Council Member Restler questions Stark on Taffy Place playground agreement

I'm going to call on Councilmember Ressler for questions.

Thank you so much, Chair Lewis.

And I do just want to take a moment to recognize one of the distinguished guests that we have joining us today, which is Rabbi Welts from Central UTA, the administrator of the second largest yeshiva in Williamsburg.

I just want to thank him for his great work in our community.

Could you just clarify the agreement that was made with the Parks Department around the Taffy Place playground?

Yes.

So the environmental review identified that this community has an existing issue with the amount of open space for the existing population that is there.

Basically, the dynamic there is any application that had a full environmental review that then necessitated an open space study would have identified an impact on the open space side.

So this was flagged early in the process, and the applicant team has committed to undertaking rehabilitation work in Taffy Playground, a significant rehab to existing handball courts

that will be required to the extent that a certain threshold number of residential apartments is built.

So this has been memorialized in a series of restricted declarations that all sites zoned with a residential zoning designation have to adopt.

They are particular to each site, but the commitment is what we would say is a joint in several.

Everybody is committed to this and, in fact, is a monumental coordinated effort to have a consortium rezoning be a...

able to coordinate amongst themselves.

Once this process is over, these are all independent owners and operators, but they are going to continue to work together after the conclusion of this process to ensure that that commitment is realized.

Yeah, I will just share this with my colleagues in case you end up in similar situations in the future.

You know, you had a handful of individual developers who were planning to rezone sites.

The Department of City Planning insisted that they all work together to make it one rezoning, which sounds good because you want to have that thoughtful neighborhood-wide planning.

But the impact of it was that there was an environmental review process that put significant economic burdens on the developers around the handball courts and other things.

So, you know, which are...

In the long term to the benefit of the community, but we're very challenging for the development team to make work.

And, you know, as the applicant noted, it's an unusual legal setup to have a consortium of private property owners coming together, chipping in on community improvements.

But I'm happy that it's all come together.

I cannot wait to vote for this project.

We intend to map MIH options one and three on all of these sites and look forward to approving this project as soon as possible.

So thank you very much for having me today, for being with us today.