Mike Drop: LICH RFP led to a Really Flawed Process, by Mike Racioppo

LICH RFP (Long Island College Hospital Request for Proposal) leads to RFP (Really Flawed Process) for LICH, you get the point.

My grandfather was a proud member of the ILA (International Longshoreman’s Association). Long Island College Hospital, blocks away from the ILA health center, was my family’s go-to hospital.

Now the campus of LICH is no longer a hospital, and last week its developer, FORTIS, announced that it will go ahead with an “as of right” luxury housing project, which means that no zoning change will be required. There will be no compulsion for community benefits, since there is little other than “delay and pray” tactics that can be done to stop it.

How did we get to this point?

Various people, for differing reasons get blamed, from the Mayor to the former community board chairman to Councilman Lander, but the original sin from which all else stems was the original SUNY RFP.  That RFP set the table for what I fear will become manifest in Cobble Hill.

When I got to speak to Brad Lander about this last week, he put it succinctly, saying that “a public institution sold off public land for private gain, and we are getting exactly what they said they’d do in response to the RFP.”  With the press focused on the Mayor’s inability to get the State to relent on the LICH closing, it has been easy to forget that SUNY(State University of New York ) owned, mismanaged and ultimately sold this property pursuant to a RFP it conceived, and that failed to include requirements for a hospital or affordable and senior housing. This may have upped the sales price, but the lack of provisos left the community without leverage to influence the development.

When the winning bidder does what it said it would do, why act surprised?

All of us concerned about healthcare and affordable housing in NYC organized in opposition to the plan in our community, sat through countless meetings and protests, and even saw a mayoral candidate and elected officials carted off to jail. But now we know it was all over with RFP and the terms set out in that document.

So while it was a really flawed process, I can’t help but remember a quote, that at this moment is applicable to national politics as well, from the great Maya Angelou:

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

One Comment

  1. LICH was mismanaged and its leadership should have been held accountable. Moving forward, our elected officials screwed up by making demand and demand on the developers which is why the community has finally been told that there will be no space set aside for any medical facility, community public areas and affordable apartments. We can thank our local councilman Brad Lander, who along with his council associates and our mayor for this mess. It appears to me that Lander, DeBlasio, et.al., were more interested in pushing along their socialist agenda on more important issues such as the Brad Lander nickel shopping bag tax, impossible integration of our schools of which over 90% of the students are minority, insuring themselves a salary increase, restoring and then non-restoring the “F” train express, acting non-patriotically by refusing to salute the American Flag, singing at council meetings the Black Panther anthem, etc.

    It is because of Democrats like Brad Lander and Bill DeBlasio that Donald Trump was able to make just enough inroads with Democrats that defeated Hillary Clinton.

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

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 collection

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

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