Reversing a previous position, the members of a committee monitoring the construction of the filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park have decided to open the meetings to the public.
The public will be permitted to attend, though not to speak, at meetings of the Facility Monitoring Committee, which consists of members and appointees of the three affected community districts and Councilman Oliver Koppell.
There have been two meetings of the committee thus far, one in March and one in April. While Community Board 7 chair Nora Feury originally supported keeping the meetings closed, the Board voted unanimously to support opening the meetings. Feury then took that recommendation to the Committee on April 7.
Saul Sheinbach, a representative of Community Board 8 on the Committee who raised the issue, also supported the change. “As long as these meetings are kept closed, the public is going to think we’re doing secret things there that we don’t want them to know about,” he said.
The city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) agreed to the change. “The decision is that they’re going to open up future meetings to the public,” said Charles Sturcken, a DEP spokesman. “They can listen and observe.”
Sheinbach said the Committee was going to try to have the meetings in the evening, so residents would better be able to attend.
Sturcken said there were also plans afoot to have a meeting soon where the public could ask questions of the DEP.
The Committee will not have a regular meeting in May, but will instead tour the construction site.
Future meetings will not necessarily take place on a monthly basis, as they have thus far, but only when new stages of construction warrant discussion. The Committee must meet four times a year.
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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.
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