City lawyers admit BMT Task Force was advisory

Responding to a lawsuit claiming that the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) violated the New York State Open Meetings Law in creating the vision plan for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal redevelopment, the city admits for the first time explicitly that the task force—which voted to approve the plan in September of last year—was an advisory body.

In a memorandum to the Kings County Supreme Court, city lawyers write, “Because the Task Force’s determinations lacked delegated sovereign authority, its activities remained advisory in nature.” While the city and others made it clear that further approvals were necessary once the vision plan had been voted through, both lawmakers and EDC officials have stated that the task force has final approval over the plan.

“We understood that the decisions there were not binding,” said Council Member Alexa Avilés, who served as co-vice chair on the task force. “ However, what you hear from the other side is, ’Well, no, [the vision plan] can’t be changed because that’s what the [task force] approved.”

She added that the EDC, along with the Mayor and the task force chair, US Rep. Dan Goldman, used affirmative vote as evidence that the community approved of the plan.

In a letter sent from the city and the EDC to elected officials on May 3, 2024 (before the redevelopment was announced to the public), it’s stated that one of the task force’s responsibilities are “to advise and approve on key planning priorities for the site and review and advise on and approve plan documents prior to their submittal for public approvals.”

Last September the task force voted to approve the vision plan for the redevelopment. The vote happened, as all previous task force meetings, behind closed doors. Over the year-long public engagement process, the only look the public got into the task force meetings came from leaks on Instagram and interviews in traditional media.

It was decided early on to shut the public out of the task force meetings, Avilés said. She and others objected, asking that the public be allowed to listen in. The EDC immediately objected, and the sides reached a compromise in which summaries of the meetings would be made public.

“ Summaries are not useful when you’re having substantive conversations. They’re good for very limited purposes, but certainly did not meet a transparency threshold community members would have wanted and certainly deserved,” the council member said.

Arguing that the proceedings violated the New York State Open Meetings Law, three Columbia Waterfront District residents sued the city, asking the judge to pause further planning and throw out the “yes” vote.

“When public land is on the line, the public has the right to be in the room. That is not a policy preference. It is the law,” wrote attorney Michael C. Pope, lead counsel for the petitioners, in a Dec. 19 press release announcing the lawsuit.

“ What makes it particularly egregious is that during the two months in between [July and September], the plan changed because people flipped their votes.  [The vision plan] wasn’t brought back to the community so that we could see the changes,” John Leyva, longtime Columbia Waterfront resident and one of the petitioners, told the Red Hook Star-Revue.

Leyva, who was a member of one of the BMT planning project’s advisory groups, recalled that last December, over the course of a few weeks, the task force, the advisory groups, and the community all convened for separate meetings, in which they were all presented with a separate set of facts.

“We can’t even have a coherent conversation because the community has one set of information, the advisory group has another set of information, and the task force has another set of information,” Leyva said. “They did all this on purpose. This was not their first rodeo; they knew what they were doing.”

In the response to the suit, Muriel Goode-Trufant, corporation counsel for the City of New York, wrote to the court, “The Vision Plan’s development was a uniquely open process.”

A key piece of evidence for the petitioners is a letter from the New York State Committee on Open Government, stating that the task force’s meetings are subject to the Open Meetings Law. The city, though, argues that the committee’s statements are non-binding and that the petitioner did not provide the committee with all the facts; Goode-Trufant also notes that the city wasn’t provided a copy of the letter until the lawsuit was filed.

In the letter, Kristin O’Neill, deputy director and counsel at the Committee on Open Government, wrote that she had studied EDC’s own description of the task force, as well as information from the City Council. “If the information I have reviewed is accurate … this Task Force has been given the authority to approve the NYC EDC’s plan for redevelopment of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal,” O’Neill wrote. Given that the task force also consisted of more than three people and was “charged with a public duty to be performed by them jointly,” the task force, thus, “is a public body that must comply with the Open Meetings Law,” wrote O’Neill.

The city also contends that annulling the vote is an “unwarranted and extreme remedy” and that the petitioners “seek to undo one year of public engagement, and the community’s collaborative development of a plan to reimagine its waterfront space.”

But to Leyva and the other petitioners, the community was never meaningfully involved in developing a vision plan.  “We just feel like the only way to do this is just to do it over again,” Leyva said.

EDC spokesperson Jeff Holmes said in an email that they aren’t able to comment on ongoing litigation.