State Sen. Daniel Squadron (center) was joined by local elected officials and community leaders on the steps of City Hall on Apr. 27 to call on the city to provide continued construction oversight in Lower Manhattan.
BY YANNIC RACK |
With the office dedicated to overseeing construction in Lower Manhattan is set to close at the end of this week, local elected officials blasted the city for leaving the booming neighborhood without a watchdog — and for ignoring their pleas to find a replacement to coordinate Downtown’s breakneck development.
“We are calling on the city to continue the construction coordination that has existed for over a decade in Lower Manhattan,” said state Sen. Daniel Squadron at a press conference in front of City Hall on Wednesday. “Unfortunately, what’s left of it is slated to close at the end of this month. That is, simply put, absolutely unacceptable.”
Squadron and a host of other local elected officials sent a letter to Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris in early March, urging the city to replace the dedicated Department of Transportation office that has kept an eye over the neighborhood’s 90-plus major construction projects since 2013 — and is now slated to close on Apr. 30.
But the pols — including Borough President Gale Brewer, Congressman Jerrold Nadler, Assemblymember Deborah Glick and Councilmember Margaret Chin — said they have yet to receive any response, despite regular follow-up calls to City Hall.
“We’re very disappointed that we have not had a response to our request,” said Glick. “It’s not just that there’s been 15 years of rebuilding, but there’s been a huge boom down here, and it is vitally important that we have coordination. I hope the mayor hears us.”
The Mayor’s Office did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
A DOT spokesperson only confirmed that Apr. 30 would be the office’s last day, but would not comment on the closure, which will likely see the office’s staff reassigned within the agency.
The Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, created in 2004 to coordinate the rebuilding of the neighborhood after 9/11, was jointly funded by the city and state, but it was phased out in 2013.
The city’s Department of Transportation then took on its function through a newly created Lower Manhattan Borough Commissioner’s Office — funded from Albany — but the agency announced late last year that the office had lost its state funding in September and would have to close in early 2016.
Since last September, it has been kept afloat by funding from the city on a month-to-month basis, according to Community Board 1. The local leaders who gathered at City Hall on Apr. 27 want the city to provide regular funding to keep the office open indefinitely to monitor the continued cacophony of construction Downtown.
“We’re asking this administration to step up and fill the gap that Albany left,” said Councilmember Chin. “Our residents deserve a good night’s sleep.”
But locals fear that the future looks dire, since the pace of Lower Manhattan’s development has hardly slowed down — and especially after a deadly construction accident in Tribeca just three months ago, where a crawler crane collapsed on Worth St. and killed an Upper West Sider.
“The impact of an accident in Lower Manhattan can be more dramatic than anywhere else, we saw when that crane collapsed just how serious the situation is in Lower Manhattan,” said Squadron, adding that the mayor had pledged to continue construction oversight in the aftermath of the collapse.
“Afterwards, the city was clear with us that construction coordination down here would continue,” he said. “Lower Manhattan is getting a raw deal — City Hall needs to change that immediately.”
