City and State Flood-Protection Funds Coming to Lower Manhattan
Rendering of a Battery Park City section of the BIG U, a proposed berm project by Danish architect group Bjarke Ingels Group designed to protect the lower part of Manhattan from flooding. Rendering: Bjarke Ingels Group
Lower Manhattan will finally receive a long-awaited $14.75 million in city and state resiliency funding to protect the area from future storms like Sandy.
The funding, announced by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office last month, includes $6.75 million from the city and state for flood protection planning for an area from Montgomery Street south to the Battery and up the west side of Manhattan to Jay Street in Tribeca. Another $8 million in city capital funds will go toward the design and implementation of a flood protection system in Battery Park.
“This is good news for the residents and the workers of Lower Manhattan,” said Community Board 1 Chair Catherine McVay Hughes, who had been a strong proponent for the resiliency funding.
The announcement came after a months-long push from CB1 and elected officials for the city to dedicate storm protection investment in Lower Manhattan.
In January, McVay Hughes and other CB1 members questioned Daniel Zarrilli, director of the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency, about why $4.21 billion in disaster recovery funds from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development had not yet found its way to Lower Manhattan.
Zarrilli told them that the city is working on a flood protection plan, called the BIG U, that is still decades away. Using sea-level projections for 2050, it proposes a series of barriers to wrap around the lower part of Manhattan, from West 57th Street to East 42nd Street. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has designated $335 million to build a 19-foot-high fortification for the section of the “U” between Montgomery Street and East 23rd Street, where the three-year project will begin in 2017. But funds had yet to be allocated to the area south of Montgomery.
“The real place to focus on is the coastal protection gap,” Zarrilli explained. “That is hundreds of millions of dollars that we don’t have right now, but we’re taking the first steps forward to understand what that number is and how to move that ball forward.”
Hoping to speed up that process, CB1 passed a resolution voicing the board’s concern that nothing is being done to protect Lower Manhattan from flooding in the short term. The resolution also called on local elected officials to advocate for the reallocation of the HUD funds “to address unmet resiliency needs in Community District 1.”
State Sen. Daniel Squadron called the funds allocation a “big step” in flood protection planning, from Montgomery Street to Battery Park City.
“The city’s acknowledgement of Lower Manhattan’s resiliency needs as part of its massive citywide plan is a great sign of its responsiveness,” he said in a statement.
“While that doesn’t correct all the issues caused by Sandy, it certainly is a step in the right direction,” Melissa Gindin, Squadron’s district liaison, told Community Board 1 last month. “I’m glad we’re making some steps forward.”
“We got the funding,” added Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who met with the mayor’s office twice to push for resiliency measures in Lower Manhattan. “[But] it’s still the beginning, and we’re going to make sure that we will continue to advocate on that.”
Jessica Lappin, the president of the Downtown Alliance, told the board that Sen. Charles Schumer recently called Lower Manhattan his “top priority” in the National Disaster Resilience Competition, a two-phase process that will competitively award nearly $1 billion in HUD Disaster Recovery funds to eligible communities.
“That wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t laid the groundwork over the past few months,” she said.
In the coming months, the city will issue a request for proposals, seeking a consultant team to study flood protection measures for Lower Manhattan, as well as the potential “secondary benefits” of those measures, including improved or expanded waterfront access, and enhanced water quality and habitat, the mayor’s office reported in a release. The team would also design and construct a first-phase capital improvement project for resiliency in Battery Park.
McVay Hughes called this effort “the first step of many.”
“Mother Nature has her own timeline,” she said. “We just need to make sure that we get ahead of it.”