Lower East Side waterfront development hearing pushed back

The Department of City Planning has agreed to push back a scoping meeting for three proposed Lower East Side skyscrapers after mounting pressure from local elected officials and neighborhood residents.

The delay, DNAinfo reports, comes after Council member Margaret Chin and Borough President Gale Brewer urged the city to release documents with information regarding the towers’ impact on the neighborhood in Spanish and Chinese, in addition to English. A considerable portion of the residents who live in the immediate area of the proposed towers, and who have attended community planning meetings pertaining to the developments, are not English speakers. Translation services have been provided at those meetings.

Chin and Brewer announced on Monday that DCP will delay the scoping meeting by one month, from April 27 to May 25, to allow neighborhood residents to review the documents. A delay in the scoping process has been one of the community’s main requests throughout the environmental review process, as developers JDS, CIM Group, L+M Development Partners, and Starrett push on to bring three developments with about 3,000 condos and rentals combined to the Two Bridges community.

At a community meeting in January, a representative for the developers pushed back against the idea of postponing the scoping meeting to September to give residents more time to vet the impacts of the developments, noting that the community meetings during which residents were able to voice their concerns about and desires for the new towers “don’t [usually] take place.”

In February, the developers rejected a delayed scoping process, saying that pushing the meeting off “will only delay the ability of community residents to access and review the kind of detailed information that they have asked for in order to evaluate the projects.”

The public scoping meeting will take place on May 25 at 1 Centre Street. There will be two sessions, at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., during which members of the public can respond to the plans.

• Hearing on Controversial LES High-Rises Delayed After Pols Demand More Time [DNAinfo]
• Lower East Side waterfront developers won’t delay skyscrapers [Curbed]
• Two Bridges residents want to delay spate of waterfront skyscrapers [Curbed]