Downtowners fear that closing the city office dedicated to coordinating construction projects across Lower Manhattan will make local quality of life worse.
BY YANNIC RACK
The city is shutting down the dedicated office tasked with coordinating construction projects in Lower Manhattan, despite repeated calls from local officials to keep the bureau running, and just two months after a deadly crane collapse shook the community.
At its monthly meeting with Community Board 1 and representatives of local elected officials last week, officials from the Department of Transportation’s Lower Manhattan Borough Commissioner’s Office announced that it would close at the end of the month.
“They announced that it would be the last meeting they would be convening on construction projects in Lower Manhattan,” said Michael Levine, CB1’s consulting planner.
Local leaders, who have long warned against the move, said the closure would lead to even more construction chaos in an area where more than 90 major construction projects are currently ongoing, with several new ones expected to commence this year.
“Now there’ll be an even larger void of information,” said CB1 chairwoman Catherine McVay Hughes. “And construction is not slowing down.”
Since its creation, reps from the Downtown commissioner’s office have regularly met with local stakeholders and also gave updates on construction projects at community board meetings. Levine said that the community board, along with Squadron and Chin, would make a special request to the department’s Manhattan Borough Commissioner, Margaret Forgione — who is set to assume the duties of the Lower Manhattan commissioner — asking her “to find a way to assign at least one staff member to continue to conduct these meetings once a month.”
Levine said he was told the program had to be eliminated because the funding for the Downtown office — which was provided by the state — dried up.
A DOT spokesperson only confirmed that April 30 would be the office’s last day, but would not comment on the closure or any other questions.
The DOT’s Downtown office has fulfilled the long-standing task of coordinating the area’s multitude of new developments, infrastructure projects and residential conversions since its predecessor — the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, which was set up to coordinate reconstruction after 9/11 — was closed in 2013.
And even though the building boom south of Canal St. has not slowed down, the city announced last December that the DOT’s dedicated Downtown office would close early this year.
Even before the February crane crash on Worth St., where a 565-foot crawler crane toppled over and crushed a man, the community board and local elected officials appealed to the city to either keep the DOT office open or provide another way to coordinate Downtown construction projects and keep locals informed.
In the aftermath of the fatal accident, the mayor did appoint a task force to improve crane safety — but City Hall has yet to respond to calls for a construction liaison that would work to make sure residents don’t bear the burden of the city’s construction boom.
“It’s critical that the city doesn’t let construction coordination in Lower Manhattan disappear,” said state Sen. Daniel Squadron, who has appealed to the administration to create a position to continue cross-agency oversight on major infrastructure and building projects in the dense and crowded area.
“We are concerned that with the impending closure of the Department of Transportation’s Lower Manhattan Borough Commissioner’s Office, there will be no entity coordinating the large number of current and pending projects in the area,” he wrote in a letter to Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris last month, along with Congressman Jerrold Nadler, Borough President Gale Brewer and Councilmember Margaret Chin. “We request that your office assign the role of coordinating construction efforts in Lower Manhattan and engage the community on construction-related issues.”
Hughes said the regular meetings with the Lower Manhattan Borough Commissioner’s Office were vital to understanding all that’s going on in a community that is continuing to see an influx of residents and the building projects they bring with them — and that there is no substitute for having a single point person who can coordinate with city agencies.
“This is the information we need. It’s really important that there’s someone who interacts with the public,” she said. “Getting an email is not the same as getting everyone in one room at the same time.”
Lower Manhattan has about 90 major construction underway, and more are on tap.
