“I think at this point, it’s really unlikely that we’re going to prevail, given the fact that the courts haven’t acted in our favor so far,” said Jane Sokolow, who heads the Friends’ board of directors, in explaining the group’s decision.

Ora Holloway, a Norwood resident and Friends board member, agreed, and added that even if the courts made the city jump through additional hoops involved in rezoning the park, it was unlikely to keep the plant out of Van Cortlandt.

But she said they still needed to closely monitor the city’s work to make sure that “whatever DEP does, they do correctly and according to law.”

Holloway said it was now imperative for her and her neighbors to keep a close eye on the project. “We will try to get this community involved in helping to monitor what is going on with the construction,” she said. “Especially air quality, since so many people in the community are asthmatics. We will try to be as vigilant as we possibly can.”

The Friends, an advocacy organization that sponsors many programs in the park, successfully beat back city efforts to build the plant in the park in 2001 when the state’s highest court ruled that the city could not build in the park without the approval of the state legislature.

But in 2003, the borough’s state Assembly delegation accepted a Bloomberg administration promise of over $243 million in water bond money, to be used for improvements to parkland throughout the borough, in return for letting the city build in the park. Of that money, $43 million is earmarked for improvements to Van Cortlandt, including the southeast corner in Norwood. Aside from Jeffrey Dinowitz, a staunch opponent of the plant whose district includes the park, the rest of the borough’s Assembly delegation went along with the deal.

Meanwhile, three other suits are pending. Supreme Court Justice Marguerite Grays has been considering since January a suit by a group of Norwood residents calling themselves Bronx Environmental Health and Justice. That suit charges that the city’s environmental study unfairly minimized the projected impact of the plant construction on the densely populated and largely minority community of Norwood in order to avoid using an industrial, city-owned site in Westchester County.

Justice Grays initially issued a temporary restraining order halting the city’s work, but an appellate court lifted that order.