Community gardens threatened with development

From the NY Times:

New rules being drafted by the city may omit some protections and assurances accorded nearly a decade ago to hundreds of community gardens scattered across the five boroughs.

The proposed rules, which are not finalized but are being written by the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, are meant to replace a 2002 agreement between the city and the New York State attorney general’s office that helped bring an end to years of contentious court battles and public protests revolving around the future of the gardens.

That agreement, which is set to expire in September, ended a lawsuit in which the attorney general’s office sought to stop the Giuliani administration from selling city-owned gardens to developers and led to the preservation of hundreds of gardens.

Several drafts of the new rules describe a process to develop gardens that is similar to the process in the existing agreement. But the drafts and the current agreement also differ significantly. The drafts, for example, do not contain language guaranteeing the continuation of gardens preserved by the existing agreement. And while the existing agreement states that “the city represents that it has no present intention of selling or developing” other gardens, such assurances do not appear in the drafts.

Consequently, some gardeners said, the draft rules would appear to make all gardens equally eligible for development, regardless of current status.