POINT OF VIEW

RIP to green and rocky Riverdale?

Posted

(re: “Planners offer to tinker with natural area rules,” Sept. 12)

If the changes proposed by the city planning department — which are scheduled to be voted on by the full City Planning Commission on Wednesday, Sept. 25 — become law, Riverdale, as we know it, will in the not-too-distant future cease to exist.

Many of the special features which make this neighborhood unique — the steep slopes, the plethora of trees (many old growth), the rocky outcroppings, the extensive stretches of greenery which city planners demonstrated the foresight to specifically protect almost a half century ago — will be gone.

The shield that protected this environmentally unique part of our area from slowly dying by a thousand cuts of heedless development was called SNAD — a unique environmental zoning law that required anyone seeking to make changes on more than a quarter-acre of land to explain to experts (the city planning department) and the community (Community Board 8) that their proposal did not do violence to the natural area features that defined our area.

Only our literal “neck of the woods,” along with a few much larger areas in less-developed Staten Island, received this special status among all neighborhoods citywide.

The special review required in our SNAD, or Special Natural Area District, without question made it more expensive and time consuming for private homeowners and large institutions — think the Hebrew Home, the hill schools, Manhattan College and Mount Saint Vincent — to develop their properties. This could involve installing a swimming pool or building a dormitory.

The lede in a recent front page Riverdale Press story was succinct: “Preserving the environment takes work and sometimes a little sacrifice.” Like so many valuable things in life, the SNAD protections represented a compromise: It would be harder for individuals and institutions to do whatever they wanted with their land, and in return, the very land that made their surrounding environment unique would be preserved.

The changes city planning is trying mightily to push through the City Planning Commission and the city council would gut our SNAD protections. Although the proposed amendments helpfully update many of the land use guidelines contained in the original law, these changes will be worthless if “no one is watching the store.”

That is because the city planning proposal also does three very harmful things. First, for any property from a quarter-acre to an acre in size, the new rules would remove any oversight by the experts at the city planning department, and allow anyone who wants to develop their land to “self-certify” that their plans comply with SNAD protections (the jargon is “as of right” development) and submit their papers to the buildings department.

But the buildings department has admitted it has no personnel trained in land use, environmental science or the SNAD protections, so their role will never be more than a rubber stamp for any SNAD application. (The buildings department would continue to do what it actually knows how to do — enforce building codes, plumbing and electrical safety, and the like.)

Second, the new proposal will eliminate community board review. Currently, owners and developers must submit their plans to our local community board, which must then recommend approval or disapproval within 60 days. The community board’s decision has never been binding — the application travels after that to the borough president, the planning commission and then the city council — but it is an opportunity for the community to fulfill a crucial role as guardian of our land’s special character.

The Press has reported that those who propose to eliminate the community’s role in SNAD now suggest that a 45-day waiting period be inserted into the regulations to give the community — individual residents of our neighborhood — a chance to review the plans filed with the buildings department and bring a lawsuit if they believe the plans violate SNAD.

This is a cynical and dishonest offer. How many individual homeowners will have the time and money to litigate against a developer or a university? And with the community board’s recommendation no longer a requirement, what developer will show up to answer questions at any public hearing the community board might convene?

Third, the proposed changes to SNAD will allow large institutions to submit a long-range plan that is only required to describe future development in the most general of terms. Once such a “campus plan” is approved, however, the institution can later bypass review by the city planning department and other decision-makers when it comes time for these institutions to actually build that building, blast that rock, or remove those trees.

You guessed it — the devil is in the details, and under this rule change, our community would have no protection.

We have been told that the reason for removing the extra layers of review in our SNAD is to lessen the expense to homeowners and developers, and to lighten the workload of the city planning department. And it was no secret that a major impetus for curtailing review under the new rules was that developers on Staten Island felt that the existing SNAD regime got in the way of their business.

But it turns out that others on Staten Island were concerned about parts of the proposal that would limit their ability to cover their land with patios and driveways — at which point three Staten Island city council members reportedly pressured city planning to remove Staten Island entirely from the proposal.

So now we have city planning pressing ahead to impose dangerous new rules on our community that were specially designed for another borough!

Let’s also be clear about city planning’s workload. If the past five years are any guide, the plan to strip out city planning and community board review from SNAD will, on average, only reduce by three (yes, you read that right) the number of SNAD applications city planning will have to review every year.

To add insult to injury, city planning tried to force our community board to vote on this highly problematic SNAD proposal a month before a new proposal could be put together that reflected the removal of Staten Island.

As a recent Press editorial put it: “The city planning department broke the process the moment they demanded CB8 vote on something they couldn’t even read.” (re: “Cohen blows an uncertain trumpet on SNAD issues,” Sept. 12.)

Bronx Community Board 8 refused to be bullied, and called out city planning for violating the most basic precept of participatory democracy — you get to see what you’re voting on. The borough president then issued his own report, rejecting the new SNAD rules for this very reason.

Our city councilman remained silent about this mistreatment of our community, because in his view, this is the only chance we will have to “fix SNAD,” but he has been vague about what in SNAD he believes needs fixing.

CB8’s SNAD working group began meeting with the city planning department in Spring 2015, before the current proposal was even conceived, for the purpose of urging changes in the rules that would create an effective mechanism for enforcing SNAD.

Notorious instances of homeowners and developers doing damage to the land in spite of the SNAD protections (SAR, Scenic Place, and the O’Connor residence, to name a few) had illustrated the problem that city planning had no enforcement powers. And the buildings department — which did have the power to issue stop work orders — never seemed to respond to the community’s alarms until it was too late.

It is sad, and not a little ironic therefore, that what started as a plea for real SNAD enforcement has now become a threat to remove both the land use experts and the public from any role whatsoever in policing SNAD for properties smaller than an acre.

A recent Point of View by Karen Argenti (re: “Riverdale’s greenbelt is great, and really should be emulated,” Sept. 12) congratulated the “SNAD protectors” for limiting building and paving in our community to only 30 percent of the land, as contrasted by the city average of 72 percent cover.

There are only two things standing in the way of city planning’s misguided plan to dismantle the essential review procedures in SNAD that have protected our community’s natural features over the last 45 years:

  • The City Planning Commission, which sits atop the city planning department, can withhold its approval, and instead send the proposed SNAD rules back to the drawing board, both to preserve the participation of land use experts and the community in the review process, and to find a way to create real enforcement mechanisms.
  • The city council can refuse to adopt these flawed rule changes, on the advice of our councilman. The city council relies heavily on the local councilman for guidance in zoning matters.

Should it get to that point, we can only hope our councilman and the council will listen to this community, which has spoken with virtually one voice at every public hearing, and in every written submission to oppose any attempts to undermine SNAD, a law that, over the last 45 years, has preserved the extraordinary natural features of our neighborhood.

The author is a member of Community Board 8, and its SNAD working group.

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Steven Froot,

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