New York Mayor Unveils Green City Plan

New York Mayor Unveils Green City Plan



   
April 2007 -   New York Mayor 
Michael Bloomberg Sunday presented a plan to cope with climate 
change and a fast-growing population in a sweeping policy 
speech containing 127 separate initiatives. PlaNYC: A Greener, 
Greater New York, has been in the works since December but the 
mayor chose to issue it on Earth Day to underline his goal of 
making America's largest city also the greenest by 2030. 
Covering land, air, water, energy, and transportation, PlaNYC 
is the result of thousands of hours of work, informed by 
public meetings and feedback from New Yorkers. It establishes 
goals that include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 
percent by 2030, although the mayor says even that goal is not 
set high enough. 
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg debuts PlaNYC Sunday on Earth 
Day 2007 at the American Museum of Natural History. 
"Climate change is a national challenge, and meeting it 
requires strong and united national leadership," said Mayor 
Bloomberg, announcing the plan at the American Museum of 
Natural History. "The fact is, the emerging consenvironment newsus among 
scientists is that, to avoid serious harm, we must reduce our 
emissions by 60 to 80 percent by 2050." 
To start planning for the sea-level rise that melting glaciers 
and ice sheets are expected to bring, the mayor of this 
low-lying city proposes to create an interagency task force. 
The new body would "protect our city's vital infrastructure 
and expand our adaptation strategies beyond the protection of 
our water supply, sewer, and wastewater treatment systems to 
include all essential city infrastructure," the mayor said. 
The plan calls for a citywide strategic planning process for 
climate change adaptation. The mayor would work with costal 
neighborhoods to develop site-specific protection strategies 
by creating a community planning process. 
The city would document all floodplain management strategies 
to secure discounted flood insurance for New Yorkers, and 
create a strategic planning process for climate change 
adaptation that will environment newsure that New York's Federal Emergency 
Management Administration 100-year floodplain maps are 
updated. 
The city would also amend the building code to address the 
impacts of climate change. 
The United Nations, with headquarters on New York City's East 
River, applauded the mayor's plan. "This is exactly the type 
of initiative that we would like more cities and communities 
to undertake," said UN Director of Sustainable Development 
JoAnne DiSano. "Real development has to allow for economic 
growth and social development in an environmentally balanced 
way. We are strongly encouraged by this proposal." 
Environmental Defense, a national nongovernmental organization 
headquartered in New York, praised Bloomberg for his 
initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 
2030. Environmental Defense advised the Mayor's team creating 
the plan for a sustainable New York. 
"Mayor Bloomberg's extraordinary plan will bring benefits to 
all New Yorkers," said Fred Krupp, president of Environmental 
Defense and member of the environmental commissions 
established by President Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. 
"The mayor has shown global leadership by transcending 
politics to act now on climate change. I hope Washington 
follows the mayor's example so we can solve this problem for 
our children and generations to come." 
Brownfield Remediation and Open Space 
"We propose to speed the clean-up of all 7,600 acres of 
brownfields still in our city – while also environment newsuring public 
health protections by developing new time-saving strategies, 
new city-specific remediation guidelines, and a new city 
brownfields office to oversee the initiatives and encourage 
community involvement," said Mayor Bloomberg. 
PlaNYC calls for a new $15 million fund to support brownfield 
redevelopment and a new city office to increase resources 
dedicated to brownfield planning, testing and cleanups. 
The Soundview Educational Campus is a high school building 
without playing fields or plazas, built on the abandoned Loral 
plant in the Bronx, New York. According to local activists, 
the school was built without adequate environmental 
investigation. 
The mayor would create a database of historic uses across New 
York City to identify potential brownfields, and also create 
an insurance program and legal protections to limit the 
liability of developers willing to clean up land they did not 
pollute. 
"Some of our brownfields may also become open space and 
parkland, which bind communities together," said Bloomberg. 
"In the past five years alone, we've added more than 300 acres 
to the biggest and best parks system in the nation. But still, 
nearly two million New Yorkers live too far from parks and 
playing fields." 
To enhance open space and create recreational opportunities, 
PlaNYC would open schoolyards across the city as public 
playgrounds, and complete underutilized destination parks – at 
least one in each of the city's five boroughs. 
The plan calls for reforestation of 2,000 targeted acres of 
parkland and a partnership with stakeholders to help plant one 
million trees over the next decade in vacant lots. 
$50 Billion for Transportation 
To streamline public transportation and reduce its 
environmental impacts, the mayor plans to establish a new 
Sustainable Mobility and Regional Transportation, SMART, 
Financing Authority "to advance new projects and achieve a 
state of good repair in the subway and on the roads." 
Transportation infrastructure has been underfunded for the 
past 50 years, the mayor says, calling for new funding of more 
than $50 billion. 
"Building the new transit we need - and our entire region 
needs - and achieving a full state of good repair will require 
over $50 billion," the plan states. 
Used by more than 150,000 commuters a day, Grand Central 
Station is one of the busiest railroad terminals in the world.
 "Only $13.4 billion is already committed to these projects; we 
can reasonably expect another $6.3 billion from Federal 
sources. That means that if we want to see those projects 
built, the region will have to raise an additional $31 billion 
between now and 2030," it says. 
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, MTA, which stands 
to gain financially, today voiced its support of the plan. 
"Mayor Bloomberg deserves tremendous credit for taking on two 
longstanding problems - traffic congestion and limited funding 
for mass transit," the MTA said in a statement. "We applaud 
the mayor's commitment to the transit system and will 
carefully analyze the city's proposal to understand its impact 
on the MTA." 
The most controversial part of PlaNYC's transport section 
would establish pilot congestion pricing to manage traffic in 
the Central Business District. On weekdays from 6 am to 6 pm, 
trucks would be charged $21 a day and cars would be charged $8 
in addition to premium parking fees charged by city and 
private lots. Traffic congestion in midtown Manhattan 
"In analyzing congestion pricing, we studied commuting 
patterns across the city, and we arrived at an astounding 
finding. Of the New Yorkers who work in Manhattan but live 
outside it, only five percent commute by car," said Mayor 
Bloomberg. 
Congressman Anthony Weiner, a Democrat from Queenvironment news and 
Brooklyn calls the congestion pricing proposal "a regressive 
tax on working middle-class families and small-business 
owners." 
Weiner praised many reported elements of PlaNYC, including 
plans to expand affordable housing tax incentives, provide 
energy-efficiency rebates, claim city control of public 
authorities, speed the brownfields cleanup, construct a tunnel 
under the Hudson River and create new zoning to expand 
affordable housing. 
Weiner says the city's most under-utilized asset is its 
waterfront. He secured $15 million for fast ferry service for 
the city, which he envisions being linked to the mass transit 
system by the Metrocard. 
The mayor's plan also would expand ferry service and better 
integrate it with the city's existing mass transit system. 
Clean Energy, Clean Air, and Clean Water 
PlaNYC would develop backup systems for the city's aging water 
network; provide additional reliable power sources and upgrade 
existing power plants; and reduce water pollution so the city 
can open waterways for recreation. 
"As we grow, and if summers continue to get warmer, the strain 
will increase, resulting in more breakdowns, more polluted 
air, and rising energy bills," said Mayor Bloomberg. 
"In fact, if we do nothing, the city's total energy bill will 
increase by $3 billion by 2015," he said. "We can't afford to 
wait and we can't afford to continue to be held hostage to 
heat waves. That's why we are proposing ways to provide 
cleaner, more reliable power and ways to use it more 
efficiently." 
The plan would establish a New York City Energy Planning Board 
to centralize planning for the city's supply and demand 
initiatives and create an energy efficiency authority for New 
York City responsible for reaching the city's demand reduction 
targets. Manhattan lights as viewed from the top of the Empire State 
Building. 
The city would commit 10 percent of the city's annual energy 
bill to fund energy-saving investments in city operations. 
To bring more electricity to the city, the plan would 
facilitate the construction of 2,000 to 3,000 megawatts of 
supply capacity by repowering old plants, constructing new 
ones, and building dedicated transmission lines. 
The initiatives include more power from solar and landfill 
methane gas, and construction of the city's first carbon 
neutral building, primarily powered by solar electricity. 
"In parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem, children are 
hospitalized for asthma at nearly four times the national 
average," said the mayor. "We cannot turn a blind eye to this 
outrage. All of our children deserve a healthy start in life. 
Many people call that environmental justice; I simply call it 
the right thing to do." 
To improve air quality, the plan would promote hydrogen and 
plug-in hybrid vehicles, introduce biodiesel into the city's 
truck fleet, enforce anti-idling laws, and lower the maximum 
sulfur content in heating fuel. 
"About a week ago," said the mayor, "the [U.S.] EPA recognized 
our success in keeping our reservoirs clean saving us from 
building a second filtration plant that would cost several 
billion dollars. That's the good news. But the system is 
showing its age, with some parts more than a century old. And 
as development upstate continues our water supply system will 
require new investments." 
In addition to the ultraviolet disinfection plant for the 
Catskill/Delaware systems, a water filtration plant to protect 
the Croton supply and other projects already in the works, the 
plan would implement a water conservation program to reduce 
citywide consumption by 60 million gallons a day. 
"New York is fortunate to have not only a vast supply of fresh 
water, but also a wealth of rivers, creeks and coastal waters. 
From time immemorial, they nurtured an incredible diversity of 
marine life, but for too long, the city polluted these waters 
and as our population grew, that contamination increased. We 
can change that," said Mayor Bloomberg. 
PlaNYC would reduce Combined Sewage Overflow discharges during 
heavy rains, and convert combined sewers into High Level Storm 
Sewers which would be integrated into major new developments. 
Through a new incentive program, the plan would encourage the 
installation of green roofs that absorb stormwater runoff. 
One Million More New Yorkers by 2030 
New York City is now home to 8.2 million people, a number that 
is projected to increase by nearly one million between now and 
2030. Apartment and office buildings crowd Manhattan, one of New 
York City's five boroughs. 
"To accommodate nearly a million more New Yorkers, we are 
going to have to create hundreds of thousands of new homes – 
even on top of our existing affordable housing plan, the 
largest ever undertaken by any city," says Mayor Bloomberg. 
"To do it, and to build those new homes at lower costs, we 
have to make more land available for new housing, which will 
help ease pressure on land prices." 
The mayor's plan would use transit extenvironment newsions to spark growth, 
as subways did more than a century ago, and explore 
opportunities to create new land by constructing decks over 
transportation infrastructure such as rail yards, rail lines 
and highways. 
The city would continue restoring underused or vacant 
waterfront land across the city, and seek to adapt unused 
schools, hospitals, and other outdated municipal sites for 
productive use as new housing. 
"Today is just the beginning – day one if you will. In the 
weeks and months to come, the dialogue about PlaNYC will 
continue across our city – and with our partners in the City 
Council and in Albany," concluded Mayor Bloomberg. "Together, 
through PlaNYC, we can build a Greater, Greener New York." 

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