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Video: Upper East Side NIMBYs Boo Quinn Over Garbage Depot
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Feb 24, 2013
Modified Feb 25, 2013
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By
Christopher Robbins
Published Feb 24, 2013
Modified Feb 25, 2013
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The easiest thing for a mayoral candidate to tell a group of angry, NIMBY activists from the Upper East Side is that a planned garbage depot that runs through their neighborhood is an "insane" idea, or that it needs "additional consideration," or that they're waiting to formulate a "deliberative response." This is exactly what Democratic candidates Sal Albanese, Bill de Blasio, John Liu, and Bill Thompson said of the marine transfer station on 91st Street at a forum on the issue yesterday. City Council speaker Christine Quinn, however, said she supported the location of the depot, and was promptly booed. "Don't expect us to vote for you, baby!" one man shouted at her. "That's fine," Quinn replied.
Quinn, who noted that the depot is part of a long-standing plan to ease sanitation truck congestion and more fairly distribute the burden of borough-wide environmental issues (there are 15 such undesirable municipal sites above 96th Street), pointed out that a recycling facility is going up in her own district: "I can't stand up in this room and say your neighborhood has to take something if mine does not take one."
At the 1:50 mark in this video taken by Capital New York reporter Azi Paybarah, Quinn notes that the $240 million depot is
Critically important reduce the excessive truck burden that has existed in some lower-income neighborhoods of color for decades in this city that is the truth of what's happening in other neighborhoods. I know there is a disagreement about that but it is the truth.
The Bloomberg administration isn't planning on moving the depot either. "They're not, and I'm not changing my position," Quinn said. "But we are doing a review with an outside expert on what structural changes need to be made." To his credit, de Blasio noted that even if it was moved out of the path of the beloved Asphalt Green, the depot should still be built in Manhattan.
"To me, it smacks of pandering," executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance Eddie Bautista told Capital of the other candidates' responses. "Out of all of them, [Quinn] takes the most progressive position, in the lions den."
Tagged
sanitation
2013 election
quinn
garbage
nimby
ues
Environmental Racism
christine quinn
upper east side
Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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