Posted Sep 20, 2018, 1:11 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,919
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http://thevillager.com/2018/09/20/no...wntown-prison/
'No jail!’ Boos drown out hearing on Downtown prison
September 20, 2018
By The Villager
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At a packed town hall last Wednesday evening, Downtowners blasted Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to build a 40-story jail in Chinatown as a part of the initiative to close Rikers Island.
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"Closing Rikers Island, in my view, is a laudable goal,” said Nicholas Stabile, a board member of Chatham Green Cooperative, on Park Row. “But the process that the mayor employed to achieve this goal, it focuses only on half the equation: the people inside the jail. It ignores the other half of the equation: the people in the surrounding community.
“There was not a single slide up there about who’s in the community, how this affects the community, and what is going to happen,” Stabile said. “Like, honestly — what were you thinking?”
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Local politicians, while all supporting the larger goal of closing Rikers Island, slammed the process thus far.
“I do believe that we need a different system than Rikers,” Brewer told the audience. “You have to have a process to get to a good end point. I listen but I am frustrated.
“I may disagree with you on whether or not there should be a jail,” Brewer said, “but I will never disagree that there should be a community process that has lots of time in order to have your input.”
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The borough president said the city’s intention to hold one Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP, for all four jails should be stopped through a zoning change in each borough to allow for four separate ULURPs.
Councilmember Chin contended that the proposal “is not a done deal.”
“Right now, it’s so important to really hear what the community concerns [and] community needs are,” Chin said. “And that’s what we’re doing now.”
The audience was then supposed to break out into workshop sessions after the public comments, but the comment period and protests ate up all the time the city had at the venue, P.S. 124, at 40 Division St., in Chinatown. Chin suggested perhaps smaller follow-up meetings would allow for further detailed dialogue and feedback.
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