Westsiders for Public Participation seeking funds

Adapted from an e-mail sent by WPP :

After Eight Productive Weeks, WPP Needs Your Help Getting Through the Long, Hot Summer

With a blistering heat wave on the way this weekend, many of us will naturally begin thinking of the beach, the park, a vacation away… anything except the noisy, dusty construction site in our midst.

While beating the heat, let's keep the heat ON the developers of the proposed “Columbus Village” and the Department of Buildings.

Some of the most important milestones in our fight for public participation and an environmental review will be taking place this summer. With a legal battle for our quality of life and property rights sure to cost tens of thousands more dollars, your help will be needed to fund the fight.

Westsiders for Public Participation is asking for as generous a financial contribution as you can--as soon as you can--to make sure it can carry on through the long, hot summer.

Progress Report

We’ve come a long way since our lawsuit was filed only eight weeks ago today, on April 11.

• On April 11 the developers had been ignoring the community’s requests for information for two years. The Department of Buildings had been stonewalling the community and even our elected officials, as we all questioned how such a large and unprecedented project could be shoehorned into a planned community without an environmental review looking at such impacts as: public transportation crowding, pedestrian traffic, car and truck traffic, noise at all hours, shadows, parking, security issues, increased sewage and garbage, air quality, urban design, reduced open space, and of course safety and health.

• Now, in just eight weeks we’ve forced the DOB to respond and gotten media coverage of our lawsuit to help keep that agency under a spotlight. We are now able to bring our case to higher City agencies, and to the New York State Supreme Court. Our district’s elected officials from the city, state and federal government have all stood with us and said “yes, we can.”

This summer, you, your condo board, your business, your parent-teacher association and your community organization, will all have a chance to give personal testimony about the impact of the development, and you will have a say in the outcome – something that wasn’t possible just eight weeks ago.

Yet we still don’t know all of the developers’ plans, and the DOB continues to resist giving us information about permits and even safety issues at the construction site, even as tragic construction accidents and mistakenly issued permits have made headlines.

We all want the benefit of the positive effects the development will have on quality of life in the community – particularly new shopping options. But we don’t want the developers to impose unfair costs on us. After all, we will have to live with all of these impacts while the developers who live elsewhere reap all of the profits. The DOB and the City are not going to stand and fight for our safety and quality of life; we have to do it ourselves.

Fighting this battle all summer will be no day at the beach. But we will do it so that every stakeholder in this community has their say on the impacts of this development, both positive and negative. We intend to keep going until we get the environmental review and public participation in the community-based planning of the development that the law demands – but that only we as a community can fight for.