Waldo Ave permits are a mess

To the editor:

As a member of the Coalition to Save Brust Park, I along with others have been working on our project for a year now, and have been keeping the community informed on our efforts to Save Brust Park.

We want to share the latest development because it involves not only Brust Park or developments going on all over the Bronx in the midst of our neighborhoods, but this time, real and clear ineptitude on the part of our civil servants.

Save Brust Park is watching this development at 3893 Waldo Ave., because it is likely to harm the park, which is well loved by the community, and offers a safe place for community members to gather during this long time of the pandemic. We also have transportation, and health and safety concerns, but those have been laid out elsewhere.

A recent permit includes many errors and omissions. The coalition brought this up before when our first Freedom of Information law request was answered with a partial response showing an error-riddled permit.

We were then told by the Bronx parks commissioner that the FOIL request had not been answered properly, and we only received a partial permit and not the final approved permit. The errors, they said, would have been caught by a parks reviewer and addressed before issuing.

Why weren’t they then? A very flimsy — and irresponsible — excuse.

So we began again and filed another FOIL request. This time, an approved permit was found. Lo and behold, it actually had more errors in it. So not only did parks issue permits with errors, they contacted us and seemingly lied to us about it, a group of citizens.

Maybe they just hoped we would have taken their word for it, and not FOILed again.

Even so, the permit expired in June, so now there is a construction fence up without a permit, already having damaged several trees within Brust Park. That means this has to be filed again by the developer.

Will there be a review this time? Will someone other than concerned citizens pay the permit any mind? Parks still hasn’t used its power to require a construction permit, nor a tree work permit, nor a forestry permit, but a parks construction permit.

A construction permit would force a full City Environmental Quality Review of the whole project, because it requires parks make discretionary decisions on the project. It is not discretionary — even, perhaps, with prejudice, and certainly lazy — for parks to choose not to act?

In fact, parks could have issued violations, which our citizens group pointed out to them, with several still unresolved — and still could, if they bothered to.

We do not want to hear about COVID-19 as an excuse. Several of us commented that if we submitted work with these kinds of errors — twice, and worse each time — we would be fired, even during the pandemic.

None of the Community Board 8 committees are meeting in July and August. But our work carries on. The Coalition to Save Brust Park is ready to begin again sharing our story. We hope you’ll join our cause.

And we hope you will also hold your community accountable for its actions.

Ann Walle

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