Brooklyn Bridge Park Contracters Eat Free Lunch

Contractors Take Bite Out Of Brooklyn Bridge Park Budget
by Sarah Ryley published online 06-22-2007
Free Lunches, Legal Fees, Car Services, Consultants
By Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN — Whoever said, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” didn’t work for the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation.
Wendy Leventer, former president of the state agency, ordered lunches like seared tuna and slow-roasted pork several times a month while working on the park, and took the bill out of the park’s budget, according to invoices obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request.
Architects from the firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates also enjoyed lunches on the taxpayer dollar for meetings several times a month, generally ranging from$12 to $35 a plate, at restaurants like The Coffee Shop, Ennju and Union Square Café. Thousands of dollars in lunches are only a fraction of the expenses that have since 2003 whittled at least $30 million away from the park’s $153 million capital budget, according to contract amendments, information compiled by the Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] and other documents pertaining to amounts owed to firms.
Many people familiar with large capital construction projects called this type of spending “business as usual” in city and state government, while others balked at what they called an abuse of taxpayer dollars.
ESDC spokesman Errol Cockfield said Van Valkenburgh architects were entitled to paid lunches, even if the meetings were only among members of that firm, as was often the case. The firm has a $21.9 million contract to design the 85-acre park, including subcontractors, according to contract amendments.
He said Leventer, who was terminated last March, was also entitled to paid lunches if she was present at those meetings.
In one invoice, a lawyer billed $79 for two private car services to chauffeur him between 599 Lexington Ave. and the ESDC’s office at 633 Third Ave., according to receipts. A government and community relations consultant was paid $200 an hour, in part, to attend neighborhood association meetings, racking up a bill of $132,000 so far. In one day, $9,443 was spent to serve the heads of containerport operator American Stevedoring eviction notices for Pier 5.
“City workers don’t get paid lunches. Are you kidding me?” said parks advocate Geoffrey Croft. “With little government oversight and accountability, this desperately needed and long-delayed park has become a free-for-all.
“The taxpayers are the real losers,” he said.
“My general impression is that they were not conducting business any differently than any other major public project,” said Claude Shostal, former co-chair of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy, a non-profit that raises programming funds.
“The way these development projects are handled should be subject to more scrutiny, in a broader sense,” he said. “But a private developer will spend 20 times that amount just to get the job done right.” A source who worked on the project said, “In the small-earth sense, maybe they were breaking the rules. That’s wrong, but in the big sense there’s no malfeasance [such as] big bills for people and not working; falsifying invoices for fraudulent time. People worked incredibly hard.
“The real story here is that the park is going to cost a hell of lot more money than anybody ever said. It’s a very controversial and complicated project that took a whole lot of effort to get approved.”
Park Still in Budget?
Pre-construction and “soft costs” were not to exceed $20.3 million in the park’s original capital budget. That budget includes landscaping and site preparations for four of the six former industrial piers, some of the uplands, and a portion of the amenities detailed in the renderings.
Construction on the park recently began — two years behind schedule — and the ESDC announced that a pool barge would soon be opening for the remainder of the summer.
So far, the $10 million in additional pre-construction and soft costs exceeds the amount originally budgeted for active public recreation on the four piers. But Cockfield pointed out that several of those amenities have changed over the years.
Cockfield confirmed that the budget has not been revised in the past four years, during which time another pier was added to the park, but said a new one is being worked on, and that the park is still within budget.
Shostal disagreed: “We never looked at detailed numbers, they were never made available to us, but anybody involved in waterfront construction knew you could not build a 1.3-mile waterfront park for $130 million.”
Judi Francis, president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Defense Fund, a coalition of civic groups opposed to the current park plan, said, “To learn that more than $30 million of the $150 million capital budget has already been spent on consultants, without any plan for how much more will be spent on consultants, before any actual park construction can begin, is alarming.”
The group has long charged that the ESDC is more interested in developers profiting than building a public park, which they say needs more active recreation facilities.
The agency approved a $206,000 amendment to Van Valkenburgh’s contract to study the feasibility of an indoor athletic facility, but noted that the community would have to raise its own funds for such a facility to be built.
Park Racks Up Legal Fees
Shostal held lawsuits waged by the Defense Fund partially responsible for the overspending. Outside legal expenses against the park’s budget total at least $2.2 million, according to proposed and passed contract amendments and information compiled by the ESDC.
Environmental counsel Sive Padget’s contract reached $1.11 million last March, according to an approved amendment, in part for work on a lawsuit challenging the park’s use of luxury housing to finance its upkeep and alleged inadequacies in its environmental review.
Real estate counsel Shearman & Sterling’s contract is currently capped at $750,000, but the firm is owed $130,000, according to a proposed contract amendment considered last month, marked “privileged and confidential.”
“The firm is retained on an hourly basis … with the aggregate fees currently capped at $750,000,” said the amendment. “The firm continues to perform its work, and there is currently due to the firm approximately $130,000. As the project progresses, the amount of real estate-related legal work is increasing, and a number of legal matters are in progress. In order to continue working with the firm, staff proposes that the Board authorize amendment to the agreement providing for an increase of $500,000 for an aggregate contract value of $1,250,000.”
Cockfield said no votes were taken on that matter.
“We often have to turn for outside legal counsel to help with very specialized legal services, and that is routine in government,” said Cockfield. “Our goal is to make sure that taxpayers’ interests are best represented in court.”
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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Randall's Island: Harlem Residents File Suit

Harlem Residents File Suit Over Randalls Island Sports Fields
WNYC Newsroom


NEW YORK, NY June 15, 2007 —East Harlem residents have filed a lawsuit to block a deal that would give 20 Manhattan private schools exclusive rights to use 2/3 of the Randalls Island sports fields.

In the suit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Harlem residents claim the schools would have exclusive access the the fields during the after school hours, prohibiting their kids from participating in their own after school sports.

Former head of the New York Civil Liberities Union, Norman Siegel, who represents the East Harlem residents says they feel the plan hasn't been properly reviewed by the city and that the private schools are monopolizing public park land.

The city's law department contends the plan was properly approved.


And:

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=8&aid=70782

Lawsuit Against City Claims Randall's Sports Fields Deal Is Unfair
June 15, 2007

Public school parents are among the backers of a lawsuit aiming to block the city’s Randall's Island sports fields deal.

Under the terms of the contract, the city will renovate the fields for $70 million. Twenty private schools will then pay about $2.2 million a year for the next 20 years for the up-keep of the fields.

In return, they'll get to use two-thirds of the new space.

The rest will go to the public schools and community organizations.

The lawsuit, which claims the deal is unfair, says the city didn’t follow proper procedure before inking the deal.
See also:

http://www.therealdeal.net/breaking_news/2007/06/15/1181935628.php

Solid Waste Plan versus Liberal NIMBY's?

Trash Station on West Side Creates Split in Assembly

from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/nyregion/20transfer.html


By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: June 20, 2007

ALBANY, June 19 — A group of assemblymen from Upper Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn sharply criticized several colleagues on Tuesday for blocking a recycling station planned for the West Side of Manhattan, saying any delay would prolong the health risks their mostly low-income black and Hispanic constituents face.

“We have some of the highest rates of asthma, which is no surprise,” said Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV, who represents East Harlem. “We have some of the lowest life-expectancy rates, which is no surprise. We have some of the highest infant-mortality rates, which is no surprise. Some people call this environmental injustice. I call it racism.”

The criticism — harsh and personal for the usually sedate Assembly — was aimed at three Assembly members who have blocked a bill that must be approved for the recycling station to be built: Deborah J. Glick, Richard N. Gottfried and Linda B. Rosenthal.

All of them represent parts of the West Side. Ms. Glick’s district abuts the proposed site, on a waterfront patch near Gansevoort Street, just south of West 14th Street, that housed a waste station in years past.

The three are urging the city to reconsider a different site, on 36th Street, that it has rejected.

“I’m really sorry that it’s devolved into personal attacks,” Ms. Rosenthal said in an interview. “It seems like perhaps it’s a misunderstanding of what we’re trying to accomplish. Dick and Deborah and I for years have been sensitive to issues like this in minority communities. We’ve been working on air pollution and diesel fumes and all the other bad environmental consequences of the city and state’s siting facilities in minority neighborhoods.”

The Gansevoort station is part of an ambitious citywide waste-management plan under which each borough would be responsible for handling all of its own garbage, a break with past practice. For years, most of the city’s dumps and waste-transfer stations were placed in poor neighborhoods in the boroughs outside Manhattan, and truck traffic to and from those stations has been linked to higher levels of asthma and other illnesses there.

Over years of tumultuous and at times acrimonious debate, the plan has won the support of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the New York City Council, Gov. Eliot Spitzer and — as of Monday night — the Republican-controlled State Senate.

The Senate passed a bill that would allow the station at the Gansevoort site, which was scheduled to become part of the Hudson River Park. City officials say passage of the bill is the final hurdle to implementing the full plan. But the legislation remains bottled up in committee in the Democratic-controlled Assembly, a fact lamented by some of the legislators at Tuesday’s news conference.

“We don’t want the Republicans being better environmentalists than we are,” said Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr. of the Bronx.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who is from Lower Manhattan, seemed to support the Gansevoort station’s opponents. “This is not a Nimby case, this is not ‘not in my backyard;’ this is a Wimby case, ‘where in my backyard?’ ” Mr. Silver said in an interview. “There is a big difference between the two.”

City officials said on Tuesday that they had amply studied the 36th Street site and several other alternatives, and had concluded that Gansevoort was the best and most cost-effective choice.

“We briefed Assembly members Glick, Gottfried and Rosenthal last week and today provided them with the follow-up information they requested,” said Farrell Sklerov, a mayoral spokesman in Albany.

The legislators at the news conference are all members of the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, which has not yet taken an official position on the plan. But on Tuesday, 33 of the caucus’s 44 members signed a letter to Mr. Silver urging him to allow a vote on the Gansevoort legislation, signaling, they said, that a majority of the Legislature’s black and Hispanic members support the bill. The legislative session is scheduled to end on Thursday.

“In the fine tradition of Albany, lots of things get done in the last two days,” said Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat of Upper Manhattan, who has been organizing support for the bill that would create the Gansevoort station.

“I think that when that bill comes to the floor, it will get a majority of us, the vast majority of us, of the members of the State Legislature.”

Brooklyn Bridge Park: Suburbia?

From:
Project for Public Spaces

http://www.pps.org/info/newsletter/new_york_city_commentary/borough_opportunities
Brooklyn Bridge Park

The downtown Brooklyn waterfront could become a world-class public space serving people from throughout the five boroughs. Instead it is on track to become a suburban-style park catering mainly to residents of an ill-conceived high-rise residential development. The current plan simply does not match up to other world class waterfronts, nor does it display a sound grasp of the principles of good waterfronts.

The park's site promises an unprecedented opportunity to create a great new public space that will be Brooklyn's face to the world. Unfortunately, the current plan by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates calls for little more than a passive recreational park dominated by luxury housing. The concept for the park has been radically degraded from the ideas that emerged from a successful community-based process in 2001, during which an extensive and much admired series of public hearings yielded a master plan laid out by Ken Greenberg Associates. What remains now is basically a huge developer-driven residential real estate project tacked on to a series of isolated one-dimensional uses -- either large-scale recreation or passive parks and walkways -- that will effectively prevent Brooklyn residents from getting the most out of their prime waterfront.

To start with, the plan's many rigid features will preclude the park from supporting a range of activities and responding to user demands. Narrow piers and pathways throughout the park offer great views but a limited sense of amenity, intrigue or destination. Without real attractions to draw people, many of the piers will quickly become magnets for negative activity. Another deadly touch, the large berms in the middle of the plan, will suffer a similar fate. Meant to act as sound attenuating devices, the berms hide secluded pathways, void of any reason for human use, that will not only be extremely dull but also unsafe.

Then there are the residential towers, sold as bringing a built-in constituency to the park, which will inevitably house a small, well-heeled population intent on keeping any other constituencies out of the surrounding public spaces. The towers themselves and the large open spaces that surround them will also go a long way towards enforcing exclusionary goals. The fact that the buildings are placed at the entrances to the park and are surrounded by highly-trafficked roads, car-dominated entrances and large swaths of passive green space ensures that these crucial areas will clearly belong to the high-rise residents and not the people of Brooklyn. (The marriage of luxury high-rises and elaborate design has played out just as predictably in other parks, including Barcelona's Diagonal Mar development, Toronto's new highrise waterfront, and Battery Park City's Teardrop Park, also designed by Van Valkenburgh.)

A model of Brooklyn Bridge Park showing the Atlantic Avenue entrance in the foreground.

No matter what you think of the Brooklyn Bridge Park design, it will be very expensive. This is completely unjustifiable. Many great waterfronts have been created with much lower budgets, using compatible and publicly beneficial revenue streams to support the public goals of the project. In Düsseldorf, for instance, a tightening budget proved to be a blessing in disguise because it forced planners to focus on lower-cost design and inexpensive programming. The result has been a simple yet astoundingly successful public space. Vancouver's Granville Island breaks even and serves as the city's number one destination for both locals and tourists. It has achieved success by constantly evolving and finding ways to attract and maintain new user groups, despite being even more isolated and inaccessible than Brooklyn Bridge Park.

All the needless expense complicates the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation's dubious mandate to operate a financially self-sustaining park, and the consequences are proving to be disastrous. The inclusion of luxury housing, for instance, is basically a crutch to prop up the park's revenue stream. The irony here is that the proposed design and management approach makes it nearly impossible for the park to sustain itself. The park is literally designed to prevent the kind of use, ownership and participation that would make it both revenue generating and valued by the larger Brooklyn community.

The chance remains to return Brooklyn Bridge Park to the "13 Guiding Principles" that evolved from the community hearings in 2001. To begin, the entrances to the park should be completely re-designed as active, pedestrian-friendly plazas and destinations that draw people from throughout Brooklyn to the ends of Atlantic Avenue, Fulton Street and even Joralemon Street. Instead of housing, which is the most private of all forms of development, these areas should be the site of buildings that generate revenue while serving a public purpose, like Brooklyn-based cultural institutions, arts organizations, non-profits, or even restaurants.

After all, the purpose of generating revenue for the park and deeding the land for park use is to promote public space goals. Why then create a park based on design and uses that conflict so directly with these goals? The vision for a waterfront to serve and reflect all of Brooklyn has been weakened by the development corporation's process, but there is still time to seize the opportunity to create a world class waterfront.

Pedicabs

NEW YORK: Thurs March 15:

MAYOR MIKE: PLEASE VETO THE BILL!

In an amazing and unanticipated move, at yesterday's fairly routine
appointment New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had at City Hall to
sign several bills recently passed by the City Council, at the prompting of
several pedicab industry members as well as weeks of lobbying, he paused and
reflected upon this bill -- Intro 331A or 331B (however you're counting) and
decided not to sign it. Among measures to improve nightclub safety and a
discussion of metal vs. wood bats in high school baseball games, the pedicab
regulatory bill caught the mayor's attention. 4 bills were signed, but the
signature line on Intro 331 remained empty at the end of the event.

[IMAGE: see NY Times Metro Section page 2: NYCPOA board member and Green
Transporters co-founder Doug Korman explains why this bill hurts the
industry]
See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/nyregion/15council.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

see:
http://www.amny.com/news/local/am-pedicab0315,0,6183285.story?coll=am-tophea
dlines

[IMAGE: See METRO NY full page ad NYCPOA took out 02/21/07 asking for Mayor
to reconsider and not put a cap on the industry in our links section]
see: http://www.nycpoa.org/info/index.htm

According to the Mayor's spokesperson, Stu Loeser, as recorded by the New
York Times, "The Mayor listened, and in light of the concerns he heard, he
decided that since he has more time to act, he'll take advantage of that."
Mr. Loeser added that the Mayor has until March 30 to act. If the Mayor
vetoes the bill, the Council can still go ahead and override the veto, OR,
the bill must be amended and put forth to a vote again. See: Metro Section,
page 2.

The Daily News (see page 12) reported the Mayor's exact words were: "I want
to think about it." The Daily News further reported that this is the FIRST
TIME EVER in his administration's history that a bill presented to him at a
signing ceremony was instead not signed at the last minute.


AM New York's coverage included a full front page image with the caption:
"SPARED: In Surprise, Mayor Stops Short of Approving Pedicab Restrictions"

Good for 2030

Welcome to Planyc2030 Watch

Planyc2030 has been announced with great fanfare and embraced by many in the metropolitan area as an enormous step forward to envision and create a livable city. Others view the Planyc2030 initiative as smoke and mirrors to distract us from the rampant and rapid development that is destroying our green spaces, corporatizing our public areas and fueling skyrocketing housing costs.

This webite has been created for you to bring to the public's attention official government policies or approved legislation or development projects that appear to be inconsistent with the stated and laudable goals of the Planyc2030 project.

With your involvement we look forward to garnering significant media attention that will draw greater public scrutiny to the decisions being made today that compromise the Planyc2030 agenda. In short time we will see if it is real.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/about/about.shtml

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