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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, our climate story of the week. When protecting a coastline means demolishing a park, if temporarily, and no, if you think you've heard this story already because it's about East River Park. No, it's about another one. New York State has planned a coastal resiliency project in Battery Park City that will see Robert F. Wagner Park torn down at the lower tip of Manhattan and reconstructed over two years. When it opens after that construction period, it'll be a full 10 feet higher than it is now. Plus, it'll bring to Lower Manhattan a continuous flood protection system, complete with flood walls and surge gates seen as a necessity in a city already coping with the effects of climate change and rising sea levels. Of course, everybody remembers Sandy from a decade ago.

In recent days, some people have rallied though, to show their opposition to the closure of Wagner Park, reminiscent of the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project and the backlash over the future of East River Park, though the pushback here has so far been less pronounced. We'll talk about the state's coastal resiliency plan in Battery Park City and the opposition now with Samantha Maldonado, reporter at the news organization The City covering climate resiliency and politics. Hi, Samantha. Thanks so much for coming on, Welcome to WNYC.

Samantha Maldonado: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to start with the basics about the project? What has the state actually proposed for this stretch of Battery Park City in addition to anything I just said?

Samantha Maldonado: Sure. Well, you did give a really thorough overview. I think at the heart of the project is demolishing Wagner Park and raising it about-- it'll be about 20 feet in the air. That's about 10 feet more than it is now. There'll be a flood wall beneath it and flood protection essentially going from the Jewish Museum down to Battery Park. As you noted, it'll be part of the Lower Manhattan flood protection system. It goes all the way from there, snakes down around the tip of Manhattan and up to East River Park. That'll just help protect the neighborhood, so says the Battery Park City Authority, from floods that are expected to get worse and also storm surges. As sea level rises, the storm surges will also definitely get worse, especially from what we saw during Sandy.

Brian Lehrer: Can you describe--

Samantha Maldonado: As you noted--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Keep going. Sorry.

Samantha Maldonado: Go ahead. Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: No, you go.

Samantha Maldonado: I was going to say as you noted there's a lot of controversy around the project itself.

Brian Lehrer: Can you describe Wagner Park for anybody who hasn't been there? Just give people a visualization of it in words.

Samantha Maldonado: Sure. Wagner Park is beautiful. It's a luscious green lawn overlooking the harbor. You can see the Statue of Liberty, great views for sunsets. It's just a really beautiful open space. There are trees lining the perimeter of the park and there's a big pavilion. Apparently, its won awards for design. There's a little [unintelligible 00:03:22] restaurant at the bottom of the pavilion and some bathrooms. On any day, you can just see people riding or running around the path that's adjacent to the water, kids playing on the lawn, people with their dogs. It's an active space. People hang out there and really enjoy the views and have picnics and takes their time. People in the neighborhood have called it a gem and the jewel of the neighborhood.

Brian Lehrer: Now, opponents of the plan have pointed out that Wagner Park did not flood during Hurricane Sandy almost 10 years ago. Were there certain flood protection systems already in place in this stretch of Battery Park City that kept it from flooding them?

Samantha Maldonado: Not that I know of. I believe it was as it was. I could be wrong about that. There might have been some flood protection that I am not aware of, but this plan is designed to introduce flood protection to that area.

Brian Lehrer: If it didn't flood during Sandy, though, is the argument. If it didn't flood then, then what are the chances of something coming along that's so much worse than Sandy, as bad as that was, that actually is going to flood Wagner Park and in fact homes and other things around there for the trouble that were being put to?

Samantha Maldonado: Well, based on climate science, the chances are quite good that storms will be more frequent and worse than what we have seen. Another Sandy could happen, which was, of course, a storm surge event. That was water from the ocean, kind of having waves and pushing its way onto the land. Scientists, as I mentioned, expect that to be worse and more frequent. Although this project does take into account some interior drainage problems. When we see storm water flooding from rain or even just from sunny day flooding, this project is supposed to mitigate those effects as well.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls on the plan to elevate Wagner Park in Battery Park City to shore up the Lower Manhattan coastline against rising sea levels and flooding, 212-433-WNYC. If you're on either side of this or just have a question, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. This plan will, of course, mean tearing down the park and rebuilding it. If you live in the area, help us report this story or just ask a question of our guest, Samantha Maldonado, reporter at the news organization The City covering climate resiliency and politics. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692.

The plan I read in your article is almost 10 years in the making and now it's coming, I guess, they started thinking about it after Sandy. There are rallies, as we've been saying, around saving Wagner Park or people rallying around that idea, including a few folks involved with the East River Park action group. With the East River Park situation, it's going to be years of closures. People were very upset that they tore down what they estimated as 900 fully-grown trees and they'll have to start from scratch with those. What's the scale of the disruption here compared to that?

Samantha Maldonado: In the Battery Park City Project, official estimates that the park will be closed for two years and there will be trees lost, but the project coordinators basically estimate a net gain of trees. I think part of the controversy surrounding that plan is, as you mentioned, it does really parallel some of the East River controversy as well. In part, some people who are against Wagner Park being shut down say we should time this, so that way we're not shutting down another green space at the same time that East River Park is down. They point to the lack of green space in Lower Manhattan and they say, "Why does it make sense to shut two parks down at once?" I must say that the East River Park story, I suppose, does have a different arc than Battery Park City.

As you mentioned, Battery Park City Authority, I should say, has been planning this plan since after Sandy, started community board meetings and certain community presentations since 2016 whereas in East River Park, there was a plan that was created hand-in-hand with the community. Then the de Blasio administration came back and pivoted with a totally different plan. I think that created a lot of backlash that was really hard, if not impossible, in some corners of the neighborhood to recover from. Here the plan has been pretty consistent throughout. It has changed a bit in response to community feedback. Most recently, the biggest change, I think, has been the Battery Park City Authority saying that actually add 75% more green space when it was done.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM, HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are a New York and New Jersey public radio and live streaming at wnyc.org. Few more minutes on our climate story of the week, the controversy over closing Wagner Park in Battery Park City for a coastal resiliency plan with Samantha Maldonado who's reporting on this for the nonprofit news organization The City. Brian in South Tribeca. I think he identified his location. You're on WNYC. Hello.

Brian: Hey, Brian. How are you? Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: What do you want to say?

Brian: Are you there?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Brian: What I want to say is that resiliency is obviously important and we need that. Climate change is real but at the same time, we have an issue in Wagner Park similar to what's going on in East River Park. I'm a community member there. I take my daughter to Wagner Park all the time. I've been involved in the community resistance which is rather large against what the BPCA, the Battery Park City Authority is doing. The reasons for that are quite logical. There're citing Sandy as a reason why we need resiliency and we need to bulldoze this park as a reason for the resiliency project. However, flooding didn't even touch Wagner Park during Sandy. There were some pinch points around the park and in the Financial District, which still have yet to be rectified and there are no plans to rectify it.

Wagner Park being that it was built for resiliency when it was built in the '90s is an award-winning park and was not touched by any flooding. We have to bear that in mind. The second--

Brian Lehrer: Right. Let me follow up on that and ask you about the projections that the report has cited that there could well be with the trajectory that climate change is taking flooding that would come up that high in the future, even though Sandy didn't and the UN climate report from earlier this year, warn that parts of lower Manhattan could be rendered uninhabitable in this generation. How do you dismiss those?

Brian: Oh, well, there's a recent NASA study in 2019 that shows that water level projections are not looking to be anything too critical. That's NASA. I'm sure the UN has other experts and that's fine. We can agree to disagree there, but as far as the storm surge that they're speaking about, that could possibly overwhelm Wagner, they're calling it the 100-year storm, meaning a 1 in 100-year chance of a super storm that's going to hit. This has been debunked and invalidated in court in, I believe it was 2015. It was the same FEMA data that they used as a rationale for East River Park. It was invalidated by court.

We've also had climatologists PhD from Columbia, come in and basically speak to the inadequacy of that projection. Now, the community board under documentation say that the main reason for doing this is to improve food and beverage revenue. In essence, this is about commercialization, not resiliency. It does not have community buy-in very similar. Really this is a sequel to East River Park, and a lot of people are going to be very unhappy. I've been put a part of this movement from the beginning. I wrote an op-ed in Westview news about it and much has been written about Wagner Park.

Brian Lehrer: Brian, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you very much. Samantha, have you heard some of those same points from others in the community. He's making it sound like there is scientific dispute about whether there's a likelihood of even a once-in-100-year flooding event that would have the impact that's leading to this disruption or the plan for this disruption of Wagner Park.

Samantha Maldonado: Yes, I've heard similar concerns. I think I have talked to Brian in the past, so hello. I'm a bit reluctant to speak specifically to the lawsuits or some of the other findings that he spoke about without having kind of everything in front of me. I think there is sort of a disagreement between some of the people in the community that are against this project and what officials are saying. It does. Whether that's just a matter of questions unanswered or people looking at different information is a question to me.

Brian Lehrer: He was casting dispersions on the community board, it's really doing this for revenue-raising purposes, and wink, wink, there's an environmental issue here. Do you have any evidence of that?

Samantha Maldonado: Right. I don't have evidence of that. I did see that there was a survey that Battery Park City Authority did some years ago where they spoke to people in Wagner Park. I didn't know if they were residents or just random people that they found. They came up with reasons in this presentation that people said, or not reasons so much as-- what people said they wanted for the park as part of this project. One of them was amenities like food and beverage services. As part of the design, the park goes away, the pavilion goes away. They're building a new park in pavilion, and that will have, from what I remember, a bigger space for a restaurant, for new amenities like that. I think that's partially what some of the people in the community are saying. We don't need that. That's part of the ploy to get this new revenue-raising business in terms of what this product does.

Brian Lehrer: Let me take one more call here with I think a different point of view than the previous caller. This is Thad at Columbia University who's identifying himself as the Director of the Center for Resilience Cities and Landscapes at Columbia. Thad, thank you very much for calling in. You're on WNYC.

Thad: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I just want to say that this is really hard and I really applaud the community groups we're stepping up and being part of this conversation. It's a city with 520 miles of coastline and our coastal communities really have to change. We can either manage that process proactively or reactively. This is something that's going to touch everywhere in the years ahead. Climate change adaptation is the challenge of our time and it's great to have this public dialogue. I also think we should applaud the Battery Park City Authority for being really proactive here. They've been planning this project for six years. It's not perfect. None of these projects are perfect.

There's so much to learn about what's gone wrong, but I think we have to cut each other, some slack and learn from these processes and try to find some common ground because sea level rise is inevitable at this point. We can cut our emissions, but we still have to deal with more and more storms like Sandy in the future. I think, again, it's really good to be proactive here, but also we've got to learn from this and really center local community voices in the way we plan these projects. We're going to have at Columbia, a Sandy 10 years later anniversary event where we hope to capture some of these lessons learned and have more of this civic dialogue that we really need so we can get better at this going forward,

Brian Lehrer: Being that you study this at Columbia and run the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes, do you have your own scientific take on how accurate the projections are, from any side of how likely it is for Wagner Park and Battery Park City down there to flood in the next coming decades?

Thad: Yes. I think I agree with Samantha that as we learn more from the climate scientist about projections, things generally are trending worse and that we all live through Sandy. We saw that event. We have other problems with climate change too. I think we shouldn't just be trying to stall for what happened in the past, but be looking forward. We have to see more and more extreme weather events, extreme precipitation, like Ida, which this project wouldn't necessarily-- maybe it could help to manage some of that stormwater, but this is really designed to protect from surge events. We have extreme heat.

The problems with climate change are just getting worse. In terms of the actual numbers for how high this park is elevated versus other parks. That gets us in some technicalities. Generally, I think to be proactive, to design a park that could survive the next hundred years is something that-- Battery Park is really privileged to be looking that far ahead. It's a place that can afford to do that. In fact, I think being more conservative is always better when it comes to these climate projections,

Brian Lehrer: 10 feet is conservative in this, not in the political sense, but in the sense of conserving, making sure that it's high enough for some of the most extreme weather events that could be coming down the park. Thank you for your input. Last question, Samantha, and to his point about Battery Park City being privileged that it has the wealth to do this kind of thing. It is one of New York's wealthiest neighborhoods. If the opposition gets as organized as what we saw with East River Park, might residents here be able to get the project scrapped, have the different outcome than East River Park did because they have more clout because of their wealth?

Samantha Maldonado: Well, only time can say. I think that the project is scheduled to start very soon. They would have to move quickly if there's some action or lawsuit or anything like that, that might be able to stop it. Yes, it's unclear.

Brian Lehrer: All right. We will see.

Samantha Maldonado: It's definitely something we'll look at.

Brian Lehrer: That's our climate story of the week. We thank Samantha Maldonado, reporter at the nonprofit news organization, The City who covers climate, resiliency, and politics in New York City. Thanks so much.

Samantha Maldonado: Thank you.

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