Just last week, New Yorkers overwhelmingly passed Proposal 2, which amends the state Constitution to include “the right to clean water, clean air and a healthful environment.” And yet the Gowanus rezoning proposal now before the City Council does just the opposite; it is a public policy proposal so bereft of basic common sense and legally required impact analysis that it is an insult to all New Yorkers and the values they just voted to affirm. At 82 blocks and 200-plus acres, the Gowanus Rezoning constitutes New York City’s largest, most dangerous and most costly public giveaway to private real estate interests of the 21st century.
After a failed community engagement process that tossed aside the grave concerns of residents, activists, the EPA and elected officials, Mayor de Blasio seeks to define his legacy with a deeply troubling proposal that would: place low-income and homeless families on forever-toxic land that must be monitored for cancer-causing fumes in perpetuity; bring more than 30,000 new residents into high-rise developments situated in a FEMA Flood Zone A next to an open sewer and EPA Superfund site; Deliver massive 421-a tax benefits to real estate developers; transfer liability for numerous toxic waste sites and other major foreseeable costs to New York taxpayers; require no city-funded infrastructure to deal with the impacts of climate change, despite the deadly destruction of the remnants of Hurricane Ida; and facilitate the City of New York’s decades of continued violation of multiple state and federal statutes that are intended to protect all New Yorkers.
After more than a century of neglect and toxic industrial dumping in Gowanus, this development proposal will almost certainly further degrade area air and water quality while increasing sewer back-ups as factors like sea-level rise and unchecked development stress the city’s aging and failing sewer infrastructure. But nobody — including the city or the EPA — can actually verify the impacts because the city refuses to conduct accurate water modeling and insists on using outdated data sets, including rainfall projections from 2008.
The sham planning process run by the de Blasio administration has indeed been such a failure that the proposal has brought on a sustained barrage of detailed criticism from every corner of the affected areas, including the U.S. EPA Region 2, Rep. Nydia Velazquez, Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon, incoming City Councilwomen Shahana Hanif and Alexa Aviles, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, the Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice, Community Boards 2 and 6, Families United for Racial & Economic Equality, and Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus. All of these key community stakeholders have submitted extensive public testimony or made public statements identifying major gaps and deficiencies in the data disclosures and impact analyses put forward by the city. In a Sept. 8 letter to Mayor de Blasio, Velazquez demands that the Environmental Impact Statement be redone in the wake of Ida, writing, “The city needs to do much more now to ensure responsible development in the future, especially with record setting storms now being the norm. Mother Nature will not be fooled by the city’s use of pre-Sandy, pre-Superfund data.” De Blasio has yet to respond.
Proponents have asserted that the rezoning is about “resiliency,” but the city currently dumps more than 360 million gallons of raw sewage and polluted Combined Sewer Overflow into the Gowanus Canal annually, in violation of the Clean Water Act. Increasing volumes of sanitary sewage from tens of thousands of new residents without any new city-funded infrastructure will take up pipe and treatment plant capacity, forcing raw sewage to back up with increasing frequency into homes and businesses and discharge into the Gowanus Canal.
In fact, the EPA has identified gross “flaws and errors” and “inconsistencies” in the city’s CSO analyses, stating in official comments that the city’s modeling “cannot be readily verified now and provides no mechanism for future confirmation or correction.” In plain English, they have called B.S. on de Blasio, but he has proceeded to ignore the EPA too.
In failing to conduct a comprehensive and legally required impact analysis, the city has put this rezoning in dire legal jeopardy. If the City Council — despite being denied the analyses that would allow it to properly assess this action — plows ahead and approves this tragically misguided proposal, then the citizens of New York City will be forced to take legal action to stop it. Voice of Gowanus has retained renowned environmental lawyer Richard J. Lippes — famous for his precedent-setting Love Canal and Three Mile Island victories — to prepare multiple legal actions. In a statement, Lippes said, “New York City has failed to follow the necessary due process in evaluating and passing this rezoning, and Voice of Gowanus is appropriately seeking judicial review of these inadequate assessments.”
In other words, see you in court.
LaViolette, Bisi and Kelly are all long-term Gowanus residents, activists and members of community coalition Voice of Gowanus.