Wednesday, December 9, 2020

The city is chipping away funding from Rikers Island closing.

 

THE CITY

 The city’s latest funding plan strips more than $500 million from construction of four new jails — with a building timeline that could extend two years past Mayor Bill de Blasio’s pledge to shut Rikers Island by 2026.

The capital budget commitment plan, published by the Office of Management and Budget last month, outlines $8.16 billion over 10 years for the “Borough-Based Jail” plan, which seeks to build new state-of-the-art correctional facilities in every borough except Staten Island.

That figure is down by about $520 million from $8.68 billion allocated in April.

“The city should be speeding up, not slowing down, the closure of the dysfunctional jails on Rikers,” said former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, who led a panel that called for the closing of Rikers.

He argued that the need to close the jailsT complex by the East River “has only grown more urgent” during the pandemic, which has “sharpened focus on racial equity.”

The city’s latest financial documents detail a timeline that wraps up two years after the original 2026 target end date.

The budget’s final construction is slated for completion in June of 2028.

That 2028 fiscal year also encompasses the previous end date of August 2027 that surfaced with a revised City Hall timeline. But the new timeline now would allow construction to carry into the 2028 calendar year.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, they should speed up closing Rikers---so that DumblASSio and his cronies can then collect their millions from their real estate developer masters for getting them a big piece of property close to Manhattan to develop. The heck with neighborhoods getting jails and the lowlifes that pass in and out of them, something everyone with a house or with kids wants to degrade the neighborhood and therefore their house's value and their kids' safety

Anonymous said...

Moe said...
@#1 Anon That sums it up !

Anonymous said...

Good I hope it never gets done. That was the stupidest plan to begin with. I want mayor dumbdumb to be housed next door to a few of these released criminals and see how he feels. Just imagine an accused pedophile living next door to a school or children. No thank you!