The meeting, which begins at 6:00 pm, takes place at Six River Terrace (opposite the Irish Hunger Memorial and next to Le Pain Quotidien restaurant). Admission is free, and no R.S.V.P. is necessary.
Tonight’s meeting will be the second in a series of public forums, and will be devoted to one of the four phases being planned to make the community safe against rising sea levels and future extreme weather events. The other three stages of the project focus the southern tip of the community, near Wagner Park and Pier A (which was the topic of a similar meeting, held on November 1), the community’s Hudson River waterfront, and the neighborhood’s northern boundary. The combined total budget for these projects is approximately $300 million.
The ball fields was one of the most grievously damaged locations in Battery Park City during 2012 Hurricane Sandy. Flood waters rushing along West Street spilled into the low-lying facility, effectively destroying the artificial turf surface that had been installed a year earlier at a cost of millions of dollars.
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At the October 29 meeting of the BPCA’s board, Authority president B.J. Jones recalled hosting earlier that day, “an all-agency stakeholder meeting with city and state and neighborhood stakeholders,” which included BPCA directors Martha Gallo and Catherine McVay Hughes. “What has become clear with these projects and the others to follow,” he said, “is that it’s not just an enormous resilience initiative. It’s a massive interagency coordination effort, unlike really any project of its kind.”
Ms. Gallo interjected that, “I think one of Catherine’s and my biggest concerns, is the interagency coordination and the complexity that we’re working with here. Because we know we’re six years after Superstorm Sandy. Every time I say that, I want to choke. And I would just encourage us to act alone where we can, to take some shorter-term steps towards a more comprehensive plan.”
She cited the recent example of the West Thames Pedestrian bridge, which is being constructed as part of an interagency partnership between the Authority, the City’s Economic Development Corporation, and the State’s Department of Transportation. This project has slipped years behind schedule, while its budget has ballooned to almost double its original planned cost.
“If the West Thames Bridge is any example of what we get when we have interagency coordination, then we can’t be that optimistic about our resiliency program,” she observed. “And I think we need to learn from that and just take it to a different level.”
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The Battery Underpass flooded
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She continued, “I don’t want to use the community as an excuse for slowing this down. I think the community issues have been about us getting it sort of ass backwards. Doing work and then telling them, ‘ta da!’ — this is what we’ve decided to do. And I think the team has done an extraordinary job lately of changing that process around and so we can accelerate some of that. The community are not experts in many of these things. And I think we’re going to need to, yes, build their trust. But we’re going to have to move this sucker along.”
Ms. McVay Hughes noted that, “today is the six-year anniversary of Superstore Sandy, just to remind everybody at the table. And on Saturday, there was a small nor’easter. I don’t know how many of you track the buoy at the Battery. But it gives you an indication of where we’re at, which is roughly an extra two and a half, three feet of water. And you could see the water slopping at Wall Street on the East River Esplanade.”
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Pier A after Sandy
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Noting that the BPCA’s resiliency plans contemplate a year-plus of design and engineering work, with actual construction slated for 2019, Ms. McVay Hughes continued, “this hurricane season is about to come to an end. But it’s not over yet. And we have a whole other hurricane season ahead of us.”
George Tsunis, the chairman of the BPCA’s board, replied, “I think we all have to get together and figure out how to work on multiple tracks and just sequence things better.We have to think of how to expedite this. We’re actually going into year seven. I think I’m sensing the frustration here.”