Yadira & Co. Gaslighting on New Rochelle’s Flowers Park - Part V

DUBLIN, IRELAND (October 28, 2025) — Part IV of this series addressed Melendez’ slide on weather-related damages to Flowers Park in New Rochelle, citing three events over 18 years— a 2007 Nor’easter, Hurricane Ida in 2021, and Tropical Storm Ophelia in 2023—that collectively caused about 170 days of field closures, averaging less than 10 days per year when prorated across multiple years. He used these incidents to claim the need for flood mitigation to ensure the park’s viability for the next 50 years (and later 100 years). He exaggerates the issue by ignoring major storms like Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Floyd that caused no reported field downtime, and by including Ophelia’s negligible $25,000 in damages to create an illusory trend. As a former DPW Commissioner, Melendez advocated targeting ten 25-year annual exceedance probability (AEP) events through cost-effective micro-projects like culvert upgrades and bioswales, which can reduce expected annual damage by 60–70% at a fraction of the cost of 50- or 100-year standards. High levels of protections are costly and unwarranted for non-critical assets like Flowers Park, where no lives or personal property are at risk, and where additional flood depth reduction yields diminishing returns at exponentially higher costs. The city’s self-funded plan prioritizes 5–10 annual projects under $500,000 to build resilience incrementally without tax hikes, bonds, or over-reliance on grants, reserving advanced upgrades for vital infrastructure.

I want to turn the second of these two slides.