‘Industry’ slowdown
Pol: Delay Sunset Park City’s rezoning by
six months or I’ll vote it down in Council
13 meeting of local Community
Board 7.
The pol delivered his ultimatum
days after Industry
City leaders agreed to delay the
rezoning , and weeks after they
fi rst submitted the request to
the Department of City Planning
in February.
That decision to delay came
after Menchaca and CB7 Chairman
Cesar Zuniga fi red off a
missive to Industry City Chief
Executive Offi cer Andrew Kimball,
urging him to hold off on
initiating the public review for
the billion-dollar plan, which if
approved would over the next
decade add more than 25 football
fi elds’ worth of space — including
a pair of hotels with
more than 400 rooms — to the 30
acres the site already occupies
between 30th and 36th streets
and Second and Third avenues.
The local leaders’ letter alleged
that the board is not yet
ready to offi cially weigh in on
the scheme — which, per the
Ulurp process, requires the
panel to hold a public meeting
about the proposal, vote on it,
and then submit a purely advisory
written recommendation
BY JULIANNE MCSHANE
Sunset Park’s councilman will
vote down Industry City bigwigs’
requested rezoning of
the commercial site if the complex’s
owners do not delay the
scheme’s public-review process
by six months, he said.
Councilman Carlos
Menchaca — who holds an outsize
infl uence on the rezoning
because the waterfront campus
sits in his district — said Industry
City bigwigs still need
to prove the proposed upzoning
would actually benefi t the community,
before their request
can begin its lengthy journey
through the city’s Uniform
Land Use Review Procedure.
“I’m not sure that a rezoning
is at all necessary right
now, and that the burden of
proof is not on us as a community
— the burden of proof
is on the private developer to
make the case for this rezoning,”
Menchaca said at a March
COURIER L 14 IFE, MARCH 22–28, 2019 M BR B G
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to the City Planning Commission
within 60 days of the
agency’s certifi cation of the rezoning
application — because
its members are in the midst
of addressing “concerns about
displacement and gentrifi cation,”
matters that would prevent
them from voting on the
rezoning within the required
time frame.
Two days after Menchaca
and Zuniga sent their letter
to Kimball on March 6, Rep.
Nydia Velazquez (D–Sunset
Park), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (DRed
Hook), and state Sen. Zellnor
Myrie (D–Crown Heights),
sent their own missive to Department
of City Planning Director
Marisa Lago on March
8, which echoed the demands of
the councilman and CB7 leader.
And later that day, Kimball and
his fellow executives agreed to
postpone the process, but did
not say for how long.
Menchaca and CB7 leaders
will use the six-month delay the
pol demanded to hold fi ve town
halls on the proposal, during
which they intend to:
• Review the fi ndings from
last summer’s series of boardsponsored
town halls on waterfront
development.
• Share the results of inprogress
“community-based
needs assessments” being conducted
by academics from NYU
Langone Hospital-Brooklyn,
Wagner College, and Hunter
College, who are respectively
studying health indicators, affordable
housing, and education
and employment indicators
in the community.
• Study the city’s rezoning
process in-depth with two urban
planning experts.
• Evaluate the lessons
learned from other ongoing rezoning
efforts in Bushwick and
Gowanus .
• Review Menchaca’s own
fi ndings from the rezoning process.
The local leaders hope to
conduct all fi ve town halls by
the end of the summer, and
then begin a 10-week review period
that would include three
full-board meetings of CB7, and
three more public hearings, before
the civic gurus ultimately
vote on the rezoning request in
November.
Industry City reps did not
reply to inquiries about how
long they plan to wait until
beginning the rezoning’s
public-review period, or when
they planned to communicate
their timeline to the community
board and local pols. But a
spokeswoman for the complex
said that its heads would work
with Menchaca to fi gure out
how best to move forward in a
way that would benefi t locals.
PLEASE HOLD: Industry City Chief
Executive Offi cer Andrew Kimball
must provide answers about how
the requested rezoning would mitigate
issues such as displacement
and gentrifi cation before moving
forward with the scheme, according
to local pols and leaders.
File photo by Sara Hylton