Read more: https://www.riverdalepress.com/stories/A-road-to-nowhere,49710?page=1&content_source=

Kristin Hart is the President of the Fort Independence Park Neighborhood Association (FIPNA)

Also see:

Aqueduct Trail disconnect

By Karen Argenti on November 21, 2011 | Edit

Aqueduct Trail: how the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail in the North Bronx is a disconnect As you may know, the historic Old Croton Aqueduct trails from Croton Lake in Westchester County through the Bronx exiting at the historic and soon to be opened High Bridge — the oldest bridge in the City. But for one little [...]

A 8069 C is the bill A8069C

A8069C with highlights and shortened A8069C with highlights

A8069C votes or the HONOR ROLL Assembly Vote 8069

2004 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) including Project List as required by Chapter 175
MOU-scanned-Sept-2004

1999 ULURP Resolution and List of Projects
Reso-933-of-1999
Mosholu-Mitigation-Res-993-of-1999

Letter sent to City Council with Excel List of Projects
09.13.04-BronxWaterFiltrationPlant
Updatedlistfor10m091304

New Yorkers will pay price for Croton Water Treatment Plant cost overruns

The price tag of a new Bronx water treatment plant has skyrocketed to $3.4 billion – nearly three times what the Bloomberg administration announced when construction began in 2004, the city’s Independent Budget Office says.

The astounding cost overruns for the Croton Water Treatment Plant mean that every New York City household will end up paying, on average, $44 more in its annual water bill for the next few decades just to pay for the plant.

And although city officials keep coming up with cash for the contractors in charge of this money pit, they have yet to produce all the parks improvements they promised Bronx residents in exchange for erecting the new plant in Van Cortlandt Park.

Mayor Bloomberg promised in a 2004 memorandum of understanding with city and state leaders that the Department of Environmental Protection would earmark $200 million over a five year-period from the Croton project’s budget to pay for boroughwide park improvements.

Only $150 million of that money has been committed, Parks Department spokeswoman Vickie Karp said yesterday.

The Independent Budget Office said the city doesn’t plan to spend the rest of the $50 million until 2019.

Somehow, a five-year promise mysteriously morphed into 15 years.

“I’m so outraged at everything DEP and the city have done here,” said North Bronx neighborhood leader Jane Sokolow. “They keep trampling over a community that didn’t want this project to begin with.”

“All of the Parks [Department] Croton projects have either been built, are in construction, or are in the process of being designed or bid,” Karp insisted.

“The undertaking is a huge success and a huge win for the people of the Bronx.”

Bronx neighborhood leaders see things differently.

They always said the plant, which the city was required to build by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, could be built more cheaply in Westchester County instead of beneath Van Cortlandt Park. But the DEP’s experts insisted the Bronx site would only cost $1.2 billion.

So what went wrong?

“Initially, bidding out the work during a hyper-inflated construction market was the primary reason behind cost increases,” DEP spokesman Farrell Sklerov said yesterday in an email statement.

In 2009, then-city Controller William Thompson audited the project and found it had jumped to $2.1 billion. The original “conceptual cost estimate [by the city] was unreliable,” Thompson concluded.

In other words, the neighborhood people had been right.

Since Thompson’s audit, the plant has swallowed another billion dollars or so.

“More recently, design and construction change orders due to the complexity of the facility, and enhancements to the design and architecture of the above ground facilities all played a role in cost increases,” Sklerov added.

That’s all doublespeak, says Bronx Assemblyman Jeff Dinowitz, a longtime critic of the plant.

“If this was Bloomberg’s own company, he would have fired the people who screwed this up,” Dinowitz said. “But the mayor has not said a word. … Someone needs to take responsibility for such huge waste.”

jgonzalez@nydailynews.com

This was passed by the City Council on September 28, 2004 – Communication from the Mayor ….. transmitting the memorandum of
understanding entered into pursuant to chapter 175 of the laws of 2003 in connection with the Croton water filtration facility and the funding of certain eligible projects in the borough of the Bronx.

MOU also references the one and only ULURP on this project passed in 1999.

Here we are in October 2011 and the DEP has admitted that of the $200 million in the MOU and the $43 million in the ULURP has been frozen.

Notes from the WM11 CWTP Monthly Report 79 from April 2011. Here is 14 pages excerpted and I have two full reports form April 2011 and August 2010.

• Comments WM11 CWTP Mo Rept 79 April 2011 comments
• Monthly Report (excerpted) - WM11 CWTP Monthly Report 79 April 2011 excpts
• 2004 Council MOU info - Updatedlistfor10m091304 from 09.13.04-BronxWaterFiltrationPlant
• 1999 Resolution:  Reso 933 of 1999
• 1999 List of funded projects:  Mosholu Mitigation Res 993 of 1999

• Watershed and Sewershed Maps and things of interest

1. Water Power Point in PDF  Water
2. Story of the Croton in PDF The story of the Croton

• Reviewed four chapters in William J. Byron, The Power of Principles:  Ethics for the New Corporate Cutlure, Orbis Books, 2006.  Excellent Book that describes ten classic principles.

• Show one hour movie:
  • “Dirt! the Movie”  - http://www.dirtthemovie.org/
  • “Gasland” – http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/about-the-film/
• YouTube of the Gowanus Canal after a rainstorm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzWOOqPAEgs&feature=player_embedded

——————

Soccer woes

Soggy fields at the Van Cortlandt Park Parade Grounds may have contributed to the ongoing sod and grass problems that have rendered the fields unusable this kiddie soccer season, according to representatives of the New York City Parks Department, at a Jan. 27 meeting for CB 8’s Parks and Recreation Committee.

“It’s not an exact science,” said Margot Perron, president of the Van Cortlandt Park Conservancy. “We don’t always know when something’s going to finish. Stuff happens.”

And one of the things that happened in the case of the Parade Ground was extra water inundating the growing grass, potentially overwhelming it during a fragile time.

“We have a wet situation,” said Steve Des- Noyer, design supervisor for Croton projects at the Parks Dept., adding that it might have been caused by water main breaks or more rain than anticipated.

The next step, Mr. DesNoyer said, will be test pits on the land in question. If groundwater is found, he said, the Parks Department will check for chlorine to see if city water is getting in.

“If that doesn’t get corrected it would have to be cordoned off,” he said. The over-watering was not anticipated, he said, adding that extra drainage would take care of the problem. All corrective work will probably have to wait until the spring, he said, though heavy rains could postpone that date again.

Still, it’s not just the extra water keeping the fields from being ready to use. The grass knitting is different from establishing the sod as ready-touse, Mr. DesNoyer said.

“It’s not just the knitting process, which can be done in four weeks,” he said. “We like to see things going through a full growing season.”

Since the new grass was planted last year, the full growing season would extend through the end of the spring, after soccer season is already over.

Letting the field grow healthily is important, agreed Traffic and Transportation chair Tony Cassino, who attended the Parks meeting, adding that it does not make it the best option for the Parade Ground fields.

“There’s a balance of wanting to preserve a gem we have right now … and, on the other hand, [are] all the leagues and teams who want to use the fields,” Mr. Cassino said.

The leagues that will be affected are the traveling teams and girls’ teams, said Bruce Silverman, president of the Riverdale Soccer Club.

Some teams will have shortened seasons and others will play on fields borrowed from neighborhood schools like the Riverdale Country School, Mr. Silverman said, adding that more than 200 girls between first and ninth grades might still have their season cancelled if they can’t find adequate field space.

“We still have to see what our options are,” he said.

This is part of the February 4, 2010 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

http://www.riverdalepress.com/full.php?sid=11362&current_edition=2010-02-04

In 1999, the New York City Council passed the ULURP resolution approving the site selection to build a filter plant in Van Cortlandt Park.  The resolution promising certain things, including the Facility Monitoring Committee.

The pedestrian bridge is mentioned in the resolution and on the list of projects.    If the project is feasible, and for some reason, too expensive, then we should be given the opportunity to raise the money elsewhere.  Parks should do the report, then it has to go to the CITY COUNCIL.

HERE ARE THE DOCUMENTS:

• RESOLUTION: Reso 933 of 1999
  
• LIST OF MITIGATION PROJECTS:Mosholu Mitigation Res 993 of 1999

Among the many other items included is this one:

9.) DPR shall undertake a study and impact analysis (the study) to determine whether or not a pedestrian footbridge, crossing the Major Deegan Expressway linking the heretofore and connected east and west portions of Van Cortlandt Park is technically, legally and financially feasible. Said study shall be completed by September 2002 and the results of such study shall be filed with the Speaker of the City Council and the Director of the Land Use Division of the City Council within the ten (10) days of completion. In the event that said study determines that the construction of such a pedestrian footbridge is technically, legally and financially feasible, a Budget Modification, transferring from DEP to DPR funds sufficient to design and build it shall be introduced in the Council by the Mayor within sixty (60) days of the completion of the study;

Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz

3107 Kingsbridge Avenue, Bronx, New York 10463 ● (718) 796-5345

November 1, 2009

The meeting that the five community members of the Croton Facilities Monitoring Committee (CFMC) held in the Amalgamated House’s Vladeck Hall on Thursday, October 29 illustrated conclusively that the water filtration plant boondoggle that is costing taxpayers unnecessary billions and is being grossly mismanaged by a secretive NYC Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is one of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s worst failures.

At the meeting, Deputy Comptroller John Graham explained that the recently released audits by Comptroller Bill Thompson found that the DEP could not account for the astronomical rise in costs as compared with their original budgeting for the project.  Many who attended spoke emphatically that the comptroller’s findings definitively support their long-held claim that the DEP cooked the books in order to see to it that the plant was built in Van Cortlandt Park and to create a lucrative bonanza for contractors and engineers while sticking everyday New Yorkers with an outrageous bill.

Specifically, the comptroller reported that the DEP failed to account for a cost escalation rate above those substantiated by industry indexes such as the Engineering News-Record Construction index of 5.04%, or the Handy-Whitman Index of Public Utility Construction of 5.73%, or the Prevailing Wage Rates of 4.7%.

I agree with the Comptroller:  “(The DEP’s) Underlying estimate was unreliable and lacked sufficient documentation to substantiate its accuracy and completeness.”  The still unanswered question of why they did it and who benefited from it was also raised at the meeting, but not surprisingly, though DEP and contractor representatives were present, they did not participate in the discussion.  What is clear is that we all need to continue our due diligence until the truth is definitively known.

Though not an official CFMC meeting, the gathering was a clear statement to Mayor Bloomberg’s DEP that a majority of the seven-member committee is fed up over the unexplained costs, debilitating and expensive construction delays, and ongoing DEP stonewalling and lack of transparency as indicated in the comptroller’s audit.   It was made clear that at the next CFMC meeting, scheduled for Thursday, November 5 at 7:00 p.m. at the DEP office at 3660 Jerome Avenue, the comptroller’s report is going to be on the agenda and Mayor Bloomberg’s DEP is going to have to attempt to justify their actions and also change the opaque processes which contribute to the scandal on a daily basis.

Since its establishment by the City Council in 2004, the committee charged with monitoring this project was manipulated by the DEP, thereby hampering its work.  However, in 2007 after my office reported that the DEP’s explanation rate for the cost escalation was not correct and that DEP’s stated justifications were invalid smoke screens, the committee finally stood up to then-Commissioner Emily Lloyd, and voted to ask for the audit.  In a pathetic and obvious attempt to avoid inquiry, though the report was issued almost two months ago, the DEP has balked at scheduling meetings of the CFMC until after the mayoral election.

But Thursday’s history-making meeting proves that no matter how much the Mayor controls the Manhattan media, the people of the Bronx must continue to stand strong in the pursuit of truthful information from City Hall and diligence over the administration’s ongoing attempt to hide from scrutiny.

I applaud the work of the community members of the Croton Facilities Monitoring Committee, and look forward to its next meeting on Thursday, November 5 so we can hear what the DEP has to say.

Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, 81^st AD