Community centers on edge of ax, leaving leaders worried about kids

BY CLARE TRAPASSO
Monday, December 22nd 2008, 3:55 PM
Smith for News
Joanne Smitherman, of Highbridge Gardens Association speaks at a Community Center Association meeting in Manhattan to figure out how to respond to city Housing Authority's plan to close 19 centers.
Smith for News
Reginald Bowman, president of NYCHA's Citywide Council of Presidents, adds his thoughts.
Smith for News
Smitherman, holds a list of centers slated to be closed.
Happy New Year. Now get out.
Nineteen community centers in public housing developments across the five boroughs are the latest items on the city Housing Authority's chopping block, according to community leaders.
The anticipated closures would eliminate after-school and teen programs for hundreds of the city's poorest children, advocates said.
Without the centers, local leaders fear they'll see a rise in neighborhood crime.
"Where will the kids go?" asked Joanne Smitherman, president of the Highbridge Gardens Residents Association in the Bronx.
"They'll be on the street. That's where you have all the problems."
Smitherman said the Housing Authority told her last month that her center was scheduled to close in early January.
"That meal that we serve in the community center is the only meal [some children] will get that day," she said. "It's going to be devastating."
Earlier this month, the Housing Authority said in a City Council budget hearing that it planned to phase out 18 community centers because of a $150 million budget shortfall.
An additional center is also expected to be closed, according to Reginald Bowman, president of the Citywide Council of Presidents of the New York City Housing Authority, which represents public housing development tenant associations.
The group is working on organizing a protest against the anticipated closures.
The proposed cuts are in addition to the 14 centers the agency shuttered earlier this year.
But NYCHA spokesman Howard Marder said nothing has been finalized.
The agency is looking for other city agencies or community organizations to step in and take over the centers, Marder said.
"If our sister agencies can come in and run a program, this would be an excellent way to keep these facilities open," Marder said. "But this is a plan that's just at the beginning."
Six centers in Manhattan, four each in the Bronx and Brooklyn, three in Queens and two on Staten Island are expected to close in January, according to Bowman.
This could mean pink slips for 236 workers, labor leaders said.