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Committed to Offering
Exceptional Quality and Service
Affordable Costs and Personalized Attention
• Offering No-Contact Virtual Appointments
• Ample Parking
• Specializing in Advance Funeral Planning
• Catered Receptions
2005 West 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11223
www.cusimanoandrussofuneralhome.com
Michael G. Rizzotto, Manager
22 COURIER LIFE, MAY 7-13, 2021
NOT SO FINE
City faces $60k per day in fi nes
for Gowanus tank delays: EPA
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
The city has done almost no work
on a massive sewage and stormwater
retention tank necessary for the Gowanus
Canal’s Superfund cleanup, despite
the federal government ordering
them to begin the process seven years
ago — which could put the Big Apple
on the hook for $60,000 per day in fi nes
for every day they stalled.
“The Environmental Protection
Agency issued an order in 2014 to begin
designing the second tank, and
it’s 2021, and they’ve essentially done
almost no design work, and still don’t
even have a new design contract in
place,” said EPA lawyer Brian Carr at
a meeting with the project’s watchdog
organization, the Gowanus Canal Community
Advisory Group, on April 27.
The tank in question is the smaller
of two — coming in at four million gallons
— that are needed to complete the
Superfund cleanup in addition to the
ongoing dredging of the canal bed.
If the daily levy is multiplied by
the fi ve-to-six year timeframe Carr
said Gotham offi cials have not been
following Uncle Sam’s orders, the city
could be looking at a bill somewhere
between $109,575,000 and $131,490,000
— roughly one-tenth of the $1.1 billion
budget for the two tanks combined.
EPA directed the city’s Department
of Environmental Protection to build the
smaller tank at the Sanitation Department
salt storage lot, known as the Salt
Lot, at Second Avenue and Sixth Street.
Up the canal, DEP must also install the
larger, eight million gallon cistern along
with a fi ltration facility known as the
head house at Butler and Nevins streets.
The catch basins are a crucial part of
the canal’s federally-supervised scrub,
which consist of two parts: dredging
the canal bed before stabilizing the soil
and capping it, and then installing the
two stormwater and sewage holding
tanks to reduce future pollution.
EPA at the end of March issued a
fresh legally-binding order with a new
schedule for the mid-canal tank to be
operational by 2028, and the upper
barrel and facility to be online by 2029.
That document also requires the city
to have a design for the mid-canal tank
done by May 31, and to start construction
in 2023.
A spokesman for DEP said the EPA’s
most recent timeline was “physically
infeasible,” and slammed the feds for
threatening sanctions as the Five Boroughs
recover from the pandemic.
“DEP is committed to the cleanup
of the canal while also protecting New
Yorker’s wallets, which is why we
have repeatedly told EPA that their
Barges docked at Huntington Street as part
of the Gowanus Canal’s Superfund Cleanup
in January. Photo by Kevin Duggan
proposed schedule is physically infeasible,”
said Edward Timbers in an
emailed statement. “During a time of
much-needed and appreciated federal
help, it seems counter-intuitive to be
threatening excessive fi nes while the
city recovers from a pandemic.”
While the city has released designs
for the larger tank and plans to demolish
the existing building there in the
fall, DEP offi cials made little progress
on the smaller catch basin and even secretly
moved funds from that project
to solicit alternative designs for the upper
facility last year, as Brooklyn Paper
revealed in November.
“That noncompliance is not insignifi
cant,” Carr told the CAG Tuesday.
“It’s been about fi ve-to-six years since
the city stopped work on the second
tank, and didn’t advise EPA that they
had transferred the money from work
on the second tank to work on two designs
for the fi rst tank.”
The city’s maneuver came to light
when EPA in a November missive rejected
DEP’s request to postpone the
tanks’ completion by up to a year-anda
half due to COVID-19-related budget
shortfalls. EPA at the time accused the
city of failing to comply with its past order,
but the federal agency did not specify
how large the penalties might be other
than saying they could be “substantial.”
The setback is one among many by
the city, including when municipal environmental
honchos fl oated the proposal
of burying a single 16-gallon tunnel
beneath the canal instead of the
tanks in 2018 — a scheme EPA rejected
the following year.
Bureaucrats sparred again when
the city tried to get away with using
faux-aged bricks to rebuild the facade
of the historic Butler Street Gowanus
Station building as part of the upper
tank facility, which EPA also shot
down.
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718-942-5693 ALEX & 718-627-1514
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Cusimano & Russo Funeral Home
SERVING THE COMMUNITY OF BROOKLYN FOR OVER 90 YEARS
718-372-1348
This firm is owned by a subsidiary of Service Corp. International, 1929 Allen Pkwy, Houston, TX 77019, 713-522-5141. New York state law mandates that all contracts for
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