange for $240 million of additional funding for Bronx parks. The city is building the plant to fulfill a federal requirement to filter the 10 percent of the city's water that comes from the Croton watershed.

The plant is to be built underground beneath the current driving range of the Mosholu Golf Course in the park's southeast corner, along Jerome Avenue. The city has said it would replace the driving range and clubhouse on top of the completed facility, returning all but two acres to public use.

Neighborhood residents and park advocates bitterly fought the plant. They continue to maintain that an industrial facility, with chemicals trucked in and sludge trucked out, does not belong in public parkland next to a densely populated community and that there is a better site available in an industrial park on city-owned land in Eastview, in Westchester County. They cite increased traffic, dust, noise, and loss of the green space closest to residential areas during the six to eight years of construction, and doubt that the city will really allow the public back in that part of the park because of security concerns.

The city preferred the Bronx location because of engineering, security, and cost considerations and a desire to keep essential city infrastructure within its borders. Park officials and most Bronx politicians were in favor of using the park because of the unprecedented amount of funding promised for park projects in the borough. Labor unions vociferously supported putting the plant in the park to keep jobs in the city, although there is no written requirement that a percentage of the jobs go to Bronx or city residents.

Monitoring the Construction

Now that site preparation has started, neighborhood groups remain deeply distrustful that the city agency in charge of the project, the city Department of Environmental Protection, will make sure its contractors provide the full mitigation and protections promised in the environmental impact statement. They already have concerns that construction work, including cutting down 40 huge old oak trees and pounding pilings into bedrock, has begun ahead of schedule and before noise barriers, dust control, wetland protections, and traffic controls have been put in place.

City Department of Environmental Protection Spokesman Charles Sturcken said that the work so far was just to provide a staging area for the roadwork. Susan Amron, deputy chief of the environmental law division of the city law department, said that work on the fence and the sound barrier was stopped by a temporary restraining order that was in effect (though was lifted on February 4) because of the litigation. "The fact that it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it is not going to happen in the first phase," she said.

Residents are also concerned that the required facility monitoring committee has not yet been set up, so the community has no idea of what aspects of the construction are being monitored - for example, truck emissions - or how it is being done. Sturcken said that the agency has contacted the affected community boards and is in the process of organizing the committee, which must meet at least four times a year. Community members are also unhappy that the office set up near the construction site to provide information and take complaints is open only during working hours, and that people must visit in person to make inquiries. They would also like to see a list of complaints posted on the agency's web site, along with their resolution. Sturcken said that the office "will be more community friendly once the project gets going." He said that people could phone in complaints to 311 and call the agency's public affairs office if they need more information.

The community groups also feel that the agency must do something to reduce the impact of dust and truck exhaust on people living near the site. "The city is spending $240 million on parks, but spending nothing on people who live across the street from the site for air conditioners so they don't have to open their windows in the summertime," said Lyn Pyle, a member of the environmental justice committee of the COVE, a local after-school and teen program.

The Legal Battle

In a final attempt to block the plant, four different lawsuits have been filed.

--Bronx Environmental Health and Justice, a community group, charges that the city's decision to put the facility in the park instead of Eastview has a disparate impact on low-income, minority populations. The agency's final environmental impact statement determined that, with the mitigation measures it detailed, there would be no adverse impact.

The group maintains that construction at Van Cortlandt, which requires digging a 9-acre, 80-foot-deep hole and removing 162,000 truckloads of rock and dirt, would create far more pollution than an aboveground building at Eastview and would affect a minority population 10 times larger than in the area around the industrial site in Westchester. There are 3,000 residents within the affected area at Eastview, compared with 26,000 residents, most of them minorities, within a half-mile radius of the park. "The Environmental Impact Statement says that particulate matter will increase by a factor of four at Van Cortlandt Park," said Ed Lloyd, law professor at Columbia Law School's Environmental Law Clinic, which is providing legal representation for the group. "The city admits there will be an increase in asthma death rates because of that. There are enormous health effects at Van Cortlandt that don't exist at Eastview."

Lloyd said, "There's an alternative site for this plant that we think is environmentally, economically, and from an environmental justice perspective, the more appropriate site where this should go. The city decision is not supported by the factual analysis that they themselves put in the Environmental Impacts Statement."

-- Friends of Van Cortlandt Park is suing the city on the grounds that it did not properly rezone the parkland for industrial use through the city's public land review process (ULURP). The city maintained that it did not have to conduct the review process because it did so in 1999 when it attempted to site the plant without state legislative approval, but last year, after the impact statement was released, it issued a "Mayoral Override Memo" of the zoning. The Friends lawsuit was dismissed by the lower court, but the group is considering an appeal.

-- A lawsuit by the Croton Watershed Clean Water Coalition charges that the city did not consider an alternate technology called microfiltration, which uses a membrane with tiny pores. A facility employing this technology, they say, would be smaller, less expensive to build and operate, require fewer chemicals, and produce no sludge. The city, however, said that using the still developing membrane technology would be riskier and also more expensive because additional treatment would be needed to eliminate color, odor, and minerals found in the Croton water. The Croton coalition is now in the process of filing an appeal after its suit was dismissed by the lower court.

--The Town of Eastchester has also sued. It alleges that the environmental impact statement did not take what is called a "hard look" at the impacts on the town, where a small pumping station near schools and residences would have to be significantly expanded if the plant is built in Van Cortlandt Park.

For More Information

Department of Environmental Protection Croton Filtration Plan

Website of community opponents to the filtration plant

Past articles in Gotham Gazette about the filtration plant

February 2, 2005 Community Gazette: Work Stopped at Filtration Plant

August 2004 $243 Million for Bronx Parkland? Who Will Decide?

July 2004 The Filtration Plant in Van Cortlandt Park

Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden. 



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