The city’s turning away of international shipping business from the
Red Hook container port infuriated Community Board 6 members who this
week voted to send a letter to city officials demanding an explanation.
At the April 13 full board meeting, CB6 unanimously voted to draft a letter
to the city’s Economic Development Corporation demanding to know
why agency officials cast away $1.6 billion in trade when a German shipping
company expressed interest in porting in Brooklyn.
The vote came about four days after The Brooklyn Papers broke
the story that cargo-haulers Hamburg Sud had decided to port in New
Jersey instead of at with American Stevedoring Inc. (ASI) at their terminal
in Red Hook, costing the city as many as 400 longshoreman jobs and ancillary
jobs, and billions in trade.
Hamburg Sud had asked ASI for assurances that the city intended to keep
the port open for at least five years. The city refused to sign the letter,
even though ASI’s lease runs another three years and the city’s
stated plan to build a cruise ship terminal at piers 11 and 12 would not
interfere with port operations.
EDC officials say they hope to expand cruise operations to Pier 10 in
2007, if the demand for another cruise berth is evident.
“Very clearly, our intention is to have enough property to ultimately
build out three berths for cruise, which is what the 20-year master plan
[for bringing cruise ships to the city] says we need, and intend, to accommodate,”
said EDC spokeswoman Janel Patterson.
Craig Hammerman, district manager of CB6, said the board was incensed
by the stories, and agreed to demand that EDC explain their plans for
the waterfront, which falls within the district’s boundaries.
“If what the community read in the papers about Hamburg Sud’s
deal is true, and that the city was unwilling to indicate that they saw
a maritime-use future, at least for the immediate future, at our piers,
then it sparked an outrage in the community,” Hammerman said.
The board members agreed to state in the letter that “shipping operations
and cruise lines can coexist” and call any statements contradicting
that notion “willful misrepresentation.”
“We suspect that what we’ve been told in the past — which
is that both containers and cruise were compatible maritime uses —
was misrepresented to us, and in fact the city’s own study, [which
investigated uses for Piers 6 through 12] was a misrepresentation, then,”
explained Hammerman.
That nearly half-million-dollar study, released to the public last year
only after The Brooklyn Papers threatened to obtain it under Freedom of
Information laws, was immediately labeled as “outdated” by EDC
officials because Pier 6 had subsequently been deemed un fit for cruise
operations and was to be ceded in stead to the Brooklyn Bridge Park plan.
Hammerman said news of Hamburg Sud being turned away frfom the Brooklyn
port came as a particularly unpleasant surprise since the board had until
that point felt the EDC had been very forthcoming and receptive to them,
and seemed responsive to their testimonies before the City Council supporting
the working waterfront.
“The EDC has been wonderful about regularly coming out to our committee,
and about keeping us posted about the cruise ships,” said Hammerman.
“So we were getting very inconsistent and unclear signals form the
city,” he said, adding “and people were hopping mad, to say
the least.”
As to what would happen to the container port, EDC spokeswoman Janel Patterson
said, “The containers will move somewhere else. Whether there is
room for them in the upland left in the Red Hook Marine Terminal, or if
it’s somewhere else like South Brooklyn or Howland Hook [on Staten
Island], I can’t speak to that.”
Hammerman said the agency’s stance seemed confusing.
“It was … incongruous to see these mixed signals coming out
of the agency, when all along we’ve been working with them to capture
the best of both worlds,” he said.
Ariella Cohen contributed to this report.
