No Land Grab

Former Community Board 6 member Edie Stone wasn’t surprised that her resignation registered barely a blip on the radar at an early January meeting of the board. Her voice, she claims, was silenced long ago.

I feel it is no longer worth my volunteer time to attempt to represent Red Hook on a community board that seems to regularly disregard the opinions of our residents and board representatives on issues of critical importance to our community,” she wrote in a Jan. 10 resignation letter to the board’s district manager and its chair, Jerry Armer.

Stone, a Red Hook resident, said she was frustrated by what she said is a stifling atmosphere on the board.

She said the board’s executive committee has failed to “heed the voices of the affected board members, preferring instead to hold private meetings with developers whose projects will change the landscape of Red Hook and other CB 6 neighborhoods forever.”

The breaking point, she said last week, was the board’s stance on Ikea, which is readying to build a superstore along the Red Hook waterfront.

“They come to the board and expect us to rubber stamp whatever they do,” she claimed. “No one asks for our opinion.”

The board last year supported – with a series of reservations – the land use requests made by the Swedish home furnishings giant, a position the City Council and City Planning Commission would later adopt.

Meetings between board officials and representatives of Forest City Ratner (FCR), the development company behind the controversial Atlantic Yards arena project, have also been irksome, Stone said.

Armer works for the MetroTech Business Improvement District – an FCR project – that has as its lobbying firm the same company, Yoswein New York, hired to represent Ikea.

“Joni Yoswein [the former assembly member turned consultant] can call Jerry on his cell phone 24 hours a day, I’m sure,” Stone said. “Community board members are supposed to represent the community,” Stone said.

Armer did not return calls for comment at press time. The board’s district manager, Craig Hammerman, was on vacation and unavailable for comment.

Asked to respond, Yoswein New York Vice President Jamie Van Bremer said,” Ikea Red Hook earned the nearly unanimous support of the entire community board, the City Council and the City Planning Commission for one reason: it is a great project for Red Hook and Brooklyn.”

Stone said that until term limits are implemented at community boards, “I feel that Community Board 6 will continue to see that economic growth and diversification are only for the already wealthy,” she wrote in her resignation letter.

“Red Hook and Gowanus will be forever reserved for toxic industry, big box stores, and public housing, none of which would be tolerated in our ‘brownstone’ neighborhoods,” she continued.

Board member Lou Sones, himself an outspoken Red Hook activist, was reserved in his assessment of Stone’s resignation.

“Whatever my frustrations are with the community board, it’s better, I feel, to work in the process so that we have a board that better represents the community,” Sones said.