The Bronx Assembly delegation that overwhelmingly supported the city’s plans to build a water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park is now calling on state and city officials to investigate and hold hearings on the project’s escalating cost overruns and other problems, the Norwood News has learned.

Eight of the borough’s 11 representatives to the State Assembly signed a letter to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn asking each to call hearings on the project’s cost overruns, which now total at least $1.5 billion.

A similar letter, signed by seven of the Assembly members, went to State Comptroller General Thomas DiNapoli and State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo calling for those officials to investigate problems with the project. (Naomi Rivera signed the letters to the speakers calling for hearings but not this one calling for a formal investigation.)

Aside from the cost overruns, the letters raise questions about the leakage of millions of gallons of groundwater from the site into the city’s already overworked combined sewer system, the charge that official promises of local jobs were not kept, and the lack of details concerning the "impending construction of a force main that will apparently traverse the entire borough, running from Van Cortlandt Park to the environmentally overburdened community of Hunts Point."

The letters also ask the officials to look into the circumstances surrounding the departure of former Department of Environmental Protection commissioner Christopher Ward, who left his post the day after the project was approved by the Council, and a year later became the head of the General Contractors Association, a key group that backed the project. "While this might not breach the letter of existing conflict of interest laws, it is highly questionable as to whether it violates its spirit," the letter states.

The members sent a third letter to the borough’s three Congressional representatives asking them to "look into this matter."

The three Assembly members who did not sign any of the letters were Jose Rivera, the chairman of the Bronx Democratic Party, Peter Rivera and Luis Diaz.

The decision to write the letters came out of a meeting the Bronx Assembly delegation held a couple of weeks ago. Jeffrey Dinowitz, a staunch opponent of the plant asked the delegation’s chair, Aurelia Greene, to convene the session.

In addition to Greene and Dinowitz, the other members who signed all the letters were Michael Benedetto, Carl Heastie, Michael Benjamin, Carmen Arroyo, and Ruben Diaz, Jr. Naomi Rivera signed the letters to the congressmen and the City Council and Assembly speakers.

The Norwood News was not able to get comment on the letters from the lawmakers by press time.