Wide Support for North Cove Marina Operator to Stay

It was standing room only in the Battery Park City Library on Thursday, Jan. 8, when supporters of Michael Fortenbaugh gathered in an effort to convince the Battery Park City Authority and Gov. Andrew Cuomo that Fortenbaugh should be retained as the North Cove Marina operator. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

With the Battery Park City Authority expected this month to announce the next operator of the North Cove Marina, local elected officials, Community Board 1 and supporters of the popular current operator, Michael Fortenbaugh, are calling for a restart of the selection process.

The officials—Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, State Sen. Daniel Squadron, Councilwoman Margaret Chin and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver—are jointly urging the authority to enlist community input in the process, a request made last month in a Community Board 1 resolution.

The call for a reworked request for proposals comes amid a mounting show of support for Fortenbaugh, a Battery Park City resident whose 10-year contract as marina operator ended on Dec. 31. He has run a sailing club and sailing school at the marina since 1994.

Fortenbaugh and his supporters fear he will lose out in the bidding process to more powerful competition. It has been reported that Brookfield Properties, which runs the World Financial Center, may be favored by the authority to win the lease in partnership with Island Global Yachting, headed by Andrew Farkas, a billionaire real estate investor with close ties to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The authority said it postponed the vote on an operator last month because it lacked a quorum.

This month, Ted Wallace, the former dock master of the Chelsea Sailing School at Chelsea Piers, took over as the authority's newly hired director of marina operations. It is a post that Robin Forst, the authority's spokeswoman, termed "interim."

On Thursday, Jan. 8, Fortenbaugh supporters, many of them members of his Manhattan Yacht Club, packed into the second floor of the Battery Park City Library, and one after another testified to what they see as the success of the marina under Fortenbaugh's stewardship. The gathering was called by Jenifer Rajkumar, the Democratic District Leader for Battery Park City. (See video below.)

Fortenbaugh supporters also made their voices heard at Community Board 1's December general meeting. Without explicitly endorsing Fortenbaugh, the board took a strong stand, passing a resolution asking the authority to scrap its request for proposals for an operator and create a new one that would give the community a role in the decision.

Battery Park City Committee chair Anthony Notaro called the current re­quest for proposals “flawed” because only 15 percent of the criteria includes demonstrated “quality and strength” of the kind of community programming that Fort­enbaugh has been providing. 

“They so diminish the value of that so that anyone with a large checkbook could come in and answer the [proposal request] and potentially be a competitor,” he said. “At a bare minimum, we need that to be the number one criterian.”

“Gaining community input should be a requirement and a priority,” he added.

Asked by the Trib to respond to CB1’s resolution and its call for more community input, the authority issued a statement, in which it said that “the Authority is required to select an operator through a competitive bid process...” and that “the bids requested by the authority require operators to continue the ongoing operation of a sailing school at a reasonable cost to users as well as enhanced programming and opportunities for greater access to the waterfront.”

But in addressing the community board, Fortenbaugh called the authority “secretive” in its handling of the selection process. “Suddenly we find ourselves unsure of where we are,” he said, adding, “We’re just asking for an open process.”