East Side Storm Protection Plan Gets Greenlight From City Council

EAST VILLAGE, NY — City Council approved a $1.45 billion resiliency project to erect flood walls and entirely rebuild East River Park in a vote that arrives more than seven years after Superstorm Sandy.

The plan, which would bury and rebuild the East River Park eight feet higher and erect flood walls north and south of it, will invest $1.45 billion of storm protection infrastructure into the Lower East Side, East Village and Stuyvesant Town.

"For the last seven years, I've watched my community's slow and painful recovery from the physical and emotional damage Superstorm Sandy has wreaked on all of us," Council Member Carlina Rivera said Thursday.

City Council approved the project, with one abstention, aimed to prevent devastating storm surges like that of Sandy in 2012 as well as sea level rise.

"We are lucky that we haven't seen a storm as bad as Sandy since, but it's inevitable," Rivera said. "We cannot let our good fortune distract us from moving forward as we face more intense storms, flooding and destruction."

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who toured the park this fall, said in a statement, "With the rising prevalence of coastal storms in the era of climate change, the passage of the East Side Coastal Resiliency project takes a critical step forward in protecting 110,000 New Yorkers from dangers this city knows all too well."

But the resiliency infrastructure — for which Manhattan has received some of the most extensive efforts compared to the outer boroughs — has drawn months of protests, outrage and deep mistrust of the de Blasio administration, which overhauled a previous design last fall.

As the project snaked through public review this summer, community givebacks and mitigations were formally announced Tuesday by Rivera and Council Members Margaret Chin and Keith Powers.

But the mitigations weren't enough to appease the project's most vocal critics, who plan to sue.

"We talked (with Rivera) about ... the phasing plan and how flawed it is and we talked about the interim flood protection that the city has promised to look (at)," said Pat Arnow, East River Park ACTION group founder. "We're pressing her on those things even while we're fighting the whole plan and trying to get a better plan."

The group's protesters were ejected from the chambers after yelling out "vote no" repeatedly during Rivera's remarks, making last ditch calls to halt the project.

West Village district leader and lawyer behind the anti-busway lawsuit Arthur Schwartz said he plans to file a lawsuit in the coming weeks, arguing it must get approval from state lawmakers through "park alienation."

"The state legislature could vote no — they could vote that there are alternatives that could be utilized that wouldn't result in taking the park away from people in the community," Schwartz said.

"These fights are always about alternatives. Were there alternatives that create less of a negative impact on the community? All of these people are saying that there are."

City officials have contended the revised plan will protect residents and the park itself and avoid noisy pile driving along the FDR Drive, where flood walls were previously planned.

As a part of mitigations for the extensive park rebuild, the administration plans to phase construction over five years — avoiding a previous timeline that would shutter the entirety of the park during construction. Local politicians Rivera and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer commissioned an independent review, which despite critics' pointing out its shortcomings, led to promised funds for a community advisory board and more research for interim flood protections. Plans for bike lanes in Alphabet City are also being analyzed.

"From the beginning of this process, I was determined to make sure my neighbors would be able to access adequate open space resources during closure of East River Park," district leader Daisy Paez, who was among outraged locals when the new plan was first announced last year, said in a statement.

With the laundry list of commitments, she said, "it's time we get to work protecting our community from climate change.