Park Development Opponents Aim To Fund Court Fight

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The New York Sun

Opponents of the $150 million state and city plan to build the Brooklyn Bridge Park will gather tomorrow night to raise money to finance a bid to alter the project through the courts.


The agency in charge of the project, the Brooklyn Bridge Development Corporation, plans to finance the maintenance of the 85-acre park, estimated at $15.2 million a year, with money generated from the development of four residential buildings on the site, including a hotel-residential complex and two luxury towers.


The president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Defense Fund, Judi Francis, who lives near the site of the proposed residential development, calls the plan for luxury towers inside a public park “a fatted pig surrounded by parsley.”


“We are fighting for a park, and fighting against a development project that is giving away park land to real estate developers. It is very basic,” she said yesterday.


Opponents say the current plan will limit accessibility, reduce the amount of recreation, and serve the interests of those Brooklyn residents who will use the park as a backyard, over those who might travel from farther away to use it.


The plan’s advocates see tomorrow night’s gathering as the kind of forum where “facts and history are forgotten and ignored,” the director of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy, Marianna Koval, said.


Ms. Koval supports limited private development as a necessary evil. “In New York City, you can always stop things. The harder challenge is to build something. The perfect is the enemy of the good,” she said.


Earlier this month, state and city officials announced an accelerated construction schedule under which portions of the 1.3-mile-long park could be completed by 2009. The development corporation is scheduled to vote on the final project plan and environmental impact statement in December, and construction could begin next year.


In 2002, a development corporation made up of several community leaders proposed a park that would be self-financed through an off-site parking lot, a recreation center that would charge users, and a hotel. Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg supported the plan, dedicated $150 million in state and city funds to it, and created the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation to oversee its construction.


A Cobble Hill resident who served on the local development corporation, Roy Sloane, said the state and city hijacked the community’s project, which had included many delicate compromises.


Mr. Sloane, the former head of the Cobble Hill Association, said the government’s decision to use private development to finance the park coincided with the purchase of an adjacent lot by a developer, Robert Levine, whose property is now slated to house some of the park’s condominiums.


Ms. Koval has a vastly different interpretation of events. She says that when the state and city took over planning in 2003, budget restraints made it necessary to downsize the community-derived plan, and a revised annual maintenance estimate required the creation of more lucrative sources of revenue. Ms. Koval said a more transparent state and city process could have mitigated some of the opposition’s anger.


Another advocate of the current plan charged that tomorrow’s gathering is not an attempt to modify the park, but to stop it. In a widely distributed e-mail message, a former staffer for state Senator Martin Connor, Howard Graubard, wrote, “This agenda of this meeting is a red herring served up by folks disingenuously (or self-deludingly) protecting their own interests while trying (whether intentionally or not) to shaft the general public.”


Tomorrow’s meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. at Congregation Mt. Sinai in Brooklyn Heights.


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