City-owned properties omitted from developers' Brownfield cleanup application

Please see following letter from Willets Point United to entire City Council, which will vote on the Willets Point plan this Wednesday. As the letter notes, a legitimate reason why some of the properties that are within "Phase One" are NOT included in the Brownfield Cleanup Program application, is that they are not owned by the City. It is important to note, however, that even discounting those properties, there are still numerous properties that the City DOES own, that Sterling/Related have excluded from their BCP application and thus from the program. Why don't Sterling/Related want a BCP Certificate of Completion pertaining to those properties? Do they not want NYSDEC looking so closely over their shoulders to scrutinize the remediation (if any) that they perform on those particular properties? How is the pubic interest served by deliberately excluding properties from the BCP -- when remediation is a top selling point of the whole project?

Letter Brownfield Application by unitedtriangle