The "land swap" - the future of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal

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updated 9/17/24

Port Authority and NYC “land swap”

As of 6/11/24, the NYC EDC is in charge of all the waterfront port property from Atlantic Avenue to Red Hook’s Wolcott Street.

The EDC’s official webpage for the planning process is https://edc.nyc/project/brooklyn-marine-terminal. As of 8/20/24, the EDC website has this under the category Waterfront Infrastructure & Transportation not under Building Neighborhoods, which we mention in case you are looking for this sometime when not working off this blogpost.

WXY Studio is the company the EDC hired to do the community engagement work. The EDC and WXY are creating a Task Force and Advisory Groups.

1st public workshop Saturday, 9/28/24, 11am-2pm, at the Miccio Center, 110 West 9th Street, in Red Hook. Please share our flyer below. The EDC is requesting RSVPs here.

On Zoom on Monday, 8/12/24, 6.30pm, the NYC EDC hosted it’s first public info session, a webinar.

  • The Zoom recording is here.

  • Their PowerPoint presentation is here.

  • For info about the EDC’s extensive prior planning efforts for this area, see a PortSide webpage here.

Concerns about their community engagement

They are promising “deep community engagement,” but limited that on the 8/12/24, Zoom webinar:

  1. attendees could not see the other attendees

  2. chat was disabled

  3. questions/comments from attendees did not automatically appear in the QnA so attendees could not get a sense of who other attendees were or see their concerns.

  4. The EDC was cherrypicking what questions/comments to make public, because several people got in touch with us and said that what they said was not addressed. We heard that other groups conferred and had the same experience, what they posted was not shared by the EDC.

  5. EDC and WXY did not say our name PortSide of the name of our ship MARY WHALEN even though multiple people brought us up in the QnA. For those new to the PortSide story, the EDC promised PortSide a permanent home, where we are now, from 2008 into 2011 to create a maritime center with much more space a spot for our flagship MARY A. WHALEN. They never delivered on that, and we got back here in 2015 with just space for the ship. More here.

1-3 allow people to build alliances, know which constituencies were represented, and “feel the room.”

4-5 suppress community voices.

The EDC is are selecting the Task Force members; instead of allowing community people to get involved at will or apply as you do to get on the community board.

Task Force members are being asked to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). How can you represent your community if you can no longer confer with them because you have signed an NDA? How is using NDAs a democratic and transparent process? How is this the “deep community engagement” the EDC is promising?

The EDC has not demonstrated much community engagement with Red Hook since managing Atlantic Basin, a place bigger than the cruise terminal, since 2005. The community needs to be vigilant and proactive.

Update of 9/23/24

Last night John Leyva, a resident of Tiffany Place and community organizer and the voice behind these BMT-inspired social media accounts (Instagram and website), sent us the link to the EDC’s summary of what was posted in the August Zoom webinar QnA. This summary does NOT provide the info many have requested which was literally a copy of what was posted. What the edit does:

  • It hides how many times a topic was brought up, so the popularity of concerns and desires is erased. (FYI, more than one person told us they brought up PortSide or Mary Whalen, but PortSide appears just 1x in this summary.)

  • It hides the exact phrasing of what was submitted. This erases passion, tone, and point of view.

  • This hides the contributor name, which the EDC justifies at the top of the summary saying “Questions are anonymous for privacy reasons.”

    • This claim of privacy feels inauthentic because at in-person meetings there is no “privacy” as in anonymity and the EDC is promising “deep community engagement” which requires transparency, not hiding the participants and input from the at-least 430 people the EDC says attended the Zoom.

    • People were also submitting suggestions not just questions. It is noteworthy that, on the webinar, EDC and WXY only asked for questions, never saying something like “put your suggestions, concerns and questions in the QnA.” Questions-only implies that all answers are with those in control, that the community has no answers. This was reminiscent of the kick-off meeting of the EDC’s Piers 6-12 study where they announced that the community could only ask questions during public meetings about the study, eg no comments. That statement was the trigger for PortSide’s founder and ED Carolina Salguero, working with documentary filmmaker Allison Prete, to create the website Waterfront Matters that recorded and transcribed all Piers 6-12 study public meetings and that provided a means for people to submit comments to the website. The website became a project of Brooklyn Community Board 6 (CB6), working with Craig Hammerman, the CB6 District Manager at the time. The website Waterfront Matters is archived here.

Tools to help the community respond and organize

In early 2024, PortSide was the community partner for a Pratt graduate class about participatory planning. They created a tool kit to help Red Hook. Get it here. Here’s how they describe it: “This toolkit is designed to support Red Hook community members and PortSide leadership in neighborhood organizing and planning processes. Informed by our own research and conversations with Red Hook community members, this toolkit opens with an assessment of the neighborhood’s needs and opportunities. It then offers a series of participatory engagement tools for both PortSide and broader Red Hook to use. These tools aim to generate local conversations about key neighborhood issues and to encourage participatory planning.”

Talk to neighbors, staff and owners at stores, post flyers, share this on social media. Our impression is that Red Hook is very active in private Facebook groups, with some people, retail businesses, and the Red Hook Business Alliance (RHBA) active on Instagram. We hear that the Columbia Waterfront District is active on Next Door? Do you agree? Where is your community active? Let us know by email so we can post or go there.

EDC should fulfill attainable past promises to show they’re sincere about community benefits now

The EDC should fulfill past promises such as fixing the shorepower in the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal and providing sufficient space for a full-sized PortSide NewYork. The exact space the EDC promised PortSide, as a community give-back to Red Hook and an amenity to the working waterfront is no longer available, so see our 2024 proposal for differently shaped “PortSide campus” here. People love PortSide! Read the 47 support letters we got in that many hours when we asked for support for a grant application in early 2024 here.

Speed of the process; use of a NYS process that doesn’t give community and City Council as much influence.

During Mondya’s Zoom, they said that they hope to finish this process by early next year. It is that fast because they are using a NYS General Project Plan (GPP) process NOT the NYC process for rezoning, a Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). As this is becoming NYC property, we think the ULURP rezoning process should be used. ,The community should demand a ULURP process as it allows for more community input. Scroll down for more about ULURP.

Does the Task Force have a written agreement with the EDC?

The newsletter of the Task Force Chair Congressman Dan Goldman of Friday 8/16/2024 said “That means ensuring that the community is in the driver’s seat of this planning process, from conception to execution.” Is there an MOU that guarantees such community power? We sent them an email on June 4, 2024 and have not received an answer. Former Councilman Carlos Menchaca established and MOU with the EDC (see here) as part of redeveloping the SBMT facility that is now slated to become an offshore wind facility.

5/24/24 Congressmember Dan Goldman, Council Member Aviles, and Senator Gounardes jointly released an Op-Ed about the land swap here. Note that is says that the Task Force that they are heading will have “ultimate approval authority.”  We have sent questions to Goldman’s office about how this will work. More as we know it.

5/14/24 Our area is about to be replanned! There was a morning press event in the Red Hook Container Terminal with the Mayor, Governor, President/CEO of the NYC EDC, Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, and Port Authority leaders. We were there. The City will take over Port Authority property in Brooklyn, swapping it for City property on Staten Island at the Howland Hook containerport, and the City will provide up to $2 billion in projected tax revenue from commercial buildings to support replacement of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown as per NYS press release here. The NYC EDC is announced as new manager/planner of this stretch of Brooklyn waterfront running south from Brooklyn Bridge Park, from Pier 7 at Atlantic Avenue through Atlantic Basin almost to Valentino Park, to Wolcott Street in Red Hook.

What’s the plan?

This is part of a City (Mayor and EDC) plan branded ‘Harbor of the Future.” There was a promise to modernize the containerport with $95MM for upgrading piers 7,8, and 10, adding an electrified gantry crane, investing NYS funds in a new cold storage warehouse so the imported produce is trucked around less, adding micromobility services (not defined as to what and how) and addressing last mile traffic by using the marine highway. (See our blogpost on that here.) FYI, the Port Authority condemned Piers 9A and 9B last September (trapping a vintage engine of ours out there), which is why the #9 is missing in the pier numbering sequence above. Non-port uses were discussed a lot with talk of “creating a vibrant, new, mixed-use neighborhood.”

How?

The planning process is not fully clear yet. A Task Force, headed by Congressman Dan Goldman was announced as the means of taking community input. What’s not clear is the timeline for the property changing hands from the State to the City, which effects whether or not the City ULURP process is used. ULURP plans are binding; Task Force discussions are not. ULURP allows for more community input. The State has a means to do the planning called a General Project Plan (GPP). If the master plan is done via a GPP, as they were with Atlantic Yards, there is no ULURP. If the new Master Plan is done while it is City property, we think a ULURP process is triggered.

Who? Political Jurisdictions

These are complicated! One NYS Assemblymember Charles Falls has the piers, and two others, Marcela Mitaynes and Jo Anne Simon have the land! Links below are to district maps.

Who? Residents and businesses

The federal census collects and shares detailed information on residents (age, income, ethnicity, race, etc.) and housing (rented, owned, owner-occupied, etc.) and business types. See the NYC Department of City Planning website here.

Councilmember Alexa Aviles (District/D 38) represents the Red Hook portion of the “land swap” area. The Columbia Waterfront has Shahana Hanif D39 as their Councilmember. During the last six months of 2023, Alexa’s office conducted a D38 land review process conferring with stakeholders. PortSide was one of the stakeholder groups. The result of that process is here and has a data snapshot of D38 (but remember that all of D38 is way bigger than Red Hook) and explanations of AMI (Area Median Income). The page is a good crash course or starting point to learn about demographics.

Historic resources, archeological assessment of the site as of 2006

An assessment (under CEQR # 06SBS009K Brooklyn) was done in 2006 as part of the EDC’s prior Piers 7-12 study. We have downloaded the report in case that link goes dead. Get it here.

“City Environmental Quality Review, or CEQR, is the process by which agencies of the City of New York review proposed discretionary actions to identify the effects those actions may have on the environment. More here. The NYS equivalent, the State Environmental Quality Review Act is SEQRA.

Media coverage right after the press conference

Most media reporting regurgitated the press event and press release with little or no analysis. The exceptions or media where we appear are listed below. Get the full packet (as of 5/16/24) of official statements, media reports and Nadler criticism here.

5/24/24 Congressmember Dan Goldman, Council Member Aviles, and Senator Gounardes jointly released an Op-Ed about the land swap here. Note that is says that the Task Force that they are heading will have “ultimate approval authority.”  We have sent questions to Goldman’s office about how this will work. More as we know it.