Two of New York's heaviest infrastructure decisions landed in the same room on March 3, and both turned on a quieter question: who actually knew this was happening. Chair Christopher Marte opened the hearing on DEP's Newtown Creek CSO tunnel, a three-mile, $3 billion storage tunnel bored 80 to 120 feet beneath the Brooklyn-Queens border to hold 50 million gallons of combined sewer overflow and keep more than 70 percent of it out of the Superfund-listed creek. DEP's Kate Edden and Cherelle walked through 99 properties in the ULURP footprint, of which only four are full acquisitions, nine are already city-owned, and 81 carry nothing more than a subsurface tunnel easement starting roughly 55 feet down. The agency framed it as minimally intrusive. The property owners did not.
Tanya Obre of Rom Realty, with holdings on both sides of the creek beside the John Byrne Bridge, said she supports the project but cannot get DEP to answer an email without legal involved, missed meetings because notice letters arrived after the fact, and still lacks the boring logs to know whether she can build above the easement. Environmental attorney Maggie McDonald of Sive Paget and Riesel was sharper, telling the panel she was not aware of any property owner who received proper notice under Title 62 and that DEP's subsurface assessment was preliminary enough that the tunnel may need realigning to avoid the 90 to 100 foot building pilings her clients rely on. Marte closed the LU 36 and LU 37 hearing and laid the items over.
Then the room shifted to Hamilton Heights. Marte read a statement from Majority Leader Brewer on the Hilltop Apartments project at 1727 Amsterdam Avenue, a city-owned lot HPD wants to hand to the Bowery Residence Committee for a nine-story, roughly 200-unit building, all affordable to households at or below 60 percent of area median income, with supportive and senior units and 21,000 square feet of replacement space for the Emma L. Bowen mental health center already on the site. Brewer's statement named the fight directly, calling out a coordinated effort to brand supportive and low-income housing as a danger to West Harlem and insisting the future residents are New Yorkers in need of stability, not outsiders.
For a subcommittee, this was a consequential morning: a generational sewer project owners say was noticed badly enough to invite a legal challenge, and a supportive-housing plan the neighborhood has argued over for years. Both now move toward a vote, with the notice questions and the funding-and-services questions still open.