Daily News from New York, New York • 40

Thursday, January 16, 1992 DAILY NEWS Phones Queens News Bureau (718) 699-7200 Fax (212) 210-2231 Home Delivery 1-800 692-NEWS ryr-rrf- Cammunitv news i ItV 1 1 For information on civic groups, entertainment, and other happenings, see the Bulletin Board. -PageQLte I DJs fife taslfii-lbQoirDiiDGi, Sees incinerator pollution fallout in Staten Island reaches ca-. pacity. The Dinkins administration, led by First Deputy Mayor Norman Steisel, former head of the Department of Sanitation, has recommended major emphasis on incineration to solve the problem. In releasing her report yesterday, Holtzman became the highest elected city official to come down without reservations against incineration.

Mayor Dinkins, during his campaign in 1989, pledged a moratorium on incinerator construction. But he has made no effort to sidetrack the Navy Yard project. The city has a modest recycling program. Holtzman said the Dinkins administration "has pursued incineration aggressively instead of carrying out its recycling mandate." The state has said the city must recycle as much as 42 of its garbage by 1997. The city says it cannot recycle more than 25 by then.

Other new incinerators have been proposed for the South Bronx and on Wards Island. Holtzman who displayed a chart showing that burning an added 9,000 tons of garbage a day would pollute the atmosphere with tons of lead, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, mercury and other harmful substances said the three new incinerators would cost $1.4 billion, $400 million more than the city estimate. Upgrading the three existing plants, Holtzman said, would cost $1.6 billion, also $400 million more than the city's estimate. Holtzman said cost over-, runs and additional environmental regulations on incinerators "are sure to come." She said, "They will place more burdens on city finances and tax the budget" New York City generates 25,000 tons of trash a day. It is running out of places to bury it as the Fresh Kills landfill By DAVID J.

OESTREICHER Daily News Staff Writer Controller Elizabeth Holtz-man charged yesterday that the city's plan to upgrade garbage incinerators and build three more new ones poses "very serious health risks" and will cost $800 million more than estimated. Waving a copy of a 131-page report prepared by her office and entitled, "Burn, Baby, Burn," Holtzman said the city should be devoting its sanitation dollars to recycling trash instead of burning it Hardest hit, Holtzman said, will be Brooklyn which has two of the three existing incinerators and will get another if a proposed $330 million garbage burner is built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The third existing incinerator is in Queens. A contract has been signed to build the Navy Yard plant. Construction work is awaiting issuance of permits by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

I vJfeL I illf V7! "It BUNDLED against the sudden cold weather, mom and child hurry along Grand Ave. on the way home from school yesterday. Today they could be dashingthrough the snow, we're informed. And tomorrow and Saturday, too. illturnbulldailynews Promises for the 'Parkway of Horrors' HE RESTORATION of I I Eastern Parkway, now in I I the fifth of its scheduled three vears.

is probably fio- ine to take less time than construc than Eastern Parkway, was finished a year ago, more than six months ahead of schedule. Another big resurfacing job, on Flatbush Ave. from Manhattan Bridge to Fourth and yet another, on Utica Ave. from Atlantic Ave: to Empire have come and gone since the first shovelful was turned on Eastern Parkway. tion of the pyramids of Egypt orthe painting of the Sistine ceiling.

That, however, is about all the consolation available to anyone trying to live a normal life along the parkway or those traveling from Queens Blvd. to Flat-bush Ave. as quickly as possible. When it isn't being used to demonstrate how slow and dirty a construction project can be if the contractor really tries, Eastern Parkway, rising through" Crown Heiehts to Grand Army Pla IVlcFARLANP THIS SIDE OF TOWN of asphalt in March, curbs in May and, finally, the top layer of asphalt in June. That will complete the roadwork, says Department of Transportation spokesman Joseph DePlasco.

Naclerio has already completed the service roads, the eastbound main road and a water main replacement. Once the westbound section is completed, the esthetic work would be done: pedestrian malls refurbished, benches installed and then permanent traffic signals put in place by late summer. If all that happens pn schedule, the parkway will be restored in time for this year's West Indian Day Parade, which takes place Labor Day weekend. "I hope so," says Brewer when asked about a target date. "Highly unlikely," opines Taylor.

"No way," says four-year Eastern Parkway resident Hortense Mason, who once had to have her car towed from a pit opened up by a work crew and incompletely covered. Assemblyman Clarence Norman, a long-time Crown Heights resident and civic leader, unquestionably spoke for the community when- he said he hoped the project could now quickly "return Eastern Parkway to its grandeur." "they said it would be ready for the West Indian Day Parade last Fox's Neighborhood Open Space Coalition has been working to make Eastern Parkway the keystone of a Greenway linking the public park systems of Brooklyn and Queens. He notes that it took only six years to build the parkway. "Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, the designers of Pros- pect and Central parks, also designed Eastern Parkway." Fox says. "They presented the parkway designs in 1868 and completed construction in 1874." The last major job on the parkway took five years, from 1915 to 1920, but that time they had an excuse, Fox points out: They installed the IRT subway.

Naclerio Construction, the cur- rent contractor on the job, didn't have to design the parkway nor build a railroad, but Naclerio is taking as long as if it had. In fact, the contractor stopped work all but completely for a while during a brawl with the city over another municipal project. Now work has begun again and generated some hope that the Eastern Parkway job may some day end. Goldstein, a major supporter of the project, says he is delighted just that work is being done, though he admits he "can't quite see light at the end of the tunnel." A report this week to Transportation Commissioner -i Lucius- Riccio? indicated that concrete would soon be poured on the westbound main roadway, followed by a binder layer za, is one of the most beautiful thoroughfares in this or any other city. It also forms, along with the Inter-borough the major auto route from Central Brooklyn to Central Queens.

Eastern Parkway and the Brooklyn-Queens auto link have been" in disarray since 1987 because of the $62.4 million reconstruction job that has proceeded with a deliberate-ness that makes the Mideast peace process seem frantic by comparison. "Nighmarish," says Eastern Parkway resident Harold Taylor when asked about life with the project "It's a mess," says Mary Brewer, who has lived on the parkway for 18 years. Those jobs were nasty and inconvenient while they lasted; but at least they had an end. "I went away to war and came back and nothing was changed," says Rabbi Jacob Goldstein, chairman of Community Planning Board 8, in Crown Heights. That's not a joke.

The Army Re-serve chaplain was activated and sent to the Persian Gulf for Operation Desert Storm. He was away six months. "I saw lots of landscape change over there, but when I got back, the landscape of Eastern Parkway was the same," Goldstein says. The city Department of Transportation now says that it expects to fin-: ish work on Eastern Parkway by OWEVER, as Fox pointed out, the stately old boulevard was supposed be restored in time for the West Indian Day Parade last year. By comparison, a complementary tuuiMui lijvii) too.

Steve McFarland's column appears each Monday and Thursday. $47 million reconstruction project June, and restore its elegant vicion-on the Interborough that started in van appointments by late summer, the spring of 1989,. two years later "Yeah," savs Tom Fox dubiously-.