Development soon to begin at the Rikers next door

Queens Chronicle 

The Adams administration has awarded a $3.9 billion contract to design and build the new Queens community jail.

The city’s Department of Design and Construction has chosen the Leon D. DeMatteis Construction Corp. of Elmont, LI, for the project. In a related matter, the DDC awarded a $2.9 billion contract for the new Bronx jail.

In an email, a DDC spokesman said construction on the Queens facility will start in August.  It will have a maximum height of 195 feet, and will total 764,350 square feet. Construction is scheduled to begin in August. It will be built behind the Queens Criminal Courthouse, on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens. Work on adjacent buildings and a nearby parking garage already are well underway.

The DDC email stressed while the contract with DeMatteis runs through 2031, that does not mean construction will take that long; and that the city will work with the firm to find some time savings.

The city by law is required to shut down Rikers Island as a jail by 2027, though Mayor Adams and numerous other public officials have expressed concern over whether it will be accomplished on time. New jails in each borough except Staten Island are slated to have space for just over 4,000 inmates. The present population of Rikers is about 6,000.

The jail will have 1,040 beds. Queens is the only site for female detainees and will have 590 beds for men and 450 for women. It will require duplicate admission and transport areas, visiting areas, health services, cafeteria and elevators. It also will have a nursing area for women. All that, the DDC said, accounts for the higher cost.

City council wants nothing to do with their law to close Rikers Island

 

 Queens Chronicle

City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Jamaica) and Member Carlina Rivera (D-Manhattan), chair of the Criminal Justice Committee, released a joint statement last Thursday in response to concerns voiced by Mayor Adams about closing Rikers Island.

During a fireside chat at New York Law School in Manhattan last Tuesday, he said the plan to do so “was flawed from the beginning.”

In their response, the councilwomen said the 413-acre facility cultivated a culture of brutal violence and dysfunction, then emphasized that the city must adhere to the 2019 law to close Rikers by Aug. 31, 2027.

“Public safety demands that we remain on-track to closing without delay,” said the joint statement. “To achieve this goal, it is imperative that Mayor Adams’ administration take responsibility for implementing the law, including working collaboratively with stakeholders involved in the criminal legal system to advance necessary progress.”

The mayor’s administration has missed several deadlines related to turning over unused parcels of land from the city’s largest jail complex for the development of an energy hub, reported the Queens Daily Eagle.

The Office of the Mayor said via email that Adams will always follow the law.

“It has become painfully clear that the plan passed by the City Council during the previous administration leaves open serious questions about the city’s ability to keep New Yorkers safe, while the costs are exploding,” a City Hall spokesman told the Chronicle on Aug. 31.

When conceived, the closure of the facility was estimated to be approximately $8 billion. In October 2022, the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform said it would be closer to $10.2 billion due to inflation.

“This is due to: necessary environmental remediation and landfill stabilization; the island’s isolation and single bridge on and off; and the presence of active jails, which would limit construction hours and require a staggered schedule to maintain sufficient capacity during construction,” according to the report. “In addition, the city would have to pay over $800 million to demolish the existing jails on Rikers. The city has already spent $500 million on design, demolition, project management, and site preparation for the new borough-based jails.”

The commission also said scrapping the shutdown plan and modernizing Rikers would cost 15 percent more than the $10 billion price tag and take years longer. Smaller borough-based jails will save the city $2 billion in operating costs annually, it said.

The city must make consistent investments in pretrial services, alternatives to incarceration and re-entry services, while addressing unacceptable lengths of stay with the courts, district attorneys and public defenders, said the councilwomen’s joint statement.

The mayor also blamed the city’s courts for failing to process cases. Commissioner Louis Molina of the city’s Department of Correction said that he believes the jail population will hit 7,000 by 2024, reported the Queens Daily Eagle. The new jails will have room for no more than 4,200 inmates, the mayor has said.

Asked about the rising costs of the jail and where the detainees will be placed during the transitional period, a City Council official said it’s up to the mayor to address.

 

You're gonna need bigger borough tower jails

When asked about how to address the increasing jail population (which is too large to meet the requirements of the borough based jail plan), the @NYCMayor said today “we need a plan b.” He then suggested sending some detainees to state facilities. pic.twitter.com/r65ZrV1U7Y

— Courtney Gross (@courtneycgross) August 29, 2022

 

NY1

 In about five years, smaller jails in four boroughs are supposed to replace Rikers Island after it shuts down.

But on Monday, Mayor Eric Adams questioned whether the city would need more space thanks to an increasing jail population.

“We have to have a plan B, because those that have created a plan A that I have inherited obviously did not think about a plan B,” the mayor said at an unrelated press conference.

The mayor’s remarks came after the city comptroller, the public advocate and the chair of the City Council’s criminal justice committee made an unannounced visit to Rikers Island on Monday morning.

And surprisingly, after months of chaos, a staffing crisis and violence, these officials said the jail’s conditions appeared to be improving.

“I do want to say that it is demonstrably better than a year ago,” said Public Advocate Jumaane Williams.

“Immediately upon arrival we did notice improvements,” said Councilwoman Carlina Rivera.

That said, they reported some detainees were not receiving medication, and many officers were still working double shifts to make up for staffing shortages.

On top of that, the officials saw at least seven individuals in what the department is calling involuntary protective custody — where the city says some of the most violent inmates have been isolated.

Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, questioned whether this unit violated a state law requiring several hours of out of cell time.

Adding on, it was the city comptroller who after their visit questioned whether the city would be able to meet its deadline to close the troubled jail complex.

“Staying on the path to close Rikers is critical, and I’m not confident that we’re on it,” Lander said. “Numbers were coming down and down over many years. They got as low as 4,000 during the pandemic. They’re back up to 5,700.”

The mayor did not offer many details about how he thinks the population could drop.

“What was the plan B that stated if we don’t drop down the prison population the way they thought we were, what do we do?” the mayor asked. “We have to look at everything from state facilities. We have to see if we can get help from the governor. We have to sit down with the chair of crime and correction. We have to see what’s available.”

The trial run Queens Borough Tower Jail

 

Impunity City 

 This scene takes place in Fresh Meadows at this hotel steps away from the Horace Harding Expressway and also a strip mall and public school. This hotel, which has clearly failed to generate any business, was subjected to numerous scoops and solidarity condemnation from the community and elected officials representing the district for it’s use as a homeless shelter for men who were recently released from Rikers Island and was used during the pandemic as housing for a hundred inmates during the pandemic to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on the island’s facilities. Which was irresponsibly made possible following former Mayor de Blasio and the City Council cronies collaborative effort to shut down Rikers to build four tower jails in the boroughs except for Staten Island. But from the optics of this building, it seems that  this hotel in Fresh Meadows is being used as a trial run tower jail while the official tower jail in Kew Gardens gets developed and which has already started it’s construction.

 It’s utterly amazing that the city approved this hotel on a quaint residential block like this. Who in their right mind thought that tourists would dwell here while vacationing in the city and it’s much to big and out of the way to be utilized for prostitution and sex trafficking.

 Upon close inspection, the optics in the front entrance belie the element that’s being housed here as cars line up on the sidewalk obstructing most of the entrance of the hotel, despite the ample parking in the lot behind it and the garage inside the building, conveying a palpable sense of security for their neighbors across the street and the passerby young and old.

 

A better safer plan for Rikers Island

Queens Chronicle 

Community Board 9 is calling on newly elected City Council members to revisit plans for the proposed closing of Rikers Island and the switch to borough-based jails.

“We figured that now, with 26 new City Council members, that it would be time to hopefully bring to their attention what our feelings are,” Community Board 9 President Kenichi Wilson told the Chronicle.

The group is supporting a revised plan from Bialosky New York, an architectural firm based out of Manhattan, which calls for a completely new, more “humane” and cost-effective complex to be built on the existing island.

The plan was originally presented at a 2019 press conference in Chinatown held in opposition to the proposed jail there.

Rallies at that same site resumed on Feb. 6 as Lower Manhattan residents gathered to protest the destruction of the current jail there for a new and bigger site.

Around the same time, Community Board 9’s land use chair, Sylvia Hack, was working to track the original proposal down and the board received a “new and improved version,” CB 9 District Manager James McClelland said.

In early February, Wilson sent a letter to elected officials in the area.

“The proposed borough-based jails are towers offering no outdoor recreation spaces for the incarcerated and, should there be a reason to empty a tower building, no viable plan exists to safely evacuate nearly a thousand detainees plus security and support staff,” he wrote.

“If we are concerned about the incarcerated population and the possibility of really helping them with the reasons that landed them in jail, then we should seriously look at this new, alternative option to four huge monoliths constructed in densely populated areas of the city,” the letter continues.

The plan of transitioning from Rikers to borough-based jails, begun under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, calls for the Queens location to be erected in place of the old lockup near Queens Borough Hall in Kew Gardens.

The Adams administration’s plan for Rikers remains unclear.

The plan for a “reconceived Rikers” includes outdoor space, gyms, art, music and science programs and skills-training programs. Another focus is to create low-rise buildings instead of the current towering structures.

According to Wilson’s letter, the plan would almost halve the price of building four new jails and prevent the “environmental and negative impacts” on surrounding communities.”

Judge rules Kew Gardens tower jail can proceed and the other three borough jails as well

Queens Eagle

 A New York judge on Thursday tossed a lawsuit filed by a pair of Queens civic groups attempting to block the construction of a new jail in Kew Gardens.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Eileen Rakower said the city met environmental review standards, public comment rules and land use laws as it sought approval to build the 195-foot detention tower behind the Queens Criminal Courthouse as part of its four-borough jail plan.

The council approved the city’s land use application for the jails — the first proposal to roll non-contiguous sites in multiple boroughs into a single package — in October 2019. Rakower said the city’s Universal Law Use Review Procedure allowed for such an application. 

“A single ULURP review of the four borough-based jail sites was lawful and rational,” Rakower wrote in her decision to dismiss the lawsuit. The city, she added. “reasonably deemed that the multi-borough review should be consolidated.”

Two civic groups, Queens Residents United and the Community Preservation Coalition, had filed the Article 78 lawsuit in September 2020 in a last-ditch effort to block the new jail, set to rise on the site of the soon-to-be demolished Queens House of Detention at 126-02 82nd Ave. Neither group responded to requests for comment Thursday. They can appeal the decision.

A spokesperson for the New York City Law Department praised the judge’s decision.

“We are pleased that the Court rejected the challenge to the Queens Borough-based jail, just as courts have thrown out challenges to jails in the Bronx and Manhattan,” the spokesperson said. “This decision will help the City to finally close Rikers Island and make our jail system smaller, safer, and fairer.”

“Closing the dysfunctional, shameful jails on Rikers Island is an urgent moral imperative, today more than ever,” said former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, who chaired a commission that recommended closing Rikers Island jails. 

“As the courts consider technical land use issues on appeal, the city should press forward on policies that rely on jail only as a last resort, continue planning for a smaller borough jail system, and begin preparing for a green future for Rikers.”

 

 

Despite the pandemic and budget cuts, plans to build the borough tower jails still proceed

THE CITY

Officials at a senior citizens’ residence next to a Lower Manhattan jail say they were told by city officials that they’ll have a few extra months before demolition starts next door.

The Manhattan Detention Complex’s knockdown is being delayed from next March to June or July, according to Charlie Lai, executive director of the Chung Pak building for seniors, which is adjacent to the jail and is scheduled to receive protective upgrades before the demo work starts.

“That will give us only 12 months or so to complete everything,” he said, including shielding for a rooftop solarium and new windows. “I am extremely anxious about, you know, getting it started so that the building has its own envelope of safety.”

The call to Lai last week from the city’s affordable housing agency marked one of the latest signs that the de Blasio administration’s 10-year, $8.7 billion plan to replace Rikers Island with smaller jails in every borough except Staten Island has hit some early snags.

Another sign: some recent pandemic-spurred funding changes, which prompted one Lower Manhattan community group to crow this week: “We have saved Chinatown for now.”

But city officials said the plan to demolish and replace the 24-story jail tower known as The Tombs is still a go — along with the rest of the planned new lockups.

“There have been no cuts to funding for borough-based jails and the city remains committed to closing Rikers and building a jail system that is smaller, safer, and more humane,” said Maggie Halley, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.

City Council approves Rikers Island shutdown and borough tower prisons

NY Times

 The City Council approved a sweeping $8 billion plan to close the troubled jail complex and replace it with four smaller jails by 2026, an aggressive timeline that will prove challenging. 

 One 886-bed jail will tower over shops and restaurants in Downtown Brooklyn. Another will be next to a subway yard in Queens. In the Bronx, a jail will replace a Police Department tow pound. And another jail will rise in the shadow of City Hall in Manhattan.

That is at the heart of a plan for a landmark overhaul of New York City’s corrections system, which will culminate with the closing of Rikers Island, the jail complex with nearly 10,000 beds that has become notorious for chronic abuse, neglect and mismanagement.

The City Council decisively approved the proposal on Thursday, taking a step that seemed improbable just a few years ago. Supporters say the plan places New York City at the forefront of a national movement to reverse decades of mass incarceration that disproportionately affected black and Hispanic people.

Still, the aggressive timeline — closing Rikers by 2026 — could prove very challenging.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, embraced the jails plan, throwing their political weight behind the measure despite steady opposition from neighborhoods whose residents worry that towering new jails will harm their quality of life. Corrections officers also criticized the plan as unrealistic.

“What we are doing today will reshape the city for generations to come and impact the lives of every New Yorker,” Mr. Johnson said on Thursday. “For decades, our city was unfair to those who became involved in the justice system, and the overwhelming majority who were caught up were black and brown men.”

With two years left in office, Mr. de Blasio also secured perhaps his most progressive achievement so far as mayor with the vote to close Rikers — an idea that even he dismissed a few years ago as impractical.

“This is about valuing our people, no longer condemning people and sending them on a pathway that only made their lives worse and worse,” Mr. de Blasio said. “Today we made history: The era of mass incarceration is over.”

What mass incarceration? Crime has been going down for over 20 years. As for Dancing Cojo's boast, it seems that besides the big windfall cash cow the developers will get from this gift from our representatives, another reason seems to be for these people to grandstand about being the first city to do this. At the expense of neighborhoods were the towers will be built and the communities they disrespected and undermined. And will eventually disenfranchise.

de Blasio offers to build affordable housing by Bronx tower jail and concessions to other boroughs to get Rikers shutdown plan approved

NY Daily News

Giddyup!

Horse-trading is in full swing as the City Council readies to vote on Mayor de Blasio’s controversial plan to close the notorious jail complex on Rikers Island and replace it with four new facilities.

The plan calls for jails to be built in Downtown Manhattan, the South Bronx, central Queens and Downtown Brooklyn by 2026, at an estimated cost of $8.7 billion.

That’s a bitter pill to swallow for some residents of those nabes. So the de Blasio administration is offering a proverbial spoonful of sugar to Council members rep’ing the areas.

The city is committing to building up to 233 units of affordable housing next to a new jail sited at 320 Concord Ave. in the Bronx nabe of Mott Haven, according to Councilwoman Diana Ayala.
 

She hopes new housing might mollify residents in the area, where the community board unanimously rejected the mayor’s plan in May.

“I’m sure that they’re not going to be excited about this, either,” Ayala said of the new jail’s opponents. “In an effort to try to do the best thing by both the community and shutting Rikers, this is the best place I can get to.”

In spite of pockets of opposition from pols like Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer — who’s been tormented by socialist activists as he seeks the Queens borough president’s seat — the Council is expected to pass the mayor’s plan. The Land Use Committee will conclude a review process known as ULURP on Wednesday, followed by a full Council vote Thursday.

Council members in districts where the new jails were sited were likely “yes” votes from the start of the debate.

But an insider noted the ULURP process, in which the Council tends to defer to the votes of colleagues rep’ing areas where projects are proposed, gives members in Ayala’s shoes lots of leverage.

“If you’re a member who’s going to vote yes, then why not secure benefits?” the Council insider remarked. “The ULURP provides a rare occasion to provide community benefits. Why not?”

de Blasio offers city services as a bribe to get Kew Gardens tower prison approved.

Forest Hills Patch

 In a private meeting this spring with Kew Gardens residents to discuss hotly-contested plans for a new jail in their neighborhood, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised they would be compensated for the jail's incursion, but he didn't provide specifics.

Now, a tentative list of those specifics has come to light. 

 Koslowitz has also pressed city officials to reduce the size of the Kew Gardens jail, which current plans say would be 27 stories tall and have a capacity of 1,150 detainees.

The proposed jail — one of four new jails the city wants to build to replace detention facilities on Rikers Island — is expected to be smaller than that by the time the City Council votes on the plan next week, according to Koslowitz's spokesperson, Michael Cohen.


Cohen pushed back on using the word "exchange" to describe the list of items City Hall is promising 
Koslowitz, who represents Kew Gardens, to secure her vote in favor of the jail plan.

He declined to specify other items being negotiated because he said the list hasn't yet been finalized.


Asked how he would describe the deal, he said, "I would describe it as the Mayor making good on his word that he understands that the community is sacrificing something here and his administration would like to do something for the community."


Koslowitz's vote is critical to the passage of the city's controversial jail plan, which calls for building a new lockup in every borough but Staten Island by 2026.


That's because members of the City Council, whose binding vote on the jails is scheduled for Oct. 17, tend to vote in lockstep with the council members whose districts are affected by a given land-use plan.


Koslowitz has already pushed de Blasio's office to nix plans for an infirmary in the Kew Gardens jail that would serve all four new detention centers.


In the private meeting earlier this year, de Blasio indicated he would go even further.


"When we ask a community to do something for the whole city, which is what we're doing here, then the community has a right to say, here are things that would help our community, including things we've been trying to get for a long time and haven't gotten," de Blasio said, according to a recording of the March 27 meeting reviewed by Patch.


"How can we say to the community, we're asking you to shoulder a burden but we want to do something back that's really going to make a difference?" de Blasio added.


Still, the jail proposal is intensely controversial among Koslowitz's constituents as well as advocates for No New Jails NYC, who say the city should close Rikers but not build any new jails.

Koslowitz's response? "Whether I supported it or not, that jail was happening."

 The elected in NYC do not represent the people anymore. What the mayor wants, the mayor gets it. Got it.

The borough tower jails approval is nigh and all it took was to knock off a few stories

Queens Eagle

 Negotiations around the city’s initiative to build new jails in four boroughs have determined that all of the facilities will be smaller than currently proposed, though talks continue around the specific heights, sources close to the deal-making told the Eagle.

The plan to close Rikers Island by replacing the isolated jail complex with four new borough-based detention towers is heading toward a City Council vote next month — and it’s on its way to passing the 26-vote threshold necessary to set the plan in motion, according to City Hall and City Council sources.

A critical issue in rallying support for the plan is reducing the jails’ heights, which vary borough to borough. The Mayor’s Office has already conceded reductions, resulting in more council support, according to a source with knowledge of the negotiations. 

“Council leadership, members and the administration have invested many hours working on a plan that the majority of the council could get behind,” a City Hall source told the Eagle. “Talks absolutely continue, but the fruitful efforts up to this point are leaving those involved feeling very good about the project.”

With just weeks left until the full-council vote on the unprecedented four-site land-use measure, the Brooklyn Eagle reached out to all 51 councilmembers to get their preliminary stances on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan.

Already, 18 councilmembers have told the Eagle that they plan on voting yes, or that they are leaning toward voting yes. Nine councilmembers said they are leaning toward or have decided on a “no” vote, while 16 said they remain undecided. The remaining 11 members of the council did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Three former councilmembers told the Eagle that the jail plan will likely pass, though it may take some back-room deal-making. The former councilmembers requested anonymity so as to not alienate former colleagues. 

“It’s going to happen. They’re going to posture and do things and maybe some will vote no,” said one. “It doesn’t get this far and not go through.”

“It will get done, but there will be a lot of tweaks,” said political consultant George Arzt. He believes a compromise between City Hall and the council on the height of the proposed facilities will enable councilmembers to save face with constituents opposed to the plan. 

“The administration has enough of an opening with the reduced jail population to cut the height of the buildings, and I think that is the most significant factor in getting this done,” Arzt said. “That allows councilmembers to say, ‘They wanted X, but we did Y, and we got this done for our constituents.’”

Council Speaker Corey Johnson has not explicitly stated how he will vote on the final proposal, but he lent his support to the plan when it was announced last summer by the de Blasio administration. He also co-wrote an op-ed in April with former Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals Jonathan Lippman outlining why he believes the borough-based jails land-use proposal — called ULURP — is essential to closing Rikers. In the op-ed, Johnson and Lippman list changes they would like to see, “such as finding non-jail, hospital-based alternatives for people with serious mental health diagnoses,” as well as investment in communities “hit hard by the inequities of the criminal justice system.”

The speaker’s support of the plan is pivotal when it comes to a full-council vote.

Queens Eagle

Yesterday, the Queens Daily Eagle generated some conversations in City Hall after contacting all 51 city councilmembers — in conjunction with sibling publication, the Brooklyn Eagle —  to find out where the legislators stand on the controversial land use application for building four new jails, one in each borough except Staten Island.

The Queens jail, part of a stated proposal for closing the detention centers on Rikers Island, would rise 270-feet and house a maximum of 1,150 detainees behind the Queens Criminal Courthouse in Kew Gardens. Queens’ 15 councilmembers differ on the proposal.

Three Queens councilmembers flat-out say they will vote against the plan. Democrat Paul Vallone, nominal Democrat Robert Holden (he won his seat on the GOP line) and Republican Eric Ulrich all told the Eagle they will vote no on the plan to create four “borough-based” jails. 

Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer leans toward opposing the jail for different reasons than his conservative colleagues. Van Bramer has aligned himself with the progressive wing of the party and the No New Jails coalition, which calls on the city to divest from jails and invest in social services, housing and education for low-income people of color disproportionately affected by the criminal justice system.

Of the 11 remaining Queens councilmembers (including Antonio Reynoso, whose district is mostly in Brooklyn), six say they are firm yes votes. The six supporters are Councilmembers Karen Koslowitz, Daniel Dromm, Rory Lancman, Francisco Moya, Adrienne Adams and Reynoso.

Meanwhile, Councilmembers Donovan Richards and Costa Constantinides say they are leaning yes, but have not decided yet. 

Councilmembers Barry Grodenchik and I. Daneek Miller say they are undecided. Councilmember 

 Peter Koo has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Each of the supporters premised their vote on changes ultimately being made to the height and scope of the project.

Koslowitz, for example, said she supports the plan — so long as the city reduces the height. Several councilmembers signalled that they would vote in lockstep with Koslowitz, who is taking a stand in favor of a politically unpopular project.

 Councilmember Daniel Dromm told the Eagle he is “definitely supporting [Koslowitz’s] principled, moral stance" to support the Kew Gardens jail, despite "NIMBY pushback in her district.”

"I really admire her” for standing up, even though the plan is unpopular among her constituents, he added.

To cap this shitshow off, a few words from Speaker Cojo the dancing clown:

Gotham Gazette 

  The plan that the mayor has put forward is an essential step in the path to close the Rikers jail complex. Conversations with communities have already led to initial reductions in the height and density of the planned facilities and more thoughtful plans regarding the treatment of incarcerated women. Moving forward, we expect to see more work from the administration to improve the plan—such as finding non-jail, hospital-based alternatives for people with serious mental health diagnoses—and to address neighborhood concerns.

"Non-jail hospital based alternatives" In other words, a hospital.