See this story at BrooklynDaily.com.
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Daily
The bocce boys of Marine Park have scored a hard-won victory!
After years of waiting for long-promised roofs for two the park’s three courts, the Marine Park Bocce Club can expect to see all of the courts renovated and covered early next year, plus other improvements around the park — or so says the outgoing councilman who has been fighting to get the project underway.
“The bocce courts will be completely refurbished and they will have roofs,” Councilman Lew Fidler (D–Canarsie) told Community Board 18 on Nov. 20, claiming victory in his years-long battle with the city’s Public Design Commission, whose rigid policies were making the project impossibly expensive.
The price tag for the bocce court covers had inflated to as much as $750,000 because the commission, the aesthetic gatekeeper for city parks projects, wouldn’t allow prefabricated structures, but Fidler said the project will soon move forward at a reasonable cost.
The Design Commission only has a say over the design phase of a project, and Fidler says that is nearly finished, and once the city signs off on the project in early January, the renovations will finally get underway.
The bocce players at Marine Park have been waiting quite a while for the promised upgrades to the courts — one of which is so run down it’s not even used for bocce anymore, according to long-time bocce-club member Mike Camporeale.
“I would say we’ve been waiting for 10 years for the Parks Department to fix those courts,” said Camporeale. “The second one is overrun by grass, and you can only use it for horse shoes.”
The players have often complained about the agonizing wait between games, especially in the afternoons, when 30 players have to contend for their spot in an eight-player game, which can last up to an hour.
“During the afternoons especially, you can be stuck waiting a long time,” he said.
Now that Fidler has said the wait is nearly over, however, Camporeale and his bocce buddies are starting to feel a little hope.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” he said.
The fight to makeover the Marine Park bocce courts has raged for more than a decade.
County Democratic leader Frank Seddio earmarked $50,000 for a bocce court canopy during his time in the state legislature back around the turn of the century, only to see the project scuttled by the Public Design Commission, which demanded a budget five times that amount.
“They wanted some ridiculous number,” said Seddio. “There are two types of structures they considered — a permanent one they said would cost $250,000 that could have withstood an atomic bomb, and a prefabricated structure that would have cost around $70,000 and could have lasted 30 years.”
Once Fidler leaves office, it will be up to Councilman-elect Alan Maisel to see that the project makes it from blueprint to reality — and protect it from last-ditch interference from the Design Commission. Fortunately, Fidler and Maisel or on the same page when it comes to the Public Design Commission.
“They are a wholly ridiculous group of people, who have increased the cost of projects to the point where sometimes it doesn’t make sense to do them,” said Maisel.
The renovations and roofs for Marine Park’s three bocce courts will be paid for with funds out from the $2 million that the councilman apportioned for various projects throughout the park last year, which will also pay for improvements to the park’s tennis and handball courts.