A group of South Bronx residents is suing the city in a bid to block a new jail from coming to their neighborhood as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s larger efforts to shutter the Rikers Island prison complex.
The suit, filed Tuesday in Bronx Supreme Court on behalf of the Diego Beekman Mutual Housing Association and other parties, seeks to halt construction on a 19-story, 886-bed jail planned for the site of the NYPD’s tow pound in Mott Haven — a neighborhood located in the nation’s poorest congressional district.
It alleges the de Blasio administration and City Council broke the law by snubbing alternative sites for the jail, failed to reveal the true environmental impact of the project to residents and snubbed the entire public-review process.
“The Mayor and Council Speaker broke the law and rigged the process to saddle a low-income community of color with a jail, plain and simple,” said Arline Parks, CEO of Diego Beekman Mutual Housing Association, which represents 5,000 residents in 38 buildings.
The Council in October approved de Blasio’s polarizing $8.7 billion plan to shutter the scandal-scarred Rikers complex by 2026 and replace it with four borough-based jails –but not without plenty of pushback from some pols and community activists.
Besides the planned Mott Haven jail, the three other new jails are slated to be built at the now-closed Queens Detention Center in Kew Gardens and at the current sites of the Brooklyn Detention Complex in Boerum Hill and Manhattan Detention Complex in Lower Manhattan.
A group of Queens homeowners are planning a similar legal fight to block the jail planned for Kew Gardens, according to Patch.com
City Hall spokesperson Avery Cohen said the “borough-based jails plan is the culmination of years of collaboration between the city, local elected officials, and the communities they represent. We will vigorously defend our work in court as we move forward with our commitment to close Rikers Island and create a justice system is that is smaller, safer, and fairer.“