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For Bronx Water Plant Being Built 10 Stories Down, a Towering Price Tag

In a city of big projects, it ranks among the biggest. New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection is building one of the largest water filtration plants in the world in a 10-story-deep hole it blasted out of bedrock in the Bronx. When completed in 2012, the plant, capable of purifying 300 million gallons of water a day, will be buried there.

But the plant, which will filter water from the Croton watershed in Westchester County, is no Bronx treasure chest. Even as construction moves forward, questions about soaring costs and delays continue to plague the project.

The cost is now estimated at nearly $3 billion, a huge jump from the $660 million city officials estimated when they announced an audacious plan in 1998 to build the plant below the surface of Van Cortlandt Park. They vowed that the park would be made as good as new, even if that meant replacing whatever was lost during construction. They now plan to rebuild a driving range on top of the buried plant.

Some officials and others fear the final tab could climb even higher, and in the process push up water rates. On April 1, the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., announced that he was starting an independent audit to determine whether city officials understated the original price, to get the plant built in the Bronx rather than Westchester. Besides scrutinizing the complicated accounting, Mr. Thompson will have to sort through accusations by some residents and officials of deliberate distortions of costs, and intimations that the project has been tainted by mob influence, though nothing has been proved.

His would not be the first effort at monitoring the expenses since work on the big hole began in late 2004. The city’s Independent Budget Office examined the project and came up with a cost estimate last September of $2.8 billion, significantly higher than the Bloomberg administration’s last previous estimate of $2.1 billion. The budget office is now comparing its cost estimate with the city’s earlier projections and is expected to report on it in the next few months.

The city’s Department of Investigation hired a law firm, Stier Anderson L.L.C., last year to monitor the progress of the construction. The law firm is now affiliated with Thacher Associates, a fraud detection company. Keith Schwam, a spokesman for the department, said the firm was keeping track “of various contractors, subcontractors and personnel” at the Bronx site.

While the plant’s opponents concede that it is too late to stop the work in Van Cortlandt Park, they say that shining more light on the project’s financing will reveal whether there was any wrongdoing in the site selection process. Read more..

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One Bad Apple Won’t Spoil the Whole Green Bunch

To mark Earth Day on Tuesday, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued its second annual “Green Apples and Bad Apples” report, which identifies five promising environmental developments and five things or places that aren’t so good for the environment. One of the biggest complaints: businesses that leave the doors open while running the air-conditioning at full blast. Our colleague Clyde Haberman has complained about this phenomenon in his NYC column, in 2006 and 2007, but it was interesting to see a leading environmental advocacy group take up the banner.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said in its report:

Whatever benefits it may have as a customer lure, this practice has significant adverse energy and air pollution impacts. According to the Long Island Power Authority, retailers increase their electricity consumption by 20 percent to 25 percent when they leave their doors open. And increasing power demand on the hottest summer days also leads to increased air pollution, as the auxiliary backup power supplies are called upon to meet peak demands. Unnecessarily boosting summer peak power demands can even make occasional brownouts more likely. In short, this is a practice that places personal business considerations over societal needs.

Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, has proposed legislation that would forbid businesses from leaving their doors open while air-conditioners are running. It is hard to say what the bill’s prospects are.

The defense counsel listed these other “bad apples”:

* The M.T.A.’s recycling program. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority does not provide separate recycling receptacles for paper and for metals, glass and plastic, as the transit systems in Chicago, Washington, Boston, Montreal and San Francisco do. The M.T.A. does perform “post-collection separation” — picking through the trash, after collection, to cull out recyclables — but that process, in which recyclables are mixed in with food waste and other trash before being separated, “inevitably leads to higher levels of contaminated recyclables,” according to the council. (The M.T.A. has provided large paper recycling bins at Grand Central Terminal for Metro-North Railroad riders.)

* The New York Organic Fertilizer Company and Hunts Point Wastewater Treatment Plant, both in the Bronx. Under a city contract, the fertilizer plant, which opened in 1992, treats several hundred tons a day of sludge from city sewage plants, drying the sludge and turning it into “pellets” for eventual use as fertilizer. The wastewater treatment plant, a few blocks away, treats raw sewage from parts of the Bronx (and from Rikers Island and City Island) before discharging it into surrounding waters.

* The former site of the Ridgewood Reservoir in Queens. The Ridgewood Reservoir was a major source of drinking water for Brooklyn in the middle and late part of the 19th century and into the 20th century. After 1900, as city relied more on its Catskill and Delaware system, the Ridgewood Reservoir was used and less; its last use under regular repair service was in 1959. The complex was transferred in 2004 to the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which wanted to turn much of the area into recreational like bike paths and artificial-turf ball fields. “But the Reservoir’s water storage basins, empty for decades, now provide a unique area for observing the process of urban reforestation,” the council said. Read more..

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Bronx History Project Awarded New York Council Grant

 BAAHP staff members Mark Naison, Ph.D., Oneka LaBennett, Ph.D., and Brian Purnell, Ph.D.

Fordham University’s Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP) has received an $18,000 grant from the New York Council for the Humanities to support a series of public programs on the history of New York’s most underrepresented borough.

The funding represents the first major outside grant for BAAHP, which began in 2003 as a joint project with the Bronx County Historical Society to document the rich history of the borough’s 500,000 residents of African descent.

During the 2008-2009 academic year, Fordham’s Rose Hill campus will be the site of “The Bronx is Building: The Bronx as a Site for Political Mobilization and Cultural Creativity,” a series of 10 public programs featuring research, discussion and analysis of BAAHP’s work.

Programs will cover these topics: Jazz in the Bronx; Civil Rights Activism; Women and Bronx Hip Hop; African Americans in Bronx Politics; When Every Gym and Schoolyard Was Open; and The South Bronx: Crucible of Black-Latino Cultural Interchange; among others.

Among the featured program speakers are poet-rapper Caridad de La Luz, known as “La Bruja,” jazz scholar Maxine Gordon (wife of jazz legend Dexter Gordon) and Susanne Stemmler, Ph.D., from the Center for Metropolitan Studies of Technical University in Berlin. Stemmler will discuss hip hop cultures in the Bronx, Berlin and Paris.

“This grant provides us with a chance to showcase the types of research that we’ve been doing for the past five years,” said Brian Purnell, Ph.D. (FCRH ’00) co-research director of BAAHP and assistant professor of African and African American studies. “Nobody has really ever studied the black community in the Bronx in any systematic scholarly way. This project helps correct that omission and adds to the historic understanding of African Americans in New York City in general.”

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All-Out Effort For A Greener Bronx

All around the borough, Bronxites were thinking green and doing their part Tuesday for Earth Day.

In the South Bronx, more than 200 volunteers celebrated by planting trees, shrubs and perennials in five community areas.

The event was in support of PlaNYC’s goal of planting one million trees throughout the five boroughs by 2017, and officially kicked off the Timberland Company’s plan to “green” 300 communities worldwide.

The effort will help “create the first truly sustainable 21st century city - what we call a greener, greater New York,” said Liam Kavanagh of the city Department of Parks & Recreation.

At Middle School 391 in Tremont, the celebration will last all week long.

Together with the Bronx Overall Development Council, more than 30 students, parents and school officials showed up at the school at 2225 Webster Ave. to blanket the concrete rooftop with 20 pine trees and plants.

“We are the first in the community to do this,” said Middle School 391 teacher Vic Madho. “It’s very avant-garde.”

The school’s Eco-Green team will take care of the garden, and the project will be incorporated into science lessons.

Later this week, with the help of the nonprofit PHIPPS, students will paint the school foyer and redecorate selected bathrooms in the building. Read more..

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Paterson Taps Bronx Judge To Be New IG

Gov. David Paterson is poised to announce he has selected Bronx state Supreme Court Justice Joseph Fisch to serve as the next state Inspector General, an aide to the governor confirmed.

Fisch and Paterson go back more than two decades. They first met in the Queens DA’s office, where Fisch worked on two separate occasions (1977-1984 and again from 1987 to 1990) and Paterson was a criminal law associate (a post over which there has been some confusion ever since).

According to The Jewish Press, Fisch attended Paterson’s wedding to Michelle Paige, and Paterson “danced the hora” at the wedding of Fisch’s daughter.

“He’s just the definition of a mentch,” Fisch told the paper, which noted that in 2007, the National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education – of which Fisch is honorary president – granted Paterson its Man of the Year award.

Fisch has also served as a deputy inspector general and general counsel at the Office of the IG of the MTA and executive director of the Office of Professional Discipline with the state Education Department.

A Harvard Law School grad, Fisch was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2003 (by then Gov. George Pataki) after serving since 1990 on the Court of Claims (appointed by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo). He also serves on the Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics.

Fisch’s appointment does not require Senate confirmation. He will earn $155,200 in his new post. He replaces Kristine Hamann, who was appointed by ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer, got emroiled in the Troopergate scandal and resigned earlier this month.

SOURCE: NYDailyNews.com Read more..

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