Connecting the dots

This was forwarded by a reader:

"Happy Spring!

You may already be aware of Green Shores NYC’s groundbreaking efforts to ensure a greener, cleaner, more accessible and connected East River Waterfront in Queens.

In keeping with our tradition of being the voice of the community with regard to our waterfront and our goal of having a greener, cleaner, connected and united waterfront, we are excited to announce our new initiative called BRIDGING THE CREEK (BTC).

For BTC we will be working closely with the Newtown Creek Alliance and with support from the Hudson River Foundation. BTC will focus on bringing Queens residents into closer contact with the Newtown Creek and its environs through tours, workshops and a forum that will gather concerns and brainstorm solutions for environmental improvements and public access. A key goal of BRIDGING THE CREEK is to open up new opportunities for dialogue, collaboration and access. A celebratory event is envisioned later this year that will further encourage connections between neighborhoods on both sides of the Creek.

In the coming weeks, we will be reaching out to you to provide more detailed information.

Thanks so much for your time and we look forward to working with you on The Creek!"

Then they received an invite to take a survey, a screenshot of which is below:

You will notice the words "trailblazing advocacy work" used to describe Newtown Creek Alliance. Kind of over-the-top language, don't you think? Let's connect the dots:

1) City Parks Foundation is in charge of administering Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant funds.

2) GreenShores is a program of City Parks Foundation, which is the Parks Department's fundraising arm.

3) According to the above e-mail, GreenShores is a "partner" of Newtown Creek Alliance.

4) Newtown Creek Alliance supports the North Brooklyn Boat Club, mainly because the boards of both organizations contain the same people.

5) The boat club went from priority #3 to priority #1 after City Parks Foundation released the list.

Numerous other conflicts-of-interest here were explained in a previous post. There's a cabal that has a lock on a majority of the funding that has anything to do with the Creek.

It's kind of funny but sad how easily the dots can be connected, yet Attorney General Schneiderman is blind to what's gone on. Is this intentional, sir? Is it time to BRING IN THE FEDS?

Someone drank the Hater-ade

Just wanted to bring your attention to this unintentionally hilarious article from Greenpointers that was meant to put me in my place. Choice excerpts are below:

Masbeth? Where the hell is that? Furthermore, Miss Heather never implied embezzlement and I never said that the boat club was paying one of their members to paint a mural. I said a member of the boat club was receiving money to paint a mural along Newtown Creek in Maspeth. Dear readers, guess where that money is coming from?

Okay. "As per a vote" the boathouse came in 3rd place. The mystery lies in how it pole-vaulted over its competition into first. Many feel that the outcome was predetermined and that the vote was just an exercise in futility. There are members of the Newtown Creek Alliance who were kept in the dark about the new proposed location of the boathouse - until Miss Heather posted it on her blog. Why is that?

The remaining $7? No. Not even the remaining $7M, which is what I assume they were trying to say. There was $7M LEFT after administrative fees were deducted and millions were given to NYSERDA for distribution. The $3M set aside for the boathouse came from THAT. They are basically sitting on half the pot of dough that was to be allocated for parks projects.

Geoggrey Croft? Holy mackerel.

What they tried to do with this blog post is really interesting: they tried to make this a matter of nasty bloggers vs. the angelic boat club and not what this is really about - a handful of people within not-for-profits in Brooklyn that seem to be procuring and kicking each other public money. A nauseating daisy chain of sorts.

The funny thing is that after you finish mentally correcting all the mistakes contained in that poorly written article, you quickly come to the conclusion that they did not refute anything that either Miss Heather or I wrote. So you gotta wonder what the point was.

It's entirely possible that the editor of Greenpointers (a Middle Village native that moved to Greenpoint, purchased Greenpointers, turned it into a blog whose content is quite pro-gentrification and then was dismayed when she could no longer afford to live there...she now lives in Ridgewood) was "preoccupied" while editing this sloppy piece. Why do I say that? Because she wrote a post on Valentine's Day letting the world know just how much she loves smoking marijuana.

This is the same person who applied for a ridiculous amount of environmental settlement funds to author a website about living healthy:

You can't make this shit up, folks.

I thought you would enjoy seeing the North Brooklyn Boat Club in action this past weekend:

Not much educating going on, but there's a bonfire, plenty of beverages and Lord knows what's going on in that sink.

I can see why this group should get $3M in environmental funds to build a clubhouse inside a hotel.

Mind you, the plans for the construction of the hotel have been stalled since December 2013.

Looking at this alley and knowing how much public money is being poured into it, doesn't it make you feel like you're living in Bizarro World?

If I'm a "hater" because I am sick of underhanded tweeding attempts that exploit communities and waste our tax dollars and have no problem making my feelings known, then I proudly accept the moniker. It certainly beats making excuses for the lack of transparency of the Commodore and his associates.

Thankfully, Curbed and its commenters see through the B.S.

Greenpoint boat club building a "park" in Maspeth

When I first read this, I thought it had come from the Onion, or at least was a piece of satire. The North Brooklyn Boat Club and Newtown Creek Alliance will be "creating a park" at the end of 58th Road in Maspeth, along Newtown Creek in an area that is 100% heavy industry.

Let me take this opportunity to remind you, dear readers, that the boat club has been holding up the distribution of $7M in environmental funding for the past few years, some of which could have been used to get the ball rolling on the St. Saviour's ULURP. Their unwillingness to shit or get off the pot (along with the assistance of City Parks Foundation) led to Maspeth losing the opportunity to have a new park. However, Maspeth residents can take comfort in the fact that this phony environmental group is building itself a "destination public space" (aka kayak landing) on the Queens side of the Creek.

Oh, and one of the boathouse regulars got a $20,000 grant to paint a mural there... Yes, $20,000. For a mural. In industrial Maspeth. On Newtown Creek.

I wonder when the outreach portion of this project is going to happen considering that no one I have spoken with in Maspeth knows anything about this or asked for this project.

Lots of conflicts of interest keeping boathouse plan afloat

I've been pondering the whole Newtown Creek boathouse debacle and wondering why the City Parks Foundation has been pushing so hard for the project and how it leapfrogged over more popular projects as voted on by stakeholders back in 2011. Well, the dots have been connected.

The choice of the City Parks Foundation to oversee the whole community outreach process for the wastewater treatment plant settlement was a joke, since they are part of the Parks Department. They may say, "City Parks Foundation is the only independent, nonprofit organization to offer programs in parks throughout the five boroughs of New York City," however, all of their employees have "parks.nyc.gov" e-mail addresses. The CPF is a 501c3 that allows Parks to accept tax deductible donations. They should not be involved in any decision making or vote collecting process regarding how the settlement money is spent. Why? Because, as the WSJ explains: "the money comes from $10 million in fines levied against the city for failing to meet deadlines in constructing a new treatment plant and in lowering the level of pollutants in the water". The City is overseeing where the fines it paid will be spent? Hello, conflict of interest.

Open Space Alliance of North Brooklyn is a multi-park conservancy authorized by the NYC Dept of Parks. (The OSA Director is also the Parks Department's North Brooklyn administrator - a Parks employee.) OSA's purpose is to raise private money for public parks in northern Brooklyn. But strangely, it’s accepting donations on behalf of this private boat club. OSA even went so far as to apply for funding for the boat club from the Exxon settlement money.

Hello, conflict of interest #2.

The boathouse project went from 3rd on the list to 1st on the list after the vote. Is this because DEC determined that it's what people in the area really wanted, or because "Commodore" Dewey Thompson, the president of the boat club, is a board member of OSA, which is affiliated with the Parks Dept, as well as a board member of GWAPP? (GWAPP applied for the sewage treatment plant money on behalf of the boathouse.) Conflict of interest #3.

Conflict of interest #4? How about the fact that the project submitted to the DEC and to the public is nowhere near the same as the one being pushed now? Don't we deserve to see the plans? (Interestingly, I hear that some of the board members of the groups behind this endeavor have not been allowed access to the plans.) Perhaps there should be a revote? Or was the result of all this "community input" pre-determined, with the necessary steps taken after the vote to ensure that the outcome looked legitimate?

And then there's Newtown Creek Alliance:

NCA Supports a New & Improved Home for the North Brooklyn Boat Club

And here are the reasons why they support it:

1) Access: Along Newtown Creek’s 11 miles of waterfront there are only two safe public access points: DEP’s Nature Walk and the Manhattan Ave. Street End park. The new NBBC facility will provide a third much needed public access point.

2) Eyes on the Creek: Dozens of pollution investigations and enforcement actions against Newtown Creek polluters have been set-in motion as a result of the first-hand observations and vigilance of concerned local residents. Waterfront and water access results in more “Eyes on the Creek”, which will ultimately lead to a safer, less polluted Newtown Creek.

3) Education: There is nothing quite like being on the water itself to inspire curiosity about the multifaceted history of the Creek and wonder at the innumerable life forms that call Newtown Creek home. Over the past two years, NBBC has introduced hundreds of people to Newtown Creek for the first time. A permanent home for NBBC that includes an education center will help build a well informed constituency for the Creek that cares about it’s future.

4) Water Quality: How the public uses a waterway informs how clean the government requires it to be. That is to say, if people are swimming in the water, then that body of water must be cleaner than one that is simply used by ships for navigating from point A to point B. Currently, Newtown Creek is misclassified with the lowest water quality designation, a classification that belies the fact that people boat and fish on Newtown Creek. It is our hope that the growing presence of human powered watercraft on Newtown Creek, enabled by a NBBC that teaches safe boating, will force a reclassification of Newtown Creek’s water quality designation so it reflects its actual use as a recreational waterway.

Hmmm... They forgot to mention reason number 5, as revealed by the NY Times:

There are also discussions to include office space for Riverkeeper and the Newtown Creek Alliance, nonprofit organizations working in the area.(inside the boathouse/hotel)

Ah...Conflict of interest #5.

Pushing "4) Water quality" when the public has been warned to stay the hell off the Superfund site, doesn't seem very responsible to me. But I am not a member of this group. I was asked many years ago to join, but I got a bad vibe from the people trying to recruit me, and I declined. Always trust your tweeding radar, folks.

I really have to wonder how the 2 men who are responsible for creating this monster - then Attorney General and now Governor Andrew Cuomo, and current Attorney General Eric Schneiderman - are allowing this to continue. And Bill DeBlasio, who is anti-conservancy for reasons perfectly illustrated by this situation...how about you? Public Advocate Letitia James? Anyone?

How about Queens elected officials whose constituents were disenfranchised by this process? Van Bramer? Crowley?

Assembly Member Joe Lentol and Council Member Steve Levin: You've been listed as "sponsors" of this boathouse. Are you supportive of the way this process has been carried out? You've been eerily quiet about the whole controversy. Of course, a member of the press would have actually had to ask you about it. Speaking of which... WHERE THE HELL IS THE PRESS? Specifically, the BROOKLYN PRESS?


Meanwhile, Miss Heather has been told that the above rendering is that of the boathouse. A tipster told her that it actually is 10 years old. Amazing that this has been going on for so long. You'd think that they'd be working out of more than just shipping containers by now if they had the community support that they claim to have.

To be continued...