Political muscles were being flexed in Westchester Friday as Gov. Kathy Hochul, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, U.S Rep. Jamaal Bowman, Westchester County Executive George Latimer and other officials pledged support for businesses and residents struggling to recover from the storm damage and flooding caused by the remnants of Hurricane Ida.
They toured businesses in Mamaroneck where the Sheldrake River overflowed its banks as a result of the record rainfall and high winds that pummeled the area as the storm’s track took it through the heart of metropolitan New York after having come ashore along the Louisiana Gulf Coast.
Hochul had come to Mamaroneck from Yonkers, where she looked at storm damage and announced that the federal government had approved her request for the declaration of an emergency and that the Federal Emergency Mangement Agency would begin providing storm recovery aid to New York.
During a news conference at the headquarters of the Mamaroneck Fire Department, Schumer, Gillibrand and Bowman focused on their new effort to push through a long-awaited flood relief project.
They called on the federal government’s Office of Management and Budget to reverse a decision made under the Trump administration that stopped a long-awaited $88 million project by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers designed to prevent the Sheldrake and Mamaroneck rivers from flooding.
“Though the study was completed and we successfully fought for construction to be authorized and it was in the 2018 Water Infrastructure Act, I put it in there with Senator Gillibrand’s help, the Trump administration in another one of their vicious moves, because it was anti-New York, decided not to move forward with construction,” Schumer said.
“They disregarded the loss of human life here, they disregarded the destruction to the village, the cost to the village and the taxpayers, the cost to the small businesspeople, they just said ‘no.’ They let many other projects in other states go forward in states that were friendlier to them.”
The project would build more than a mile of breakwater walls and deepen the rivers.
“We’re going to get a lot more rain with climate change and global warming,” Schumer said.
When asked by the Business Journal about his ability to follow through on a relatively small issue compared with the significant national issues with which he has to deal such as the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the new Texas law restricting abortions, efforts to restrict voting rights, the infrastructure bills and more, Schumer reflected on his past.
“I started out as an assemblyman, a local organizer and that’s never left me and I promised when I became majority leader, I promised the people of New York state, that I would continue to be a local guy as well as a national guy, and I’ve continued to be that. This is important,” Schumer said.
“If you sit on the phone and sit on your butt in Washington you don’t get it. When you come here and you see what happens and you see the flooding and you see the store owners hurt … you just talk to people who talked about people in a basement apartment … and they’re sitting there and it’s a humble little home but it’s their home … and all of a sudden because the windows are at sidewalk level the water comes pouring in and they try to get out and they can’t and they die, that matters, that matters. So, I will never give up the local aspect.”
“When people talk about these 500-year events, 1,000-year events, none of us are buying it anymore. Mother Nature has changed because of what man has done,” Hochul said. “The future of climate change is right now. It’s happening. We feel it and we’re experiencing the aftermath this week.”
“The construction of the Mamaroneck and Sheldrake River Flood Risk Management Project is critically important to the families of the village, to the local economy and the future of the community,” Gillibrand said. “We have been hit by these severe weather storms constantly, constantly over the last decade. This country is being devastated from flooding, from tornados, from wildfires. This is the impact of global climate change on our new normal and it is devastating, it is heartbreaking, it is deadly.”
Mamaroneck Mayor Tom Murphy praised members of the village’s volunteer fire department, many of whom had gathered at the firehouse for the event, for the risks they had just taken to save lives during the storm and aftermath.
Latimer said that the failure of government to fix the generations-old flooding problem in Mamaroneck is symbolic of government failures that have caused people to lose faith in the system.
“The only way we provide something different is by getting this done, by showing people that the plans become reality, that actually the repairs are made,” Latimer said.
“Until we do that we’re going to lose the most important battle, which is the belief that democracy works. This time we’re going to straighten it out because these people are here. This time it’s going to happen.”
