Members of the Bronx Assembly delegation which voted in lockstep-save the two feet of Jeffrey Dinowitz-to allow the city to blast a massive hole in Van Cortlandt Park for a water filtration plant, are starting to have second thoughts about the project they championed as a boon for the borough’s park system and its workers.

Assemblyman Ruben Diaz, Jr., a candidate for Bronx borough president in 2009, told talk show host Gary Axelbank last week that he and his colleagues were "misled" by the city when they voted to allow the city to dig a giant hole in Van Cortlandt Park for a water filtration plant. "We need to come to grips that we’ve been misled," Diaz told Axelbank. "If we had known then what we know now, we would have voted differently."

What he knows now is that, although many of the park projects have begun to come to fruition, the price tag for the plant has escalated dramatically from $1.2 to $2.8 billion; over a million gallons of water a day from the site are being discharged into the sewer system; and that the project has produced many fewer Bronx jobs than promised. Diaz said that he had forwarded the applications of 31 constituents to the DEP but that "not a single person has received a job."

Diaz’s comments come after a year of bad news for the DEP, much of it unearthed by activists working closely with Dinowitz, who has repeatedly called for an investigation of the growing problems with the project.

Even some of the Assembly members who have traditionally sat on the other side of the factional Democratic divide from Dinowitz are giving him his props.

"I have to say that I was misled and Jeffrey Dinowitz was right," Diaz said in a phone interview.

Assemblyman Michael Benjamin said basically the same thing. "It’s tough to hear the ‘I-told-you-so’s,’" Benjamin said, adding that he would join Dinowitz in "requesting that the appropriate [Assembly committee] look into the process."

Both Diaz and Benjamin said they would follow Dinowitz’s lead.

Dinowitz said he continues to meet and discuss the issue with his colleagues and plans to recruit them to ask Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to allow the Assembly’s Cities Committee to hold hearings on the issue. Dinowitz also sent a long letter with copious supporting attachments to the city and state comptrollers and the attorney general’s office and he is hopeful that the City Council will hold hearings as well.

(The Norwood News called every other current Bronx Assembly member who voted for the filtration plant for comment on Diaz’s statements. Only Peter Rivera responded, saying, "I haven’t followed the nuances of the debate. I can’t comment on whether I would change my vote or not change my vote.")

But as the DEP gears up to start building the actual filtration plant, does any of this matter? After all, the Assembly members can’t take back their vote and it’s unlikely any of this will stop work at the site.

Dinowitz, for one, thinks it does matter, if only to hold city government accountable and prevent additional problems.

"If costs have escalated because of incompetence or worse, then we need to prevent that from continuing to happen on this project and from happening on other projects," Dinowitz said.

"Even if we can’t stop this project, if there are people that lied to the public, if there are people who are not capable of doing their jobs properly, then they have to be held accountable," he added later.

Dinowitz and some community activists would like the Croton Facilities Monitoring Committee (FMC) to call for City Council hearings on the filtration plant. Greg Faulkner, the chair of Community Board 7 who also heads the FMC, said that may well happen, and that anyone on the committee is welcome to present a resolution on the matter. But he also said that he is more focused on getting more jobs for Bronxites at the plant site.

"My issue is jobs," Faulkner said. "I’ve been obsessed with that, and I can’t say honestly that I’d be someone who will be [an expert on the] financial aspect. The bottom line is let’s assume that all these things are correct – [that there’s been] a lot of mismanagement – what’s going to be the result? Are they going to pick up the plant and move it? The bottom line is that the community hasn’t gotten the jobs we were promised and that’s real."

"As a chair of a board, in a community that has a high unemployment rate, I have a mandate to fight for these jobs," Faulkner continued, saying that he was "not trivializing cost overruns."