Tide Turns at North Cove Marina with Approval of New Operator

A tug hauls some of Michael Fortenbaugh's docks from the North Cove Marina to its new home across the river at Liberty Harbor Marina. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

The bitter struggle by Michael Fortenbaugh and his supporters over operation of the North Cove Marina ended last month with a unanimous vote by the Battery Park City Authority board to hand over control of the marina to Brookfield Office Properties, the landlords of the giant office complex that towers above the cove.

Brookfield will operate the marina in partnership with Island Global Yachting, whose luxury marinas are in the Car­ibbean, Mexico, Montauk, Newport, the Bahamas, Colombia and Panama.

Dozens of Fortenbaugh’s supporters crowded into the boardroom while many more watched the proceedings from just outside. Some booed as authority Chairman Dennis Mehiel gave a lengthy reasoning for the board’s decision.

See excerpts in video below with responses by Fortenbaugh.

“All I can say to all the concerned members of the community is to understand our responsibilities,” Mehiel said before the vote. “You guys are a very cri­tical stakeholder in the decisions we make. But at the end of the day, we have to do what we think is the right thing to do.”

Mehiel tried to assure the crowd that the changes approved by the authority will result in “wider, not narrower, community use and access to the marina.”

Brookfield has pledged to invest $450,000 for marina improvements, in­cluding more lighting and public seating, as well as continue to offer a sailing school and a summer camp program.

Noting that the authority “does not ignore incumbency,” Mehiel said that Fortenbaugh’s application had some “deficiencies.” And during a second round of interviews, when Fortenbaugh met with the authority’s staff to discuss his bid, “the dialogue with the incumbent operator did not improve his standing in the relative competitive process,” he added, without elaboration.

“Sorry the authority didn’t view our operations as good enough to continue here,” a dejected Fortenbaugh said after the vote. “We were here for 9/11...and helped the community when ev­eryone else was leaving. To say we’re not good enough now is a little hard to hear.”

Last month, Community Board 1 passed a resolution asking the authority to scrap its request for proposals in order to include community feedback in the process. Elected officials followed suit, signing a letter to Mehiel requesting a new selection process.

Without mentioning Fortenbaugh by name, Mehiel said at the meeting that “an individual bidder” decided “to mount political pressure on the authority to subvert our process and preserve his economic interest in the operation of the marina.” The remark was followed by  jeers from Fortenbaugh’s supporters.
Fortenbaugh insisted that this was not true.

“[Mehiel is] saying I caused all this reaction,” he said. “I don’t think I did. I think the authority is the one that never reached out to the public about this.”
Manhattan Bor­ough President Gale Brewer, who had sent a letter to Mehiel in December asking him to require the winning bidder to give community-based operators “the maximum possible chance to stay at North Cove Marina,” voiced her support for Fortenbaugh.

“It’s a shame,” Brewer told the Trib after the meeting. “I'm a big fan of what Michael’s done to bring the community sailing school here. I’ve known him for years and feel very badly about this. We'll try to reevaluate and see if there's anything else we can do."

In a letter, Brew­er, along with Rep. Jerrold Nadler, State Senator Daniel Squadron and Coun­cilwoman Margaret Chin, asked Gov. Andrew Cuomo to urge the authority to make local residents the majority of the board.

The only Battery Park City resident on the board, Martha Gallo, recused herself. Her family has a slip in the marina and contributes to the New York Harbor Sailing Foundation. (The vote was originally supposed to take place in December, but Gallo’s recusal then left the board without a quorum, prompting the directors to postpone that action until January.) But if Gallo had voted, she told the Trib, she would have supported the BPCA’s decision.

“Now that I have seen all the situation and the criteria I think I would have supported the authority,” she said. “I’m an optimistic person. Brookfield and IGY and Michael are going to have op­portunities to do things together on the waterfront in the future.”

Prior to the meeting, reporting by Matthew Fenton of the Broadsheet re­vealed the use of Island Global Yachting docks for Mehiel’s own yacht, drawing attention to a possible conflict of interest for the chairman and the need for him, like Gallo, to recuse himself from the vote.

Mehiel called that suggestion “preposterous.”

“There is a high likelihood that our boat was stopped at an IGY marina at some point, dropped an anchor in the water and may or may not have fueled,” Mehiel said, adding that his yacht docks in the Caribbean in the winter and in Greece during the summer. “Where that happened, I don’t select those marinas, [or] have any knowledge, either contemporaneously or later, of where they stopped or what they bought.”

Gallo said she agreed with Mehiel in his decision not to recuse himself.

“[My] recusal had more to do with the length and the intensity of the relationship with the club and with Michael and his family,” she said. “That is very different from the commercial relationship that Dennis had.”

Fortenbaugh has already planned his next move––he has taken over operation of Liberty Harbor Marina in Jersey City, and will open the season on April 18.

“We’re going to sail. It’s just a question of how many members will stay with us,” he said.

But it was an emotional decision for the longtime Battery Park City resident who is well known for his community involvement.

“We had no choice,” he said, fighting back tears. “I’d said I’d never leave Battery Park City.”