Neighborhood Advocates See Push For Power Blocked

When any one of the 700,000 people who live in east and central parts of The Bronx flush their toilets, the product moves to the Hunts Point sewage plant at the East River's edge. It's not the only burden Hunts Point's roughly 11,000 residents bear for their fellow New Yorkers. Down the street from the sewage plant, the Vernon C. Bain Center—a floating jail—is berthed. Within a half-mile are seven waste transfer facilities. And there is always the constant rumble of 18-wheelers on their journeys to and from the massive Hunts Point Cooperative Market.

Two decades ago, New York City set out to protect neighborhoods like Hunts Point from being overburdened by facilities that serve the rest of the city. But advocates say those "fair share" provisions added to the city charter in 1989 did not go far enough. This year, they pressed the Charter Revision Commission to strengthen fair share and bulk up another vital tool, the community planning mechanism known as "197-a."

Last Wednesday, the advocates—including environmental justice groups, community boards and urban planners—won a partial victory. The charter commission overruled its staff and agreed to put on the November ballot a question about expanding the scope of what city agencies are required to consider when weighing each neighborhood's fair share.

"This is a good first step," said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYCEJA). "If they had adopted more of our recommendations, it would have been helpful. We're still pushing."

Spreading the burden

The current city charter calls for the city to locate facilities in a way that furthers "the fair distribution among community of the burdens and benefits associated with city facilities." The city is supposed to aim for this fair distribution through a combination of public notification (publishing all its plans for facilities in the Annual Statement of Needs, so that community boards can weigh in on location decisions that affect them) and analysis by city agencies.

In the early 1990s, the Department of City Planning produced rules for how agencies would implement the fair share rules. An agency planning a waste management facility, for instance, is supposed to "take into consideration the number and proximity of existing city and non-city facilities, situated within approximately a one-half mile radius of the proposed site, which have similar environmental impacts.”

Critics of the current system say vague language in the charter and flaws in the City Planning rules have made fair share less potent than they were meant to be.

For one thing, many city projects never make it onto the Annual Statement of Needs. Critics of the fair share system couldn't name recent examples of the city bypassing the annual statement for a facility with an environmental impact. But the city has pursued other kinds of facilities without giving communities an early heads up, even in cases where the projects' timing or scope seemed well-suited to full notification, like the movement of Correction headquarters from Manhattan to Queens and the location of the city's counterterrorism headquarters in a building on Broadway.