Good afternoon and thank you for holding this hearing today. I am representing Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. He is a co-applicant, along with Council Member Alexa Avilés and Assemblymember Marcela Mitaynes, of the Last Mile Zoning Text Amendment (ZTA) application submitted by the Last Mile Coalition in 2022 and has been working with advocates from all over the city to advance this effort and the accompanying Indirect Source Rule legislation (ISR). Our neighbors in Sunset Park and Red Hook are being disproportionately affected by an overconcentration of these facilities and the air quality and street safety concerns that accompany them. BP Reynoso wants to thank DCP for moving forward with this work, which is so important for Brooklyn’s environmental justice communities.
DCP’s version generally supports the goals of the Coalition’s draft, which were to address facility concentration and community impacts without affecting viable manufacturing businesses also located in industrial zones. The facility size threshold of 50,000 square feet makes sense, as well as the provisions to prevent on-street operations, which can cause traffic congestion and dangerous streets.
However, BP Reynoso has a few concerns with DCP’s draft as currently written:
Definitions: DCP’s draft defines Parcel Delivery Facilities as: “a type of distribution warehouse used primarily for unloading & sorting pre-packed goods and reloading those goods onto vehicles certified as Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Vehicle Weight Classes 1-5 for final delivery. Little to none of the following activities occur – extended inventory storage, picking & packing, wholesale distribution, or retail.” Meanwhile, the City Council is working with the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to pass an ISR, which would regulate emissions from last-mile facilities. The definition of “warehouse” in the current draft of Intro 1130-2024 is, “a fulfillment center, a facility whose primary purpose is storage and distribution of goods to consumers either directly or through a last mile facility; or a last mile facility whose primary purpose is processing or redistributing goods for delivery directly to consumers; or a parcel sorting facility whose primary purpose is sorting or redistributing goods from a fulfillment center to a last mile facility.”
Environmental review for the ISR is expected to begin this summer. DCP should work with DEP to standardize a definition to avoid future confusion about the applicability of these policies. Additionally, BP Reynoso is concerned about the use of federal vehicle standards to define facilities, given the potential for technologies and associated federal policies and regulations to change.
Sensitive receptors: Residential buildings aren’t the only places where air quality and street safety impacts reach the public. The Coalition’s ZTA would disallow last-mile facilities from locating within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, nursing homes, and public housing buildings. BP Reynoso encourages DCP to consider adding a buffer for these uses as well.
Clustering and cumulative impacts: DCP’s analysis shows that the exemptions as currently written are likely to push new facilities into Subarea 2, located at least 1,000 sq ft from residences and requiring EV charging infrastructure. Facility operators will be further incentivized to locate in Subarea 2 when the City passes the ISR, which will encourage operators to transition to zero-emission vehicles. This could lead to a high level of clustering in Subarea 2, which can still have impacts even though Subarea 2 is not directly adjacent to residential, for example, the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs and heavily increased traffic through nearby residential zones. This can be addressed by adding a cumulative impact analysis requirement for facilities to locate in Subarea 2, and/or based on the Coalition’s draft, adding a requirement that DOT analyze potential traffic congestion and street safety impacts for each facility, including their proposed truck routing information.
Enforceability: While BP Reynoso understands the difficulty of regulating anything other than land use through zoning, the provisions to encourage use of sustainable transportation modes as written will be difficult to enforce. Simply having EV charging infrastructure or a pier on-site doesn’t guarantee that a facility will use it, and in the case of EV infrastructure, doesn’t account for the use of other zero-emission vehicle types such as cargo bikes. (It is important to remember that though EV trucks ameliorate emissions, they do not address PM2.5 impacts from tires.) BP Reynoso recommends changing this provision to a finding – requiring operators to demonstrate how they will utilize zero-emission vehicles and/or waterways – rather than an automatic exemption just for the presence of infrastructure.
Resiliency: According to the City’s EJNYC map, more than half of existing last-mile warehouses and e-commerce distribution centers are located in the 2020s 100-year flood plain. DCP’s current draft does not address this. The Coalition’s draft included compliance with any applicable waterfront district zoning requirements as a finding, and BP Reynoso encourages DCP to add this.
Finally, BP Reynoso wants to encourage DCP to analyze the Coalition’s draft application as an alternative during the environmental review process. This would allow for future changes to be made based on the Coalition’s work without risking them being “out of scope.” The Coalition is finalizing updates to their Reasonable Worst Case Development Scenario to help facilitate this. Thank you again for holding this hearing today and for working with us to protect our city’s environmental justice communities.