Call it a characteristic display of Big Apple chutzpah. Last month, city and state attorneys scored a $1.1 billion legal victory against out-of-state polluter Ohio Edison for violating the federal Clean Air Act, which regulates pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. But now, the New York State Office of the Attorney General and New York City Corporation Counsel, along with half a dozen other governments in the Northeast and West Coast, are going after carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is currently unregulated by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The chemical, CO2, is a natural byproduct of fossil fuel combustion. Though benign from a chemical safety standpoint, its ability to absorb and retain heat has led many scientists and governments around the world to attribute a recent rise in global mean temperatures to unchecked industrial and automotive exhaust.
Many business groups and even a few scientists challenge this so-called "greenhouse effect" theory, but evidence of rising carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere is incontrovertible. A study of atmospheric concentrations at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, the longest continuous study on record, reported an 18.8 percent increase in the mean concentration of carbon dioxide between 1958 and 2003.
With the Bush Administration currently distancing itself from the Kyoto Protocol, the recently-enacted treaty forcing developed nations to reduce "greenhouse gas" emissions, state and city governments with financial and political stake in climate stability see the legal system as the best way to reduce U.S. emissions.
"I think if we want to see progressive, responsible environmental policy, it's going to have to come from the state and local governments,'" says Judith Enck, policy advisor to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. "If you get the West Coast and the Northeast teaming up, sooner or later you get a national global warming policy even if the federal government won't act."
Bush's Clear Skies Act Ignores Carbon Dioxide
Last month, just about the same time Ohio Edison was agreeing to a court-mandated installation of smokestack-scrubbers at its largest coal-burning power plant, the Bush Administration's efforts to spare other power companies the same indignation were stalling out in Congress.
Dubbed the Clear Skies Act, the Bush air pollution plan would abandon a decades-old policy of forcing power companies to clean their facilities whenever they expand or upgrade production -- a policy known as "new source review" by insiders -- in favor of a market-oriented policy in which clean companies earn pollution credits which they can then sell to dirtier companies as a monetary reward for compliance, This policy is known as "cap and trade."
According to the Bush administration, this market-driven system would reduce sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury emissions by as much as 70 percent over the next two decades while at the same time reducing the number of costly lawsuits. Opponents, however, see major flaws: During the first decade of the plan, or at least until 2012, the so-called Bush "cap" would actually be lenient enough to relieve power companies from the compliance duties already required under new source review. More importantly, however, the Bush plan makes no mention of carbon dioxide whatsoever. Although Bush promised to regulate during the 2000 election campaign, his administration voided the promise less than 60 days into his first term, citing recessionary concerns.
Looking At 19th Century Law To Get Around Bush In The 21st
Since then, Democratic-voting coastal states such as New York, Massachusetts and California, and even swing states such as Iowa, have been looking for alternate ways to remedy the rising cost of severe weather storms and lost wetlands. Environmental lawyers have found their remedy not in the federal case law built up since the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 but in the common law that governed most environmental disputes in the days of limited federal authority.
David Doniger, policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the 19th century nuisance laws that once allowed cities such as New York to ban slaughterhouses, rendering plants and other unpopular businesses and to regulate their activity across jurisdictional lines offer an opportunity to go after fixed-point carbon dioxide producers. Doniger cites, in particular, State of Georgia v. Tennessee Copper, a 1907 case that worked its way all the way up to the Supreme Court. In that case, the state of Georgia asserted its legal right to limit the tree-killing sulphur dioxide emanating from a copper smelter operating in Tennessee. In 1915, the Supreme Court sided with Georgia, setting up the modern framework for interstate environmental regulation.
"This is old, hallowed stuff," says Doniger of the 1907 case. "A lot of it was put aside or put on pause during the last few decades because most kinds of pollution are now addressed by the Clean Air Act."
Most but not all. As noted previously in this topic page, the Bush administration's undisguised antipathy to the decades-old new source review policy has already created a vacuum of leadership which many states and cities are rushing to fill. That carbon dioxide remains off the federal enforcement agenda only adds to the shifting legal momentum.
"It's ironic," observes Frank O'Donnell, president of the non-profit monitoring group Clean Air Watch. "Historically more liberal groups sought to make sure the federal government had primacy in matters of this sort. Since the Bush administration has in effect dropped the ball, however, it is now up to state attorneys general to clean up the environment."
Last summer, eight states, including New York, together with New York City and the Natural Resources Defense Council, filed lawsuits in the Southern District of New York against five power companies which, added together, account for 10 percent of the country's carbon dioxide emissions. The list includes Ohio-based utilities American Electric Power and Cinergy, Atlanta-based Southern Company, Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy, and the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority. The since-consolidated lawsuit demands that defendants reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.
Pat Hemlepp, spokesman for American Electric Power, says his company is already reducing its carbon dioxide emissions voluntarily.
"We're the leader in our sector on carbon [gas reduction] efforts, which is why, frankly, we were quite surprised to be one of the companies named in the suit," says Hemlepp.
Then again, American Electric Power is also the country's largest consumer of coal and a strong supporter of the Bush administration reasoning that any national carbon dioxide standards take into account growing industrial competition from countries such as India and China, a Kyoto treaty signatory that, under the treaty terms, won't have to curb its emissions until the next decade.
An Environmental Scopes Trial?
Economic issues aside, the current case pushes the carbon dioxide debate out of Congress, where the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is currently locked in a 9-9 stalemate on the Clear Skies Act thanks to moderate Rhode Island Republican Lincoln Chaffee and Vermont Independent Jim Jeffords, and into the courts. Green Car Congress, a blog that tracks environmental issues, has already likened the case to Tennessee v. John Scopes, the sensational 1925 trial in which attorneys debated the scientific validity of Darwin's theory evolution.
In a statement issued at the time of last summer's filing, Michael Cardozo, head of the New York City legal department, described the city's participation as response to global warming concerns and "part of the Bloomberg Administration's commitment to maintaining a clean and sustainable city."
Speaking after last month's court victory, Judith Enck of the Attorney General's Office sees things in even more dramatic terms. Like O'Donnell, she sees ironic payback for a Republican party that, during its own time as a minority power, sought to transfer federal authority on issues such as environmental regulation back to the states.
"When [conservatives] were designing the new federalism, they weren't banking on an aggressive attorneys general," Enck says. "The federal government can assert its power over much more territory and more jurisdictions, but an aggressive, focused attorney general can accomplish more than a lumbering federal bureaucracy."
TRACKING CITY CARBON MONOXIDE DETECTOR USAGE
While New York officials focus on carbon dioxide, Boris Riabov, a sophomore at the Bronx High School of Science, has been keeping tabs on its more dangerous cousin: carbon monoxide.
Based on data from a recently collected school assignment, Riabov estimates that nearly a third of Manhattan residents have yet to install -- or have their landlords install -- carbon monoxide detectors.
Riabov, 16, created the survey for a class called Science Instrumentation and Problem Solving (SIPS). As noted in a December 2003 column, carbon monoxide detector sales have historically been tragedy-driven. People read grisly stories such as the October, 2004 suffocation deaths of an Albanian family in its Staten Island home due to a blocked exhaust vent, and go out and buy detectors. A city law enacted last November seeks to break that pattern, however, mandating the purchase and installation for all rented units.
Taking inspiration from that law, Riabov created an anonymous questionnaire which he circulated at various public libraries in and around Washington Heights. The questionnaire asks people to list carbon monoxide's effects and to report the number of detectors in their apartment or house. Although 93 percent of the survey's 70 respondents knew about carbon monoxide and almost every returned questionnaire listed at least one negative effect caused by the gas, 30 percent of respondents reported no carbon monoxide detectors.
"That was most surprising to me," says Riabov. "I also found that ten percent of homes with children didn't have a detector, and one of the facts about carbon monoxide is that it affects children quicker than adults."
Less surprising was the statistic showing that 44 percent of respondents reported new detectors in their homes since November 1, 2004, a sign that the law, while not reaching everyone, has certainly affected a significant number of people. Riabov says he hopes to use this finding as a foundation for a more ambitious study, documenting code compliance later this year.
"There are a couple contests I'd like to enter," he says. "If you get approved, they give you a grant to get started. I'll have to wait and see if they give me a grant."
Riabov completed his survey just days before the latest news story involving the odorless, colorless gas firefighters and parametics call the "silent killer." On March 31, police in the Douglaston section of Queens discovered the bodies of a hearing-impaired husband and wife. The medical examiner has yet to determine the cause of death, but police officials speaking to the Associated Press believe the couple left their car running in the garage and suffocated from the fumes after failing to hear their alarm go off. Â
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.Â
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."
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"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.
Though he campaigned vigorously for the national Republican ticket, New York Governor George Pataki now seems bent on distancing himself from a White House that is often seen as anti-environment.
The governor's proposed budget boosts the state's Environmental Protection Fund by 20 percent, to $150 million. Pataki is also looking to offer expanded tax credits for "green buildings" to foster cleaner, more efficient energy usage here in the city. The governor's office plans as well to expand by 70 the number of state staffers at the Department of Environmental Conservation, shoring up an overwhelmed Superfund/Brownfields program in the process. To underwrite the additional salary costs, the governor is proposing that developers who seek to build in or near protected wetlands pay an additional permit-processing fee.
For the Environmental Advocates of New York, a watchdog group whose July, 2004 report, "Endangered Agency," decried the Department of Environmental Conservation's prolonged record of staffing cuts, it was a welcome turnaround. Robert Moore, the group's executive director, says he and his colleagues had met repeatedly with the governor's office, suggesting the wetlands fee as a way to finance the department’s expansion without a statewide tax.
"Before, we were basically subsidizing the destruction of wetlands," says Moore. "Developers were getting permits free of charge regardless of how much [Department of Environmental Conservation] staff time went into evaluating those permits."
The governor's budget comes on the heels of major state announcements in the way of renewable energy and emissions. In September the New York State Public Service Commission set a 24 percent renewable portfolio standard, meaning that at least 24 percent of the state's energy demand must be supplied via renewable energy sources by 2013. On January 11, the governor and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer teamed together to announce a trio of legal settlements which stand to reduce dramatically the amount of airborne pollution entering New York state while at the same time forcing polluters to pay for the clean up of dirty power plants at a time when the federal government has adopted a more lax approach to power plant regulation.
Add it all up, says Moore, and you get a pretty clear picture of a politician willing to alienate a few pro-business conservatives at home in exchange for a few green-voting Republicans outside the state..
"You have two Republican governors who have really broken with the [Bush] administration on the environment," Moore says. "Both have done very proactive things, especially when it comes to energy. Both are looking for ways to stand out."
In journalism the reflex move when faced with a giant story is to look for the local angle. In the case of the recent tsunami coverage, most New York journalism has focused on local relief efforts and the immigrant communities affected by the disaster. A few, however, have gone for the more visceral approach, speculating on what it would take to trigger a similar event here on the east coast.
The New York Post documented the "mega-tsunami" phenomenon that has some scientists concerned about the U.S. east coast. At first glance, this seems like a typical case of the Post grabbing at the most sensational storyline it can find. Upon further examination, however, "mega-tsunamis" are a legitimate phenomenon that, while unlikely in the near future, offer a useful reminder that New York City's proximity to the ocean can be both a blessing and curse.
In 1958, an earthquake-triggered landslide in Alaska's narrow Lituya Bay generated a tsunami wave more than 1,500 feet high. Survivor accounts likened it to an underwater atomic bomb test and ever since, scientists have been forced to raise the upper limit of worst-case tsunami scenarios. As documented in a 2000, BBC special geologists have since discovered credible signs of similar mammoth displacement waves hitting Hawaii and portions of the Bahamas.
That last discovery is what proves so unsettling from a New York perspective. According to BBC report, volcanologists at the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre in London see the Canary Islands as the potential source of a major wave train that battered the Bahamas roughly 100,000 years ago. In an effort to determine how long until the next catastrophic event, they have turned their attention to Cumbre Vieja, a volcano on the island of La Palma. Cumbre Vieja last erupted in 1949, an event that, while benign, managed to speed the separation of the mountain's eastern and western halves. Volcanologists estimate that the western half slipped four feet during the eruption and is set to tumble off into the Atlantic Ocean anywhere between now and the next 100,000 years. Computerized modeling of the wave generated by a complete breakaway of the western half of Cumbre Vieja showed an initial wave height of 650 meters moving quickly across the Atlantic. How large that wave would be once it got to America is hard to say -- as is the number of eruptions it would take to cause such an event.
"We simply don't know," says Benfield Greig volcanologist Bill McGuire in the BBC special. "But put it this way: If I was living in Miami or New York and I heard that the Cumbre Vieja was erupting, I'd be keeping a very close eye on the news."
Pondering such worst case scenarios is grim stuff. Even grimmer, however, is the realization that New York City has neither the infrastructure nor cultural memory to deal with even a moderate-level natural disaster requiring a speedy evacuation of coastlines. As noted a few months back, New York has experienced flooding and fast-rising ocean levels in the past. It also looks to be losing a few millimeters to the sea each decade. While our city has done much to guard against terrorist risk, we have done very little to safeguard ourselves against hurricanes, floods and other environmental events that might demand coordinated evacuation and recovery.
Recently, delegates from 50 nations gathered in Kobe, Japan for the United Nations World Conference on Disaster Reduction to discuss this very problem. Using the South Asian tsunami as a backdrop, the conference quickly focused in on the unmeasured disaster risk presented by "megacities" -- metropolitan regions with populations in the ten million-plus range. Factoring in population size, property values, and overall disaster history, the German insurance giant Munich Re recently gave New York City a risk index ranking higher than 43 out of the world's 50 largest cities. The only cities to rank higher were cities with a history either of recurring earthquakes, such as Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Osaka, or of hurricanes, such as Miami.
"Perhaps the most frightening prospect would be to have a truly megadisaster in a megacity," said UN Director of Disaster Relief Jan Egelund, a conference attendee. "Then we could have not only a tsunami-style casualty rate as we have seen late last year, but we could see one hundred times that in a worst case."
Egelund focused most of his concern on fast-growing Third World cities, but the notion that natural disasters have become a global issue, not just a local one, is the resonating message coming out of December's catastrophe in South Asia.
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Take a deep breath in New York City, and chances are you are filling your lungs with particles of pollution from the tailpipe of a diesel truck.
Tailpipe pollution is the biggest local threat to the city’s air quality – over 80 percent of the cancer risk from air pollution in New York City comes from a transportation-related source. Diesel exhaust is especially dangerous, spewing a toxic stew of more than 40 cancer-causing compounds into the air. New Yorkers suffer from some of the highest asthma rates in the country (up to 25 percent of school age children in some neighborhoods in Harlem have been diagnosed with asthma), and diesel pollution is a well-known asthma trigger.
New York is not alone in struggling with this challenge. Across the country, about 170 million Americans – half the U.S. population – live in places that fail to meet the federal Environmental Protection Agency's basic healthy air standards for smog and soot.
The good news is that cost-effective solutions exist that can cut sources of air pollution substantially. New York has already begun to adopt some of those solutions, but there is a great deal more that government agencies, business leaders and even citizens can do.
There are three basic ways that New York City can cut pollution from the many truck and other diesel engines that flood the city with bad air.
Diesel engines live long lives. Some, like those used in construction and commercial marine vessels are used for decades and emit more soot pollution than cars and trucks combined. School buses present a special challenge, with kids inside exposed to unusually high levels of soot pollution.
But pollution from these old engines can be substantially cut in two ways -- the installation of new parts, such as filters, which are called retrofits; and the use of the cleanest grade of diesel fuel.
Right now, the cleanest grade of diesel (ultra-low sulfur diesel, with a sulfur content of 15 parts per million, or ppm, compared to regular diesel with a sulfur content of 500 to 3000 parts per million), is available in the New York market ahead of much of the rest of the country. Tailpipe retrofits, the best of which require use of the cleanest fuel, can cost only a few thousand dollars -- a small fraction of the cost of a large construction vehicle.
New York has begun to take steps to adopt these technologies. Last year, New York City became the first major city in the U.S. to enact legislation (in pdf format) requiring all companies that receive city contracts for public construction projects to use ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel and "best available" retrofits. The city can use its purchasing power to help bring these technologies to this market at the best price.
There is legislation before the city council now that would expand this commitment to all city fleets, from sanitation trucks to school buses. If enacted, that legislation would make New York a national leader in cutting diesel pollution. Every major construction site and every diesel fleet in the public and private sectors should make the same commitment.
The Environmental Protection Agency has set standards that will require new diesel engines to be much cleaner. Yet, many diesel engines stay in use for decades and won't be replaced by vehicles with cleaner engines for many years. The EPA estimates that the full health benefits of its new standards will not be fully realized until the year 2030. A child born today might not be breathing the cleaner air until after she finishes graduate school.
Another council bill would, if enacted and signed by the mayor, commit New York public fleets to buy the cleanest possible vehicle available for its intended use. That means speeding the transition to the most fuel-efficient vehicles available, including hybrids and alternative fuels like compressed natural gas or, over time, hydrogen.
Private fleets can make a big difference too. Last year, FedEx introduced into New York City a new generation of hybrid delivery trucks, developed in partnership with Environmental Defense (the national non-profit environmental organization where I am New York regional director). The ten trucks travel 57 percent farther on a gallon of fuel and emit 96 percent less soot than a regular FedEx delivery truck. We believe that every fleet can begin now to take advantage of cleaner vehicle technologies.
Clean technologies are great, but they are not always enough. The number of trucks on our streets is growing dramatically. In fact, the transportation sector is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gases in New York, and the miles these trucks travel are projected to increase substantially over time. Every year, for example, the trucks that pick up our garbage travel about eight million miles a year (300 times around the earth!) on Manhattan streets alone.
A recent report entitled Investing In Mobility (in pdf format) shows how, by shifting the majority of waste transport to barge and rail, truck traffic can be cut in half. The mayor’s new solid waste policy takes important steps in this direction. But for waterfront neighborhoods to accept the necessary infrastructure to transfer garbage onto barges, basic ideas about how to design municipal facilities must change. Attractive facilities can be built that eliminate queuing, get trucks off city streets and cut diesel pollution.
It is time also to look creatively at using incentives to cut traffic in our neighborhoods. London adopted a remarkable congestion-pricing plan that has cut traffic congestion in its downtown core by about 30 percent. Hudson River crossings in New York City have shaved peak travel volumes by about seven percent with a modest congestion pricing plan. San Diego is using pricing to help pay for new forms of transit, like bus rapid transit, that are flexible and cost-effective. These incentives work just like off-peak phone discounts – travel is cheaper at off-peak times. New technologies make it possible to introduce these pricing incentives here without tollbooths and in ways that are suited to local business needs.
In short, New York City needs a comprehensive plan to attack pollution from tailpipes. Both the public and private sectors can help expand the market for the cleanest possible technologies. Infrastructure can be built to minimize dependence on trucks and maximize incentives to make clean transport choices. By making these choices, the city can meet minimal clean air standards and allow New Yorkers to breathe easy.
Andy Darrell is the New York regional director of Environmental Defense
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made the creation of a Manhattan greenway a goal of his administration. Within two years of taking office, he completed an interim bicycle and pedestrian route around the entire island. He has supported putting into place the citywide 350-mile greenway plan, developed in 1993 by the Department of City Planning. But in Brooklyn, where the city is about to build one of the first sections of the trail envisioned along the downtown waterfront, the administration's current plans undermine the purpose of the greenway as a park space and a safe corridor for bicyclists and pedestrians.
All over the country, cities are creating landscaped bicycle and pedestrian paths (In PDF Format) for the many benefits they bring, including reducing traffic congestion, encouraging exercise, increasing real estate values and softening the hard edge of the city. So far, New York City has built about 100 miles of greenway, helped by the availability of federal transportation funding for this purpose.
Still to be built is the proposed Brooklyn Waterfront Trail in northwest Brooklyn, from the Brooklyn Bridge to Sunset Park. It would meet an existing path along Bay Ridge and could potentially connect with greenways along Jamaica Bay.
The first section of the trail slated to be built goes through the Columbia Street district, a mixed residential and industrial neighborhood wedged between the piers and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by the highway and connected to the working waterfront, it has the feel of a village and views of the Manhattan skyline. In a neighborhood only a few blocks wide, residents created four community gardens, which are now official city parks, and have been trying for a decade to get the city to put in the greenway through their neighborhood.
The city is finally putting a pedestrian/bicycle path through the area as part of a long-planned road reconstruction to better accommodate truck traffic to the piers. But the current design would leave the greenway with a hole in one section, where it eliminates the green - and the off-street path for bicyclists - in favor of widening the road.
For several blocks along Van Brunt Street, the city Department of Transportation plans to narrow an existing wide sidewalk and route bicyclists onto striped bike lanes on both sides of the street. To rejoin the greenway going north, riders would have to cross the street just before a blind turn that is being redesigned to allow trucks to pass at higher speeds.
Hundreds of residents have signed a petition to Bloomberg asking him to intervene in the impending reconstruction project and establish an interim greenway on the existing harbor-side sidewalk.
Residents believe that the greenway is being downgraded in favor of widening the road because adjoining neighborhoods, which are more populous and politically powerful, want to divert traffic from their streets. They note that the Columbia Street area already has 14 lanes of moving traffic. The Department of Transportation did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
Community Board 6, which stretches from the Red Hook and Columbia Street waterfront to Park Slope, approved the road reconstruction project. According to Craig Hammerman, the district manager, the roadwork was originally proposed 15 years ago to reduce the impact on the neighborhood of trucks going off the approved routes. "If we design the truck route properly, then we won't need to rely on enforcement down the line," he said. The project has since taken on two other elements - infrastructure work for the Third Water Tunnel and incorporating the Brooklyn Waterfront Trail. In the negotiations over the project, the
Department of Transportation agreed to turn over for a park a 100-foot site originally intended to divert trucks. "We believe the agency has gone as far as we can get them to go," Hammerman said.
Bicycle advocates credit the Department of Transportation with becoming more bicycle friendly in recent years. The agency has added 200 miles of bike lanes as well as bicycle crossings on all four East River bridges, one factor contributing to doubling of the number of people riding bicycles in the city over the past 20 years. But they say it has been less receptive to off-street greenways or even physically separated lanes, giving first priority to moving vehicular traffic through the city.
One example is on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, where there are high volumes of traffic. The city chose not to put in a physically separated bike lane, "letting people fend for themselves in traffic," said Noah Budnick, projects director at the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. "In the Columbia Street area where you have a community that very much supports building the off-street path, it's harder to understand why the city and the Department of Transportation don't want to choose the safe alternative," he said.
Dave Lutz, a neighborhood resident and member of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway Taskforce, an advocacy group, said that Van Brunt Street isn't the only place the city is putting a greenway along the road where there is space for it to go through a landscaped corridor. Lutz, who is also the director of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition and one of the creators of the city's greenway plan, said, "As we paint those stripes on our streets and put greenway signs on those streets, we water down the term of what a greenway is. A greenway is a separate trail for pedestrians and bicyclists buffered by greenery."
The Overall Path
Because the land along the Brooklyn waterfront is controlled by so many different entities - including city agencies, the Port Authority, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and numerous private companies - piecing together a greenway promises to be a complicated and politically charged process.
The goal of greenway advocates is a 30-foot-wide, 14-mile-long landscaped off-street path along the waterfront. Such a trail would provide greenery and recreation for many neighborhoods that have very little public open space, as well as access to the borough's far-flung beaches and parks and its diverse neighborhoods. "It is as much a park space that you move through as a transportation corridor," said Robert Pirani, director of Environmental Programs at the Regional Plan Association, an independent planning group for the tri-state area.
Several local organizations are beginning to create an overall framework for the trail, which ultimately would be implemented by various city and state agencies and private landowners. The office of Borough President Marty Markowitz was instrumental in getting grants for the work through the New York State Waterfront Revitalization Program.
One of these organizations is the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, Inc., led by two former members of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway Taskforce who split off from that group to take a more active role in planning and advocating for the overall path. Milton Puryear, director of planning for the initiative, said they believed that the way to "get around the DOT's refusal on Van Brunt Street and the quality we are after was to really communicate the whole vision and engage a much bigger population than the couple thousand people who live along the BQE."
Together with the Regional Plan Association, the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative has begun a six-month process of developing a route in Community Boards 2 and 6, from Red Hook to Newtown Creek in Greenpoint. The first public meeting was held in November. The planners will return with a conceptual plan at another public workshop on February 1.
In Community Board 7 in Sunset Park, the community-based organization UPROSE has trained neighborhood youths to lead a grassroots participation process to design a greenway through the largely Latino, Asian, and Arabic neighborhood. UPROSE helped block the construction of a power plant along the waterfront and is involved in a number of efforts to reduce pollution and increase greening in the neighborhood. The neighborhood has 35,000 young people, yet just a quarter-acre of parkland per thousand residents and almost no public access to the waterfront.
As the Brooklyn waterfront changes, there are many competing visions for how it should evolve. These range from preserving the working waterfront and encouraging water-borne transportation to current city proposals for housing, parks, and a cruise ship terminal. The city recently approved a zoning change in Red Hook to allow a controversial Ikea store to be built, and other big box stores may follow. These changes could provide opportunities for the creation of a green pathway, as well as obstacles.
Many of the projects proposed or in the works for the Brooklyn waterfront have the potential to increase automobile traffic unless there is an effort to develop alternatives. "Communities all across the country are trying to get automobile traffic off the waterfront so that the amenity value can benefit the community," said Pirani. "What is Brooklyn's waterfront edge going to be like? Is it going to be designed more for moving cars and trucks around the waterfront, or as more of a space for pedestrians and bicyclists and people being comfortable walking around it?"
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.
A little over a year ago, "Jurassic Park" author Michael Crichton delivered a speech to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club on the similarity between environmentalism and religion.
"Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists," said Crichton. "There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions, there's a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is called sustainability."
His words replayed in my mind during the media coverage of New York's two most famous raptors – the red-tailed hawks Pale Male and Lola, after their unceremonious eviction from a 12th floor perch at 927 Fifth Avenue.
Biologists often lump predatory birds into the category known as "charismatic macrofauna" -- animal organisms big enough to impress or awe human observers. In their decade of residence alongside Central Park, Pale Male, Lola and their offspring have been the inspiration for a documentary movie, multiple television specials and magazine articles, not to mention a book, "Red-Tails in Love."
That may explain why the removal of their nest inspired a week’s worth of rallies, with nearly a hundred people gathered across the street chanting “ No nest, no peace.”
"Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets," read one sign.
"Honk-4-Hawks," read another.
"People want to see the nest brought back," E. J. Adams of the New York City Audubon Society politely explained to the press.
The co-op board reversed itself; Pale Male and Lola will return – demonstrating the benefits of ...not a religion... but what could be called emotional environmentalism. Before we elevate them to sacred status, however, it's important to realize that not all species have the benefit of a Manhattan address, celebrity neighbors, and a noble visage. Many, like the endangered Torrey's Mountain Mint and the American chestnut tree, do their living and dying invisibly in overlooked spaces such as Charleston Woods on Staten Island.
The history of Staten Island and the history of Staten Island real estate development are often one and the same. Since the days of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Staten Island economy has been built on one fundamental precept: Inside every cramped city apartment is a future Staten Island homeowner yearning to breathe free.
Forty years after the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, however, many local groups are starting to question the wisdom of that notion. A hot real estate market coupled with a loophole-riddled building code have led to hasty, ill-conceived developments on an island already known for its crazy-quilt approach to neighborhood planning. But resistance has been piecemeal as well: "There's so many things going on on Staten Island that everybody is so busy taking care of their own little piece of turf," says Dennis Conwell, a Dongan Hills activist.
Lately, however, island environmental groups have been finding places to dig in. For the last 12 weeks, Kryscherville, a neighborhood just north of the Outerbridge Crossing, has been the scene of candlelight vigils as local environmental groups protest the potential construction of the island's third Home Depot store on 130 acres of city-owned woodland known as Charleston Woods. Event co-organizer David Burg of WildMetro says the protest was the only recourse after a failed legal attempt to block the sale to the Blumenfeld Development Group, a Syosset-based company that a 1999 New York Public Interest Research Group report ranked as the top-spending lobbyist in New York City.
Burg admits that turnout for the Sunday vigils has been slight -- most attract fewer than 12 participants -- and the media coverage negligible. Still, in giving activists a place to gather and vent their feelings, the group has managed to turn a local defeat into a victory of sorts. On November 17, delegates from 15 island groups convened for an island-wide "summit" on open space issues. Attendees pledged mutual support on everything from low-level single-lot disputes to large-scale projects such as the recently proposed Nascar racetrack in the wetlands region just below the Goethals Bridge. To sum up the "join or die" spirit of the gathering, delegates ambitiously titled their alliance the Coalition to Save Staten Island.
"The feeling is that there's just too much for existing groups to take on individually," Burg says. "It's now or never."
Most official remedies to the threat of overdevelopment involved changing “the width of streets or the number of curbs,” said Shirlee Marraccini, a resident of Great Kills and president of Turnaround Friends, a non-profit dedicated to converting abandoned or underutilized properties into community parkland. Such remedies do little to prevent the subdivision of existing city-owned or privately-owned lots currently regarded by most Staten Islanders as open space.
If recent behavior is any indication, island politicians are already sensing a shift in community sentiment, and responding accordingly; area representatives, for example, oppose development of the Charleston Woods site.
"Before we use the Charleston site for stores, we should put it to public use," writes Councilmember Andrew Lanza on Gotham Gazette. "The infrastructure of Staten Island has lagged behind development. We have overcrowded schools, we do not have enough parkland, and we do not have a single recreational ballfield on the South Shore."
For Conwell of Dongan Hills, political support is crucial but not as crucial as a coalition. Development is a many-headed opponent, he believes; without cross-island coordination, each local victory is outweighed by multiple losses.
"It's so hard to see information in the city," Conwell said. "Between tracking the auctions, trying to keep track of what the building is department doing, what the [Department of Environmental Protection] is doing, you also have to throw in the dimension of what our friends in Albany and Washington D.C. are doing. Everybody's got a little slice of responsibility, which adds to the confusion. Most of the time I've just seen things by watching the Internet."
Burg says even the limited pressure over the Home Depot development has scored results. Earlier this month, he says, attorneys from the Blumenfeld Development Group contacted WildMetro to set up a discussion on how to mitigate the project's environmental impact. Representatives from the company did not return calls requesting comment, but the company has a similar Home Depot/Costco project in East Harlem facing even more community pressure. The group is also talking with the city about preserving a 30-acre remainder of the Staten Island site as open woodland space.
While not exactly victories, such talks have done much to slow the fait accompli nature of local developmental politics. When coalition members gather in January, Marraccini hopes the group can come up with a few more places worthy of collective action.
"I sincerely believe that the Kryscher Hill-Charleston Wood project was the beginning of something," she says. "With all the natural areas going away, we really need to have one united voice. Hopefully, we will have some impact not just on one project but on all of them." The result won't restore us to Eden, but the members of the coalition hope that Staten Island, at least, will be saved.
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This is a good time for City Hall, and the city as a whole, to focus on using energy more efficiently.
There are many reasons to do so. For one, energy costs have been skyrocketing, and promise to rise even more steeply. The price of oil is already way up, and Con Edison is trying to get a rate increase of 6.7 percent.
Pollution also looms as a large threat. This summer, New York City joined eight states in announcing a lawsuit against five major polluters, whom they charge with contributing to global warming. These companies alone -- American Electric Power Company; the Southern Company; Tennessee Valley Authority; Xcel Energy Inc.; and Cinergy Corporation -- are responsible for ten percent of the nation's total carbon dioxide emissions.
"There is no dispute that global warming is upon us and that these defendants' carbon dioxide pollution is a major contributor," says Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
At the same time, the demand for energy is increasing. In recent years, the number of electrical appliances in homes and offices (especially computers) has increased significantly. In August 2003, the high demand for energy led to a major blackout. While New York’s energy systems are some of the most modern, the state’s reserve of energy is 40 percent lower than regulators say it should be. That is one reason why power companies are proposing the construction of up to 15 more power plants in New York City.
Thus, reducing energy use would save money, prevent blackouts, reduce the need to build new power plants, and could also improve local air quality.
And one way to reduce energy use is to increase energy efficiency. There are some computers – and air conditioners and lights and household appliances and industrial motors – that run more efficiently than others. Most newer computers have software that can automatically save power when the computer has not been used for a certain amount of time. Experts also advocate for greater use of such cleaner and more efficient energy sources as solar power and wind power, as well as fuel cells. Frank Morris of the Sierra Club believes that better management of the demand for energy could reduce the city’s energy use by 35 percent.
Currently, there is a bill pending in the New York City Council that would create a new energy policy office. The law would require the city to develop a comprehensive energy policy, assess the efficiency of energy use in city facilities, set goals for the reduction of energy use, encourage energy conservation and the use of fossil fuel alternatives by both the public and private sector, and promote public awareness of the efficient use of energy.
One could reasonably question how effective this office would be, however, in light of the difficulties over another bill being considered by the City Council, which encourages City Hall to get its own house in order.
The bill focuses specifically on the use of city-owned computers. The city owns some 100,000 personal computers and office equipment, which could be made more efficient – and save some $1.4 million on energy costs – through the use of power-saving software.
But the city agency in charge of the computers, the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), opposes the legislation.
Why?
The city’s vast information technology infrastructure “makes the implementation of the proposed initiative difficult to deploy and enforce,” testified Ron Bergmann, a deputy commissioner at DoITT. “Agencies largely administer their own computer operations and have a diverse array of equipment, operating systems and applications.”
Laura Forlano is a doctoral student studying communication technology policy at Columbia University.Â
Ask anyone who has jogged, biked, skated or strolled along the Hudson River lately what their least favorite stretch is and you might be surprised at the response. It is not in the Meat Market area, where lamb and cow carcasses get unceremoniously dumped into refuse bins early each afternoon. It is not Gansevoort peninsula, where dozens of garbage trucks idle and queue at the beginning and end of their route. It is not the West 130s in Harlem where the North River Sewage Treatment Plant sits on the shore. No, the smelliest, most offensive stretch of the Hudson River Greenway is in Chelsea, right beside what is being called the Hudson Yards.
At West 30th Street sits the heliport. Helicopters – like most fossil fuel burning engines – do not run at peak efficiency at lower speeds. While landing or idling on the waterfront tarmac the smell of hot, unburnt fuel is overwhelming. The hundreds of takeoffs and landings here each day may seem to constitute a dense arrival and departure pattern for tourists and high rolling commuters, but the stifling reality is that the air quality along this stretch of the Hudson River Greenway is possibly the most unhealthy and certainly the most offensive one can find the length of the waterfront along the entire Manhattan shoreline of the Hudson.
Slightly more than four blocks north is Pier 76, home to the city’s tow pound.
This stretch of the Hudson River, then, is home to two unfortunate waterfront uses, neither of which makes use of the water in any way.
Sadder still, the city and the state do not have any plans to change this. At the same time that both city and state are pulling out all the stops to redevelop the West Side, attract the 2012 Olympics, and expand the convention center, it is unfathomable to think that more than a billion dollars in public money is to be spent to redevelop 11 blocks along the Hudson River with no real plan to improve the waterfront.
The greatest sea-change in urban living in New York City in the last 30 years is the transformation of urban waterfronts and waterways into exciting new public spaces. From the Gowanus Canal to the Bronx River, these once-derided waterways are now synonymous with grassroots success. And there is no revival to rival the rescue of the Hudson River along the west side of Manhattan, where the collapse of the Miller Highwayover thirty years ago opened the door for the removal of the detritus of commerce, parked and towed cars, crumbling pier sheds, and miles of chain link fence separating the hundreds of thousands of workers and residents in the adjacent communities from the most famous river in the United States.
But this is not happening in the area alongside what is being called, ironically, the Hudson Yards. The only thing the city is doing for the Hudson River in its plans for the Hudson Yards is stealing the river’s name. This stretch of Hudson River waterfront will not be the beneficiary of either the city’s investment of $600 million in the Hudson Yards, nor the state’s plan to expand the Javits Center. In fact, these two plans together in their present state will simply perpetuate the non-planning that has plagued so much of the city’s waterfront development in the last thirty years.
The neglect of the Hudson River in the Hudson Yards plan is the most short-sighted aspect of what is being promoted as a visionary, long-range plan. The city’s own map for the Hudson Yards area makes clear that the study deliberately left out the waterfront. As the Environmental Impact Statement for the project makes clear, the western terminus of the project area is not the river, but 12th Avenue. Despite the fact that images used to promote the Sports and Convention Center illustrate glorious river views and an active waterfront dotted with sailboats, ferries, and water taxis, the plan for the stadium itself includes merely building an elevated walkway over the West Side Highway to connect to Hudson River Park.
If this is visionary planning then I would rather take the proposed $600 million in city funding for the Hudson Yards and trade it in. For this awesome amount of money, one could complete Hudson River Park ($225 million), Brooklyn Bridge Park ($150 million), Sunset Park Waterfront Park ($25 million), Harlem River Park ($50 million) the South Bronx Greenway ($50 million) combined. With the extra $100 million we could create a few hundred street-end parks around the city in any of the places where few such large-scale waterfront opportunities still exist. The beneficiaries of all these investments may not be season ticket holders, of course, but we all must remember that the beauty of this city is not that not everyone can afford a skybox – it is that most of us don't want to be in one.
Carter Craft, an urban planner, is director of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance.