More affordable housing, a new public school, plentiful jobs for local residents: These were among the perks Columbia offered to the West Harlem community to offset the impact of its Manhattanville campus expansion and make good on its promise that the neighborhood makeover would be for the better.

These promises were codified in a so-called community benefits agreement, or CBA, which was signed in May 2009. But since then, the group tasked with overseeing it has fallen into disarray, jeopardizing the benefits that the CBA was supposed to guarantee. It has no headquarters, no contact information, and no tax-exempt status, and even some local officials are in the dark about its operations.

The University reports that it has already paid $1.5 million into a fund controlled by the West Harlem Local Development Corporation, an ad hoc group of local representatives and politicians that was formed in 2006 to negotiate the terms of the CBA with Columbia officials on the community’s behalf. So far, the LDC has not distributed any of the money to the projects specified in the agreement, though members say they are close to establishing a new organization to administer the funds.

In other words, for nearly two years, while all eyes have been on the legal battle surrounding the state’s use of eminent domain to turn private properties over to the University, another battle has fallen through the cracks: the fight to secure the $150 million in benefits that Columbia promised to the community.

The Promise

If carried out in full, the community benefits agreement will be worth $150 million. Of that total, $74 million will fund specific projects agreed upon by the University and the LDC during the CBA negotiation process. The remaining $76 million is unencumbered, meaning the LDC can distribute it as it sees fit.

Of the $74 million in earmarked funds, $20 million will go toward affordable housing, and $4 million toward offsetting the cost of legal services for tenants. $30 million will help fund a new public school, and $20 million is designated for “in-kind benefits,” which would allow community access to certain University facilities.

The majority of these benefits are intended to ease the economic impact of the project and to address widespread concerns about gentrification. Like Harlem as a whole, Manhattanville is known for its diversity and its working-class roots, and critics of the expansion argue that the project will increase property values and the overall cost of living beyond the means of many current residents.

These fears are not without merit. In 2009, a full 25 percent of households within ZIP code 10027, which covers most of Manhattanville, had yearly incomes of less than $10,000, and more than half had incomes under $35,000, according to the real estate website, CLRSearch. And, as property values inevitably rise, the project will also require the demolition of about 135 existing housing units, many of them rent-controlled, according to the General Project Plan for the expansion.

The CBA is meant to mitigate problems including decreased affordable housing, but by how much, no one knows for sure. In addition to its $20 million pledged for new housing, Columbia has promised not to privatize the Grant Houses or Manhattanville Houses, two existing public housing complexes in the expansion area.

In addition to helping low-income residents in the short term, the CBA includes funding for initiatives to address the root causes of pervasive problems, such as unemployment, in the long term. Among these is the Teachers College-affiliated Demonstration Community Public School, which should open by the end of 2015 if the timeline given in the CBA holds.

The CBA provides few concrete details on this particular project, describing it broadly as “a high-performing neighborhood NYCDOE [Department of Education] public school … that will support family development and be a community school in the sense that it will associate other services such as after-school programming, community educational programming, and a professional development hub.”

Columbia has also promised $20 million in “in-kind benefits”—namely, public access to unspecified “existing CU facilities, services, and amenities” until 2045, or until the market value of the benefits reaches $20 million, whichever comes first.

In theory, this should allow Manhattanville residents to take advantage of the University’s academic and recreational resources, thus fulfilling the promise that the community would benefit from having an expanded research university in their backyard. In practice, though, it is unclear exactly which resources will be made available, to whom they will be made available, or what impact they will have.

As for the $76 million in unencumbered funds, it is up to the LDC to decide where they will go, and there is no indication of when or how it will do so. LDC member Pat Jones, the former chair of Community Board 9, says only, “Appropriate processes are in place to make determinations of what charitable purposes funds should be used for.”

The CBA requires the University to pay the promised funds in four-month installments over the course of 16 years. In the 21 months since the agreement was signed, Columbia has paid $1.5 million into a benefits fund administered by the LDC. It has also paid half of its $20 million commitment for affordable housing into a fund controlled by the city. While it was mentioned in the CBA, this particular benefit was negotiated earlier with Borough President Scott Stringer, not with the LDC.

The Process

A community benefits agreement is a contract in which a developer promises certain perks to offset the impact of construction, and the community representatives with whom it negotiates agree to support the developer’s project in return.

In theory, the CBA negotiation process should account for a full spectrum of local interests, and the final product should be readily enforceable. But because the process lacks standardized criteria and takes place with little governmental oversight, critics say it tends to produce agreements that exclude parts of the community and cannot be enforced.

The Manhattanville CBA process began in 2006 with the establishment of the LDC. Initially, the group consisted of 13 neighborhood residents and representatives for seven elected officials, with the latter serving in a non-voting, advisory role only. Community Board 9 selected the members to represent various constituencies, such as tenants, business owners, and supporters of the arts. Over the next three years, the LDC negotiated with University officials and drafted an agreement, and in May 2009, it voted to approve the final CBA.

But it was never that simple. The negotiations were tense from the beginning, with some members alleging that the process was skewed in Columbia’s favor, and these tensions escalated into outright hostility when the elected officials’ representatives were given votes on the board.

“The idea was that we would have representatives from the politicians, but they would be advisers and not have any voting power—it would be a community-based organization, and it should primarily function to benefit the community,” says Walter South, a member of Community Board 9 who was involved in the establishment of the LDC. “But … [Congressman Charles] Rangel said if he didn’t have a vote, he was going to kill it, so they caved and gave them a vote. But by them all voting in a bloc, they were able to almost manipulate what the organization was all about.”

Other members, including Susan Russell, chief of staff for New York City Council member Robert Jackson, argued the opposite: that the elected officials served to broaden the of the constituencies represented by the LDC.

Infighting reached a crisis point at the end of 2007, when five of the LDC members most critical of Columbia—Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage owner Nick Sprayregen, who is best known for his unsuccessful lawsuit against the use of eminent domain in Manhattanville; Tom DeMott and Joan Levine, members of the local activist group Coalition to Preserve Community; Earl Kooperkamp, a CPC member and pastor at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 126th Street; and resident Luisa Henriquez—resigned in protest, calling the negotiations “rigged.”

The controversy did not end when the LDC approved the CBA in May 2009. Just days beforehand, the executive committee of Community Board 9 had voted unanimously to reject the agreement, deeming its contents insufficient and questioning how it would be enforced. The board’s decision was nonbinding, but served as a recommendation that its two representatives on the LDC—Vicky Gholson and then-chair Pat Jones—vote “no” on the final ballot.

Many critics of the CBA cited the community board’s opposition as evidence that the agreement did not represent a full spectrum of interests. But the LDC approved the agreement with 15 yeas, two nays, and three abstentions, and this result raised questions about whether the LDC or CB9 was better qualified to represent the community.

Critics also condemned what they saw as a lack of transparency in the process.

“I tried one time to go to one of their meetings, and they threatened to arrest me if I didn’t leave. That’s how democratic they were,” South says. “I think most of the community has been closed out of what’s theoretically happening.”

Local activists raised similar complaints when they were barred from the building during the LDC vote. Then-LDC Vice President Donald Notice, who is now president of the organization, defended the decision to make the vote private, telling the protesters that they had been too unruly at previous meetings. But this did not placate those who felt they had been excluded from the whole process.

Nearly a year later, in March 2010, the New York City Bar Association released a report that criticized the CBA negotiation process—not only as it played out in Manhattanville, but the process itself. The report argued that ad hoc groups like the LDC are not always representative of the communities on whose behalf they are negotiating, and that CBAs may be difficult to enforce because these groups usually disband after approving an agreement and because there are no formal standards governing the process.

The Progress

In Manhattanville, true to the Bar Association’s warnings, the LDC has very little accountability. It has no headquarters and no phone number, and a spokeswoman for the Internal Revenue Service says the IRS revoked the group’s tax-exempt status “for failing to file a yearly information return for three consecutive years.” She cannot say exactly when it was revoked, but the New York Post reported the same information in May 2010, indicating that the group has been operating without 501(c)(3) status for at least nine months.

This could potentially jeopardize the entire CBA, because without tax-exempt status, the LDC cannot dispense any of the money it receives from Columbia.

When asked whether he thought the CBA was being well enforced, South laughs and responds, “‘Well?’ I don’t think it’s being enforced at all.”

He adds, “I find it amazing how inept they are, and you can quote me on that.”

Jones, however, says the LDC was only tasked with negotiating the CBA, not enforcing it, and that a new organization—the West Harlem Development Corporation, or WHDC—will be created to oversee enforcement.

“The work that’s being done now … will be toward the application for 501(c)(3) status for the development corporation,” she says. “The consultants have been working for several months and we had been anticipating that all of this stuff would have been filed by now, but it seems like we’re probably a couple weeks away.”

Notice gave a longer timeline, saying the WHDC should be established by “the middle of spring.”

Asked why the LDC’s 501(c)(3) status was revoked, Jones and Notice say the group never applied for tax exemption because it wasn’t supposed to oversee enforcement.

“Right now, the money that Columbia puts in for the community benefits agreement goes into the Fund for the City of New York, which acts as a fiscal agent for the LDC,” Notice says. “They have 501(c)(3) status, but the LDC itself never intended to have it, and we don’t have it. It wouldn’t have been revoked because we never applied for it. It was never intended for the LDC to carry on the function of implementation of the community benefits agreement.”

IRS records, however, indicate that the LDC was once tax-exempt, and South says, “I got the tax-exempt status for them when they were incorporated.”

Currently, “No money is going directly to the LDC,” Notice says. “It’s going for the community benefits agreement, but we don’t have a fiscal organization set up yet. We are working aggressively trying to get that set up. We’ve worked through the whole summer. We are behind schedule on it, but we have worked vigorously trying to get it set up.”

He adds, “Right now we cannot do it [distribute money] because there are no operation procedures.” But once the WHDC is incorporated with tax-exempt status, he says, “We can hit the ground running and start running programs.”

CB9 members “were told that they [the LDC] were reorganizing, and we were told they had a small board of directors, and we were told that CB9 would have two seats [in the new organization],” South says. “But being told something and seeing something real are two different things.”

Another common allegation has been of a lack of transparency throughout the process.

“The WHLDC has literally not held a public meeting since the CBA was passed in January 2008 and formally signed in 2009,” DeMott says in an email. “There is no implementation pace; there are only secrets, control, and manipulation—all of which shield Columbia quite well.”

Community Board 9 has pushed for stronger enforcement of the CBA, and chair Larry English says he believes the LDC will have its affairs in order soon.

“It is no secret that the community has not been happy about the slow pace that the LDC has taken to organize,” English says in an email. “However, I have spoken with the LDC and have been assured that they will have a new entity in place in the next several weeks. I have expressed that it is important for the LDC to move forward with its mission as quickly as possible and with total transparency.”

Former LDC President Julio Batista, who resigned last year for reasons that were not made public, did not respond to requests for comment.
But it takes two to tango, and the other party is Columbia. Spokeswoman Victoria Benitez says in a statement that the University “has diligently fulfilled its responsibilities under the agreement and worked cooperatively with the WHLDC.”

Columbia promised to give local residents and minorities priority in hiring for project-related jobs. So far, Benitez says that 68 percent of contracts, worth a total of $19 million, have been given to “minority, women, or locally-owned firms,” and that between August 2008 and September 2010, 66 percent of construction work hours were done by minority, women, or local workers. She did not break down the total into individual percentages for minorities, women, and locals.

But it is not just about hiring local residents for construction jobs. The CBA also calls for training programs that would enable unskilled workers to get better positions in the long term.

“The real job training programs in this beginning stage that were envisioned as part of the CBA and which might begin to address Harlem’s unemployment rate—well over 50 percent for black males—are instead supplanted by Columbia’s evictions of the small businesses and landowners and the loss of jobs,” DeMott says.

Another key component of the CBA, the new school, has also made uncertain progress.

“The Demonstration Public School, I think, is getting way too little attention,” says Ben Totushek, a student in the joint General Studies-School of International and Public Affairs program and a member of the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, which has worked closely with the Coalition to Preserve Community. “This is small in the context of the project or even the CBA, but it’s one thing that actually does help the local neighborhood.”

Totushek says that, according to his discussions with University officials as a member of the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, Teachers College is conducting a study of the current educational conditions in the neighborhood.

“I honestly do feel like TC is moving forward in good faith,” he says. “The problem seems to be with the new chancellor of public schools. This new person is having trouble providing Columbia with an actual space.”

Teachers College President Susan Fuhrman did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the language of the CBA, if University officials determine that building a school is unfeasible, they can legally transfer that portion of their financial commitment to the LDC’s unencumbered benefits fund—a fund that cannot be distributed to the community so long as the LDC remains without tax-exempt status.

What’s Next

While some negligence is clearly apparent, Jones emphasizes that the LDC—or its presumptive successor, the WHDC—is not responsible for enforcing every item in the CBA.

“Some of the things that are set forth in the Community Benefits Agreement are obligations that Columbia is bound by under the restrictive declaration that was signed with the city of New York, as well as the General Project Plan, which was signed by the state of New York,” she says. “The CBA clearly says that all community benefits included in the CBA that are provided for in the governing documents shall be governed solely by the governing documents, enforceable solely by the state or local government authorities.”

While many of the benefits stipulated by the restrictive declaration and the General Project Plan are restated in the CBA, they actually predate it and are separate both legally and financially. These items “do not come out of the funds that Columbia would be making to the Development Corporation pursuant to the CBA,” Jones says.

As the LDC struggles to reshape itself and community members seek nonexistent transparency and accountability, Benitez says Columbia’s Office of Government and Community Affairs “is in regular contact with members of the WHLDC and other community leaders.”

But there is still no clear indication of where the LDC is going or whether the WHDC, if established as Jones assured, will do what members insist it will. And given the bitterly fought negotiation process, the still-pervasive belief that the CBA does not do enough, and critics’ deep distrust of Columbia’s and the LDC’s intentions, success or failure will likely be an all-or-nothing affair. If even one promise fails, it could destroy the credibility of the entire agreement for critics.

“I have met numerous times with the management team of Columbia’s Manhattanville project and can honestly say that they have been honest and forthcoming and are making a genuine effort to ensure that the construction process is positive for northern Manhattan,” English writes in an email.

But, he adds, “Columbia has to recognize that … it is viewed, all too often, as placing its interest ahead of the greater community. … The university has to realize that taking 17 acres on the island of Manhattan is the equivalent of seizing a small city. In doing so I believe it assumed greater obligation to community than just being a good neighbor.”

Regardless, the success of the CBA—and in turn the quality of life for Manhattanville residents for decades to come—will most likely hinge on local advocates’ willingness to keep constant pressure on it, and groups like the Coalition to Preserve Community seem more than happy to do so.

“The [expansion] project was presented as, ‘It’s going to help the community because of the nature of the institution,’” Totushek says. “Everyone wants to see that be true.”

With Finn Vigeland

The U.S. Supreme Court will meet today to discuss whether to re-evaluate the legality of eminent domain for Columbia’s 17-acre Manhattanville campus expansion.

If the court decides to grant certiorari—the official term for agreeing to hear a case—it will throw the expansion into legal limbo once again. If it denies certiorari, the state will be able to seize private properties on the University’s behalf. Typically, the court, which has officially scheduled this case for “conference” today, grants just one percent of all petitions for certiorari, so the odds are in favor of Columbia’s project.

At stake are the only properties in the expansion zone—from 125th to 134th streets, from Broadway to 12th Avenue—that Columbia does not yet own: Nick Sprayregen’s four Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage locations and two gas stations owned by Gurnam Singh and Parminder Kaur. Under eminent domain, the state would turn the properties over to the University in exchange for market-rate compensation for Sprayregen, Singh, and Kaur.

“The significance is huge,” Norman Siegel, who is Sprayregen’s attorney and the former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said on Thursday. “If they decide to hear our case, then the issue will be front and center before the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Singh and Kaur have argued that their business is their livelihood and should not be taken from them.

“I need a fair deal from the Supreme Court,” Kaur said on Thursday. “The way the law is now, rich people can do what they want to do—they can do anything. If the decision goes for the rich people, for Columbia, then in the future, poorer people will not have the right to live.”

For Sprayregen, it is also about fighting the state on principle.

“It is a tremendous feeling of violation, it really is,” Sprayregen said in an interview with Spectator last month. “You’re being violated by the very government that’s supposed to protect your rights but instead is merely doing the bidding of the highest bidder, so to speak.”

The legal battle began in December 2008, when the Empire State Development Corporation, the state agency that approves eminent domain, deemed the neighborhood “blighted,” paving the way for the use of eminent domain.

Sprayregen, Singh, and Kaur filed lawsuits shortly thereafter. In December 2009, the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division struck down ESDC’s approval of eminent domain. In a harshly worded ruling, Justice James Catterson said that the project could not qualify as a “public use” because Columbia is an “elite,” private institution. He also cited a common accusation that there was “collusion” between the University and the consulting firm, AKRF, that declared Manhattanville blighted. This accusation stems from the fact that, while conducting the blight study, AKRF also had a contract with the University.

ESDC then appealed, and the New York State Court of Appeals overturned the Appellate Division ruling in June 2010. The Court of Appeals—the highest court in New York state—ruled that the project did constitute a public use because it will create jobs and foster scientific research and noted that a second firm unaffiliated with Columbia had affirmed AKRF’s finding of blight.

From there, the property holdouts’ only recourse was the U.S. Supreme Court, which has supported eminent domain in the past—most recently, in 2005, the court ruled in the landmark Kelo v. New London case that eminent domain could be used to transfer properties from one private owner to another.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a concurring opinion that there were certain situations in which this precedent would not apply—namely, if eminent domain “is intended to favor a particular private party, with only incidental or pretextual public benefits.”

“Our position is consistent with Justice Kennedy’s position in Kelo v. New London,” David Smith, attorney for Singh and Kaur, said on Thursday. “It is imperative that the court should hear our case.”

If the Supreme Court refuses the case, though, “Our options are over,” Smith said. “Columbia has already started to take action on this procedure [eminent domain] in order to remove parties by condemnation. … I’m sure that would be started immediately thereafter. There’d be nothing for us to do, but obviously, I’m hoping we never get to that point.”

Robert Kasdin, senior executive vice president of the University, said in a recent interview, “I don’t have any inside lines into the Supreme Court and as a result, whenever they conference it, they conference it, and we’ll look forward to their decision.”

Smith said he expects the court to make its decision by Monday.

“I’ve been an eternal optimist,” Siegel said in an interview last month. “There’s so many times that people have told me there is no chance. It’s a good fight. I think if somehow the court took it, it’d be a national issue.”

Sam Levin contributed reporting.

After years of on-and-off negotiations with the University, popular Cuban restaurant Floridita will reopen in April 2011 at a new location on 125th Street.

Owner Ramon Diaz said he has signed a lease on a Columbia-owned building at the corner of 12th Avenue and 125th Street—just two blocks west of his former location on 125th and Broadway, and right next door to the newly relocated Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. If all goes according to plan, the restaurant will reopen almost exactly a year after Columbia, Diaz’s landlord, shut down the original location, citing emergency repairs needed to the kitchen floor.

According to University spokesperson Victoria Benitez, Diaz signed the lease for the new space in May, but Diaz said his own plans were not certain until this month. He said he had wanted to reopen by now, but logistical delays made that impossible.

“We at Floridita sincerely apologize to the community and loyal customers for these unforeseen delays, however, we have been forced to deal with an entity and issues that are out of our control,” Diaz wrote in a statement this week. “Despite these challenges, we have resolved to continue to work as hard as we can to reopen and reestablish Floridita within the community that we were proud to serve for 35 years.”

For more than two years now, Diaz has negotiated with Columbia over his longtime premises on Broadway. The University owns the building, which is part of the Manhattanville campus expansion plan.

According to Santiago Carrion, an architectural consultant and project manager for the new Floridita location, Columbia has required the restaurant to take care of maintenance concerns beyond what city codes require, which he said has delayed the opening.

Carrion said the University has asked Floridita to implement a system to remove smoke and exhaust after a fire, in addition to a special valve to prevent water contamination—two steps that he said go beyond the New York City Department of Buildings’ requirements.

“If New York City is OK with it, Columbia should be, and it turns out that’s not the case,” Diaz told Spectator.

The University is overstepping its bounds, Carrion said: “They’ve delayed the project by double-checking things that would be rechecked … by the building department.”

Though University officials did not comment on this specific claim, they released a statement saying, “The University has at every stage fulfilled its promises to achieve this win-win result for Floridita consistent with our responsibility to maintain safe premises for workers and patrons alike.”

The statement continued, “We work with our commercial tenants to help them understand what permits and approvals they need in order to operate within City Code.”

Diaz will provide Columbia with information regarding the contractor who will build out the restaurant, it added.

“I don’t get the sense it’s taken an unusually long period of time,” Columbia Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin said in an interview earlier this month. “We look forward to Floridita completing its relocation and hope it prospers as a business going forward.”

The popular Cuban restaurant Floridita will reopen in a new location after having closed last April, the University said Monday.

Owner Ramon Diaz “has signed a new lease for an attractive relocation space on 125th Street,” University spokeswoman Victoria Benitez wrote in an email Monday afternoon. She did not specify the exact location or the date the lease was signed.

“I should have some better information on how I’m going to proceed by the end of the week,” Diaz told Spectator in an email.

Diaz has spent more than two years in off-and-on negotiations with Columbia over his longtime premises on 125th Street and Broadway. The University owns those buildings, which are part of the Manhattanville campus expansion plan. Columbia closed Floridita in April, citing emergency kitchen repairs. At the time, Benitez said the closure would be temporary and that a relocation deal was in the works.

In a conference call from the Oval Office on Monday, President Barack Obama, CC ’83, spoke to college journalists on “the issues important to young Americans”—everything from the financial crisis to the food at (presumably) John Jay.

The United States has fallen from first to 12th in the world in college graduation rates, the price tag for a college education is skyrocketing, and graduates are hard-pressed to find jobs. Obama tied each of these challenges to two overarching needs: to repair the economy, and for youths to participate in the political process.

He reiterated a promise made in this year’s State of the Union address: that, starting in 2014, college graduates will be able to cap monthly payments on federal student loans at 10 percent of their income. For students who go into public service, such as becoming teachers or police officers, remaining loans would be forgiven after 10 years if they kept up with payments in the meantime.

But colleges must also address rising costs, he said. “If I keep on increasing Pell Grants and increasing student loan programs and making it more affordable but … higher education inflation keeps on going up at the pace that it’s going up right now, then we’re going to be right back where we started.”

He called on colleges to publicize how each dollar of tuition money is spent. Campus facilities have improved since Obama attended college, and “somebody has to pay for that,” he said. “Are we designing our universities in a way that focuses on the primary thing, which is education? You’re not going to a university to join a spa—you’re going there to learn so that you can have a fulfilling career. And if all the amenities … start jacking up the cost of tuition significantly, that’s a problem.”

If students want college costs to decrease, they may have to accept fewer on-campus luxuries, Obama said, hearkening back to his own undergraduate days at his alma mater—50-50 chance he’s talking about Columbia: “Food at the cafeteria was notoriously bad. I didn’t have a lot of options. We used to joke about what was for lunch that day, and there would be a bunch of nondescript stuff that wasn’t particularly edible,” he said. “I don’t want to get in trouble with the First Lady here, because she’s obviously big on improving nutrition, but I do think that you’ve got to think about what we can do to generally make universities more cost-effective for students.”

He also responded to a student from Radford University in Virginia who asked whether the current crop of college students would become the “lost generation” thanks to the economy.

“Your generation is going to be just fine,” he said. “Don’t let anybody tell you that somehow your dreams are going to be constrained going forward.” The “greatest generation,” he added, “had a situation where unemployment reached 30 percent, and they essentially ended up building the American middle class to what it was. … I have no doubt that you guys are going to be successful.”

In Central Harlem, a row of buildings between Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell boulevards has divided neighbors over an affordable housing development.

On one side are residents of the Ennis Francis Houses on 124th Street, who say they just want decent housing. Their apartments are deteriorating, and they would be relocated to new units on 123rd Street. On the other side are residents of brownstones on 123rd, who say the eight-story building would be out of context with the neighborhood.

The project, proposed by the Abyssinian Development Corporation, cleared a hurdle on Sept. 1 with near-unanimous approval from Community Board 10. It awaits City Planning Commission and New York City Council votes, and ADC hopes to begin construction in January.

In the current Ennis Francis building, “When it rains … it backs up into the residents’ apartments,” said Gary Coppedge, president of the building’s tenants association. “There were some places with mold where you saw mushrooms growing out of the carpet.”

Dozens of Ennis Francis tenants showed up for the CB10 vote.

“It’s very difficult when you have a roomful of people who want decent affordable housing to say no, we don’t think it’s appropriate for you,” CB10 chairman William Franc Perry said.

Joshua Bauchner, a member of the CB10 land use committee and a 123rd Street resident, said the 123rd Street Block Association voiced several concerns about the project.

He said the new building will be much taller than the surrounding brownstones and that ADC is avoiding a more arduous city review process by presenting the plan in stages rather than all at once. Residents are also worried that ADC might not have enough money to demolish and replace the old building on 124th, which may create a vacant space for crime to flourish.

They also feel ADC’s management of other properties has been subpar.

Sheena Wright, CEO of ADC, called these allegations misleading. She said the new building will be about 10 feet taller than the brownstones, not 30 feet as 123rd Street residents have claimed, and that a large building is needed to accommodate all Ennis Francis residents, each of whom will be relocated to an apartment with the same square footage as their old one.

“You can’t just upturn these buildings and pour the people out to suit your needs,” Wright said. “The project has to meet the needs of the people.”

She added that, though only phase two is going through the approval process now, phase three will go through the city’s full Uniform Land Use Review Procedure later, at which point there will be “a lot of engagement with the community board, elected officials, and others.” ADC has already submitted preliminary plans for phase three, but they need to be updated.

“What is the financing environment going to be in 24 months?” she said. “Projects take a long time to bake, and this one has been baking since 2005. … I’m very confident we’ll be moving on to phase three as soon as phase two is completed.”

Several 123rd Street residents said they had seen drug deals behind the current Ennis Francis building and dealers scattering when police arrived. But Ennis Francis tenants said that drug dealing occurs in the brownstones as well.

“The parking lot [on 123rd]—the very place we’re trying to build a building—is and has historically been the site of drug activity and sales. Once you build a building there, that is no longer a place where you can do that,” Wright said. “The residents of Ennis Francis Houses very much feel they’ve been painted with a broad brush.”

The idea that “the entire building is out of control is so disingenuous and absolutely inaccurate,” said Kim Smith, former president of the Ennis Francis tenants association.

But the fear of crime is not the only issue.

“Eight stories will take away my afternoon sun. Most brownstones in Harlem are not surrounded by eight- to 11-story buildings on three sides,” said brownstone resident Susann Miles, who used to live in Section 8 public housing herself. She suggested moving some Ennis Francis residents to other ADC-owned buildings and building a smaller development for the rest.

At an Aug. 18 meeting of the CB10 land use committee, dozens of residents on both sides fleshed out an agreement under which CB10 would approve the plan with certain conditions. The next week, though, the executive board revised the conditions to be less stringent, Bauchner said.

Wright responded that at the Aug. 18 meeting, CB10 “talked broadly about what some of those conditions would be,” but never agreed on specifics. After that, “The drafter took verbatim the document from the 123rd Street Block Association and attached that as a set of conditions, which was not at all what the committee had approved.”

Among the final conditions are requirements that ADC provide adequate street lighting, remove garbage expediently and address traffic during construction, submit a complete plan for phase three, and maintain security if the old building remains vacant.

Bauchner said the block association asked Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer to evaluate the process but has not yet gotten a response. Stringer’s office did not respond to calls for comment.

Interestingly, each side said it wanted to sit down with the other and come to a compromise—but neither believed the other was willing to do so.

“Let’s discuss what’s best to the entire community,” Miles said. “I wish they would not pit residents against each other.”

“I’m hopeful that at the end of the day, we can have some type of happy medium where we’re able to move forward with the construction as a team,” Smith said.

Next up is the City Planning Commission vote, but CPC spokeswoman Jovana Rizzo said no date has been set.

It’s been great weather for gardening, and police in two Highlands communities say the summer’s Jersey Fresh has included nice, tall marijuana plants.

And, surprisingly, the pot’s been sprouting right in suburban homeowners’ yards.

Late summer is peak growing season, and in Ringwood and Wanaque, some residents’ pot plants apparently enjoyed August’s ideal combination of sun and rain a little too much: They grew so big, they were readily visible from the street. So just this month alone, police in the two mountainous boroughs have made three substantial discoveries and consequent arrests.

While homegrown marijuana is nothing new, that residents were tending plants out in the open is startling. And so were the locations: suburban neighborhoods.

“We’ve had grow operations before, but normally they’re indoors and small,” said Wanaque Capt. Ken Fackina. “I don’t know if you’d call two a trend, but it’s certainly different.”

On Aug. 4, an investigation by state and local police led them to 62 marijuana plants, worth about $124,000, in the back yard of a Boulevard residence in the Haskell section of Wanaque. On Aug. 10, they found seven plants in a yard on Villa Place, also in Haskell. And on Aug. 12, Ringwood police spotted nine in a yard on Bellot Road. Based on the large quantities of pot, police charged the homeowners not only with possession, but also with intent to distribute, which is a felony.

“It’s not something we run across very often, and it was right in the back yard in kind of a close neighborhood,” said Ringwood police Detective James Rapp.

While indoor pot growers are periodically busted throughout the state — just in March, police uncovered a $10 million operation in Middlesex County — it is the Highlands region that’s seeing a spike in outdoor growing.

It is unclear why. The wooded landscape might hide an outdoor crop, but there wouldn’t be enough sunlight in the woods, Fackina said, adding that the two busts made in Wanaque this month were on suburban streets and readily visible to passers-by.

“We are very rural for New Jersey, so that could make it more tempting for someone,” Rapp said. “But in our case, the last grow we had was in a residential area.”

Facing three growing incidents in such short sequence has put police on guard, but they continue to work mostly on neighbors’ tips rather than proactive searches, which require a warrant.

“It’s certainly piqued our interest,” Fackina said. “This is a little more than normal, but it’ll still be a case-by-case type of thing.”

Ringwood does hire a helicopter from the state police’s Marijuana Eradication Squad periodically to fly over the borough, looking for evidence of pot crops, Rapp confirmed. And while they’re at it, Fackina said, the state usually covers Wanaque as well.

State police officials did not return calls for comment.

The problem is not universal, even in the Highlands. There have been no arrests in West Milford in 2010, said Detective Michael Malfetti. There were several in 2009, including arrests for a huge indoor crop of more than 80 plants and another along the Appalachian Trail near the New York border.

Ringwood’s neighbor, Mahwah in Bergen County, also reports nothing amiss. And just over the Morris County border from West Milford, in Kinnelon, Lt. John Schwartz said there had been no upsurge in pot busts. The last case was two years ago, when police received a tip that a resident was growing marijuana but were unable to find hard evidence.

“Do I think it’s being done? Absolutely,” Malfetti said, “but we haven’t had any calls recently.”

Growers are usually busted when neighbors tip off the police. In the two recent cases in Wanaque, “the plants were large enough that they could be seen from the roadway,” Fackina said. “If you know what you’re looking for and you’ve seen it before, it’s a pretty distinctive-looking plant.”

The problem comes when residents keep their pot in a less visible location. “If it’s growing among other vegetation, people are just going to see green. Most neighbors wouldn’t be able to put it together,” Fackina added. “But we don’t have areas in our town that are really that big where people can grow them in a spot we won’t see.”

In theory, it’s simple: Drive intoxicated, go to jail. Yet there are always plenty of drunken menaces to be corralled, say the cops focusing on pre-Labor Day road safety.

Through Sept. 6, police are adding road patrols and running checkpoints to screen drivers at random for alcohol and drugs. It’s all part of the state Division of Highway Traffic Safety’s intensively publicized “Over the Limit, Under Arrest” campaign. Dozens of police departments in Passaic, Bergen, Morris and Hudson counties are participating.

The goal is to deter drunken drivers through education and visible enforcement, but these crackdowns typically result in arrests and summonses for all manner of moving violations, from speeding to driving without a seat belt.

It is already apparent that some people still need the campaign’s basic message.

Elmwood Park police ran Route 46 checkpoints Aug. 14-15, a week before the campaign formally began, making 15 DWI arrests and writing 246 summonses.

They charged a Newark man with aggravated assault on a police officer and eluding arrest after he allegedly refused to stop at the checkpoint and drove onto the Garden State Parkway. With officers pursuing him, his car caught fire. He tried to flee on foot but was caught and jailed.

“It’s amazing what’s going on out there,” said Elmwood Park Police Chief Don Ingrasselino. “Two, three o’clock in the morning, there’s people going through with kids with no safety restraints, unlicensed drivers. It just doesn’t end.”

Among others, the city of Passaic, Woodland Park and Ringwood will run at least one checkpoint during the two-week campaign and put more officers on the road daily. Clifton, Fair Lawn and Lincoln Park will forgo checkpoints in favor of roving patrols “specifically looking for drunk drivers,” said Lt. Richard Stuart of Clifton.

The primary obstacle to putting up more checkpoints is money: Each one can involve 10 officers and more than $6,000 in overtime pay, according to Woodland Park Police Chief Anthony Galietti and Ringwood Lt. Joseph Walker.

The state gave $4,400 grants to 11 towns in Passaic County and 23 in Bergen that, based on statistics, showed problems with drunken driving. This helps defray the cost of paying officers, but it doesn’t cover the whole cost — Walker said Ringwood spent about $1,800 last year beyond the grant.

DHTS encourages all towns to participate regardless of whether they receive a grant, and Director Pam Fischer said close to 90 percent typically do.

Checkpoints involve stopping cars at random and checking for sobriety and a valid license. Sometimes besides the usual miscreants, police snag a bonus: During last year’s effort, Ringwood police arrested eight criminal fugitives.

The reason for the extra effort is apparent in New Jersey road-death statistics. There were 583 traffic fatalities in 2009, 185 of which — about 31 percent — involved alcohol. This year’s goal is to reduce that to 29 percent, said Clifton Lt. Stuart.

The task is daunting: Nationally, about 1.5 million are arrested each year for driving while intoxicated, but police catch only one drunk for every 772 estimated to be on the road, says DHTS.

During last summer’s campaign, departments statewide reported 1,528 DWI arrests, 8,051 speeding tickets and 4,964 seat belt violations.

It is apparent that any such special effort makes a difference, no matter what time of year.

In a monthlong crackdown from Dec. 7, 2009, to Jan. 3, 2010, Passaic city police made 25 DWI arrests and issued 399 summonses. The average number of DWI arrests per year is between 215 and 225, said Sgt. Scott Nayda — about 16 in a normal two-week period.

But officials emphasized that they do not target drunken drivers just during this campaign. Fischer, the DHTS director, called it a “supplement” to regular efforts.

Besides resulting in more arrests, Fischer said, checkpoints and increased patrols create a culture of visible law enforcement that deters people from driving drunk to begin with.

“We’ve come a long way, and there’s a recognition from a social norm standpoint that it is unacceptable,” she said. “But we still have to look at the fact that between a quarter and a third of fatal crashes [in New Jersey] have alcohol as a factor. We have to keep pushing this message out there.”

PASSAIC — The defense attorney for a city man accused of domestic violence was held in contempt of court Tuesday after a verbal confrontation with Municipal Judge Xavier Rodriguez, but she says she was just doing her job.

That morning, attorney Alexis Enderle of Passaic had made a motion for her client’s case to be dismissed after a witness — the alleged domestic violence victim — failed to appear in court and could not be found at her house. Rodriguez granted the motion but told Enderle that if her client was found to be “in cahoots” in the witness’s failure to show, the case would be reopened.

Enderle “began to argue and scream that her client was not a witness tamperer,” Rodriguez said in a certification read in a continued municipal court hearing on the matter Tuesday afternoon. He said Enderle refused to stop speaking despite being asked to do so several times.

But Enderle told Rodriguez the implication that her client was involved in the witness’ disappearance was “slanderous,” and testified, “I felt as though I was protecting my client’s best interest by defending his integrity.”

“My job as his attorney is to create a record,” she said. By not challenging Rodriguez’s statement, she added, “I would not have been fulfilling my obligation.”

She and her attorney asked that Rodriguez postpone his decision until Enderle could get a copy of the transcript from the morning’s domestic violence hearing. But Rodriguez refused, saying it was enough for him just to read the certification of what happened. He upheld the contempt of court charge and ordered a $350 fine to be imposed following a five-day stay. Enderle may appeal, he said.

Neither she nor her attorney would comment after the hearing.

WOODLAND PARK — By day, workers plow through the former UBC quarry off Valley Road, readying it for the homes of the future.

But by night, scientists sift the newly dug up earth for treasure from a barely conceivable past: fossils, from the first age of dinosaurs.

Developer K. Hovnanian Homes will build condominiums on the privately owned site. But scientists and history buffs have petitioned officials to absorb part of the quarry into a park, thus preserving a sandstone wall imprinted with dinosaur tracks predating an ancient mass extinction and showing effects of climate change.

But time’s running out as the county review takes its course. And now, with tractors atop the cliff already having pushed a shroud of soil over the wall, those scientists have turned their efforts to salvaging what fossils they can for museum display.

“It’s really bulldozed over,” said John McCauley, an amateur paleontologist and museum founder who’s collected more than 2,000 signatures on a petition to incorporate the wall into the adjacent Rifle Camp Park. “The layers are intact, but they’re about 10 to 15 feet deep under soil now.”

Preserved in the wall are the footprints of dinosaurs and other life, plus evidence of the conditions following the Triassic-Jurassic wipeout of half of the planet’s life forms amid volcanic activity about 200 million years ago.

“The Triassic extinction layer is just below the lava in the sandstone, and the dawn of the Jurassic period is there, with the most species at that layer of any quarry in New Jersey,” said Chris Laskowich of Woodland Park, a former science teacher at Paterson’s Eastside High School.

There are dinosaur tracks throughout the Newark Basin, but this is “the only place that remains in eastern North America where the geological context of those footprints can be seen,” said Paul Olsen, a Columbia University professor who has extensively researched the site. In laymen’s terms, that means it’s the only such site not shattered by development.

The fossils also include other animals’ tracks and even rain patterns. Water ripples also are visible in the sandstone, indicating a lake once existed, said Gary Vecchiarelli, research associate at the State Museum’s Bureau of Natural History and a geoscience student at New Jersey City University.

Layers of sediment show the lake dried up and then returned, Laskowich said. There also is a spot where lava “paused and chilled and then started up again.”

Collectively, these natural records show the conditions that sparked the mass extinction: the eruption of giant lava flows coupled with a reversal of Earth’s magnetic field, Olsen said.

The eruptions likely emitted “huge amounts” of carbon dioxide that “wiped out about 50 percent of the groups of living organisms, and it took 20 million years for ecosystems to recover that diversity,” he added. In the current context of climate change, “It certainly bears examination — but we can’t examine it if the rock outcrops are covered with concrete.”

McCauley’s petition asks the Passaic County Parks Department to incorporate the wall into adjacent Rifle Camp Park, leaving the rest of the quarry to the condos. County spokesman Keith Furlong said the county received the petition “a few months ago” and that its Planning Board had met with K. Hovnanian executives about ways to preserve the tracks and fossils.

But a spokesman for K. Hovnanian said the developer will proceed as planned.

“We’re bringing this site into conformance with the rest of the neighborhood,” said spokesman Doug Fenichel. “We’re creating a lot of good homes and a lot of economic activity. This is a great story of taking an industrial operation that was in a residential area and reclaiming it for residential use.”

The scientists said they do not oppose developing the quarry so long as the fossil wall is left intact. “If they were to leave the red rock exposed but not excavatable, that would still be very valuable,” Olsen said. “But if they put a wall of cement on top of it, that would, for all practical purposes, eliminate the scientific value of the site.”