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Park Group Drops Suit Against Plant

By JORDAN MOSS

The Friends of Van Cortlandt Park has decided not to appeal a state Supreme Court judge’s Dec. 3 ruling dismissing their lawsuit, which argued that the city failed to rezone the park for industrial use.

The move eliminates one of the last remaining hurdles for the city, which is already well into site preparation and has just begun blasting into bedrock.

“I think at this point, it’s really unlikely that we’re going to prevail, given the fact that the courts haven’t acted in our favor so far,” said Jane Sokolow, who heads the Friends’ board of directors, in explaining the group’s decision.

Ora Holloway, a Norwood resident and Friends board member, agreed, and added that even if the courts made the city jump through additional hoops involved in rezoning the park, it was unlikely to keep the plant out of Van Cortlandt.

“The zoning challenge is not likely to stop the construction,” Holloway said.

The organization’s board of directors informed Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe of their decision. Benepe offered to arrange a meeting with DEP Commis-sioner Emily Lloyd to address the group’s concerns, according to Sokolow.

But she said they still needed to closely monitor the city’s work to make sure that “whatever DEP does, they do correctly and according to law.”

Holloway said it was now imperative for her and her neighbors to keep a close eye on the project. “We will try to get this community involved in helping to monitor what is going on with the construction,” she said. “Especially air quality, since so many people in the community are asthmatics. We will try to be as vigilant as we possibly can.”

The Friends, an advocacy organization that sponsors many programs in the park, successfully beat back city efforts to build the plant in the park in 2001 when the state’s highest court ruled that the city could not build in the park without the approval of the state legislature.

But in 2003, the borough’s state Assembly delegation accepted a Bloomberg administration promise of over $243 million in water bond money, to be used for improvements to parkland throughout the borough, in return for letting the city build in the park. Of that money, $43 million is earmarked for improvements to Van Cortlandt, including the southeast corner in Norwood. Aside from Jeffrey Dinowitz, a staunch opponent of the plant whose district includes the park, the rest of the borough’s Assembly delegation went along with the deal.

Meanwhile, three other suits are pending. Supreme Court Justice Marguerite Grays has been considering since January a suit by a group of Norwood residents calling themselves Bronx Environmental Health and Justice. That suit charges that the city’s environmental study unfairly minimized the projected impact of the plant construction on the densely populated and largely minority community of Norwood in order to avoid using an industrial, city-owned site in Westchester County.

Justice Grays initially issued a temporary restraining order halting the city’s work, but an appellate court lifted that order.

Additional suits by the Westchester town of Eastchester, which would have to build its own filtration plant if the Croton facility is built downstream in the Bronx, and the Croton Watershed Clean Water Coalition are still pending. Lawyers for all three of the groups are frustrated that the cases are proceeding so slowly.

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