Brooklyn Heights wants to keep its trash trucks on the edge of Park Slope.
The neighborhood’s powerful community board rejected a city plan to move a garbage truck parking lot onto its turf, even though every neighborhood is responsible for having its own garage within the district’s borders.
In trashing the Department of Sanitation proposal, Community Board 2 refused to relocate the Second Avenue garage, which sits in Park Slope’s Community Board 6, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is a part of CB2.
District Manager Rob Perris downplayed the notion that Brooklyn Heights and the rest of CB2 were pulling out every stop to keep the garbage trucks off their streets, stating that the board opposed the plan because the Navy Yard is the wrong place for the garage.
“The Navy Yard is a very successful industrial park that is home to hundreds of quality jobs,” said Perris. “Locating the sanitation garage there would be contrary to that mission.
“Every square foot that a sanitation garage takes up is a square foot that can’t be used for quality private-sector jobs,” Perris said.
A Navy Yard spokesman said the industrial park was pleased.
“The CB2 resolution speaks for itself and we echo their position,” the spokesman said.
The CB2 garage has been between 14th and 15th streets for at least the past 18 years, according to CB6 District Manager Craig Hammerman, whose board’s sanitation garage is only blocks away at Second Avenue between 11th and 12th streets.
“We’ve mentioned to the Department of Sanitation every year the thought that it was their responsibility to relocate the garage to an appropriate site within CB2,” Hammerman said. “It’s been a perpetual item on our agenda.”
The Sanitation Department says it wants to move the garage as well — it just hasn’t found the right place yet.
“Although the Department would like to have each district garage located in the community district it serves, no suitable alternative site … has been identified,” said spokesman Matthew LiPani.
For residents of the changing neighborhood at the gateway to Park Slope, the extra garage only adds traffic and noise to their increasingly residential community.
“It’s certainly louder and busier here than it would be if they moved the garage,” said Meredith Rike.
Others think it’s just another case of the city forcing their corner of Brooklyn to do other neighborhoods’ dirty work.
“Gowanus absorbs a lot of industry from the rest of the city, so having the garage doesn’t strike me as inconsistent at all,” said Rachel Foullon of Red Hook. “But it would only be fair if we got something in return.”
