Anthony Notaro, the chair of Community Board 1 (CB1), has issued a candid warning that area residents may wish to keep in mind heading into tomorrow night’s public meeting of the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency (LMCR) project.
At the May 2 meeting of CB1’s Battery Park City Committee, during a discussion of measures planned by the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) to harden the community against future extreme weather events, Mr. Notaro observed, “I will emphatically say that, while there is discussion at City and State levels, there is no plan right now for coastal resiliency in Lower Manhattan.”
“When you get past Pier A,” he said in a reference to the southern border of Battery Park City (and thus the lower extremity of the resiliency plans being formulated by the BPCA), “Around the Battery, up through FiDi and the Seaport, we are failing at coming up with a consolidated plan,” he continued.
“We have a problem that we have not addressed at LMCR, from Brooklyn Bridge up to Harrison Street.”
“Our former chair, Catherine McVay Hughes, did a wonderful job of pushing the City to allocate $100 million,” Mr. Notaro continued, in a reference to his predecessor, who has been a relentless advocate for resiliency planning in Lower Manhattan. Ms. Hughes succeeded in persuading the de Blasio administration to commit that amount to a comprehensive network of flood-control barriers to protect all of Lower Manhattan’s waterfront communities: the South Street Seaport, the Financial District, Battery Park City, and Tribeca. But, Mr. Notaro added, “we will eat that up in less than two years in design work. And we still won’t yet have a plan.”
Mr. Notaro praised the work of the BPCA in conceptualizing flood mitigation measures for Battery Park City. “You’ve done a wonderful job,” he said. “But the issue is you’re going to stop at Pier A and Stuyvesant High School.” This was not a criticism of the Authority, but an acknowledgement that it cannot legally operate outside the boundaries of the neighborhood it governs.
“You guys have a major portion of the puzzle, but we don’t have the puzzle done yet,” Mr. Notaro continued, while noting another dilemma. Having formulated even a preliminary plan, and being able to pay for its implementation (the BPCA generates more than $100 million in excess revenue each year, and has untapped bonding capacity of many hundreds of millions more) puts the Authority roughly five years ahead of planning for adjacent communities.
“If you think we have a problem,” Mr. Notaro said, referring to Battery Park City, “the Seaport doesn’t have a damn plan for resiliency.” This is a striking irony, in that Battery Park City was almost unscathed by Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 storm that has catalyzed the push for anti-flooding measures throughout New York City’s waterfront communities. By contrast, the Seaport neighborhood was inundated with a wall of water seven feet high, which inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.
“You people are moving ahead, full speed, and the City has not kept up with you. Nobody else has caught up,” Mr. Notaro said to BPCA representatives at the May 2 meeting. “And that’s our concern. As a community board, we have to be very focused on that.”
Nick Sbordone, the BPCA’s director of communications and public affairs, replied, “to be fair to the City, I understand some of the intricacies of dealing with a bureaucracy that is large and has many moving parts. I know they are committed to it, but it’s a matter of different timing.”
Water damage on Front Street in the Seaport district
Mr. Notaro insisted, however, “the BPCA has the resources and the brains and the money, but the whole plan for Lower Manhattan? We don’t know where it is. We got a small portion for Two Bridges, which is going to eat more than $350 million, and it’s a fraction of our coastline.” This was a reference to a large federal grant, allocated in February, 2016, for the area between the Brooklyn Bridge and Montgomery Street, on the Lower East Side.
About the BPCA’s plans, Mr. Notaro voiced the concern that, “there is a probability that you could do all this work and protect Battery Park City, and we could be completely protected and walled off from the rest of the City. Or it could be that we still have vulnerability. We haven’t addressed sewer water that will come back up from the other side. We haven’t looked at this holistically.”
Mr. Notaro also decried what he saw as a lack of coordination. “It is not accurate that BPCA has shared this with City,” he said of the Authority’s plans. There are conversations between BPCA, and four or five consulting firms. But it you put them all in the room right now and gave them a blank check and asked, ‘what will this whole thing look like?’ No one has that answer.”
The LMCR project will hold a public workshop tomorrow (Thursday, May 18) at St. Paul’s Chapel (209 Broadway, at the corner of Vesey Street), from 6pm to 8pm.
This session is slated to focus on resiliency measures from the Brooklyn Bridge, stretching south around the tip of Manhattan, and up the west side to northern edge of Battery Park City. Admission is free, and all interested members of the public are welcome to attend.