EDC issues in Red Hook’s Atlantic Basin, summer 2023

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For the TLDR folks:

The NYC EDC promised Red Hook a lot over the years starting in 2005. The EDC did not fulfill those promises to Red Hook about how their management of Atlantic Basin would benefit the community. Spring 2023, Councilmember Alexa Avilés intervened to fix the latest batch of EDC problems: she ran months of weekly Zooms with the EDC and community members over the summer; she co-authored a City Council bill Intro 1050 that would oblige the EDC to fulfill some of those promises. In response, in September 2023, the EDC put out a press release with yet more promises.  Many people are concerned about the EDC’s RFP for Atlantic Basin that they released witthout notifying local people as it looks to be planning a last mile facility, but one using the waterways, and many last mile facilities have been built in Red Hook during the pandemic, with more on the way.

June 6, the EDC shut down PortSide programs while we were trying to get the EDC to renew our berth permit (a contract for our ship MARY WHALEN to be here). We get Councilmember Avilés involved in this too; but the EDC keeps moving the goal posts and the process drags on until October 6, so we lose the whole summer program season.

Our nonprofit PortSide has monitored the EDC’s performance in Atlantic Basin for years (see webpage here) and is one of the victims of EDC unfulfilled promises; so on behalf of all, in late 2022 we launched a campaign to reform the EDC called #rethinkEDC. The EDC is the New York City Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit, quasi-governmental organization that does a huge amount of work for NYC City government. 

In detail

The Brooklyn Cruise Terminal (BCT) in Red Hook is located inside the “Atlantic Basin” facility owned by the Port Authority and managed by the NYC EDC.  PortSide is in here on Pier 11 aboard the ship MARY A. WHALEN. In 2023, use of BCT on Pier 12 soared to unprecedented levels with many more ships and weekly visits by the biggest ship we’ve ever had here, the 5th largest cruise ship in the world MSC Meraviglia as of April 20, 2023. The max passenger count plus crew count of that ship at 6,636 is about 2/3 of the population of Red Hook.  The western side of the peninsula of Red Hook was buried in traffic, causing the B61 bus to be re-routed and an ambulance to drive down the Van Brunt Street sidewalk. Businesses couldn’t get staff and customers in. The gridlock lasted for hours.

How much traffic?  What we now know is that standard volume for the MSC ship Meraviglia is 400 to 600 vehicles inbound per hour from 7am until 11:15am, tapering down to 200 vehicles when it ends at noon, according to measurements on 6/4 and 6/11. Red Hook was already agitated about traffic due to number of last mile facilities built here during the pandemic.

Full traffic report here.

* We have two air quality monitors on our MARY WHALEN’s wheelhouse: see Purple air map and our Davis AQI.

Many Red Hook people complained to Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Councilmember Alexa Avilés. Those elected officials wrote a joint letter to the EDC.  Alexa sent the EDC another letter on 8/7/23 about shorepower and other cruise EJ issues.

To tackle this, Avilés set up a weekly Zoom call with the EDC, the new Red Hook Business Alliance (we’re members and were on these Zooms), and residents Kiki Rakowsky and Matias Kalwill. These weekly Zooms ran throughout the summer and focused on improving the traffic situation, though other issues lurked in the background:

  • the cruise terminal had never delivered economic benefits to Red Hook.

  • the EDC had not fixed the shorepower, though they promised to in 2019 (after years of dodging questions) and getting $750,000 from Borough Hall in April, 2021. The air pollution* is a burden on this EJ neighborhood and does not help fight climate change.

  • the EDC had not delivered the home they promised to us PortSide on round one (2008 into 2011) or just the building space after the 2018 business plan they made us do. Then, on June 6, 2023 they cancelled our summer programs during an unfair process to renew our berth permit (a contract for our flagship MARY WHALEN to be here). The berth permit negotiations, with CM Alexa Aviles’ office assisting, were not concluded until 10/6/23, so we were prevented from having 2023 summer programs. This may cost PortSide some $30,000 in grant money, deprived us of the opportunity for the many fundraising/friendraising concerts we planned, reduced the number of volunteers we recruited since people often learn about us and volunteer via events; AND deprived those that we serve of our programs.

  • The EDC released an RFP for Atlantic Basin Anchor subtenant that looked like a plan for another last mile facility – NOT a popular idea in Red Hook - though one using the waterways - and would displace the MARY WHALEN, making PortSide homeless.

During the first of the weekly Zooms with the EDC, Susan Povich, head of the Red Hook Business Alliance and owner of the Red Hook Lobster Pound asked if the EDC had made plans to deal with the huge surge in traffic. The answer was ‘no” and indicative of the extractive way the EDC has run this entire facility (taking the revenue and not givnig back nor mitigating negative effects).

This compounded the nothing the EDC had done over the years to make the cruise terminal easy to find and the Atlantic Basin facility easy to navigate (despite many PortSide suggestions).  There was a lack of signage inside and out. They had not communicated directions to all the wayfinding apps the way the Port Authority does for the airports, so hundreds of drivers were misled by uninformed apps. Part of the problem is that the MSC passengers are coming in individual cars, not in coach buses like many of Cunard’s QM2 passengers (a ship that carries half the number of passengers), so the MSC Meraviglia meant many more vehicles and non-professional drivers who might know how to get here.

Chaos ensued, some of it dangerous since pedestrians were not well separated inside Atlantic Basin from moving and parked cars and huge trucks; and the corner of Pioneer Street and Conover was a mess with bikes coming off the Greenway to encounter a gridlock of double-parked cars and clumps of cruise passengers with rolling luggage. The pedestrian gate at that corner is not wide enough to handle more that one person at a time, so pedestrian clustering and clogging was intense. 

The vehicular entrance to Atlantic Basin was gridlocked, so passenger pick-up and drop-off began occurring blocks away from BCT, congesting local streets further.   

Local users of the Red Hook/Atlantic Basin ferry stop found the ferry system overwhelmed and hard to use. No extra boats were added on cruise ship days.  

None of this worked well for anyone.

Avilés and/or her Chief of Staff Ed Cerna ran weekly Zooms, and Red Hook voices shared the latest documentation of problems and offered many solutions.  Community people basically tackled a long list of operational challenges that the EDC should know to do and should have done.  Here are some early suggestions from PortSide. The EDC was very responsive, and hired traffic engineers who also made suggestions, and things improved each week.

Here are some immediate changes during cruise days:

  • The interior roadway of Atlantic Basin was changed to 3 lanes, 2 in and 1 out.

  • The exit for BCT on MSC days became Wolcott Street to get vehicles out faster.

  • People were paid to direct exiting vehicles as to the best way out of Red Hook.

  • The MSC ship sailed later to allow for more time for boarding.

  • The wayfinding apps were all notified of how to get to and into Atlantic Basin. NYPD were stationed at several intersections.

  • Crossing guards were added to the corner of Pioneer and Conover and the crosswalk just inisde Atlantic Basin by that corner.

  • The block of Conover south of that corner had the bikepath protected by road cones so that cars could not use it as a loading/unloading zone.

  • By October, the EDC added ferries on days when cruise ship passengers were visiting NYC, and more.

During the last Zoom of the summer on 8/11/23, the traffic engineers hired by the EDC presented this report (the source of the traffic study slides on this page). The understanding was that the Zoom working group would take a 2-week break and resume to discuss economic development, eg economic benefits for Red Hook – something the EDC had totally failed to deliver to Red Hook in their management of Atlantic Basin, and had not shown any signs of attempting.

Alexa Avilés team did a great job ensuring progress, but a Councilmember should not have to spend this kind of time on operations. This is the kind of work a good economic development agency would do on their own.

Intro 1050

During the first month of weekly EDC Zoom meetings, Avilés had also been partnering with the Councilmember Erik Bottcher, who has the larger Manhattan cruise terminal in his district, to co-author City Council bill Intro 1050, released May 25, 2023, which would oblige the EDC to do what it has not done on its own. The bill mandates that the EDC supply shorepower at both terminals, only allow ships that use shorepower to visit NYC, and create traffic management plans.  

Avilés and Bottcher held a press conference about Intro 1050 on Red Hook’s Pioneer Street on September 18 with a cruise ship in the background. 

Tweets about the press conference 

Reporting about the press conference 

The surprising EDC response

Ten days after the press conference about Intro 1050, on September 28, 2023, the EDC surprised everyone by putting out a press release with promises about shorepower use, traffic plans, and community benefits. The relevant Councilmembers Bottcher and Avilés were not quoted (a deviation from protocol), nor were any Red Hook voices. The EDC has a history of NOT fulfilling promises in Red Hook, so having the EDC promise more things has not been reassuring.

Additionally, the terms in the EDC proposal leave much to be desired. Here are some observations:

  • The EDC proposed their own (slow) schedule for installing shorepower, did not separate the BCT shorepower timeline from Manhattan (fix ours already, Manhattan doesn’t have any yet, so why should Red Hook have to wait until Manhattan’s is installed?). 

  • The EDC is offering to create a community benefit fund via a head tax on cruise passengers, but that is not fair to Red Hook. This neighborhood gets no significant economic benefit from the cruise ships whereas Manhattan does, and the EDC makes money here via more than the cruise terminal. In short, Red Hook deserves a share from ALL that the EDC makes in Atlantic Basin and should get a higher percentage than Manhattan since Red Hook gets almost no indirect economic benefits from the cruise terminal but Manhattan gets lots.

  • Also, the EDC proposes to manage the community benefit fund, but why would Red Hook trust the EDC to run the community benefit fund they are proposing? They’ve ignored the community for years.

  • The EDC should fulfill some old promises, one being space for a fully-realized PortSide NewYork, NOT displacing us via an RFP.

EDC backtracking

At some point in the year, the EDC began to backtrack on one improvement, their new BCT schedule webpage. In 2023, they FINALLY separated Brooklyn and Manhattan cruise shedules onto separate webpages (something PortSide suggested for years) and grew it to include all we had suggested. The backtracking shows how the EDC evades accountability and transparency. The colums on the right side of the page have changed. At the point we think they were the best, they showed if a ship was shorepower compatible and if it had connected to shorepower.

  • It’s no longer possible to tell if a ship connected. As of November 5, 2023, and for some time now, the two right columns say if the ship is shorepower compatible and if it is BCT shorepower compatible; there’s no info about actual connection.

  • At some point, the EDC also began deleting the list of ships that had already been here this year, so it’s not possible to see at a glance how often cruise ships are impacting Red Hook in terms of ship exhaust or vehicle traffic.

Similarly, the EDC’s new language about the Brooklyn shorepower evades accountability. This year the EDC began saying “we are proud of the Brooklyn shorepower installation for being the first on the east coast.” That positioning is slippery PR and severely disrespectful to the EJ community of Red Hook that fought to have the shorepower installed and then suffered years of EDC evasion about why it isn’t working and years of EDC delays fixing it.

For a detailed history of the BCT shorepower saga, visit Adam Armstrong’s blog (active into 2018) and very active Twitter feed.

EDC machinations with PortSide’s 2023 berth permit

PortSide’s experience renewing our berth permit in 2023 reveals the kind of EDC machinations that are chronic.

Starting Spring 2022, the EDC would deny PortSide requests saying “it violates our lease with the Port Authority.” We’d check with the Port Authority; and in every case, the EDC statement was false. For example, no, the EDC is not prevented from renting us the size building space for the term we requested in our 2018 business plan.

After checking with the Port Authority several times about such EDC claims, the Port Authority told us to FOIL the lease (submit a Freedom of Information Law request, the official way to get info from governmental organizations). We did that immediately in October 2022. 

During our berth permit negotiations, in April 2023, the EDC claimed another PortSide request violated their lease, our desire to again have a shipkeeper (overnight presence on the ship). Unfortunately, the Port Authority didn’t respond for almost two months, so the EDC said our summer programs were cancelled since we hadn’t signed the berth permit while were waiting to hear from the Port Authority. The Port Authority responded promptly to the cancellation of PortSide’s summer programs by sending their lease with the EDC (and no, shipkeepers are NOT prohibited) and by sending a Port Authority shipkeeper policy (which the EDC ultimately ignored).

We got our Councilmember Alexa Avilés involved and asked for her to run Zoom meetings with the EDC as she had done for the cruise traffic issues above. We are certain that her presence and pressure helped, but the EDC kept up the machinations. Next, the EDC said we needed more insurance. We got more. Then, they said we needed even more insurance, and we got more. 

Then, the EDC claimed our insurance didn’t cover liquor use; but we clarified that it did. This dragged on until Friday 10/6/23, so we lost a whole season of summer programs, which may cost us grant money.

In the end, the EDC ended up deleting the reference to the new Port Authority shipkeeper policy we put in our draft of the berth permit, so the position of their landlord was only relevant when the EDC was misrepresenting it to deny PortSide something. If the Port Authority position didn’t support the EDC’s position, then the EDC ignored it.

As we say, time to #rethinkEDC for a better PortSide, a better Red Hook, and a better NYC.