Another bend in the road.

It's been a tough month for FFWP--apologies for the lack of updates, but we've been catching our breaths since the General Meeting on April 28th--where, as expected, Community Board 12 voted decisively to approve the Parks Department's proposed changes to Fort Washington Park, excessive paving and all.

We did our best to speak out against the more damaging elements of the plan, but were hamstrung by a baffling decision to limit comments from concerned members of the community to two minutes each--the normal limit is three minutes. At a typical cb12 general meeting, the charmingly addled gentleman who stands up and introduces himself as the Rightful Mayor of New York gets three minutes. We got two minutes apiece, and even with some people graciously ceding their minutes to those of us who had prepared presentations to make, there simply was not enough time to make our arguments--and money would have talked louder, in any event.

One community board member, in a fit of hyperbole, spoke of sixty million dollars being spent in our community--the total budget for the entire parks improvement project was slightly less than forty million dollars, much of which was earmarked for Upper Riverside Park (which isn't in Community Board 12), and I'm curious as to why anyone would assume all or even most of that money would be spent inside our community. Some, certainly.

But whatever our share of the pie would be, the pie itself just got a lot smaller.

We have just recently learned that funding for the PlaNYC improvements to Upper Riverside and Fort Washington Parks has been cut--drastically cut. It's not hard to guess why, if you've been following the financial news lately. The city is badly strapped for cash, and it's been baffling to many why Mayor Bloomberg would be spending millions on optional (and sometimes controversial) changes to our parks when the Parks Department as a whole is seeing major budget cuts, not to mention the severe budgetary shortfalls afflicting mass transit, education, policing, etc.

This is not to say nothing should be planned or built during a time of financial crisis, and you could make a case that continuing with the planned reconstruction of the parks could fall under the broad heading of economic stimulus--but don't subways, schools, and safety come first?

Faced with ever-tightening options, the city has opted to withdraw much of the funding for this particular aspect of PlaNYC. We do not know by how much--specifics are still hazy. A little information was provided at this past Tuesday's meeting of the cb12 Parks & Cultural Affairs Committee--which I will mention as an aside could have been a little better publicized--in the sense that it wasn't publicized at all. But never mind that now.

Liz Ritter, chair of that committee, was as much in the dark as anyone else as to what was happening, and asked Daniel Mercado (the only parks employee present) to try and get some specifics from Jennifer Hoppa, administrator for North Manhattan Parks. He went off with his BlackBerry, and returned much later with a few scraps of intel. To wit:

1)The funding has indeed been significantly cut, by city edict. The decision is apparently final.

2)The Parks Department is now engaged in figuring out what money they can find in their own budget, along with state and federal funds they can lay claim to, so they can go ahead with what they see as the priority Phase I projects--basically, improving park entrance points, and widening the paved path for better bicycle access--the Greenway, in other words. Would the changes be exactly the same ones they proposed? Including the changes over a thousand residents of Community Board 12 opposed by signing our petition? Unknown.

3)As of now, it seems that every other aspect of the plan for Fort Washington Park--a new playground, more volleyball courts, a rebuilt playing field for baseball and soccer, improvements to the dog/kayak beach, wheelchair-friendly picnic tables, new water fountains, and pretty much every other community-serving idea they had proposed, which had in their entirety formed the principal argument in favor of the plan--backburnered. Indefinitely. They remain in the plan as an aspiration, but not as an imminent reality.

I am still waiting for more information from the Parks Department, which I requested in person at the meeting, and then by email the following day, and which has not thus far been forthcoming--Liz Ritter has also promised to provide us with more details, as they become available to her. Much is obviously unclear at the present time, even to the Parks Department itself.

If I have misrepresented the facts in any way in this article, however unintentionally, I would ask representatives of the Parks Department to set the record straight--this blog will happily report whatever they have to say on this subject.

But even with the limited data now available, the question must be posed--is this the project that was presented to our community? Is this the project the community board approved? Is this a project worth shutting down Fort Washington Park for months at a time? Because we were told, over and over, that the plan as proposed would mean the park would be closed to the public for as much as a year. That was made extremely clear to us, and we were asked to let local residents know about it--it's a rather unpleasant pill for all of us to swallow, made somewhat sweeter by the promise of improved park facilities for all. Only now the improvements that still have a chance of being implemented in the near future would primarily benefit bicyclists passing through the park on their way to somewhere else.

The access points could be improved without shutting down the park, because the most important entrance to Fort Washington Park--the 158th St. Ramp/Stairway--has already been repaired and greatly enhanced, thanks in no small part to the efforts of our City Councilman, Herman D. Farrell. Most of that work would be going on in areas the public does not heavily use.

But widening the paved paths in the park would almost certainly mean closing the park to the public--perhaps not for a year, but for a considerable period of time.

And at that project's completion, we would have--a wider paved road--smaller and more fragmented open grassy spaces--more speeding bicycles. The park's natural beauty marred for the purpose of making it a slightly more serviceable leg of an existing transportation corridor.

Most of us didn't want that to begin with--and now that's ALL we're going to get?

And then, if the money to implement the other changes becomes available further on down the road, we get to have our park shut down again?

We look forward to further clarification from NYC Parks.