Yes, you really can fight city hall

To the editor:

How many times have you heard that old canard, “You can’t fight city hall?”

Well, it’s not always true as the Community Board 8 community, its community board, elected officials — and yes, The Riverdale Press — just proved.

Their combined and forceful persuasive abilities proved that when people work together on a sound and moral cause, it can prevail.

City hall and its minions determined to deprive the community of its small window to participatory democracy by seeking to repeal the Special Natural Area District regulations and substituting regulations that, among other things, gave institutional owners of large properties an even greater opportunity to avoid environmental and preservationist oversight and constraint, and removed the planners, community and its community board from the power of a last look at inappropriate changes to smaller properties that make up the bulk of the natural area district.

And, as if that were not enough, with the arrogance for which some bureaucrats are notorious, the board was told it must vote on an unintelligible and yet voluminous proposal (after its primary text — concerning Staten Island — was yanked at the last moment), and the borough president had to act without the benefit of community input.

Unanimously, community board members — under the leadership of board chair Rosemary Ginty — said “no.” Community residents rose up to join the chorus. The Riverdale Press editorially supported that effort. And a courageous borough president Ruben Diaz agreed.

Armed with that clear sense of community, and a firm determination to preserve it, Councilman Andrew Cohen was in a position to assert his influence to ensure the proposal would not pass the city council, and was thus withdrawn. That took courage and principled action.

That, in a nutshell, is what we achieved together. It took hard work on the part of individual residents in the community, like Sherida Paulsen, Jodie Colon, Martin Zelnick, Sura Jeselsohn, Karen Argenti and Stephanie Coggins, to name just a few. It took literally hours upon hours of work from the community board’s SNAD working group (Steven Froot, Bob Bender, Bob Fanuzzi and Rosemary Ginty).

And finally, it took Andrew Cohen to say, “Not on my watch,” for which we all thank him, as we thank each and every one of you.

You can fight city hall, when to do so is principled and important.

But the fight to preserve the environment and our natural areas is not over. We can and must — together with willing planners — now work to strengthen and rationalize the applicable natural area regulations that are the backbone of this community. Not by dictat, but by working together.

We now know it can be done.

Charles Moerdler

The author is chair of Community Board 8’s land use committee.

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