Menchaca Statement on Valentino Pier Bathrooms

I heard a variety of views during recent community meetings and conversations on the proposed comfort station at Valentino Pier Park. Some expressed the strong need for a bathroom in that area while others described issues with the comfort station as proposed.  Ultimately, I have decided to pull the funding from this currently proposed project.  

Carlos Menchaca speaking about Valentino Pier at the Red Hook Library
Carlos Menchaca speaking about Valentino Pier at the Red Hook Library

The roughly $2 million in New York City Council funds that were set aside for this comfort station during the previous administration will remain in Red Hook for a parks project.  The allocation of these funds will be built into our participatory budgeting process. More information on Participatory Budgeting in New York is available at http://www.pbnyc.org, and information on our neighborhood assemblies is available at http://council.nyc.gov/html/pb/events.shtml#district38.

This outcome does not change the fact that we need restrooms near Valentino Pier Park. A diverse group of stakeholders—including small businesses, those that fish off of the pier, kayakers, and Red Hook public housing residents—have underscored the real need for bathrooms in this area.  Let’s not forget that.

This comfort station project was inherited by both the New York City Council and the Parks Department.  My predecessor had allocated most of the funding to this Red Hook project over several years.  My office and the Borough President’s Office each contributed $250,000 to fill a gap in project costs that came from new FEMA requirements post-Sandy.  When we stepped in, the assumption was that this idea was borne out of a community process, but what we learned was a real need to press the re-set button and begin a new, truly participatory process.  This is a process I am committed to for capital projects and policy making across our district, and I hope you will all join me for the Participatory Budgeting kick-off TONIGHT (Sunset Park High School, 6:30PM), where I will discuss that vision with our community in more detail, and at the community assemblies that follow through the month of November.

Through conversations with the Parks Department, we all learned a tremendous amount about their process, and saw a real responsiveness to our initial ideas about scale and placement of the bathroom with the second proposal presented to us.  These are the types of conversations with our City agencies that we want to build upon, and I thank the Parks Department and the many community groups and individuals that participated in this productive conversation.

We heard a number of alternative ideas–from public-private partnerships on sites near the park to a model used in Portland (the Portland Loo) which would allow for restrooms at a much smaller scale. I am exploring some of these alternatives, with neighborhood groups and the Community Board, and the participatory budgeting process is the perfect way to keep this conversation going.

Finally, investments in our community should not be made in a vacuum–we must consider both residents and visitors when we spend capital dollars in our community.  This is a principle I am mindful of as we look at our entire capital process, including our participatory budgeting dollars.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Comments are closed.

READ OUR FULL PRINT EDITION

Our Sister Publication

a word from our sponsors!

Latest Media Guide!

Where to find the Star-Revue

Instagram

How many have visited our site?

wordpress hit counter

Social Media

Most Popular

On Key

Related Posts

Film: “Union” documents SI union organizers vs. Amazon, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten

An ode to the bar at the edge of the world, review by Oscar Fock

It smells like harbor, I thought as I walked out to the end of the pier to which the barge now known as the Waterfront Museum was docked. Unmistakable were they, even for someone like me — maybe particularly for someone like me, who’s always lived far enough from the ocean to never get used to its sensory impressions, but

Quinn on Books: In Search of Lost Time

Review of “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance,” by Kevin Brown Review by Michael Quinn   “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” – Countée Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Come Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to family and the communities that shape us. Kevin Brown’s “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance” is a

MUSIC: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Mothers of reinvention. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” according to writer George Eliot, who spoke from experience. Born in the UK in 1819, Mary Ann Evans found her audience using the masculine pen name in order to avoid the scrutiny of the patriarchal literati. Reinvention, of style if not self, is in the air