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Concessions


The parks department needs to do a better job of monitoring whether concessionaires are making agreed-upon improvements to the park facilities they lease, according to an audit by the office of New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr.

The Department of Parks and Recreation licenses about 600 businesses that pay to operate on parkland or in park buildings. In some cases, the owner of a concession, such as a skating rink, golf course, or restaurant, contracts with the city to spend a certain amount of money to make specific improvements to the facility they operate. According to the comptroller’s report, 37 of the 58 concessions inspected had not completed promised capital improvements totaling $10 million. The audit determined that the department did not make sure that improvements were started and completed on the specified dates and that it did not conduct routine inspections of the work.

The audit also found that it was difficult to track the status of projects because the parks department did not obtain required documentation from concessionaires. It noted that 10 of the 37 businesses with uncompleted capital improvements claimed that the department had authorized them to modify or cancel the projects, but neither the department nor the concessionaires could show paperwork certifying that changes had been requested and approved.

The parks department, however, disputed the findings. The department noted in a press release that the businesses audited met or exceeded their required capital investment by a combined total of more than $15 million. "The inaccuracies of the comptroller’s audit send the wrong message to businesses working with the city," said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. Nevertheless, the department said that it was expanding its current policy "to assure that all changes to contract requirements, regardless of size, will be documented in writing" and that it would include reports on concession capital projects in its monthly revenue management meetings.

WHERE SHOULD THE REVENUE GO?

Last year, parks department concessions brought in nearly $60 million. But the parks department doesn’t get to keep the revenue; instead, it goes to the city’s general fund. New Yorkers for Parks and other advocates believe that the revenue should go to the department, in addition to its regular city appropriations. These advocates have been working for years to increase parks funding. They say the extra money would help rebuild the department’s fulltime staff of skilled professionals, which has dropped 60 percent over the last 15 years ago, and fund more recreation programs.

 

Joseph Pupello, president of the New York Restoration Project, a non-profit group that has been restoring parks in upper Manhattan and the Bronx, believes that concessions can be a growing source of revenue as well as a way to enhance the park experience. "Stop bashing the parks department and starting coming up with creative ways to make concessions a wonderful part of the city," he said. "There is so much new opportunity for creativity and entrepreneurship in parks," particularly in the outer boroughs where the population is growing and parks are being improved. His organization has invested in the New Leaf Café, a restaurant in an historic building in Fort Tryon Park.

Some park supporters worry, however, that increasing the number of concessions could lead to too much or inappropriate commercialization. Their worst fears seemed to be realized last year when the parks department announced that it would contract with Wendy’s to put a restaurant in a closed comfort station in a Bronx park. Others object to turning over more public space to activities, like golf, where people have to pay to play, while neighborhoods where poor people live are short of green space and sports facilities.

Some of these concerns might be allayed by a new breed of concessionaires -- the non-profit organizations that support and help manage the parks. These organizations have as much of an interest in beautifying and improving their parks as they do in raising funds. The Prospect Park Alliance, for example, operates all of the concessions within Prospect Park. It recently won the contract to take over the tennis center at the nearby Parade Grounds, whose previous concessionaire had failed to build a clubhouse and make other promised improvements.

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.

Waterfront 'Access' May Actually Keep Public Out


Over a decade ago, New York City made sweeping changes to its zoning rules that require the construction of public esplanades in new residential and commercial development along its 580 miles of waterfront. The zoning also requires that developers keep open streets that lead to the waterfront.

But the new rules do not apply to industrial areas, and they are now being used in a back handed way to justify conversion of industrially-zoned land to residential. Industrial areas were not required to have public access under the faulty logic that it necessarily interferes with industrial activity. But if decent public access had been required, residents might be more tolerant of their industrial neighbors. What remains of the working waterfront is too often used for warehousing or garbage transfer, or lies vacant while speculators wait for the city to rezone it. This might not be the case if the city had from the start adopted a policy of making these areas more appealing to everyone.

In Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the City Planning Department is selling its scheme to rezone the industrial waterfront for market-rate high-rise housing by using the upside-down argument that this is the only way the community will get public access to the waterfront. They say that only expensive housing yields developers enough profits so they can build and maintain an esplanade and public access.

The outcome of the rezoning may very well be just the opposite. Even with certain contextual design features built into the zoning, high rise housing is likely to create a wall of luxury apartments sharply separated from this low- rise neighborhood. Luxury rents will put pressures on and displace tenants and homeowners in upland areas without providing new units affordable to people with modest incomes. Without protections for industry, the neighborhood will change even more rapidly from vibrant mixed use community to swank bedroom enclave. Residents now looking forward to a chance to get to the waterfront may discover that the public access they were promised does not work for them or that they cannot even afford to stay in the neighborhood. But by then it will be too late.

Years ago people who now live and work in Williamsburg and Greenpoint came up with a more sensible notion of how to get public access. They developed waterfront plans that call for a mixture of low-rise housing, compatible industry, retailing, and public access to the waterfront. The plans were approved by the City Planning Commission and City Council. The city's rezoning, however, would give them a luxury residential enclave on the waterfront.

Attractively redeveloped waterfronts all over the world include lots of low-rise development with intensely utilized public greenways. In Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen government played the leading role, creating opportunities for private development without compromising the public character of the waterfront. Government there does not wait for new development but builds public esplanades in already established neighborhoods. London's Docklands, on the other hand, is a massive waterfront development that followed the private model. Government there had to step in to rescue developers from bankruptcy and eventually ended up spending billions to pay for public amenities.

Another part of the argument by New York City officials is that the old industrial sites are contaminated and soil remediation is so expensive that the costs can only be recovered by building lots of expensive housing. This is only a small part of the truth. The other part is that remediation costs vary widely and are not necessarily budget-busters. Also, nice subsidies are available for low- and mid-rise housing. For the last two decades the city has subsidized the construction of one- to three-family homes affordable to people with modest incomes through a program that was profitable enough to attract lots of private developers. But here is the biggest item that gets left out of calculations: by rezoning their land the city is giving developers huge windfall profits. The city could recover some of these profits and invest them in a way that implements the community's vision for a mixed use waterfront.

Public Planning and Public Money

Behind this logic is the premise that little or no public money should go to revitalize the waterfront. The downtown Brooklyn waterfront, for example, will have a few big commercial developers to pay for a public park that allows people to stroll along the riverfront. The Hudson River greenway would not have been built without its godfathers.

 

This logic goes back to the 1970s fiscal crisis, which immediately followed the demise of the port. Unfortunately, long after the city's fiscal comeback, the idea that private development is the only option for the public remains a cornerstone of city policy. Even civic and community groups that have been fighting for decades for a public waterfront have come to accept this privatizing logic. The newest generation of community activists has no memory of a time when it was normal for people to expect government to put up the financing for a public benefit.

While communities are told they cannot have subsidies, developers are finding new ways to dip into public coffers to fatten their deals. For example, say you want to build a stadium or convention center with deep public subsidy. You create a public corporation to issue tax-exempt bonds (a form of subsidy), condemn land (a form of subsidy), and limit tax contributions (a form of subsidy). You can also say the bonds will get paid back by taxes on the private owners some time in the distant future, knowing full well that the privates can decide to go elsewhere, end up in bankruptcy court, or plead for public subsidies decades from now when no one will remember who made the promises.

Planning in the public interest should mean that everyone knows the costs and benefits involved. Our elected officials, public servants and communities should make decisions on the waterfront based on a mutually accepted vision of the future, not somebody's bottom line.

Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.

Sludge and Scandal


When Alvarado Sorin gives a tour of the New York Organic Fertilizer Company’s plant in Hunts Point, which processes what was originally the city's raw sewage into fertilizer for farmers, she is sure to warn people about the stink. Few know that stench better. A consultant for the company, and a member of the local community board who serves as the Bronx community liaison for the company, Sorin takes the call anytime the smells inside their plant get too much for local residents. Even with a full quarter mile between the plant and the nearest residence, the calls are frequent.

But ask some local residents, and they will say something else at the plant stinks. "The smell is not just a nuisance," says Elena Conte of Sustainable South Bronx, a Hunts Point environmental group. "It's what's in the smell that concerns folks."

Launched in 1993, the New York Organic Fertilizer Company is the largest facility of its type in the world. It processes up to 40 percent of the city's treated sewage sludge (up to 300 tons a day, according to the company), and has the capacity to handle the city's entire output, if needed. It is the flagship operation for Synagro Technologies Inc., a Houston-based company that bills itself as an "industry leader in biosolids, sludge, and residuals management."

At first glance, the conversion of sewage into commercial fertilizer appears to be an environmental "win-win." Both the 1972 Clean Water Act and the 1988 Ocean Dumping Act put limitations on how cities dispose of the solid waste that passes down toilets, sinks, and gutters. Currently, the choice boils down to one of three options:

  • incineration,
  • landfill dumping,
  • conversion to fertilizer.
In its effort to encourage the third option, the Environmental Protection Agency "strongly supports" the efforts of industry groups such as the National Biosolid Partnership to educate cities about fertilizer recycling.

 

That's where the trouble starts. Environmental groups, decrying the cozy relationship between the EPA and industry, have argued over the last two decades that the standards used to determine the safety of recycled sewage are dangerously lax. Of particular concern are so-called "Class B" fertilizers which undergo little more than a brief heating process to kill bacteria and can be spread in certain limited environments such as open pastureland. In 2002 Synagro settled out of court with the family of Shayne Conner, a New Hampshire man who died in his sleep a month after the spread of such fertilizer on a neighboring field. Although the settlement required that the family members state the lack of scientific evidence of the company's complicity, the EPA, in the wake of similar suits, announced last month that it would review its safety standards on 15 chemicals found in recycled sewage sludge and, according to the New York Times, look for pathogens.

As a producer of Class A fertilizer -- a more tightly regulated product that can be mixed with other forms of fertilizer for general agricultural use -- the New York Organic Fertilizer Company's Bronx plant runs its sludge through an intense heating process designed to kill pathogens. Nevertheless, there are concerns over heavy metals, such as iron, lead, and zinc, a byproduct of both industrial waste and human waste.

There was also concern when, last September, there was an explosion at the plant, caused by a volatile mixture of oxygen-rich air and swirling dust inside a silo.

Although the explosion caused no injuries and did damage only to the silo's interior, the New York Post headline -- "Dung Flung" -- caused some apprehension halfway around the world, in Hawaii.

There, the Honolulu City Council was considering a proposal by Synagro for a similar plant. That is undoubtedly why the company purchased tickets to fly Alvarado Sorin and Marta Rivera, chair of community board 2, to Hawaii, where they offered testimony favorable to the company.

"I felt it was very important for your community to know that sometimes media can get a hold of a story and sensationalize it," said Rivera, according to a printed transcript of the December 3 testimony. "Unfortunately, people do not want to hear the truth and the truth is Synagro has been a responsible company."

This little junket caused a different kind of explosion. The Daily News ran two stories in January playing up the quid-pro-quo element of the emerging scandal while also hinting at a possible investigation by the city's Conflict of Interest Board.

The Conflict of Interest Board declines to say now whether or not a complaint has been filed. Rivera, meanwhile, resigned her position as chair of community board 2, though she still remains a member of the board. At a February 3 meeting to hire her successor, Alvarado Sorin, announced that she, too, was resigning as chair of the board's economic development committee but not from the board itself. She took responsibility for the decision to invite Rivera to Honolulu, which she said in retrospect was wrong, but blasted fellow board members for feeding the media the story.

Speaking a day later in the conference room at the New York Organic Fertilizer Company facility, Sorin sounded more conciliatory, focusing on the facility's ongoing attempts to maintain an open dialogue with its harshest critics.

"The community organizations are asking for more accountability from the managers and to have more input," she says. "My operations people have no problem sitting with the people if that's what they want."

Marian Feinberg, health coordinator for the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition, has yet to be convinced. Earlier this month, she and other community members participated in a sitdown with managers following a tour of the plant. It wasn't the first time her organization and the plant had attempted a clear-the-air session, but, while the meeting was long -- "We were there long enough that we all had to go home and wash our coats and clothes," she says -- she does not believe that much was accomplished.

More important than direct communication, Feinberg says, is the pressure finally coming from outside the borough. The demand for better, cleaner process is increasing, thanks to:

  • the EPA standards review
  • the personal injury lawsuits
  • a pending state Department of Environmental Conservation review of the New York Organic Fertilizer Company's airborne emissions permit
  • the growing number of grass roots groups willing to trade information and keep one another apprised of the latest developments

"We will meet whatever guidelines the state and federal governments set for us," Sorin says.

It is doubtful whether that pressure will be enough to result in zero odors and close-to-zero emissions, which is why plant opponents have created a slogan that has become their rallying cry -- "clean it up or shut it down."

 

 



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