Four years into the construction of a controversial underground water filtration plant in the Bronx, a steep rise in projected costs has revived questions about whether the city made the best financial decision in choosing the location over an aboveground site in Westchester.
The city's economic crisis has made these questions more pressing than ever, adding to the concern over the amount of debt the city has taken on for capital projects and the future cost of paying the interest on that debt.
The escalating cost of the facility, which will be one of the largest water filtration plants in the world, is one of a number of complaints raised by critics, who opposed ever placing it in the Bronx and say the city is mismanaging the project. As they watch over the construction of the plant as well as associated work at nearby Jerome Park Reservoir, they want to ensure that the city keeps its promises to provide jobs to local residents, minimize the environmental impacts of construction in residential neighborhoods and spend an additional $240 million on Bronx parks.
Local politicians and state officials agreed to let the city build the filtration plant after the Bloomberg administration made these promises. Other projects throughout the city -- from Willets Point to Atlantic Yards to Yankee Stadium -- also faced local opposition and entail similarly elaborate agreements for community improvements, affordable housing and more. The ongoing saga of the filtration plant in the north Bronx shows the need for constant vigilance by residents and elected officials to make sure these promises are kept.
The plant's roots go back to the late 1990s. The federal government has deemed much of the city's water so pristine that it need not undergo filtration. Since 1998, though, the city has been under a court order to begin filtering the portion of its water supply that originates in the Croton watershed, east of the Hudson River, so that it can meet federal drinking water standards. For nearly two decades, residents and elected officials in the northern Bronx fought the city's attempts to build a water filtration plant there. They succeeded in blocking the first proposed location at the Jerome Park Reservoir.
Many pushed for the plant to be built outside of the city, at a non-residential site in Westchester County. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection, which manages the city's water supply, preferred the Bronx site because of its proximity to existing water tunnels as well as for various engineering issues. It also wanted to keep the filtration plant within the city borders for security reasons. City construction unions lobbied heavily to put the plant in the Bronx.
In 2003, the city won the necessary approval from the state legislature to build an underground facility on 28 acres of Van Cortlandt Park beneath the driving range of the park's Mosholu Golf Course. In return, the Bloomberg administration agreed to spend $200 million to restore and build parks in every Bronx assembly district plus $40 million on improvements in Van Cortlandt Park. It promised that environmental impacts would be mitigated and jobs would go to local residents.
The final environmental impact statement determined that building the plant in a 10-story-deep hole blasted from the bedrock, and then restoring the surface, would cost less than building at the more distant above-ground site in Westchester.
Plant opponents argue that it defies basic common sense to think that building a one-of-kind underground facility would be less expensive than a standard plant above ground. They say that the environmental agency deliberately understated the costs of building in Van Cortlandt Park to convince people it was the best location.
Since 2003, the projected cost of building the Croton Water Filtration Plant, as the project is called, and the associated off-site infrastructure has risen from $1.3 billion to more than $3 billion. It has been plagued by delays as well. Originally set for completion in 2006, the city now expects it to come on line in 2012.
The delays have already cost the city money. The federal government fined New York City $4.78 million after it missed a 2007 deadline for hiring a primary contractor for the plant.
Financing for the city Department of Environmental Protection, including debt service on large capital projects like the filtration plant, comes from water and sewer fees, not general city revenues. The department says that two recent increases in city water rates are not related to rising costs at the filtration plant. Whether or not that is true, ultimately city residents and businesses will bear the additional costs.
"The costs have turned out to be what we feared -- enormous -- and the water rate payers are the ones who pay," said Assemblymember Jeffrey Dinowitz, who represents the area and is an outspoken critic of the plant.
In April 2008, New York City Comptroller William Thompson began an audit of the project, which is still in progress, according to press officer Laura Rivera.
The city Independent Budget Office analyzed the costs in an October 2008 report. "We tried to look at how much of it is due to general construction cost escalation, sometimes known as inflation, and our sense is that explains about 45 percent of the increase," budget office deputy director George Sweeting said, according to the Riverdale Press. He added that it would be fair to assume that the plant's costs would have ballooned wherever the plant was built. He cautioned that the analysis is not an audit.
"A number of factors, including general inflation in the construction industry and the highly competitive construction market in New York City, contributed to the rise in construction costs for the Croton plant," Angel Román, deputy press secretary for the Department of Environmental Protection, wrote in an email message.
Design changes and the withdrawal of the original contractor further added to the cost.
The report from the budget office shows that more than $600 million in projected costs were not included in the 2003 final supplemental environmental impact statement. These costs were not included in the estimates for either location, said budget office analyst Ana Champeny.
Certainly major cost overruns are not unusual. Last week Thompson issued a report indicating that the cost of capital projects, which are funded primarily with debt, has escalated by 187 percent since fiscal year 1990.
Requests by Dinowitz and other Bronx officials for a full city, state or federal investigation of the construction costs and potential conflicts of interest in the decision to site the plant have gone unanswered.
One possible conflict, according to plant critics, involves Christopher Ward, who was commissioner of the city Department of Environmental Protection at the time of the plant's approval and now chairs the Port Authority. "We know that the main advocacy group for building in Van Cortlandt Park was the General Contractors Association. We also know that on the day the City Council gave final approval for the plan, Ward resigned, and almost a year later took the top job at the General Contractors Association," Dinowitz said. His year wait, Dinowitz charges, fulfilled the letter but not the spirit of city conflict of interest laws.
Aside from the costs in dollars, an undertaking of this magnitude carries a number of environmental costs, bringing significant noise, dust, vehicular exhaust and other possible hazards.
"The project requires enough concrete to build a sidewalk from New York to Miami and enough pipe to reach the top of the Empire State Building 140 times over. Workers carved out enough dirt from the ground to fill more than 100,000 dump trucks," Roman wrote in an email.
The project's environmental impact statement called for minimizing the effects of such a mammoth effort on the adjacent community, home to about 26,000 people in a half-mile radius.
Residents say that construction crews successfully muffled the noise of blasting to prepare the underground site, but it took several years before the Department of Environmental Protection was able to get pollution controls installed on construction vehicles at the site, as promised.
The Croton Facility Monitoring Committee, which includes representatives of local community boards, elected officials and the parks and environment departments, was established to provide oversight of construction.
Lyn Pyle, who lives across the street and was on the monitoring committee during the first year of construction, said the environment department was unable to do anything to reduce pollution from the parade of trucks going back and forth through the neighborhood. The situation improved after the city passed a law in 2007 requiring trucks to have the best available pollution controls.
Residents say that, with prodding from community representatives on the monitoring committee, the Department of Environmental Protection has become more sensitive to the neighborhoods' concerns. The process at Van Cortlandt Park is much better than the one at Yankee Stadium, which does not have a mechanism for community oversight, said Karen Argenti, a former Bronx resident who has remained involved in both issues.
Nevertheless, there remains a legacy of mistrust of the city. It was reinforced last summer when the environment department announced that it would use explosives to dig a shaft at Jerome Park Reservoir, across the street from the Bronx High School of Science. A judge blocked the blasting, and the agency ultimately decided to use surface drilling instead.
Longtime watchdogs also are concerned about the leakage of large amounts of groundwater at the underground construction site, which they said is enormously wasteful. The project has a permit to discard up to 1.2 million gallons of groundwater and stormwater runoff a day into the city's sewage system during construction.
The design for restoring the surface includes creating artificial wetlands to filter and hold runoff as well as any remaining groundwater flows. “We anticipate that the final design will incorporate several beneficial reuse and management strategies,” Román wrote in an email.
As with many projects, the city sold the filtration plant on the promise of jobs for local (typically minority) residents. Very few of the jobs have materialized, however.
At the Croton plant, federal restrictions against hiring people based on where they live hampered such efforts. The lack of a labor agreement with the contractor to set aside apprenticeships for non-union members has also hindered job creation efforts. In addition, many young Bronx residents don't have the high school degree or training to gain entry to the various construction unions that control the jobs, said Gregory Faulkner, who has been deeply involved in this issue as chair of Bronx Community Board 7 and the monitoring committee.
In seeking subcontracting jobs, minority businesses, which tend to be small, face obstacles such as the prohibitive cost of insurance, the lack of political connections and a demanding certification process.
"It is very troubling when you have a community that needs jobs and you see billions of dollars being spent and they don't go to the community," said Faulkner. He said, however, that the Department of Environmental Conservation and Skanska, the contractor constructing the plant, are making improvements.
Several programs show promise, he said. Skanska has trained two classes of local contractors in a program it created, and the environment department provided funding to Project H.I.R.E., a construction skills training program of Bronx Community College, which has trained 60 neighborhood residents so far.
The environment department reported to the monitoring committee that Bronx residents held 23 percent of the filtration plant jobs in the last month. Faulkner said that percentage is greater than several years ago, but the agency's goal of 25 percent is too low. "I'd like it at 80 percent," he said.
The parks department does not have figures on how many local workers or contractors have been hired to build or renovate Bronx parks. "Our contractors have employed Bronx residents for the Croton park projects and we encourage them to continue to do so whenever possible," parks spokesperson Jesslyn Moser wrote in an email. "Parks seeks the lowest bidders for our park construction projects. Unfortunately, some of the Bronx based subcontractors are not the lowest responsive bidders to our projects so they are not hired."
When the water plant was approved, many people expressed skepticism that the $240 million for fixing up Bronx parks would really come through. Much of it has, though. So far, the city has spent $120 million to complete 23 of the 67 promised park projects, according to Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. Another 20 are under construction and the rest are in the pipeline. Asked if the current economic crisis might affect the funding, he said, "I think it's highly unlikely these things will be cut."
"I think the real story here is how much good has been accomplished for the citizens of the Bronx in addition to the public good created by the filtration plant," Benepe said.
Even critics agree. The parks are "the one positive that's come out of this project," said Dinowitz. But he and many residents say that it was too high a price to pay. "The Bronx should not have to accept such an awful project in its midst to get money for parks," he said.
The $2.3 million Sachkerah Woods Playground adjacent to the filtration plant site was one of the first projects. It was designed with a great deal of community involvement, and residents are very happy with it, said Ora Holloway, a 32-year resident who led a long community effort to rid that corner of the park of drugs and prostitution and build a playground.
Restoring the golf course has proved more controversial. Many people predicted that security concerns would prompt the city to restrict public use in the area over the plant. But plans are moving forward for a new driving range, golf clubhouse and parking lot on top of the plant.
These plans, however, have drawn some opposition. At a recent presentation of the design, residents were dismayed to find that the clubhouse and a 75-car parking lot encroached upon a grassy field next to the new playground, a space where families picnic and young people play pick-up sports.
"In the summertime, that area is so full it is unbelievable," said Holloway.
Barry McLoughlin, executive director of the Mosholu Golf Course, which is run by the nonprofit youth development program The First Tee, said, though, that the city had agreed to restore the parking once the plant was complete and that the spaces are needed to accommodate golfers and school buses and provide revenue for the program.
After objections from residents, the city's Design Commission gave preliminary approval to the project on the condition that the agencies restudy the parking lot design. Benepe said that the parking lot has since been moved. The final design is expected to be released in a few months.
Although the city seems to be fulfilling its promises on improving parks, the placement of the filtration plant in the park remains troubling to advocates, who say that city infrastructure doesn't belong in parks, unless there is no alternative.
The project, they say, set a disturbing precedent for taking over, or "alienating," parkland for a non-park use over the objections of elected officials who represent the community. In effect, this deprives the community of a say in what happens in their park. To add to advocates' concerns, the filtration plant decision was soon followed by the taking of Macombs Dam Park for a new Yankee Stadium before the community had a chance to protest.
"Parkland is an easy mark," said Dinowitz. "No one lives there. The city both under this and the previous administration treats parkland as prime real estate and that should never be."
Benepe noted, however, that numerous city parks, including Central Park, have city infrastructure. Because of the mitigation money, he said, "parks in the Bronx are replete with hundreds of acres of recreational facilities that are being dramatically improved. That has never happened before with any public facility put into a park."
Yankee Stadium presents a more troubling picture. As of last spring, the cost of replacing the parkland the Yankees took over for their new stadium had almost doubled, and many of the new parks, set to open along with the new stadium this spring, had fallen two years behind schedule.
Residents say that the new parks are not a fair trade because they are much farther from where people live than the old facilities were, and part of the replacement is artificial turf on top of a parking garage.
The Yankees say they are fulfilling promises to provide jobs for minorities and woman, construction contracts to Bronx businesses and a job-training program made in a Community Benefits Agreement with Bronx officials. So far, though, there has been no independent oversight to verify this. In addition, the team was supposed to set aside money -- about $1.2 million a year -- for local nonprofit groups, but it took more than two years before the first grants were distributed.
The recent parkland takings have led park advocates to seek greater protection for public land. The nonprofit advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks is exploring legislation that requires the city to complete an environmental review before parkland can be taken.
"Outcomes are important - you can't delay projects forever," said Christian DiPalermo, the organization's executive director. "But the more people are heard, the better your development or your change of use is going to be accepted in the long run."
Over the past eight years, federal support for urban parks has largely evaporated. Now parks advocates hope that a new administration with strong city connections will put urban parks back on the agenda.
This would come at a time of increased appreciation for parks in cities. Even as federal dollars for parks have dwindled, a renewed investment in parks and public spaces from city, state and private sources has helped revitalize urban centers. Cities all over the country are realizing that fixing up parks, adding recreation and greening the cityscape not only improves residents' quality of life and the environment, but also attracts business investment and raises real estate values.
Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley has been in the vanguard, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg has also been building a green legacy, adding more than 300 acres of parks and renovating parks and playgrounds throughout the city, continuing the effort to restore parks that was launched by nonprofit conservancies beginning in the 1980s. The Bloomberg administration has spent $1.5 billion in capital funding on parks projects so far, according to parks department spokesman Philip Abramson. New and restored parks and sports fields and the unfurling of parks and greenways along the waterfront have created outdoor recreation and community gathering spots that that make people want to stay in the city to raise their families, instead of dispersing to the suburbs.
Two federal programs provide grants for state and local park projects and inner-city park rehabilitation, maintenance and recreation programs: the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Program. During the Bush administration, both received little to none of the total amount Congress was authorized to spend when the legislation passed in the 1970s - $900 million a year for the conservation fund and $725 million over five years for the urban park recovery program.
Now, though, parks advocates see reason for optimism. President-elect Barack Obama is the first president in decades to come from a city, and he has promised to renew efforts to protect the environment. The advocates hope he will begin by including parks in his of proposed economic stimulus package of infrastructure rebuilding and energy projects.
"A lot of people on the Obama team are from Chicago and have seen what the whole investment in green infrastructure did for that city," said Drew Becher, executive director of the New York Restoration Project, which is partnering with the city on its Million Trees project and improving parks in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. "We can take this and make it something on the national scale."
In mid-December, the citywide advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks and a number of city park conservancies and other nonprofit park partners signed a joint letter to the New York State congressional delegation calling for the inclusion of parks in the federal stimulus package.
The letter mentions numerous projects in the city that are fully planned or already under way where work could begin within a few months, as would be required under the plan. These include the Hudson River Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway. The New York City parks department reportedly has more than 25 projects, at a cost of $1 billion, ready to be started within 120 days.
PlaNYC 2030, Mayor Bloomberg's blueprint for making the city environmentally and economically sustainable as it grows over the next 25 years, aims to put a park or public plaza within a 10-minute walk of every resident, complete greenways, provide more playing fields and playgrounds, plant a million new trees, and add street plantings and "bluebelts" to help capture stormwater runoff that is polluting the harbor.
The funding for this new wave of green infrastructure remains in place, said Bloomberg spokesman Marc La Vorgna, but last spring revenue shortfalls caused the city to stretch out the current (FY 2009) four-year capital plan to a five-year schedule, which will slow all capital construction, including parks. "We already have a built-in program of projects that could move forward now if we had an infusion of cash," said La Vorgna. "Within that plan, there is a heavy emphasis on parks."
Although the Obama team is focused on conservation, energy efficiency and the development of new energy sources, it is not clear whether it is looking at the role of green and livable urban communities as part of its strategy to reduce energy use and curb the greenhouse emissions that cause global warming.
Vehicles burn two thirds of the petroleum used in the United States and produce about a quarter of the country's greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to developing more efficient vehicles, policies and programs that encourage people to live in cities and to cluster suburban development would diminish the consumption of fossil fuels. These would include changing the patterns of where we live and how we commute. Improved mass transit, making communities more pedestrian and bicycle friendly and "smart growth" that encourages clustered development can all play a role.
Another piece is creating and sustaining vibrant cities and cohesive communities -- and the parks and public spaces that help make them that way. Making cities and towns more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly further reduces their carbon footprints, as does planting trees and other vegetation. Minimizing sprawl also protects other equally vital resources, such as clean water, farmland and wildlife habitat.
Some observers express concern that, in our rush to invest in infrastructure and get people working immediately, we could cast in stone environmentally wasteful development patterns and continue the haphazard 20th century suburban and exurban exodus.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, for one, wrote recently that he feared the stimulus plan would be the federal version of "This Old House," reinforcing the existing sprawl instead of building on the emerging movement to create town centers and meeting places that reverse the isolation and, though he didn't mention it, the unsustainability, of the suburbs.
The Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit that works to turn public spaces into community places, seconded that concern in a discussion about the proposed infrastructure investment on its forum for a new "placemaking" movement: "There is a disturbing message that this money will be spent overwhelmingly on roads and bridges and a real danger that the (stimulus) plan will retard innovation and entrench us in the past."
Assuming it comes to fruition, the billions of dollars in federal spending will shape the American landscape for the next century. Will it entrench the wasteful consumption of energy, land, water and natural resources or put us on the way toward a more livable and sustainable strategy that will give a real symbolic significance to Obama's acceptance speech in Grant Park?
Anne Schwartz, in charge of the parks topic page since its inception in 1999, is a journalist who specializes in environmental issues.Â
Last year's campaign to create more people-friendly streets on the Upper West Side was launched with visions of Copenhagen or Paris, or at least of closing Broadway to cars. But what has emerged from a yearlong collaboration of the community, transportation experts and advocacy groups is a more modest set of proposals that can be put in place piecemeal and at a relatively low cost. Together, however, these streetscape changes could make the Upper West Side a much greener and safer place and set a precedent for other neighborhoods.
The report, the Blueprint for the Upper West Side: A Roadmap for Truly Livable Streets, proposes a number of design elements, including physically separated bike lanes in both directions along Broadway's median, extended curbs and raised crosswalks at intersections and parking spots replaced with sidewalk "bulb-outs" for seating, bicycle parking, greenery and garbage pick-up.
The effort aims to ride the momentum of the city's new focus on the streets as public space. The debate over the plan on the Upper West Side could be played out in neighborhoods across the city as the administration and transportation advocates come up with similar proposals for those communities.
The Upper West Side Streets Renaissance Campaign "is the community's effort to put it on a silver platter for a Department of Transportation that's interested in seeing a lot of good change roll out," said Wiley Norvell, spokesman for Transportation Alternatives, one of the groups working on the plan.
The plan has the support of the neighborhood's elected officials, including Councilmember Gale Brewer, Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal and Borough President Scott Stringer. So far, the Bloomberg administration is noncommittal. Department of Transportation spokesman Scott Gastel said, "The study proposed some interesting ideas for the Upper West Side, which we will keep in mind as we look for ways to improve the area."
But entrenched attitudes about driving and, especially, parking in the neighborhood could pose obstacles to implementing the full range of proposals. Any street changes would require support from the local community board, which has to balance a wide range of interests.
"I think the community as a whole is hungry for the changes," said Helen Rosenthal, chairwoman of Community Board 7, "but it does mean for some people giving up things they've become accustomed to."
Although Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to reduce traffic through congestion pricing failed, the Department of Transportation, under commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, has gone into high gear to make the streets more livable in other ways. Over the last three years, the department has created new pedestrian plazas, built 200 miles of bicycle lanes, closed streets on summer weekends and launched new programs for safer streets for seniors and schoolchildren. It is looking at how to improve especially congested corridors throughout the city in ways that meet the needs of all users, not just drivers..
The department presented its new planning approach in a recent report, World Class Streets. "Designing streets as great places for people and not just as utilitarian corridors for vehicles takes full advantage of New York's density and vibrancy — it's a new frontier in ensuring that New York remains the greatest city in the world," said Sadik-Khan.
A 2006 study by Transportation Alternatives found that people living on streets with heavy traffic go out less often and have fewer friends and acquaintances. Three quarters of Upper West Side residents live within two blocks of a congested road. The designs proposed in the Upper West Side blueprint aim to make the streets greener, quieter, safer and more accessible and ultimately to create street life and a sense of community many say the increasingly dense neighborhood lacks.
"People want something green and they want to sit and they want to socialize," said Brewer. "From talking to the BIDs [area's Business Improvement Districts], it helps small merchants, too. If people linger, they buy things."
To improve pedestrian safety, the plan calls for widening curbs at all corners of every intersection — starting with temporary extensions at major street crossings — and installing bollards or planters at corners to protect people standing there. It also proposes raised crosswalks to make pedestrians more visible to drivers and re-timing the lights to allow slower-moving pedestrians time to cross.
Sidewalk extensions would be used to make the streetscape more pleasant in other ways: adding public seating, bicycle parking, trees and greenery and moving garbage and recycling collection out of the path of pedestrians.
Another goal is to calm traffic on the smaller cross-streets, making residential blocks safer places for children to play as well as for bicyclists. The prototype looks almost suburban to a New Yorker accustomed to the grid. Angled parking narrows the street to one lane. Halfway down the block, curved sidewalk extensions on opposite sides of the street create a zigzag that cars must navigate, and the parking switches to the other side. Greenery or benches go on the extra bit of public real estate.
Another major goal of the blueprint is to make bicycling safer and easier in the neighborhood. It proposes physically separated bicycle lanes along Columbus and Amsterdam avenues. The two middle lanes of traffic on each side of the Broadway Malls become protected bike paths. Slowing the crosstown streets would make it easier for bicyclists to ride between Central and Riverside parks.
Other safety features include continuing painted bike lanes through intersections and creating "bike boxes" at the front of intersections where cyclists waiting at red lights would be more visible to drivers.
Although the blueprint aims to reduce traffic congestion by creating more delivery zones to discourage double parking and by raising the price of parking so fewer people drive around looking for a spot, many drivers are no happier with some of its proposals than they were with congestion pricing.
Cabdriver Abubakar Abdullah told the New York Post, "It's going to cause a lot more traffic, and especially rush hour will be crazy. We already have the same problem on Ninth Avenue below 34th Street because of the bicycle lanes. Motorists have rights, too."
Bicycle and pedestrian advocates point out that only 10 percent of Upper West Side residents commute by car, yet the neighborhood is dominated by automobile traffic.
Transportation planners say that reducing space for driving and parking ultimately encourages people to turn to other forms of transportation, with the overall effect of reducing traffic. In New York City, 90 percent of people who commute by car have other options.
Speaking at the release of the blueprint at P.S. 87, renowned Danish urban planner Jan Gehl told a crowd of Upper West Siders that Copenhagen has been transformed over the last 30 years as the city gradually reduced the number of cars entering the city and put together a door-to-door bicycle network. As a result, traffic has decreased and 36 percent of commuters bicycle to work.
New York is lucky because it has wide streets, Gehl said. "Wide streets enable us to have a nice comfortable sidewalk, a nice bike lane, a nice row of street trees, a bus lane, and a median. And even have a couple of lanes for cars also."
The proposed conversion of a small percentage of parking spots to other uses could be the biggest stumbling block for some of the streetscape improvements in the plan, said the Community Board's Helen Rosenthal. Many of the elements that would make the neighborhood more livable require the sacrifice of parking spots or an increase in the price of parking at meters.
Finding a parking spot on the Upper West Side is notoriously difficult. Residents long accustomed to parking their cars for free — if they can find a spot — turn out in force when the Community Board considers requests to remove even one or two spaces.
"There are many brilliant ideas in there that won't require changing parking. We should move forward on those quickly," Rosenthal said. "The ones that do involve parking, bring 'em on. Let's address them publicly and hear from every side."
Where support is strong, changes can go into effect block by block, project by project, according to advocates and city officials who support the blueprint. At P.S. 87, they urged residents to ask the community board and elected representatives for specific changes on the street.
"This is a moment in time to meld those greening ideas and good transportation ideas," said Brewer. "If you can't do it now, I don't know when you can."
Anne Schwartz, in charge of the parks topic page since its inception in 1999, is a journalist who specializes in environmental issues.