Plans to pay for Brooklyn Bridge Park primarily using revenue derived from luxury housing didn’t get the nod from the community, elected officials or advisory committees before they were announced, sources said this week.

Nonetheless, the most recent designs for the 1.3-mile waterfront housing, commercial and open space development, which have been reviewed by the public at sparsely advertised presentations throughout the past few months, have taken for granted that housing is the only solution to the problem of financing the park’s yearly maintenance fees of $15.2 million.

At each of the meetings an additional idea for row houses along Furman Street was also introduced, but so far that is being called a preliminary idea by the park planners. More concrete are four high-rise condominiums with a total of 730 units planned for the Atlantic Avenue and DUMBO-Vinegar Hill ends of the park.

Original plans by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to create a waterfront housing development, introduced in 1986, met with fierce objection from the communities that surround the property, which runs from Pier 6 at Atlantic Avenue to just past the Manhattan Bridge. That opposition led to the creation of the park idea, one of whose tenets was that housing not be built on the waterfront.

Yet the latest plans presented by the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation (BBPDC), a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation charged with planning and building the park, dictate luxury housing as the only viable revenue source.

Even if nobody can figure why that is.

Several elected officials say that prior to the housing component’s addition in December, they’d heard little to nothing about it as a reality.

“We were not [consulted],” on the idea of pursuing housing for revenue generation prior to adding it to the plans, said Dan Wiley, a community coordinator for Rep. Nydia Velazquez.

Assemblywoman Joan Millman said she hadn’t heard of it, either.

“We believe the Citizen’s Adisory Committee was made aware of the various pros and cons of the different revenue-generating options,” said Corri Freedman, a spokeswoman for Millman, “but the assemblywoman wasn’t informed of the extent of the housing [until December].”

Roy Sloane, a Cobble Hill resident and member of the CAC, said he hadn’t heard about housing since it was discarded in 2001, which he said happened at the behest of Community Board 6. Although he opposes the housing now planned for the park, Sloane said he used to advocate for a small, fixed amount of housing in the design.

“It was a very contentious point,” said Sloane. “Essentially there was a proposal to build some small amount of housing on the table, but it was never specified what.”

Barbara Brookhart, another CAC member, who formerly worked for the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition (now Conservancy), said she had not heard of housing being brought back into the plan since the Port Authority plan was beaten down by community opposition.

“It never came to the community. Even when there was a Local Development Corporation, it never came to the community,” Brookhart said.

But Hank Gutman, chairman of the 15-member park LDC, a precursor to the BBPDC that still exists to complete a federally funded park transportation study, said that housing was a topic that had reached his board on several occasions.

“I can’t say at what point housing first surfaced; frankly I don’t remember. We understood back in the LDC days, back when the LDC was working on the plan, was what you wanted in terms of ways to generate revenue were uses that would be compatible for the park.”

Wendy Leventer, president of the BBPDC, has declined all Brooklyn Papers requests for comment on the park plan, referring all calls to the Empire State Development Corporation.

As to concerns that the BBPDC did not consult with the elected representatives of the communities that surround the park plan, Deborah Wetzel, a spokeswoman for the state authority, said, “In our normal process we always brief elected officials before the public. They were definitely notified before the unveiling.”

Asked whether elected officials were consulted or asked their opinions of the changes to the park plan as they were being devised, Wetzel declined to comment further.

State Sen. Martin Connor, one of the earliest political sponsors of the park, who represents Brooklyn Heights, said he’d caught an inkling of the housing plan several months prior to the Dec. 18 unveiling of the new plans to elected officials.

He said that Wendy Leventer, president of the BBPDC, first came to him last summer.

“Wendy first came to see me [in June or July] and said, ‘We’re having trouble making the numbers work,’” Connor said.

“They basically told me to get new revenue would require more development,” he told The Brooklyn Papers.

“I did say, ‘What kind of development?’ and they said maybe housing, maybe other things. What we see now is that housing generates revenue, and it generates recurring and substantial revenue for a smaller footprint,” Connor said.

“At that point they were going to go back to the planners to do some things, one was look at construction costs. There was no way they could do some things in the budget,” he said, noting that one of those was a bio-wall along Furman Street and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which has now been omitted.

Brooklyn Heights Councilman David Yassky said he knew housing would be considered as a revenue source as soon as 360 Furman St., a former factory of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, was sold to a developer who plans on converting it into condominiums. He said it was always on the table in discussions for Pier 6 uses.

The 12-story former book and video distribution center for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which sits between Joralemon Street and Atlantic Avenue on the uplands of the piers, was purchased last spring by Manhattan-based RAL Development Services, which plans on converting the 1 million-square-foot building into condominiums.

When RAL President Robert Levine began discussing payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTS) to bolster the park’s missing green space, he created a jumping-off point for planners to re-evaluate options for revenue, explained Yassky.

“The first piece was 360 Furman St.,” said Yassky. “I think that’s the first time housing first surfaced as a revenue generator.

“Before it was sold I sent a letter to the Jehovah’s Witnesses … saying I personally will insist that anybody who turns this into residential help serve the park; so certainly that idea was on the table,” added Yassky, who heads the council’s waterfronts committee.

But Brookhart insisted that in her years with the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition, she had never heard about it.

“The housing never came to the community before they put it on there,” she said. “Now they’ve gotten way ahead of the community.”

©2005 Community Newspaper Group