State development officials fired the chief planner of its Brooklyn Bridge Park project last week — as experts admitted that the controversial housing and open-space development will cost twice as much as anticipated.
The dismissal of Wendy Leventer, president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation, came after a costly legal battle with opponents of the project, a 1.3-mile parkland, luxury condo, retail and hotel development on the publicly owned waterfront between Atlantic Avenue and the foot of the Manhattan Bridge.
Leventer took over the $130-million project in 2004, after a long and hopeful public planning process that had local leaders anticipating a vast Prospect Park-style greenspace on the Brooklyn waterfront.
But soon after she came on board, that all changed.
Instead of a traditional, taxpayer-funded city park, the so-called “Brooklyn Bridge Park” would be maintained with revenue generated from commercial development within its footprint, Leventer told residents in a contentious meeting in 2004.
“We basically blew up at her,” said Roy Sloane, a Cobble Hill activist who attended the meeting.
And that anger never waned. This week, opponents of the development project weren’t sad to see Leventer go.
“Wendy Leventer has provided no transparency,” said Judi Francis, a critic of the project who sued to block the development.
Francis said Leventer oversaw a “sham process,” but last week, the New York Post linked her ouster to the $16.5 million that Leventer’s agency has already spent on a park that doesn’t exist
ESDC spokesman Errol Cockfield told The Brooklyn Paper that firing Leventer was part of larger changes by the Spitzer administration, which is still projecting that the park will be done by the spring of 2010.
The Leventer firing comes just as experts said last week that soaring construction costs citywide could double the price of the park — and that the state will have to figure out how to pay without adding more private development.
“It’s clearly going to cost more than we’ve estimated and we intend to [lobby public officials] for the additional funding,” said Marianna Koval, executive director of the Brooklyn Bridge Conservancy, a non-profit that has raised $5.6 million for programming in the park since 1999.
