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Dinowitz Calls for Investigation of Filter Plant Costs

By ALEX KRATZ

Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, usually an outspoken critic of the water filtration plant being built in Van Cortlandt Park, sat mostly silent during a meeting two weeks ago of the Croton Facility Monitoring Committee, which oversees the filter plant project.

Dinowitz, who has opposed the project from the beginning (unlike other Bronx politicians such as Bronx Democratic boss Jose Rivera), may have been playing possum because this Friday he is set to unleash a formal complaint to the city, calling for a complete investigation into the project, which is experiencing “astronomical cost overruns.”

“Any reasonable analysis puts the cost to taxpayers approaching $3 billion!” Dinowitz writes in letters obtained by the Norwood News to both the city’s Department of Investigation (DOI) and Conflict of Interest Board.

An initial estimate from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in 2004 said the plant would cost about $1.3 billion total. Now, with a new general contractor in place to build the structure after the first contractor bowed out in April (three months after they were supposed to start construction), the DEP is saying the project will cost around $2.2 billion. But that doesn’t include the $240 million for park renovations or the design and management costs or money for job training and community outreach programs. The plant was supposed to be completed by 2011, but that date has been pushed back to sometime in 2012.

At the monitoring committee meeting, the DEP announced that the DOI had been overseeing the project since last summer, but did not say what specifically they had been, or would be, looking at.

Dinowitz said that’s a good start, but he wants the DOI to go back to the very beginning to investigate the grossly underestimated cost estimates (which he says may have been fudged to convince legislators to approve the park site) and the actions of former DEP Commissioner Chris Ward who resigned the day after the City Council approved the site location and exactly one year later took a job as head of the General Contractors Association (the most prominent of several labor unions that pushed for the park site).

There is also the issue of why the city chose to use what Dinowitz calls an “antiquated chemical filtration process” over a less expensive and less bulky process called membrane filtration, which Dinowitz says is an “industry-standard.”

“While at this time I am not making any specific allegations of corruption, certainly the possibility must be considered given the extraordinary difference between what was projected and what is real,” Dinowitz writes.

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