Talk Bronx New York

BRONX BOYS OF SUMMER 

The borough’s parks are all being renovated at once, so local teams are sharing crowded turf.

Construction equipment behind them and other teams all around, members of the Love Gospel Assembly Little League found themselves betwixt and between at one recent practice

A view of the Croton Water Filtration Plant under construction, looking northwest from the roof of Montefiore Medical Center.

A stream of cash pouring into the Parks Department budget has created a rehabilitation bonanza at Bronx parks, but the mostly welcome windfall is also displacing community sports teams and visitors to parks across the borough.

As an incentive for Bronx officials to agree to the construction of the nearly $3 billion Croton Water Filtration Plant in Van Cortlandt Park by the New York City Department of Environmental Preservation, the agency agreed to give the Parks Department $220 million to $260 million for rehabilitation projects at 63 parks around the borough.

The deal had one major provision: The money had to be spent by 2009. Officials in the borough aren’t completely sure why that deadline exists, but the result is a rush to spend. As the weather warmed up and both children’s and adults’ baseball teams hit the diamonds, they faced a flurry of rehabbing that’s made it hard to play.

Although park renovation sounds like a great thing to many, critics also fault the undertaking for including too little community input, benefiting disadvantaged neighborhoods like Hunts Point, Soundview and Highbridge less than other areas, and even possibly contravening DEP’s own charter.

“It’s inconveniencing a lot of people with the construction they’re doing,” said Anthony Robles, president of the Bronx Panthers youth football team. The Panthers were booted from the Williamsbridge Oval Park, in nearby Norwood, due to a construction project. Robles said he learned of the Oval project “right when they were coming in with the equipment and closing off the fields.”

Having to share their field, members of the Love Gospel Assembly Little League were forced to move due to several rain puddles at home plate. Coach Rory Gilbert said, “We have to coexist – but I have permits for this field.” Referring to two other large groups, including the young football players currently using the field, Gilbert added, “But I’m getting ready to start batting and if they have a problem with that, I really can’t do anything.”

Obtaining a field requires that an applicant fill out a form and pay an $8 per hour fee, with a two hour use minimum, but one Parks Department staffer explained: “The big problem is if we have the availability.”

When completed, Harris Park – where fences went up in April and several teams are now sharing one field – will have four new ball fields, a multipurpose field as well as a new track, playground and an exercise equipment room with showers.

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DEP Seeks Rate Hike As Institutions & Co-Ops Owe Millions

Call it Law and Water.

While the city Department of Environmental Protection turned off the water at nearly 100 single-family homes earlier this month, the agency has left the water running at dozens of Bronx institutions and co-op buildings that owe millions in unpaid bills.

To make matters worse, many of those institutions say they struggle to pay the bills because the DEP is charging them for years of misread meters and other billing mistakes.

The chaotic billing situation exists even as the DEP seeks a 14.5% water bill hike.

City Council opponents of the hike fume it would not be necessary if the DEP collected the $600 million owed by 15% of its customers.

The DEP says it did not have the ability to recover the money until last December, when Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council gave it authority to impose property liens on deadbeats.

In early April, the DEP announced it was shutting the water off at 93 homes across the city that owed between $1,342 and $2,330 - a total that amounted to no more than $220,000.

Meanwhile, according to a list of delinquent payers the DEP released after receiving it via a Freedom of Information Act request, the top 10 debtors in the Bronx owe $6 million - most of them exempt from the lien sale.

They include St. Vincent De Paul, a nursing home which owes $844,465; Leland Gardens, a condo building on Leland Ave. which owes $961,642, and a housing development fund co-op building at 2089 Arthur Ave. which is $870,813 in arrears.

Many of the largest unpaid Bronx bills are from nursing homes that say they are strapped for cash and dependent on government funds, including St. Vincent de Paul, Workmen’s Circle MultiCare Center and the Hebrew Home for the Aged.

Soloman Rutenberg, Workmen’s Circle’s executive director, said the home was hit with a $400,000 bill after the DEP found it had been misreading the home’s meter for several years. Read more..

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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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Hunts Point Activist Group Raises Stink Over Fertilizer Plant

Something stinks in Hunts Point, and this time it’s not the sewage-roasting fertilizer plant but the city panel tasked with policing odors on the peninsula, according to activists who have mounted protests.

The New York Organic Fertilizer Co., which cooks sludge from all over the city into fertilizer pellets, has long been a source of odors and controversy in a part of the South Bronx that is no stranger to environmental problems.

But starting a couple of years ago, community groups like Sustainable South Bronx have managed to forge a remarkably cooperative relationship with NYOFCO.

“We had a process with NYOFCO,” said Miquela Craytor, deputy director of Sustainable South Bronx, “and it was working pretty well.”

Sustainable South Bronx and other local stakeholders had formed a working group that met with NYOFCO officials, toured the facilities and held regular meetings to discuss best practices.

“NYOFCO opened their doors and became very transparent,” said Craytor, who admits she’s unaccustomed to praising the company.

But that all came to an end last December, when the city’s Department of Environmental Protection stepped in.

A clause in the fertilizer company’s contract with DEP stipulates that it cannot share information about its internal workings without DEP’s permission. Late last year, the agency apparently rescinded that permission.

“At the December meeting, DEP said they were folding the NYOFCO process into the Hunts Point Monitoring Committee,” said Craytor.

The HPMC is a panel controlled by DEP that meets monthly to discuss odor issues on the peninsula. Chair Debra Pucci said the reason DEP put the kibosh on NYOFCO’s outside cooperation with community groups was to make sure DEP was kept in the loop. Read more..

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What Stinks? The Mourners Wore Hazmat Suits

 The coffin held the South Bronx. The mourners wore asthma inhalers and face masks. And the litany of complaints regarding the New York Organic Fertilizer Company was all too familiar: “the smell was unholy, the demands righteous.”

Neighbors of the New York Organic Fertilizer Company, on Oak Point Avenue in the Hunts Point section, held a candlelight vigil in front of the plant this afternoon. Sludge from the city sewer system is burned there and made into fertilizer pellets.

“The South Bronx is dying from the odor,” said Wilfredo Febre, a member of the environmental justice committee of Mothers on the Move.

The group’s demands, addressed to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Emily Lloyd, head of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, included imposing higher standards on the company and the Hunts Point Water Pollution Control Plant, and reducing odors in the neighborhood.

“South Bronx residents are basically sick of the years of breathing that nauseating smell of the sewage,” said Mr. Febre, who lives a half-mile from the company and has to close the windows if the wind is from the south or southwest.

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