BP assembles environmental group to lead Queens’ climate efforts
/
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards announces the launch of Operation Urban Sustainability and is joined by a number of its members in Flushing on Thursday, April 21, 2022. Photo via the QBP’s office
By Jacob Kaye
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards assembled his own Queens version of the Planeteers Thursday to announce the first-ever advisory board focused solely on equipping the borough for the climate crisis.
Operation Urban Sustainability, a working group of Queens environmentalists, elected officials, policy workers, transportation activists and nonprofit leaders, gathered in Flushing Thursday, blocks away from where three people drowned in their flooded basement apartment during Hurricane Ida.
The group will be tasked with coming up with plans to shore up Queens’ resiliency and sustainability efforts.
It includes members from the Alley Pond Environmental Center, the Waterfront Alliance, Woodside on the Move, Transportation Alternatives, Queens College, Guardians of the Flushing Bay, the Queens County Farm Museum, the Queens Climate Project, the Newtown Creek Alliance, Queens Solid Waste Advisory Board and the Surfrider Foundation NYC, as well as former City Councilmember Costa Constantinides.
The borough president made the announcement at the intersection of Kissena Boulevard and Rose Avenue, which was flooded on the last day of August 2021 as a result of heavy rains from Hurricane Ida.
“Just seven months ago, this block was ground zero for one of the most horrific examples of extreme weather our borough has ever seen,” Richards said. “Ida exposed just how grossly inadequate our infrastructure was, and how deadly those consequences were.”
“It's not just severe storms that threaten our future – what's just as dangerous is the reluctance to see sustainability in a holistic manner,” he added. “Queens should be an unrivaled leader in modern infrastructure, in clean, renewable, clean, renewable energy production. Queens should be a national hub of urban agriculture. Queens should be a model for the rest of the city to follow when it comes to creating open space – that's why we're standing here today, to launch Operation Urban Sustainability.”
The group, which will serve for a year, will meet once a month beginning in May. Though the meetings won’t be public, the report they issue at the end of the year will be.
The group will make recommendations to the borough president in regards to which environmental projects the office spends money on or pushes for.
Though there isn’t a set dollar amount on what types of projects the group can recommend, what ultimately is pursued will be largely dependent on what funds the office can get from the local, state and federal government.
“Once we know what the initiatives that they're going to create look like, that enables us to then go and advocate to the administration on this Queens plan,” Richards said.
Operation Urban Sustainability was created by Katherine Brezler and Malik Sanders, both of the Queens borough president’s office.
