The Brooklyn Marine Terminal Task Force will decide on a proposal from the city's Economic Development Corporation after multiple delays to redevelop the outdated port complex and build thousands of new housing units.
But it’s faced opposition from some Red Hook locals over its large scale and the fact that it's going around the city's typical land use process.
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso is a member of the task force that will vote on the project. He's opposed to the current proposal, and he joined WNYC’s Sean Carlson to discuss his vision for the facility and why he feels the redevelopment process has gone awry.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Sean Carlson: Can you describe the current state of the marine terminal and why redevelopment of the site is necessary?
Antonio Reynoso: After decades of neglect by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the piers in the Brooklyn Marine Terminal have fallen to significant disrepair and have made it so that the amount of work that can happen on our ports — it's inconsequential to the greater transportation of goods in the City of New York. We have a significant amount of square footage that is completely useless. It's just a port that at this point is working maybe to 10% of its capacity.
Can you briefly describe your opposition to the project in its current state?
This is supposed to be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to really do something big here. And the City of New York hasn't put forth a process that speaks to a once-in-a-generation opportunity. And an example of that is, we've seen the rezoning in Gowanus. We've seen the rezoning that happened in the Atlantic Yards a while back and now Atlantic Avenue with the AAMUP rezoning.
We have these opportunities that come up that people spend six, seven [years], even a decade worth of work to get right. In this one, we've spent 10 months on it. And we can tell that the process has been a mess. We can tell that there's huge issues with what I call taking a port project and turning it into a housing project. And in order to make it work in 10 months, the City of New York has had to make it so that some task force members are getting side deals that are not necessarily a part of a port-only project on the [Brooklyn Marine Terminal]. And now we just have this monstrosity of a plan that really doesn't speak to this port-only economic development.
You say that this is a port project, not a housing project. Do you mean that the whole site should stay a port?
Originally, the presentation to us was that it is a port-first project and that any housing that would be built would be built specifically to offset the cost of the construction and maintenance of the port. Quickly into this process, we found out that that was not [the Economic Development Corporation's] plan.
EDC wanted housing first, and the port has now become second fiddle to the housing that they want to build here. And you can tell by the more than 50% of the port square footage [that] has been taken specifically for housing. So because of that, we've gotten into a little bit of a mess where we have some manufacturing and industrial advocates that thought they were going in to assist a plan that was going to allow for port operation, [but] instead have been brought into a plan that is largely a housing project.