Call it a positive development.
The city extended a deadline for Boerum Hill residents to submit comments on two massive towers planned for their neighborhood after elected officials demanded locals get more time to weigh in.
“Seven working days do not allow enough time for people who were not in attendance on June 28 to thoroughly review the proposal and craft a written response,” said state Sen. Velmanette Montgomery (D–Boerum Hill), Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon (D–Downtown), and Councilman Steve Levin (D–Boerum Hill) in a letter to the city pushing for the extension.
The deadline, set last month for July 10, was moved to July 28, giving neighbors a full month to provide thoughts on how the Educational Construction Fund — the education department’s development arm that allows companies to bulldoze old schools and build luxury high-rises in their place as long as the buildings include new classrooms — should conduct a study on how Alloy Development’s 74- and 38-story towers would affect the nabe.
Plans for the high-rises — which would hold 900 apartments and rise on a triangular lot bounded by Flatbush Avenue, Third Avenue, and State Street — include building a 350-seat elementary school and moving the already on-site Khalil Gibran International School from its location inside a crumbling Civil War-era building to a new facility.
The Educational Construction Fund will use comments it receives to determine how to conduct its Environmental Impact Study, which residents at the June 28 hearing demanded expand from just 400 feet around the site’s perimeter to within a half-mile of it, in order to better account for the changes the high-rises will bring to a neighborhood where several towers already have risen.
Locals opposed to the buildings say new development is an unfair trade for much-needed infrastructure improvements, but Khalil Gibran’s principal pleaded for the community to support the project so his students can move into a functional school.
Locals can submit their comments to Jennifer Maldonado, Educational Construction Fund, 30-30 Thomson Avenue, Fourth Floor, Long Island City, NY 11101, or e-mail khali
