"Yank the parking garages" Norwood News Aug 23-Sept 5, 2007

Yank the Parking Garages

The new Yankee Stadium has 5,000 fewer seats than the old one.

Nevertheless, city officials endorse the team’s plan to build four new parking garages, most of them in place of public parks, essentially inviting fans from the suburbs to bring their cars into the area to clog local streets and deposit their exhaust in a community that has among the highest asthma rates in the country. The garages are even more absurd when you consider that a brand new Metro North station is being built right next to the stadium that is expected to transport 10,000 fans to the game.

Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg and other city officials, giddy about green roofs and expanding ferry service as laid out in the much-hailed PlaNYC 2030, are handing over millions in taxpayer monies to the private corporations building the garages.
Why would the same officials who are in favor of charging people so they don’t drive to Manhattan, encourage people to drive to the Bronx by providing huge public subsidies to build parking lots?

This and more is laid out in “Insider Baseball,” a new report published by watchdog Good Jobs NY (on-line at www.goodjobsny.org).

The community lost the battle to defeat the stadium. Construction is well under way. But there is still time for residents to bring officials to their senses and eliminate several of the parking garages, which are receiving an insane public subsidy of $96 million.

The parking lots are not inevitable. The city can still knock them out of the park.

It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.