CROWN HEIGHTS — A proposal to change land use rules in Crown Heights hit yet another roadblock Tuesday as the local community board sent a key document to start the rezoning process back to the drawing board.
At a full Community Board 9 meeting Tuesday night at Medgar Evers College, the board voted to send its year-old resolution letter to the Department of City Planning back to CB9's land use committee again for further consideration.
“Everyone in this room is tired of this,” said CB9 board member Fred Baptiste, who introduced the motion to send the resolution back to the committee at the end of the meeting, around 10 p.m. “We just need to move forward … Let’s let the committee do its work.”
The board had been planning to vote on whether to accept the document, which would prompt the city to move ahead with a study of rezoning southern Crown Heights and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens.
The decision came after a more than two-and-a-half-hour meeting filled with jeering and shouting from board members and residents alike during which police nearly escorted out members of the activist group Movement to Protect the People. The group — which has used increasingly disruptive tactics to oppose the rezoning process — used noisemakers and chants to drown out debate about the resolution, which they claim was written without community support.
CB9 originally sent a resolution to city planning last year to begin the rezoning process, which was rescinded in the fall following protests from MTOPP and a vote miscount by the board’s manager.
Since then, the board has held several meetings — one of which descended into a racially charged shouting match and another of which resulted in police removing MTOPP’s leader — to try to come up with new language for the resolution.
Many residents say new zoning rules are necessary in the district to protect against a recent uptick in building and construction projects in the neighborhood.
The next Community Board 9 committee meeting will be posted to the board's website.
