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Ms. Ortiz, co-chairman of a community board task force, remembers families lobbying for benches and tables where seniors could play cards and petitioning for outdoor movie screenings. “People from the neighborhood wanted to see themselves in this process,” he told me. “Over time, we felt we were heard.” After all, that is the purpose of participatory decision-making. To borrow a phrase from Malcolm Araos, a graduate student at New York University writing His thesis on the park, public trust, requires participants to “continually recognize their reflected input into the evolution” of a project.
Thus, the transition did more than infuriate residents when the administration of Mayor de Blasio, who had not made insurmountable objections during nearly five years of community consultations, suddenly swapped the plan for what officials decided was more technically sound. It caused a legitimacy crisis. Residents felt deceived. The entire consulting process suddenly seemed fake. And if that’s the case, opponents asked, why should we believe city officials who said engineering, construction and maintenance costs made the previous plan impossible? The expertise itself was now up for debate.
“We understand the frustration,” said Jamie Torres-Springer, who was the first vice president of the city’s Design and Construction Department when the new plan was announced. Looking back, he told me it would have been better to explain the city’s perspective more clearly to residents at community meetings, before declaring it was a done deal. But he added that “we were facing a deadline to spend federal funds and wanted to build the project as quickly as possible to fulfill flood protection.” “We didn’t really think the new design was a radical change from the original.”
Except, of course, undermining a core purpose of the whole process – building trust.
I recently met half a dozen East River Park Action members, the loudest of the opposition groups that emerged in response to the new plan. Months ago, alerts from the group started popping up in my inbox, announcing a court hearing or inviting people to join the protest march. We gathered around a table at Cafe Mogador, a former Middle Eastern stand in the East Village. Pat Arnow, a photographer in the group; landscape designer Billie Cohen; and Eileen Myles, author and poet of “Chelsea Girls.” Their distrust of the mayor’s plan was compounded by the city’s refusal to hand over documents related to the buildability study. “We had to file a Freedom of Information Act request, and the city eventually released a largely corrected version of the study,” Ms Arnow said. “Why should we believe everything the city says if he continues to hide the truth?”
Ms. Arnow’s group supported the original berm idea developed with the community and imagined the East River shoreline gradually turning into wetlands. As sea levels rise, Ms. Arnow predicted that East River Park will turn into eco-friendly marshes managed by the parks department.
The group has suggested that a truly illuminating response to climate change would be to build a green roof over FDR Drive – an idea that the BIG Team floated around at the very beginning, before city officials asked it to withdraw because, as Amy Chester, Rebuild’s general manager, He remembers that City Hall didn’t want to “make too many promises.” A roof will create a protective barrier for residential developments while suppressing traffic noise and providing additional parking space, according to the East River Park Action group. In essence, they said, bury the highway, not the park.
Ms. Cohen summed up the criticisms of the city’s proposal as “It’s not a comprehensive plan”. The group argued that it was pointless to cut down mature trees and replace them with saplings, which provide shade, sequester carbon and act as a stopover for migratory birds. Instead, they urged the city to focus on increasing its sewer capacity, improving public housing campuses, and reducing car emissions.
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