CROWN HEIGHTS — After admitting it botched a vote on the subject, Brooklyn’s Community Board 9 is set to reconsider recommendations for new zoning rules in Crown Heights next month.
At a CB9 meeting Tuesday night chairman Dwayne Nicholson announced the board would go back to the drawing board on a set of proposed guidelines for the Department of City Planning about land use changes in the area. A previous resolution sent to city planning in the spring was scrapped after a vote to rescind it was incorrectly tallied at a September board meeting.
Nicholson blamed the error on “chaos” caused by chanting and protests from a local activist group.
“Disrespectful behavior and loud outbursts allowed for the error,” Nicholson said. “The vote miscount allowed the resolution to remain. The corrected vote, as has been discovered, indicates the resolution was rescinded.”
Newly-appointed CB9 members will attend a workshop on zoning issues to prepare for a committee meeting held in January to hash out what CB9 wants in the document, Nicholson said.
Then, the board will vote to accept or reject the resolution about rezoning southern Crown Heights and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens “for the final time” at their January full board meeting, Nicholson said.
“Board members are reminded their votes will affect the lives of 125,000 people and your block is no more important than other parts of this community,” he said.
Members of the activist group Movement to Protect the People shouted and jeered at Nicholson as he announced CB9’s plan for the resolution, demanding the community, not just board members, be allowed to give input.
Board member Tim Thomas introduced a draft resolution he’d made and urged the board to not wait until January to restart the rezoning process, which has been in the works since well before the original resolution was adopted in March.
“I don’t believe we need to put this off a single minute more,” Thomas said.
But after a brief debate, the board voted 25 to 8 to reject Thomas’ draft, effectively postponing any conversation on rezoning to next month.
The board also heard from several community members who called for urgency on the matter, citing sales of development lots and rising real estates prices as evidence urgency was needed.
“As we sit here and bicker and snicker and disrupt … developers can move on with what is at hand," said Rabbi Jacob Goldstein, Nicholson’s predecessor as CB9 chairman for more than 30 years. "They can assemble the land, they can buy the property and one day you wake up and find out someone has the land rights, the air rights to put up huge buildings. You know why? Because we sat here and did nothing.”
But others urged caution, like Beverly Newsome, appointed to CB9 this year, who felt moving too quickly on the resolution was dangerous.
“We’re making the same mistake we made in September — being forced to vote on something we as new board members are just learning about,” she said. “This is supposed to happen in committee.”
