Jail Plan Foes Demand Planning Commissioner's Recusal From Vote

NEW YORK — Opponents of a proposal to replace Rikers Island with new jails demanded this week that a member of the City Planning Commission recuse himself from a key vote on the plans.

Advocates fighting a new lockup in The Bronx say Planning Commissioner David Burney has a conflict of interest that should bar him from voting when his panel decides the fate of Mayor Bill de Blasio's plans for a new jail in each borough but Staten Island.

They cited Burney's work with the Justice Implementation Task Force, a group the mayor established to help shepherd along the plans to close Rikers. Patch first reported on Burney's two roles when he was appointed to the planning commission in March.

"How can an architect of the City’s controversial jail plan now be trusted to objectively vote on that same plan?" said Arline Parks, the CEO of the Diego Beekman Mutual Housing Association, a nonprofit housing corporation that has proposed a residential development for the Bronx jail site.

"This is just more evidence that the de Blasio administration’s plan to burden a low-income community of color with a jail has been rigged from the beginning," Parks added in a statement Monday.

Burney has not attended a Justice Implementation Task Force meeting since last year and does not plan to do any work with the group going forward, said a spokesperson for the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, which is spearheading the jail plans.

The city's Law Department maintained its stance that there is no reason for Burney to recuse himself from the planning commission vote.

"This is old news," a Law Department spokesperson said in a statement Thursday. "Nothing has changed with respect to the Borough-Based Jails application or Commissioner Burney’s involvement."

Burney did not return phone calls seeking comment this week.

Burney is the newest member of the planning commission, which must decide whether to approve, modify or reject the de Blasio administration's plans for the new jails as part of the city's land-use review process. The panel held a hearing on the controversial proposal last week.

Burney, an architect and Pratt Institute associate professor, worked on the task force's Working Group on Design. He previously said he dealt largely with how the jails should look and had attended 12 to 15 meetings, mostly over the prior year.

"I was mostly involved with the design of jails and how do we design humane jails that create a normative environment that help the inmates and deal with mental health issues and so on," Burney said in March.

But jail opponents say Burney's involvement in developing the project taints the position he will take on them as a member of the planning commission.

"You cannot objectively evaluate a project you were involved in planning," Adam Stein, an attorney representing a group of Mott Haven residents who filed a lawsuit over the project last month, said in a statement. "Commissioner Burney must recuse himself from this vote if the City wishes to pursue a fair process."

The de Blasio administration wants to replace the notoriously violent Rikers Island complex with brand-new jails by 2026. City officials say the new lockups will be safer and more efficient, as they will house detainees closer to courthouses and give them better access to services.

But the plans have drawn strong opposition from four community boards, two borough presidents and a group of activists opposed to the construction of any new jail.

Diego Beekman in 2018 proposed a 533-unit, mixed-use affordable housing development for the NYPD tow pound site where the city now wants to build a jail. Residents of a Diego Beekman complex across the street sued over the plans in June, arguing the site deserves its own public review process, according to Curbed.