This frost-resistant-fountain project is frozen in place!
Prospect Park joggers are furious that meadow keepers have yet to install three out of four non-freezing water fountains that they promised to debut by Thanksgiving.
“It’s an issue of government accountability,” said Redmond Haskin, a Park Slope resident and avid runner. “Don’t promise something and then blow by it.”
Locals in 2016 voted to fund the four fountains — which cost taxpayers some $175,000, but retail for a modest $2,000 each — via Park Slope Councilman Brad Lander’s participatory-budgeting initiative.
And last moth, Lander and meadow stewards with the Prospect Park Alliance announced the arrival of the ever-flowing H20 dispensers, which are supposed to hydrate park-goers between November and April, when the standard water fountains in Brooklyn’s Backyard are switched off.
But locals looking to quench their thirst since then said no fountains arrived after workers installed the first new contraption near Vanderbilt Playground ahead of the Prospect Park Track Club’s Turkey Trot run on Thanksgiving Day.
“They were eager to have one working so they could have an event before the Turkey Trot,” said Stanely Greenberg, who bicycles through the park regularly. “I was impressed by the speed of construction, and surprised by how it just stopped.”
Alliance leaders blamed the delay on bad weather, according to the group’s spokeswoman Deborah Kirschner, who said rain and freezing temperatures stalled the excavation work necessary to hook up the rest of the fountains, which will be connected to waterlines buried deep enough that they won’t ice over.
And there is not a set date for the three remaining fountains to debut, according to Kirschner, who said one going in near the park’s Garfield Place entrance will likely be installed next, followed by the last two at Ball Fields 6 and 7.
