Rally against garbage transfer station in Brooklyn

I’ll be attending this rally on Sunday morning, and will probably speak. The details of this event are below.

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[Invitation to rally from Brooklyn Greens Chair, Mitchel Cohen]

Hi,

This is to invite you to the rally SUNDAY, August 11, 2013, at 11 a.m. in scenic Bensonhurst along Gravesend Bay, against the proposed (and subsequently approved by the Department of Energy Conservation) SW Brooklyn municipal Garbage transfer station.

Place: The end of Bay Parkway, overlooking Gravesend Bay (a couple of miles south of the Verrazano Bridge).

How to get there: D or F train to Bay Parkway. Take #6 bus WEST. It will go under the Belt Parkway. Get off there, at Kohl’s shopping center (aka Caesar’s Bay) and walk to the water. If you take the D train, you could also walk down Bay Parkway around 2/3rds of a mile, to the water. [By car, take the Belt Parkway and get off at the Bay Parkway exit.]

Invited are all the Mayoral candidates from every party, and we’ve asked them to take the pledge to block the Garbage Transfer Station from being built. A few have expressed interest, so we’ll see. Please bring cameras and signs. And SPEAK UP!

The community has been fighting this garbage transfer station for 9 years — we’ve done quite an effective job. No transfer station belongs in a residential neighborhood, period. The ones in residential neighborhoods in Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Canarsie and Flushing should be shut down as well.

We’d filed a lawsuit, and we now have a Judge’s decision, which will be discussed in depth at the rally. He wrote that the process used by the City was “irrational”, but he approved it anyway if a large number of conditions he added to compensate for the proposal’s shortcomings and stupidity would be fulfilled by the City.

What are those “irrational” processes, you ask? Good question. For one, the City refused to do any studies of the water’s contamination before submitting for approval. Our contention is that the waters are extremely polluted by decades of contamination by an illegally operated municipal incinerator by the very same agency on the very same site, that took us many years and a succesful lawsuit to finally force closed. And that dredging — which will be required annually — will stir up all those toxins and poison the entire residential area.

Well, guess what? The Army Corps of Engineers required exactly the kind of study we were demanding for all those years and found exactly the toxins in high quantities that we’d feared. The Judge was aghast — but said that the study could not be used in our lawsuit because it occurred after the papers were submitted!!!! So the Department of Sanitation he ruled “irrational”, but then proceeded to compound that irrationality!

So too with Hurricane Sandy, which changed the shape and designation of the entire coastline in southern Brooklyn. That hurricane would have flooded the garbage station had it been in operation at the time, and sent all those toxins into the community, which consists of a home for special children adjacent to the site, and a number of old age homes and hospices nearby. And a bird sanctuary! (The birds will be poisoned by eating the pesticides they’ll use to kill rats and mice.) It may look “state-of-the-art” but when you peel away the layers, it’s a horror.

So please come!!!!!

Yes, the No Spray Coalition is part of this lawsuit and rally. We are working with local politicians and community groups, especially NY State Assembly representative from the area, Bill Colton, and Democratic Party candidate (in the primaries) for City Council Mark Treyger — both of them are wonderful on these issues, and way more visible than most of the all-talk no-action Green Party. I’d like to see a visible Green Party presence there! (Last rally, Dan Zuger came all the way down from the Bronx, thank you Dan! But he was the only Green Party person I recognized there, although a lot of people — especially high school kids — asked me about the Party after my speech.)

Gracias!

Mitchel Cohen
Brooklyn Greens/Green Party, and
Coordinator, No Spray Coalition against toxic pesticides