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Following last week’s vote by GSD members to recommend a “No” vote on the land use application for the East River Park flood protection plan, GSD president sent the following letter to our representatives on City Council, Carlina Rivera and Margaret Chin.
on the land use application for the East River Park flood protection plan, GSD president sent the following letter to our representatives on City Council, Carlina Rivera and Margaret Chin.
Councilmembers Rivera and Chin,
I wanted to let you know that at last week’s Grand Street Dems meeting, members voted to recommend that you vote “No” on the ULURP application for the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project.
The City has resisted too many of the community’s recommendations for changes to the plan, and has left too many questions unanswered about how its preferred alternative was developed, and the adverse effects its plan will have on the environment and the surrounding neighborhoods.
If delay of this project spurs the City to provide immediate flood protection to the East Village and Lower East, all the better — these neighborhoods remain unprepared for a major flood even seven years after Sandy.
We appreciate that you are both well aware of criticisms of the City’s plan and have been engaged this year in negotiations with the City to adapt its plan and get to a place where a “Yes” vote makes sense. Unfortunately, the City has not been cooperative enough, and a vote is coming soon.
Given the current status of the ULURP application for ESCRP, Grand Street Dems recommends that you vote “No.”
Respectfully,
Jeremy Sherber
There are now four announced Democratic challengers to Rep. Carolyn Maloney, starting to make their case for why voters should oust the 26-year incumbent.
At Grand Street Dems’ fall meeting, we had a chance for brief introductions to all four challengers.
Learn more about the candidates:
We plan on having an endorsement meeting in January when we’ll have more time to hear from all the candidates.
Downtown activist Grace Lee announced her primary challenge in Assembly District 65 last night at Grand Street Dems’ fall meeting.
Lee would face two-term incumbent Yuh-Line Niou in a primary at the end of June.
We’ll be watching this race closely, and will invite both candidates to our endorsement meeting in January.
With a City Council vote imminent on the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project — the plan to add 8-10 feet of land fill to East River Park for flood protection from Montgomery to 23rd Street — Grand Street Dems voted at our fall meeting to recommend that our Council representatives vote “No” on the ULURP application.
At our spring meeting, GSD passed a resolution expressing many reservations about the City’s plan. With most of those reservations unresolved, club members voted to reject the City’s plan and push for a new community-driven design process that could produce a better plan.
How our representatives — Carlina Rivera and Margaret Chin — vote may determine how the entire City Council votes, since on most ULURP votes Council members defer to the wishes of the local representative.
Thank you to the organizing done over the past several months by East River Alliance and East River Park Action, including several GSD members, to shed light on the many problems with the City’s plan.
At our fall meeting on October 16, Grand Street Dems members voted to recommend “Yes” votes for all five City Charter revision proposals that will be on the ballot in November.
We were fortunate to have three members of City Council with us to give us the Charter revision highlights — Ben Kallos, Mark Levine, and Brad Lander.
There will be five revisions to the City Charter that need voter approval in November:
There are a few very useful documents you can find online:
Again, Grand Street Dems recommends voting YES for all five Charter revision proposals on November 5.
Do you like to come prepared for a good civics forum? Then take a look at these helpful documents that lay out the options we’ll be asked to vote on:
On Wednesday we’ll hear from three City Council members about the City Charter revision proposals — Brad Lander, Mark Levine, and Ben Kallos — and then vote on whether to recommend Yes or No votes to our neighbors.
Our fall meeting is a big one — please join us!
We’ll meet FOUR Democratic challengers to Rep. Carolyn Maloney.
We’ll hear from THREE members of City Council about the City Charter revision proposals on this November’s ballot.
We’ll vote on a new East Side Resiliency resolution — should our representatives vote YES or NO?
And we’ll vote for new GSD officers for the next year (president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer).
GSD Fall Meeting
October 16, 7:00 pm
Seward Coop Community Room
266 East Broadway
Manny Cantor Center, 197 East Broadway
Thursday, October 3, 8:00 – 10:00 am
Manny Cantor Center is hosting a morning idea-storming session with Councilmember Margaret Chin for CD1’s very first Participatory Budgeting process, where ordinary citizens (that’s you!) get to propose — and then vote on — neighborhood projects to receive City funding.
The process starts now with collecting ideas, and runs through vote week in April 2020 when any resident age 11 and up can cast a ballot for their favorite project.
(If you can’t participate in person, add ideas and comments at ideas.pbnyc.org.)
September 17, 2019
Thank you for allowing me to submit this testimony on the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, or ESCR.
It’s been nearly seven years since Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New York City, but the effects that storm had on the Lower East Side and the Five Boroughs can still be seen and felt today. Our neighborhood and many others are still recovering and rebuilding from the $19 billion in damage and economic losses that Sandy wrought. And for the families of the 43 New Yorkers who lost their lives, their lives will never truly be fully healed.
As a former community organizer who led the emergency response to Sandy and participated in the Rebuild by Design program, and today as a Council Member who is responsible for the safety of over 160,000 New Yorkers, I understand the seriousness of the crisis we face from climate change and increased sea levels and storm surge. I also understand that $335 million of the budget for this project comes from federal FEMA funding that will by rule expires in 2022. If we allow those funds to disappear, this project will not be able to move forward and we will almost certainly never get that money back from a Trump administration and Congress that has continually stripped funding for state and local infrastructure projects. That is why it is imperative we get this project done quickly and correctly for our community.
Let’s be absolutely clear — this city is not living up to that second point. As Community Board 3 perfectly framed it in their resolution on this item, “the ESCR process since Fall 2018 has frayed trust in government and public agencies because of the drastic change in plan design done without community consultation, despite the needs of the community who look to their government to supply desperately needed protection of their lives and homes.”
It’s why I demanded an apology from the city, and why Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and I hired an independent consultant to review the project’s design. While I look forward to the results of this expert review from the Netherlands-based environmental consulting group Deltares, I will continue to urge the city to finally commit to other key concerns.
The most disappointing of all of these concerns is the lack of details regarding a phased-in approach to construction. When my Council colleagues and I held a hearing on this project in January, Jamie Torres-Springer, the First Deputy Commissioner at the city’s Department of Design and Construction, said we’d have more details on phased-in construction in “a few months.” It’s now September, and the city continues to drag its feet and fails to live up to its promise for honest and open communication.
Residents deserve to know all the details regarding a phased in approach and every effort must be made to ensure that residents can still enjoy sections of the park while construction continues.
In addition, our community’s elected officials called for interim flood protection measures (IPFM) during construction of ESCR. In a letter to our offices, DDC Commissioner Lorraine Grillo wrote that an “analysis of existing conditions” did not find IPFM to be an effective solution for the ESCR area. While IPFM is not designed to protect neighborhoods from Sandy-level events, they can ensure critical infrastructure remains operational during more frequent, less severe storms. The City must share the details of the analysis mentioned in their letter with our offices and with the independent reviewer to guarantee that there aren’t certain interim protection options that could be used for our community’s most important infrastructure.
Some of our other concerns that must be met include:
The city has recently informed our office they would make certain commitments, including the planting of 1,000 neighborhood trees and the installation of 40 bioswales beginning this fall, new lighting at six neighborhood sport fields, improvements to turf fields at six sites, new sports coatings and painting at various parks and playgrounds, enhanced barbecue areas, the conversion of the LaGuardia Bathhouse demolition area to a turf field, “spruce-ups” at 16 NYCHA park and play sites, nine new Parks staff for the neighborhood, and a commitment to keep all East River Park staff on the East Side of Manhattan, below 34th Street.
But it is hard to balance these very important measures with the continued silence from the city on the rest of our demands.
If the city wants the votes of Council Member Powers, Chin, and I when this project comes to the City Council, they can not wait until our hearings to start sharing this information. They need to address these concerns now so that our community can assess all factors along with the independent review that is slated to be completed by September 23.