By Bernard L. Stein, Riverdale Press, 7/15/04

There's a $350 million dollar mistake in the final Environmental Impact Statement comparing the cost of building a water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park to a city-owned site in Westchester.

The final statement erroneously adds $350 million to the cost of the alternative preferred by opponents of the Van Cortlandt site, who had argued for months that the city Department of Environmental Protection's own figures showed that it would be cheaper to build the plant in Westchester than in the Bronx.

A table in the final statement gives the cost of the local advocates' favored alternative as $1.597 billion, compared to the estimate in the draft statement of $1.216 billion. "There was a transposition error," said Charles Sturcken, the DEP's chief of staff, when asked about how the original estimate could have been so far off. In preparing the final table, he said, someone transposed headings, making the Eastview alternative the advocates had argued for look more expensive than it is.

Nevertheless, the correct estimate, which appears elsewhere in the impact statement, remains far higher than the original, and boosts the cost of building in Westchester so that it would be more expensive than building in Van Cortlandt. While the cost estimate for Van Cortlandt didn't change in the months between the two analyses, the estimated cost of building at Eastview and transporting the water south through a new tunnel rose in the final assessment to $1.247 billion, just enough to make the water bills of New Yorkers higher with a Westchester than with a Bronx plant.

Mr. Sturcken said the difference lay in a $51 million mitigation package negotiated by the supervisors of the Westchester towns of Greenberg and Mount Pleasant, which straddle the Eastview site. The mitigation package for Van Cortlandt is $43 million, and for the third site studied, on the Harlem River near the Fordham Landing co-op in the Bronx, $41 million.

"Like any good town supervisor, they negotiated," Mr. Sturcken said. However, Robert F. Meehan, the Pleasant Valley supervisor, said, "We didn't have that much input on it." And Paul Feiner, the Greenburgh supervisor said flatly, "We never got to serious negotiations." Mr. Meehan was stunned into a long silence when told the $51 million number. "I couldn't tell you what it was for," he said at last.

Told that Mr. Sturcken had speculated that the town had expressed concerns about traffic and cutting down trees, Mr. Meehan said, "I have a recollection of some discussion involving that," but "there wasn't like a spreadsheet of numbers." The sum he said, must have been calculated later by the DEP.

On July 1, 2004, Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News wrote . . . .Then there's the $243 million City Hall has offered Bronx Democratic politicians for "park and playground improvements" throughout the borough. Bloomberg put that pocket change on the table last year to secure legislation in Albany to allow him to build the water plant on city parkland. With such an offer, how could Jose Rivera, boss of the Bronx Democratic Party, refuse?

Rivera promptly agreed to ignore the opposition of the neighborhood's Democratic assemblyman, Jeffrey Dinowitz, and supply the favorable votes of the rest of his Bronx legislators in return for what Rivera calls "the city's investment." So the Bronx politicians are happy. The construction unions are happy. And Bloomberg, whoruns for reelection next year, is ecstatic

Read the whole story: upload file name: 070104 Bloomberg's all wet.pdf

On July 14, Jordan Moss of the Norwood News wrote . . . Assemblyman Jeffrey Klein said today that he would make an announcement next Thursday concerning his position on the water filtration plant planned for Van Cortlandt Park.

. . . . the Norwood News asked Klein for his current thoughts on the plant, which the city just officially announced it would build at Mosholu Golf Course in Van Cortlandt Park. Klein said he was weighing the issue and that "there are major problems with the DEP's" plans to build the plant at Mosholu Golf Course.

Read the whole story: upload file name: 071404 Klein announce.pdf

Parks are un-zoned to ensure no unregulated development occurs. Section 11-13 of the Zoning Resolution states:

District designations indicated on zoning maps do not apply to public parks, except as set forth in Section 105-91 (Special District Designation on Public Parks). In the event that a public park or portion thereof is sold, transferred, exchanged, or in any manner relinquished from the control of the Commissioner of Parks and Recreation, no building permit shall be issued, nor shall any use be permitted on such former public park or portion thereof, until a zoning amendment designating a zoning district therefore has been adopted by the City Planning Commission . . . .(Emphasis added.)

Therefore, in order to build a non-park facility like a water treatment plant within a public park owned by New York City, the City had to alienate the parkland. With alienation, the transfer of the property to another entity must follow. This is just simple reasoning. Yet, the City continues to investigate alternative methods of the parkland's property transfer, rather than proceed with the inevitable ULURP.

Get the upload file: 071504 Findings Zoning.pdf

On July 15, 2004, Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz sent a letter to the New York City Department of Investigation Rose Gill Heam requesting an investigation into the "potentially scandalous situation at City Hall." See story above in the New York Times.