Kew Gardens Community Board Votes No To Jail Plan

KEW GARDENS, QUEENS — The Kew Gardens community board voted unanimously against the plan for a new local jail advancing to the next stage.

Queens Community Board 9 voted unanimously Tuesday night to urge the City Planning Commission not to green light the plan for a new jail in Kew Gardens, which would allow the plan to advance to the city's land use review process.

The planning commission must decide by March 25 whether to certify the jail plan as complete and send the plan through the city's land use review process, known as ULURP. The vote Tuesday is largely symbolic, but city rules say the planning commission must explain any decision that goes against community board recommendations.

"The City Planning Commission does irreparable harm by starting the ULURP clock," the community board's resolution states. "This proposal, designed without any communication with the affected communities, will quite simply overwhelm and destroy the small historic residential neighborhood of Kew Gardens, and also adversely affect the adjacent community of Briarwood."

A spokesperson for City Council Member Karen Koslowitz, who represents Kew Gardens, declined to comment on the vote.

In August 2018, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to build four new jails throughout the city to replace the detention facilities on Rikers Island and reduce the city's jail population from 9,400 to 5,000 by the year 2027.

"Closing Rikers Island and opening community based facilities is not only beneficial for New York City’s corrections officers and incarcerated population, but also beneficial for the Kew Gardens community," Koslowitz said at the time. "The new facility in Kew Gardens will bring significant economic development, and provide hundreds of new parking spaces for the community."

To gather community input on each of the new jails, the mayor's office created "Neighborhood Advisory Committees" to meet with local stakeholders, though what happens in the closed-door meetings is largely a mystery.

Last week, Queens Borough President Melinda Katz and Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. sharply rebuked the mayor's office for what they said was a failure to collaborate with the local communities that would house the new jails.

"We are deeply disturbed by the lack of meaningful local engagement on the borough-based jails project to date," Katz and Diaz Jr. wrote on March 8. "The process of developing the borough-based jails system must start anew."

The mayor has pledged to hold more open meetings about the jail projects.

"We’re going to fix that situation and make sure there are meetings in communities where media have the access to hear how the dialogue goes," de Blasio said during a press conference.