Yadira & Co. Gaslighting on New Rochelle’s Flowers Park - Part IV
DUBLIN, IRELAND (October 28, 2025) — Part III of this series targets City Manager Will Melendez’ claims Flowers Park is chronically flooded (it’s not). To demonstrate this he points to three storms—the 2007 Nor’easter that caused $1.6 million in damage, Ida in 2021 with over $700,000, and Ophelia in 2023 at $25,000—for a total of $2.4 million. Yet two-thirds of that figure stems from a single event 18 years ago. After reviewing 50 years of records, I found he omitted far more significant storms, including Sandy in 2012 with a 9-foot storm surge and $527 million in countywide damage, Floyd in 1999 with 10–13 inches of rain, Eloise in 1975 with more than 10 inches, and the 1992 Nor’easter with 8–11 inches.
He notes, correctly, that there is more heavy rain (over the past two decades): 6-inch rains are now occurring every 2–3 years compared to every 15 in the 1970s. But he ignored factors that amplify flooding from those heavier rainfalls like sprawl creep (60–80% impervious cover across New Rochelle), an antiquated and poorly maintained water drainage system, that 5,000 acres of Westchester have been paved over since 1990, and hyper-locally, that every grass field at Flowers Park has been replaced with synthetic turf that does not absorb water and generates significant runoff. Anyone claiming Flowers Park is “high risk” (it’s not) might want to consider installing grass fields.
Whether residents accept that man-made climate change is real or not (and I am stipulating that there are heavier rains over the past 20 years) Melendez fails to explain why the need for flood mitigation projects to deal with heavier rainfall during storms justifies a public-private partnership to build a soccer arena and a professional-level sports complex on Flowers Park.
Because he never makes the connection between the (stipulated) need for flood mitigation it does not really matter what Melendez says about down time at Flowers Park fields or the cost of FEMA reimbursement (in the next slide) but it does not help that he is cherry-picking data and drawing unfounded or misleading conclusions from that data. There are two relevant slides. I will address one here and the other in the next article.
