VOLUME 29, NUMBER 15
War of words BPCA called out for banning public comment at meetings BY ALEX ELLEFSON State Sen. Daniel Squadron used his first opportunity to address a board meeting of the Battery Park City Authority to blast its decision to allow only elected officials to comment at its supposedly public meetings. Describing the BPCA’s policy as a “woefully inadequate” response to residents’ call for more input, Squadron listed nearly two dozen other state and local authorities that invite the public to comment at their board meetings. “The operations of these organizations are not diminished by greater public participation,” Squadron said, “they are enhanced.” The BPCA board, which is hand-picked by the governor and includes only one resident of the neighborhood, has come under fire for a series of deeply unpopular decisions without community input — including removing longtime leaders of the North Cove Marina and Battery Park City Parks Conservancy as well as replacing the city’s Parks Enforcement Patrol with private security guards who have no enforcement power. The latest attempt to increase the BPCA’s accountability to residents was a call from several Downtown elected officials for the board to have a public-comment period at its meetings — which are open to the public, but do not allow comments. The BPCA’s response was to invite elected officials — but not residents — to speak at board meetings, which Squadron and others argue completely misses the point. “As I have said before, this was never about elected officials’ opportunity to be heard — we have many opportunities to be heard,” Squadron said at the board’s July 20 meeting. In his statement to the board, Squadron relayed comments and questions he had received from Battery Park City residents, covering concerns ranging from access to affordable housing, storm resiliency upgrades in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and questions about whether the authority could effectively balance the needs of residents and small businesses with tourism interests. But he stressed that hearing residents’ concerns second hand was no substitute for hearing them directly
JULY 28 – AUGUST 10, 2016
Armada of heroes New book recounts epic, civilian-led, waterborne evacuation of Lower Manhattan after 9/11 attacks
BY COLIN MIXSON A new book sheds light on an oft-overlooked aspect of the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — the massive waterborne evacuation of Lower Manhattan undertaken that day largely by civilian vessels and sailors. James Kendra and Tricia Wachtendorf, co-directors of the Disaster Research Center at University of Delaware, compare the mass rescue operation to the historic evacuation of more than 300.000 British troops surrounded by the Nazis at Dunkirk in 1940, when an armada of lifeboats, fishing vessels, and pleasure craft spontaneously sailed to their rescue from across the English Channel. Sixty years later, the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks saw an even more massive operation, in which hundreds of commuter ferries, tugboats, party boats, and even historic sailing ships braved the chaos to deliver as many as half a million souls from the clouds of toxic dust engulfing Downtown, as the authors describe in their book, “American Dunkirk.” The mass-rescue operation, though nominally coordinated by the Coast Guard, was largely ad
NYPD
Hundreds of commuter ferries, tugboats, party boats, and even historic sailing ships braved the chaos of 9/11 to deliver as many as half a million souls from the clouds of toxic dust that engulfed Lower Manhattan after the World Trade Center collapse.
hoc, with the skippers of individual vessels making crucial decisions on the fly in response to the rapidly changing conditions, according to the authors. “What we saw was whether you were a member of the Coast Guard or the captain of a tug boat, they were able to make sense of their
Also in this issue:
Dropping the Ball Port Authority moving WTC Sphere to Liberty Park — against wishes of locals, board members, even executive director Page 4
BPCA Continued on page 16 1 M e t r o t e c h • N YC 112 0 1 • C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 16 N YC C o mm u n i t y M e d i a , L L C
environment, and that’s part of the reason this improvised response worked so well,” said Kendra. The book relies on the firsthand accounts of local captains, including Captain Patrick Harris, skipper of the nearly century-old Armada Continued on page 6