Quantcast

Dumped by beep, member is back

It’s a hard battle, fighting the man. Especially if that man has
veto power, and many of your opinions are diametrically opposed to his.

That is a lesson Ken Diamondstone — a briefly former, and now reinstated,
Community Board 2 member — learned this week.

Diamondstone, whose appointment was tenuously renewed for one year June
9, less than a week after Borough President Marty Markowitz discharged
him from his 11-year tenure on the community board, held a press conference
Monday to shed light on what he characterized as an epidemic of shutting
out dissenters. Diamondstone said he was dismissed for disagreeing with
Markowitz over developer Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards plan.

“I am a former vice chair and a current member of Community Board
2. Or, rather, I was a member of Community Board 2 until I made the mistake
of disagreeing with Marty Markowitz about the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards
project,” said Diamondstone.

Joining him outside Borough Hall were 15 community members, four of them
currently members in good standing of boards 2, 6 and 8, and two former
CB2 members who Diamondstone charged were also given the boot for opposing
Markowitz’s arena and development agenda.

“I have always been an advocate for development of appropriate scale,”
said Diamondstone, citing as examples his leadership in securing senior
housing in Fort Greene’s Atlantic Village, and in the new Court House
development, a mixed-income rental facility developed by David Walentas
on Court Street and Atlantic Avenue.

“But I do not support the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards proposal,”
he continued. “I oppose the Ratner top-down secret process that comes
to the community after a year and a half as a fait accompli.

“And I oppose a land grab, and lining the pockets of Forest City
Ratner with hundreds of millions of extra dollars,” Diamondstone
said. “And because I said that at a closed-door meeting of a private
political group discussing possible endorsement of elected officials,
Marty Markowitz decided not to renew my membership on CB2, where I have
served and worked conscientiously for over 11 years.”

The private group to which Diamondstone referred was a meeting of the
Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, of which he is a member. That
group recently endorsed Norman Seigel for public advocate, who represents
Prospect Heights homeowners in litigation against eminent domain being
used for the arena project.

With his desire to bring a major professional sports team to Brooklyn,
Markowitz has been a driving force in seeing that Ratner’s proposal
to build a basketball arena for the developer’s New Jersey Nets NBA
franchise and 17 high-rise office and residential buildings emanating
from the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues succeeds. That
plan, which would create up to 7,300 units of mixed-income housing in
Prospect Heights, may rely on the condemnation of private property under
the state’s eminent domain authority.

Diamondstone said he was summoned to Markowitz’s Borough Hall office
on June 6, two days before CB2’s monthly board meeting. He said the
borough president confronted him about having “attacked him in public”
and then asked him to resign from the board.

“I’ve never attacked him in public personally,” said Diamondstone,
who refused to resign.

By Tuesday, Diamondstone had heard rumors that he had been dismissed.
When he showed up for the monthly board meeting on June 8 he was told
he was no longer a CB2 member.

Two days after The Brooklyn Papers ran an article about the dismissal,
Diamondstone was reappointed to the board — but only conditionally.

Markowitz’s office issued the following statement:

“I have received numerous complaints about Ken Diamondstone’s
disruptive behavior and requests from both board members and community
leaders to remove him from the board. Instead, I appointed Ken to a one-year
term to give him the opportunity to repair those relationships.

“I have appointed many people to community boards who differ with
my views on the Atlantic yards Project and other issues. There is no litmus
test for board membership. Ken’s assertion to the contrary is a pure
fabrication. Once again, it’s hyperbole intended to promote his virulent
anti-arena agenda.”

A normal community board appointment is for two years.

Markowitz chief of staff Greg Atkins explained that the term was just
a year because rather than being reappointed, Diamondstone was now appointed
to fill a seat left behind by a board member who resigned midterm.

But several other current and former CB2 members said they had received
the same treatment.

Cathy Wassylenko, who was not a CB2 member but had a seat on its landmarks
committee, charged that she was pushed out of her committee seat after
she criticized the board’s chairwoman, Shirley McRae, for attending
closed-door meetings with the developers of the proposed arena site, Forest
City Ratner.

“I testified at a hearing about the procedure … and I said in
my testimony I thought they [McRae and District Manager Robert Perris,
who also attended the meetings] should be removed from the community board,”
Wassylenko told The Brooklyn Papers.

“That sort of triggered my dismissal,” said Wassylenko, who
said it was only a month later that McRae contacted her and said she was
merging the landmarks committee with the land use committee and had to
shed members.

Perris said this week that Wassylenko was kicked off the committee for
poor attendance and one particular outburst just prior to the committee
merger.

Another CB2 member, who did not want his name published for fear of retribution,
said he, too, was brought into Markowitz’s office and given the same
treatment as Diamondstone. Unlike Diamondstone, who was appointed by the
borough president, this longstanding member was a councilmember appointee.
When he was called in, he was joined by his sponsoring councilmember,
Letitia James, who is one of the staunchest political opponents of the
Atlantic Yards project.

All appointees of council members must be approved by the borough president,
who has veto power.

“He sat me down in his office,” said the board member, recalling
his interaction with Markowitz in December. “‘I hear you mentioned
my name a couple of times in public. I was thinking of not reappointing
you to the board again. I don’t want you embarrassing me by mentioning
my name,” he said he was warned by the borough president.

“I got furious because, to be honest, I’m so hot-tempered. I
said, ‘My lips are too sore to be kissing anybody’s ass —
including yours.”

Kenn Lowy, a non-board member who has sat on the transportation committee
for five years, said he applied to be a board member two years in a row,
but just gave up after a while.

“The third year I didn’t apply, but received a letter from Markowitz
saying I was not allowed in. Which I thought was funny, since I didn’t
even apply,” said Lowy.

He added, “They don’t want people who are outspoken like I am,
and I guess they don’t want people who are outspoken like Ken was,
either.”