Good afternoon,
I am Council Member Ben Kallos. Thank you to the Department of City Planning for hosting this meeting.
This scoping session is crucial for the community to have a voice in this proposal’s environmental impact statement.
I am your Council Member and I will have a vote on this project as it goes through the ULURP process.
From what I have seen so far, I have concerns about the shadow study and the impact on St. Catherine’s Park. I have expressed these concerns at Community Board 8 meetings and listened to support, opposition, and suggestions to improve the project.
As you know, the current Blood Center building is located on a through lot in the mid-block on 66th and 67th st., zoned R8B for residential use with a height limit of 75 feet. This proposal would rezone half of the block to allow the construction of a 16-story, 334-foot-tall building.
As with any zoning change, we must carefully study the impact on our climate and on the surrounding neighborhood. With a proposal of this magnitude on a mid-block, we have to ask if there are mitigation measures that can sufficiently address the project’s impacts.
I am particularly concerned by the impact the new building would have on sunlight in St. Catherine’s Park.
The environmental impact study should investigate the impact to our only Park in the East 60's.
- How many children and families use St. Catherine’s Park each year and during what hours? Specifically, how many children use what areas of the park during the hours that of projected shadow impact in the build scenario?
- How would the new shadows impact activation and use?
If there is an impact, what will be the impact on the health of children playing outside for fewer hours a day, burning fewer calories, particularly on childhood obesity rates in a city with an epidemic of overweight children and adults?
As the applicant looks at mitigation measures, is there an example of a similar project with a similar or greater loss of light to a city park, where mitigation actually increased the use of the park during shaded hours after the construction of the project?
I ask this because a community as a whole should be better off following discretionary land use actions than before.
Mitigation will need to overcome the negative environmental impacts of this project.
We should not only look at St. Catherine’s Park. The Blood Center sits across the street from the Julia Richman Education Complex. Julia Richman houses six schools with students from across the city of New York, including one school focused on students from immigrant families and a school for children on the autism spectrum.
The science of effective learning spaces has shown that natural light in classrooms “boosts mood, alertness, concentration and energy levels” and improves test scores.
How much natural light will be lost in classrooms at Julia Richman?
A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America confirmed what might be common sense: “External noise was found to have a significant negative impact upon performance.” How much construction noise will be audible in the classroom or outdoors during classroom and construction hours?
What will the impacts of this project be to students with autism trying to learn across the street? Can those impacts be completely mitigated? If not will the children ever be able to catch up?
I was proud to support the passage of Local Law 19 of 2019, known as the Climate Mobilization Act, which sets ambitious carbon emissions standards for New York City’s biggest polluters: its buildings.
- What will the difference in CO2 emissions be between the current building and the building as proposed?
- Will the building as proposed be compliant with the long-term requirements of the Climate Mobilization Act?
- If not, what will the difference in CO2 emissions be between the building as proposed and after required retrofits to meet the Climate Mobilization Act's long-term regulations?
What impact will rezoning this half-block of residential zoning to commercial zoning have on projected affordable housing for the neighborhood? What would be the impact of this rezoning were it repeated once, twice, or on every block of the Eastside? What is the impact on the commercial core and emissions from vacant spaces 9 blocks away with the addition of several million FAR of commercial space?
These are just some of the questions that I would like to see studied in the environmental impact statement and hope that we can get these answers for the community. Thank you for having me today and for allowing me to testify.
[The conclusion of this testimony was made extemporaneously, no transcript is currently available]