Court Hearing Scheduled For Fort Greene Park Fight To Keep Trees

FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN — The city's attempt to appeal a ruling that it must had over unreacted documents about Fort Greene Park to a group trying to stop a controversial revamp of the grounds will get its day in court in the next few weeks.

The city has said it believes a court decision in October that it must had over a full 2015 report on the park is incorrect and will make its appeal in front of The New York State Appellate Division of the Supreme Court at a 2 p.m. hearing on April 4.

The report, which the city originally released with entire pages redacted, is one of several documents a local group requested under the Freedom of Information Law as part of their effort to stop a $10.5 million reconstruction of the park's northwest corner, mostly due to the fact that it would mean cutting down at least 58 trees.

The project is expected to start as early as this spring, parks officials have said.

The judge's original decision argued that The Parks Department had not sufficiently proved that FOIL exemptions applied to the documents. Parks officials failed to show that Nancy Owens was hired as a consultant and misidentified the pages that had been redacted, the opinion shows.

The local advocacy group, Friends of Fort Greene Park, maintain that releasing the documents is a matter of government transparency. Their quest for more information is in part rooted in inaccuracies revealed in earlier requests, advocates have said.

The removal of the trees — which the group has called arborcide — concerns those that not only love the greenery of the park, but those who live nearby and worry about light pollution or the plaza becoming an active site for skateboarders and other noisy activities, they said.

The hearing will be held at 27 Madison Avenue at 25th Street, the group said.