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Light Drizzle Fog/Mist Schumer, Suozzi pledge support for Glen Cove ferry
On June 18, New York Senator Charles Schumer pledged to prevent “pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington” from forcing the city to pay back millions in grant funds that helped build the Glen Cove Ferry Terminal if it fails to begin offering service by January 2019.
“I will do everything I can,” Schumer said, “whether it’s persuading the [Federal Highway Administration] not to do it or writing something in legislation that won’t allow them to do it.”
He continued, “The Feds are telling Glen Cove citizens to walk the proverbial plank and pick up a tab of $16 million on a deadline that everyone agrees should be extended.”
Schumer said that the claw back was “nasty,” and added, “there’s no rationale for it.”
The senator credited Congressman Tom Suozzi, a former mayor of Glen Cove, with bringing the issue to Schumer’s attention, and with spearheading the initiative to build a ferry terminal when he was mayor.
Suozzi pointed to the cooperation of RXR Realty, the real estate company behind the Garvies point development, who has offered to chip in $1 million in subsidies for two years to help the city sweeten the deal for prospective ferry operators. “The developer doesn’t really want to see this operation up and running until all the construction is in place,” Suozzi said, citing construction vehicles as obstacles for would-be ferry commuters.
Mayor Tim Tenke agreed, adding, “We want to put our best foot forward when we open this ferry.”
Suozzi added that RXR’s promise of subsidies would be a boon for the developer’s future tenants. Subsidies improve transportation, and better transportation “makes people’s lives better,” he said. “It all feeds off each other and causes economic development.”
City officials met a few weeks ago with officials from the FHA — from which the grant money is paid out — and the state’s Department of Transportation —which is helping administer the grant at the state level — to ask that the deadline be extended by a year, to allow development on Garvies Point to progress further before opening the terminal for business.
The January 2019 deadline had been extended from a 2017 deadline, according to Deputy Mayor Maureen Basdavanos. Neither she, nor Ann Fangmann, 19 months into her role as executive director of the Glen Cove Community Development Agency, which handles most of the city’s grants, could say from the information they had on-hand how many extensions the city had been granted, nor when the first deadline was set.
