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He Won Key New York Environmental Battles That Reverberate Today: Celebrating Al Butzel


Al Butzel at City Hall in 2009 (photo: Tracy Collins @threecee)


A towering figure in New York environmental law for the past half-century, Albert K. Butzel is relocating to Seattle to be closer to family. Al and his wife Brenda depart this weekend. We worked alongside Al over the years and offer our reflections on his enormous impact below.

First, Charles Komanoff, a policy analyst who runs the Carbon Tax Center and is active in the campaign to bring congestion pricing to New York. Then, attorney Michael Gerrard, who practiced environmental law full-time in New York for 30 years and since 2009 has been a professor and faculty director of Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

***
From Charles:

I met Al nearly 50 years ago. It was late 1973, a fraught but exciting time. My stint as energy analyst at New York City’s Environmental Protection Administration (as the Department of Environmental Protection was then called) was coming to a close, with the technicolor mayoral torch of John Lindsay passing to the stolid clutches of mayor-elect Abe Beame.

I had a secret to share with Al, concerning a contested power project Con Edison had been trying for a decade to build in the Hudson Highlands 50 miles north of mid-Manhattan. Al was attorney for the gentry who had won the landmark 1965 “Scenic Hudson” decision granting citizens legal standing to defend natural or historic places. Con Ed had subsequently modified its design to mitigate the project’s intrusion on Storm King Mountain. After years of stasis, ground-breaking was imminent. 

Lindsay’s environmental agency was overseeing the permitting. Along with an attorney there, Ken Semmel, I had devised an ingenious alternative, pairing combustion turbines with heat-recovering generators making both electricity and steam. Our configuration might actually compete with the Con Ed plan on cost, efficiency, and reliability. Around Thanksgiving, City Hall cleared the agency to send Con Ed our plan for comment. It was time to open a public channel.

I contacted Al. Meeting was a bit like looking in a mirror. We were probably both surprised at the other’s relative youth. I was 26 but looked closer to 20. Al, in his mid-30s, was just as skinny and still boyish. He was rumpled, easy-going, and affable. He spoke with a lilt, sometimes laughing at his own words, but he was steely and, at the end of the day, no-nonsense.

I described our concept. Al quickly grasped that our plan appeared to beat Con Edison at its own game. It would burn less oil, make less pollution, be buildable in stages, and, sited in Manhattan and the Bronx, be more reliable. It may have been Al who deduced that municipal tax revenues from our plan could neutralize criticism that we were advancing the economic interests of wealthy landowners.

That day launched a collaboration lasting half-a-dozen years. In short order, Al arranged for me to present my Storm King alternative to a Washington audience that included Westchester member of Congress and conservationist Dick Ottinger — and to leak our analysis to New York Times reporter Pete Kihss, who cornered Con Ed into preparing a response. When no deep flaws emerged, our plan gained the support of the state attorney general, in mid-1974.

From then to 1980, the Storm King project died a slow death, its demise multiply determined. New York’s near-bankruptcy, cratering power demand, Con Ed’s 1977 transmission-caused blackout, fears of larval striped bass destruction from Storm King’s massive water pumps, all played a part. Ken’s and my labors possibly rate an historical footnote.

Al’s work on Storm King as litigator and strategist was a different matter. For years after the “Scenic Hudson” decision, when Con Ed still had economic muscle to push the project forward, he kept the utility off-balance. His unflagging confidence gave Hudson River defenders faith we could prevail. Al always insisted that a better solution lay in store that wouldn’t mar the Hudson Highlands. He was right.


Storm King Mountain (photo: Charles Komanoff)

***
It wasn’t long before the two of us took up an even bigger issue, nuclear power. The Long Island Lighting Company was juggling two reactor ventures on Suffolk County’s north shore. Shoreham had a construction permit from the federal Atomic Energy Commission, but Jamesport, a much larger project 20 miles east, still faced public hearings. 

It was 1975, four years before anti-nuke activism would be turbocharged by the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania. Oil-dependent, tech-rich Long Island was hospitable to nukes. Ann Carl, a biologist from the north shore village of Lloyd Harbor, had other ideas. Channeling dissidents like Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs, Ann considered nuclear power expensive and unnecessary and wanted Lilco to prioritize energy conservation and efficiency before Jamesport. She hired Al, and Al retained me.

It didn’t take us long to apply what we had learned from our Con Ed work. Knowing that Storm King depended on cheap, surplus nuclear electricity to overcome power lost from pushing Hudson River water uphill to a reservoir each night, we peered behind the atomic curtain. Rather quickly, we saw that the nuclear power industry, a juggernaut from the outside, was reeling from cascading regulatory changes and delays that piled up carrying costs. On paper, spiraling oil prices validated more nuclear power from plants like Jamesport. In real life, the combination of costly oil-fired power and the struggle to build two reactors at once pushed up Lilco’s electric rates, driving down demand and drying up financing.

These critiques, obvious in hindsight, were heretical at the time. Al never shied from them. I’ll say he was a born contrarian, a lover of undisturbed nature, and a spoiler for a good fight. Riding into battle with Al, you had the edge. There seemed no argument he couldn’t win, no trap he couldn’t wriggle out of, no adversary he couldn’t outwit. Not just the smartest guy in the room, he was the most effective. 

***
From Michael:

When I graduated from law school in 1978 I joined the boutique environmental law firm Berle, Butzel & Kass. It mostly represented community groups fighting projects that threatened to worsen local pollution. 

Along with Peter Berle, who would later become state environmental commissioner, Al taught me how to try a case. Two were particularly memorable. The first concerned a proposed U.S. Postal Service vehicle maintenance garage in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Al was the lead lawyer, and he contended that the Postal Service's environmental impact assessment was inadequate because, among other things, it failed to consider an alternative site that had been proposed by a young, flamboyant real estate developer named Donald Trump. 

The federal judge hearing the case stopped Al's argument at that point and said, at some length, that Trump was a blowhard who had never really built anything and never would, and his proposals should not be taken seriously. Al stood there stoically while the judge lashed into him, and then proceeded calmly to try the case. 

The other, far weightier case concerned Westway. For close to a decade, Al was the lead lawyer fighting this proposed underground interstate highway along the Hudson River on Manhattan’s west side, which opponents branded “a massive real estate development project masquerading as a highway.”

He first contested it on the grounds that it would bring more traffic and therefore air pollution into Manhattan’s congested streets — an argument developed by his expert, Brian Ketcham, the engineer who had devised a plan in the waning days of the Lindsay administration to meet federal clean air standards through a combination of policy carrots and sticks designed to curb motor vehicle traffic.

Ketcham’s thesis was an early expression of the paradigm now known as induced traffic, which holds that expanding road capacity temporarily makes driving easier and more efficient, up until the increased traffic volumes cancel the initial boost in vehicle speeds. This argument is today nearly gospel (except among hardened, senior highway officials), but in the 1970s it was no match for the ridicule from the state transportation officials pursuing Westway.

The trial on the induced traffic issue took place before a hearing officer of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in one of the twin towers of the original World Trade Center. The lead lawyer on the other side was Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., a legendary trial lawyer from the even more legendary law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. (Ordinarily the state attorney general’s office would have been representing the state, but the attorney general at the time, Bob Abrams, opposed Westway and made the state hire outside counsel.) The first cross examination I ever conducted was of an expert witness called by Schwarz; that was intimidating, to say the least, but Al coolly coached me through it.

One of the major issues in the case was whether there was enough parking capacity in Manhattan’s commercial garages to hold all the cars Al said would be attracted by the highway; if there weren’t, maybe they wouldn’t come. The official numbers in the city’s records indicated there were enough, but Al didn’t trust them. So Al spent several weeks riding around Manhattan on his bicycle, stopping at every parking garage and writing down the number of spaces it had posted. The other partners in the firm questioned whether this was the best use of a senior lawyer’s time (when I became a senior lawyer myself, I realized that of course it wasn’t), but Al was insistent on getting the numbers right.

The hearing officer (a retired upstate judge) recommended that the permit be granted; the DEC Commissioner (reporting to Governor Hugh Carey, a strong supporter of Westway) signed the permit. Thus ended our traffic case.

Al then pivoted to the aquatic biology he had learned in the Storm King dispute. To Judge Thomas Griesa of the federal district court for the Southern District of New York, who was hearing the lawsuit, he brought fisheries biologists who testified that creating the 220 acres of new landfill to undergird Westway would grievously harm the habitat of the striped bass that spawned upriver before leaving the Hudson to populate New York and New England bays and sounds. Under Al’s questioning, the biologists stressed the potential devastation, highlighting the highway’s appropriation of ten percent of the river’s expanse along Manhattan’s west side.

The biggest question in the trial was whether the Army Corps of Engineers had been intentionally misleading when it said in its environmental impact statement that this stretch of the Hudson River was a “biological wasteland.” From time to time plain brown envelopes containing internal Corps documents would appear under the door of our law firm when we entered in the morning. We never learned who slipped these documents to us; we called the source “deep fish.” But the papers helped us prove that the Corps had indeed been misleading. Judge Griesa pronounced from the bench, “I’ve thrown people into jail for securities fraud for less.” 

During this time, Al made sure to coordinate his public push to protect the river with appeals from transit advocates led by NYPIRG’s Straphangers Campaign to use Westway funds to bolster the transit financing that activist MTA Chair Richard Ravitch was cobbling from state and federal funding sources. 

After two long trials, Al, our colleague Mitch Bernard, and the Westway opponents prevailed. The massive highway was shelved and eventually replaced by the boulevard-type West Street and the parallel Hudson River Greenway, now the nation’s most heavily used bicycle path. And nearly a billion dollars — a critical infusion at the time — was traded in from the highway project to improve the city’s mass transit.

***
The two of us owe Al a great deal. More importantly, so do New York’s urban environment, the surrounding natural world, and all who call New York home.

***
Charles Komanoff is a policy analyst who runs the Carbon Tax Center and is active in the campaign to bring congestion pricing to New York. Michael Gerrard is an attorney who practiced environmental law full-time in New York for 30 years and since 2009 has been a professor and faculty director of Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

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A New Think Tank on Latino Politics


Puerto Rican and Dominican pride in New York City


For six years as a contributing writer for Gotham Gazette I have written almost exclusively on the trajectory and current dynamics of Latino politics in New York. In my first column here, in 2017, I explored how the increase in the Latino electorate was shifting the dynamics of our city’s politics. In the years since, I’ve written about many trends, elections, officials, and more. (I am most grateful to Gotham Gazette and editor Ben Max for giving me a platform from which to explore the important realities of Latinos and politics in New York.)

My writing on this subject stems from a deep passion to give voice to my fellow Latinos, a group that historically has been disenfranchised, rejected, and pushed out from political discourse and participation in the city and state. Indeed, that has also been the national dynamic. 

Whether locally or nationally, the struggle is hardly a recent one. Latinos have been fighting for political recognition and representation for nearly a century, ever since large numbers of Puerto Ricans began to arrive in Gotham. 

These early efforts, financed by numbers runners (boliteros) and organized by cigar makers (tabaqueros) and pioneering women like Antonia Denis, led in 1937 to the first Latino elected to office in the history of New York, the Puerto Rican Oscar Garcia Rivera, who won the East Harlem Assembly seat. I have shared some of this history in an ongoing series for Gotham Gazette here and here.

While Latinos now comprise almost a third of the population of New York City, and while there has been significant progress since the pioneering efforts of Latinos that came before us, our Latino community continues to struggle for recognition and empowerment. This is perhaps most clearly evident in the dynamics in the “Condado de la Salsa.” The Bronx is the only Latino-majority borough — it is also the poorest borough in the city with the lowest voting participation rates, and it no longer has any borough-wide Latino representation.

My passion to give voice to my people has now led me to embark on a new journey: the founding of a new, independent, nonpartisan think tank focused on Latino politics and policy called The Institute for Latino Politics and Policy (ILPP). The Institute will expand on many of the topics I have explored in my writing at Gotham Gazette and elsewhere over the past six years. Its mission is to promote research, publications, and the education of the wider public on policy and political issues affecting Latinos in New York, including through advocacy and community engagement.

The Institute is inspired by the pioneering efforts of thinkers like Angelo Falcón and José Ramón Sánchez, who decades ago formed their own policy research entity to explore the Latino political and social reality in New York. Falcón, who passed away five years ago, labored as best he could to interpret and describe this reality. 

Through the long process of conceiving this think tank, I have been honored to receive the support of many others who have also sought to be a voice for their fellow Latinos — Lucía Gómez (in many ways a Falcón ‘alum’), Aldrin Bonilla, Rev. Ray Rivera, Dr. Sam Cruz, Marlene Peralta, Rev. Fred Davie, Emerita Torres, and still more. This group has been an important sounding board in the exploratory phase of the Institute. A number of educational institutions have also expressed a desire to work collaboratively with The Institute for Latino Politics and Policy.

Over the coming months, the Institute will sponsor virtual and in-person events bringing together academics, policy-makers, faith-based and community leaders for conversation on issues that affect Latino communities. It will also soon begin releasing reports and video content on themes relating to the political and social realities of Latinos in New York.

In sum, The Institute for Latino Politics and Policy is another platform through which I and we can advance the Latino cause and explore the larger context of Latino politics. I hope that you, reader, whether Latino or not, will join me in this effort. You can follow us online at www.latinopolitics.org and on Twitter @InstituteLatino.

***
Eli Valentin is a political analyst and author of the forthcoming book, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Life. On Twitter @EliValentinNY.

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What New York City Should Take from San Francisco’s Ongoing Reparations Debate


A Black Lives Matter street renaming (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


In his third inaugural address on January 1, 1986, Mayor Ed Koch remarked that "New York is the city where the future comes to rehearse.” It was a poetic take on the old idea that New York is a leader in culture, politics, and public policy; a place where cutting edge ideas are embraced only to be belatedly adopted by the rest of the country. This is often true, but one glaring exception has emerged related to a deeply important policy being examined by our West Coast counterparts: reparations for Black Americans.

Unless you are paying close attention you might have missed the major news that San Francisco is gaining momentum behind proposals to implement groundbreaking modern reparations. In 2020, California enacted a law to create a task force to determine how the state could provide reparations to Black Americans and who would be eligible.

While this process moves forward, some localities are taking action on their own, namely San Francisco, where the San Francisco Board of Supervisors just voiced enthusiastic support for proposals, including payments of $5 million to every eligible Black adult. While this expression of support by the board does not mean all recommendations will be approved, policymakers around the country would be wise to take note.

The moral case for reparations is clear: for 246 years, Africans taken from their homes and their descendants born on this land were purchased and sold as chattel, pieces of property, and enslaved. Millions of Africans and their African-American descendants were forced to labor in the most brutal conditions with no rights to self-determination and, of course, no compensation for their labor. 

After the abolition of slavery, and for the next century, freed Blacks and their descendants were subject to Jim Crow Laws that limited their participation as full citizens. For centuries, Black Americans have been subject to systemic racism that has hampered their economic growth potential and specific government policies have explicitly left these communities out. For example, the Social Security Act itself, as enacted, did not provide benefits to those in professions then dominated by Black Americans, including agricultural and domestic workers. The GI Bill, which triggered the post-WWII economic boom as enacted, systematically excluded Black service members from being able to reap its benefits. 

The result of all this history is an unquestioned loss of wealth generation and accumulation. According to a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 2019 the average per capita wealth of white Americans was $338,093 but only $60,126 for Black Americans.

The public policy case for reparations, much like universal income proposals, is also sound. New York should provide reparations to the descendants of those who were enslaved not just as a matter of moral justice, a recognition that slavery was wrong and an act of contrition for the very active role that New York played in the Atlantic Slave Trade, but as a matter of good policy. Providing reparations and closing the racial wealth gap will allow more Black families to stay in New York City, which has seen its Black population continue to shrink due to the economic pressure of living in the highest tax and highest cost-of-living city in the country.

Further, despite the initial fiscal hit of a multibillion-dollar outlay, paying reparations and closing the racial wealth gap also means there will be several hundred thousand fewer New Yorkers reliant on the city’s social safety net, likely saving taxpayers money in the long run and freeing up resources to be put toward things we all agree need more funding. Like other cash transfers, this has potential to be an economic stimulant, especially given that research shows Black entrepreneurs start businesses at higher rates than other groups, which will spur economic activity that lifts others out of poverty, further reducing reliance on social safety programs and increasing tax receipts. 

There even exists an historical precedent for reparations in New York City. Over four days in July 1863, while the battle of Gettysburg was being fought over 150 miles away in Pennsylvania, mobs of white New Yorkers, protesting the draft, terrorized Black people by roaming the streets setting fire to buildings and killing people. The overall death toll is estimated at between over 100 and up to 1,000. After the riots, the white merchants of New York combined forces to raise money to care for the injured, repair the damaged property, and support the legal and employment needs of the community's Black people. The shopkeepers raised over $40,000, equivalent to $825,000 in 2021.

Reparations are not “unAmerican” or unconstitutional, in fact they are deeply American. Indeed, the United States has regularly proposed, and occasionally paid, reparations to groups intentionally harmed by its policies. A small selection of those occasions includes the following: 

On January 12, in the midst of the Civil War, General William T. Sherman and U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton met with 20 Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia. Four days later, General Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 stating that Black people would receive an army mule and not more than 40 acres on coastal plains of South Carolina and Georgia. By June, roughly 40,000 Blacks had settled on 400,000 acres of land — before Confederate landowners, former enslavers, aided by the new Johnson administration, started taking back "their" land.

With the Pueblo Lands Act of 1924, Congress authorized the establishment of the Pueblo Lands Board to adjudicate land title disputes, along with a payment of $1,300,000 to the Pueblo for the land they lost (although the Pueblo disputed the amount). Later, in 1980 as the result of a lawsuit, the federal government appropriated $105 million to be paid to the Sioux of South Dakota for seizure of their land. Again in 1985 $12.3 million was set aside for the Seminoles of Florida. And of course in 1988, with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill providing $1.2 billion ($20,000 a person) and an apology to each of the approximately 60,000 living Japanese-Americans who had been interned during World War II. 

Support for modern reparations policies is growing. In 2021, Evanston, IL released its first batch of funds in a program offering reparations to Black residents whose families faced discriminatory housing practices and Amalgamated Bank became the first major U.S. bank to support a federal proposal to explore reparations. 

While the exact dollar amount is, and should be, debated (and it is worth noting that San Francisco’s proposal of multi-million-dollar payments is an outlier as most experts on the study of reparations propose payments closer to $350,000 per eligible individual, a number that would represent closure of the racial wealth gap) there should be no doubt that New York, the nation’s largest Black city, and a city that played a starring role in the economy of slavery, must lead in redressing the lasting harm that manifests itself daily. 

These proposals will surely be met with legal and political challenges. But the impact of slavery, and subsequent century of policy choices that excluded Black Americans from opportunity and wealth creation is felt across our city every day, from the racial wealth gap to disparities in health and education, segregation in housing, and much more, its impacts are also felt by those who benefited from that history and continue to do so, even if they don’t know it.

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Akhurapa Ambak is an attorney and sits on the associate board of the Harlem School of the Arts and is a Board Member of the Drexel Law School Black Alumni Association. Erika Tannor is an SVP at Tusk Strategies and the co-founder of the 5BORO Institute who has written on cash transfers extensively.

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