Making 'Fair Share' Fairer

Gotham Gazette has an excellent piece out about the changes to “fair share” proposed under the City’s Charter revision. In a nutshell, it will give neighborhoods like North Brooklyn (home to five or six City Sanitation garages, about half of the city’s commercial waste haulage, numerous brownfields, power plants and a sewage treatment plant).

Currently, the City Charter has a provision that is intended to take into account the impact of Sanitation garages, sewage treatment plants, and the like on a community. The provision is intended to encourage a more equitable distribution of city facilities across community districts. But the current Charter provisions only require that the City take into account facilities on City-owned sites, leaving out the environmental and social impacts happening on privately-owned land. The proposed Charter revision would take into account all “state, federal and private facilities that handle solid waste and transportation in the city facilities map”.

This is a big step forward. It certainly is not a perfect fix – the fair-share provisions only require review, not an actual fair-share distribution (witness the City’s recent approval of expanded Sanitation facilities in CD1), and the new provisions don’t take into account all impacts on privately-owned land – but as Gotham Gazette says, it is a good first step.

One response to “Making 'Fair Share' Fairer”

  1. In fact,the Department of City Planning already compiles this information. Making its collection a charter requirement confers the appearance of improvement without the substance.
    More to the point, this provision falls far short of being useful enough justify approving several of the other changes arbitrarily bundled into a single ballot question, at least two of which increase the influence of personal wealth in NYC political campaigns.
    We have written extensively about this at http://www.CityPragmatist.com.