BPCA Hosts Public Hearing About North/West Resiliency Project
On September 18, the Battery Park City Authority hosted a public hearing at Stuyvesant High School to review the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for its North/West Resiliency Project. This hearing began with a presentation summarizing the DEIS. All questions raised by the audience were recorded, and detailed answers are to be provided in writing when the DEIS is updated as a Final Environmental Impact Statement in December.
All of these steps are mandated under the New York’s State Environmental Quality Review Act. At the same time, the BPCA is also complying with the local version of this statute, the City Environmental Quality Review. Both laws require government agencies to document possible negative impacts from any project they are considering, and to formulate mitigation strategies to address these concerns.
The North/West Resiliency Project — now budgeted at approximately $1.6 billion — is expected to start construction in late 2025 (after Wagner Park, currently undergoing reconstruction for a separate phase of the BPCA’s resiliency plans, has reopened), and continue for at least five years. The initiative, which passed its 60 percent design milestone earlier this year, aims to create a coastal flood risk management system consisting largely of flood walls and deployable gates stretching from First Place near South Cove, running north along the Esplanade to the north boundary of Battery Park City, and across West Street to a high point in Tribeca near North Moore and Greenwich Streets.
Despite the ambitious scope and scale of this plan, the DEIS mostly finds that the actions planned by the North/West Resiliency Project will have no significant impacts on categories such as air quality, community facilities, and natural resources.
The DEIS does acknowledge temporary (within the five-year construction period) significant impacts on local quality of life, open space, noise, and transportation. The DEIS outlines preliminary strategies for mitigating each of these impacts, all of which are expected to be resolved when the project is concluded.
This meeting was part of a public comment period that ends October 7, during which any concerned party may share their point of view. Those wishing to submit comments in writing are invited to email nwbpcrinfo@bpca.ny.gov.
To the editor,
I attended the DEIS presentation [Draft Environmental Impact Statement presentation by the Battery Park City Authority for its North/West Resiliency Project] and I was deeply disappointed. The presentations were shoddy, the sound system was deplorable, the connection to outside parties was poor. I expected more.
I have attended many of the resiliency meetings and each time I came away believing this project has run amok. I keep hearing the money has been allocated, the budget is there to be spent, and there is no turning back. No one has explored the idea of using that money to create a fund that would throw off sufficient interest to fix disasters where, when, and even if they occur. Instead, we are ploughing billions into BPCA in a scheme that will utterly destroy the use and enjoyment of this special property for five to eight years and maybe more. A lot of us don’t have that kind of time to waste on climbing over barriers and staring into what will become a catastrophic money pit.
No one is considering moms with baby carriages, kids trying to get to school or the ball field, seniors trying to get to a park or the pharmacy, the impact on North Cove businesses, the shutting down of the marina…let alone the unsightly mess all of this will create. The Environmental Impact envisions the destruction of more than 450 carbon-reducing trees. How do we justify creating this resiliency boondoggle by adding to the planet’s climate change burden?
Yes, there is climate change; yes, there are hurricanes; and, yes, storms like Sandy will happen again. With the right financial management, funds now budgeted can be used to fix things as they occur, where they occur, when they occur.
If not, we will have a mess on our hands that will be entirely self inflicted. The construction and design people don’t like hearing this because this project means a big paycheck.
But they don’t live here. And they don’t have to deal with the every day calamity this so-called resiliency project will create for the people who love this place.
It’s time to stop the insanity.
Timothy H. Cole