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Who Says: We should have known this was coming. Just wait until the start tearing down the old stadium and find that the land is contaminated from an oil leak from the stadiums oil tanks..

Time and Cost Rise for Yankee Stadium Parks

 Anthony Santiago, left, and his twin brother, Christopher, playing in a temporary park at Jerome Avenue and East 161st Street.

 Cost estimates for eight small parks around the new Yankee Stadium have almost doubled.

The cost of replacing two popular parks where the new Yankee Stadium is being built has nearly doubled. At the same time, several of the eight new parks, which were supposed to be completed before the new stadium opens next spring, have been delayed by as much as two years, according to city documents.

The price of the new small parks — which are to replace tennis and basketball courts, a running track and baseball and soccer fields eliminated to make way for the new stadium — is now projected to be $174 million, almost one-seventh the cost of the $1.3 billion stadium itself. The original estimate had been $95.5 million. The increase comes amid skyrocketing costs for construction projects, both public and private, around the city.

The stadium is being financed by the Yankees with city subsidies, while the eight new parks for the South Bronx, which range in size from 0.24 acre to 8.9 acres, are being paid for by the city.

None of the replacement parks have been completed, and construction on several has not yet started; however, the parks department has built a temporary replacement park on a parking lot in the area, opened a ball field this spring at a school almost a mile to the east, and is building a sports field at a recreation center about a mile to the north.

The city was required to build the new parks after it selected the 28.4-acre Macombs Dam Park and a portion of the 18.5-acre John Mullaly Park as the site of the new stadium in 2005. State and federal law dictated that a similar amount of parkland nearby of equal or greater fair market value be built to replace the parks that would be lost.

Some residents have been critical of the trade-off. While Macombs Dam and Mullaly Parks were almost contiguous stretches of grass and trees amid the concrete topography of the South Bronx, the replacement parks are small parcels scattered around the area. The sites include sports fields atop a planned stadium parking garage and a park along the Harlem River, which is on the opposite side of the Major Deegan Expressway.

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Bronx Awaits Community Benefits From New Yankee Stadium Construction

The Yankees still owe the Bronx about $1 million of community benefits in return for building a new Yankee Stadium, according to outraged attendants of Tuesday night’s Community Board 4 meeting, held in the Murray Cohen Auditorium of the Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center.

“This is important to the community and you allow only three questions from the community, that is not fair,” said a local resident.

But residents around the stadium say that even though the new Yankee Stadium is well under construction, the community has yet to see any benefits.

The Yankee Stadium community benefits agreement agreed for the Bronx Bombers to give each year $800,000, as well as $100,000 in sports equipment and 15,000 tickets to games – for the next 40 years.

“The community benefits agreement was carved and said that when the shovel went in the ground, when they took over the park,” said Gregory Bell, an advocate for the disabled. “That is when the $800,000 was supposed to start to flow.”

The head of the volunteer advisory panel for the benefits agreement attended Tuesday’s meeting to say the money is on the way.

“During April we will have started that process and organizations will start to see that money,” said Serafin Mariel of the benefits advisory panel.

“We know that people wonder if we exist - and if we exist what is our function,” said Michael Drezin of the benefits advisory panel. “So the first thing we want people to do is know that we exist. We hear them and we want to be responsive to them.”

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Our reader says:

“I am beginning to think that we were Bamboozled by the Bronx Borough President who gave our parkland to the Yankee Organization.”

  The new Yankee Stadium, with a 2009 target date, is being built near the old one in the Bronx.

Building Yankee Stadium But High & Dry On Funds 

Several years ago, as the Yankees negotiated to build a new stadium in the South Bronx, the neighborhood faced the realities of a massive construction project in its midst: parks would be closed and moved, traffic would be horrendous, life would be, for a while, a hassle.

So, as one way to make up for these inconveniences, the Yankees and elected officials signed a community benefits agreement. It required that the team would give roughly $1.2 million a year, starting when the work began, to various community groups through a special panel. The deal was similar to agreements in other major projects, like Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and Columbia University’s expansion into Harlem.

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