BY KIRSTYN BRENDLEN
A new lawsuit fi led against
the city aims to overturn thecontested
Gowanus rezoning,
alleging that land-use change
violates state and federal law.
The suit was fi led by activist
groups Voice of Gowanus
and Friends and Residents of
Greater Gowanus, and a collection
of Gowanus residents, in
Kings County Supreme Court
late last month. The 38-page
complaint accuses the city’s
Parks, Housing Preservation
and Development, and Citywide
Administrative Services
departments of violating the
National Environmental Policy
and National Historic Preservation
acts, as well as New
York’s Environmental Conservation
Law, Historic Protection
Act and State Environmental
Quality Review Act.
“I have tried many environmental
law cases in my
decades as a lawyer, but the
Gowanus rezoning involves
an exceptionally egregious set
of failures to comply with the
law,” said environmental lawyer
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Richard Lippes, who is representing
the complainants.
“This is one of the most complex
cases I have seen: the cascading,
overlapping failures to
comply with state and federal
laws is stunning. This is not
your run of the mill environmental
case. It rises to another
order of magnitude entirely.”
Lippes repped plaintiffs in
the infamous Love Canal case,
where hundreds of families
were evacuated from the area
surrounding the toxic Canal as
dangerous chemicals seeped
into their neighborhood, causing
serious health risks.
The city council voted
nearly-unanimously to approve
the 82-block rezoning,
which is expected to bring
An excavator scoops out some polluted sediment from the Gowanus Canal. The heavily-polluted canal is at the
center of a new lawsuit seeking to overturn the Gowanus rezoning. File photo by Kevin Duggan
dozens of new developments
to the neighborhood in coming
years, in November, after
a years-long heated debate.
While many celebrated the
vote, especially after thencouncilmembers
Stephen
Levin and Brad Lander successfully
negotiated to include
the three core demands of the
Gowanus Neighborhood Justice
Coalitions, some concerns
lingered, especially about the
environmental impacts of
mass development in an ecologically
sensitive nabe.
Gowanus is best known for
the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund
site in the process of being
cleaned by the federal Environmental
Protection Agency,
and the proximity to the canal
makes the neighborhood especially
prone to fl ooding.
The lawsuit accuses the
Department of City Planning
of violating SEQRA by failing
to issue a “Findings Statement,”
which would analyze
the results of the Final Environmental
Impact Statement
and confi rm that the rezoning
“avoids or minimizes adverse
environmental impacts to the
maximum extent practicable.”
Late last month, the EPA
sent a letter to the state’s Department
of Environmental
Conservation, expressing
concern about the ongoing
cleanup effort and saying that
further action than is currently
planned might be required
to keep toxic coal tar
and contaminated groundwater
from leaching into the canal
and neighboring lots.
The suit takes complaints
a step further in accusing the
city of violating the National
Environmental Policy Act.
No-zone!
Lawsuit seeks to overturn
contested Gowanus rezoning
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