Ronnie Dugger, founding editor and longtime publisher of the Texas Observer and for many years the crusading conscience of the progressive movement in Texas and beyond, died of complications of dementia at a hospice center in Austin on May 27. He was 95. 

Dugger was the author of biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan and other significant books, as well as countless articles and essays about Texas politics, civil rights, higher education, capital punishment, nuclear proliferation, and computerized voting, among many issues that attracted his earnest attention over the years. He also wrote poetry. His wide range of interests notwithstanding, he will always be associated with the scrappy little Austin-based political journal created in his image. 

Few would have predicted his shaping influence when the Observer came into being in late 1954. Dugger himself would have been among the skeptics. 

Twenty-four years old at the time and a recent graduate of UT-Austin, where he served as an outspoken liberal editor of The Daily Texan, he had charted a different course for himself. On a Saturday in October, he was packing his car to leave Austin, with plans to embark the following Monday on a quintessential young man’s adventure. He would drive to Corpus Christi, catch on with a shrimp boat and then jump ship in Mexico. He would head back to Texas in the company of migrant laborers and farmworkers. Perhaps he would write a novel. 

A phone call interrupted his adventure before it began. The call would evolve into a life’s calling.

Some 150 Texas liberals—“usually self-identified,” as Dugger recalled in later years, “as loyal Democrats who were pledged to support the then liberal Democratic nominees”—were meeting at the Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin on that Saturday. They had agreed to spend $5,000 to purchase a weekly newsletter published by Paul Holcomb, a lay Church of Christ preacher who admired William Jennings Bryan and FDR. The State Observer would become The Texas Observer; it would be the party organ of Texas progressives. Needing an editor, a member of the group called Dugger, wondering if the former Daily Texan editor would be interested. 

He was interested enough to drive downtown for lunch in the hotel restaurant with a few of the group. Principled and high-minded almost to a fault—as his future cohorts would soon learn—he explained that he was a Democrat but considered himself independent. He had no interest in working for a party organ, he said, “but that if they would give me ‘exclusive control of the editorial content,’ I would take the job.” 

They “caucused and fumed,” Dugger recalled, but then, to his surprise, said yes. “As the editor I would have exclusive control of all of the paper’s editorial content. As the publisher they would have the absolute right to fire me anytime they wanted to.” 

Those beleaguered Texas liberals—among them East Texas lumber heiress Frankie Randolph (“the Eleanor Roosevelt of Texas”), Madisonville oilman J.R. Parten, liberal banker Walter Hall of Dickinson, and future Congressman Bob Eckhardt—not only waylaid a young man’s Yucatan adventure, but they also changed his life. For nearly three-quarters of a century, he would dedicate himself to changing Texas, if not the world. He would become, in the words of Willie Morris, his friend and successor as Observer editor, “one of the great reporters of our time.” 

“When we began,” Dugger wrote in an essay entitled “Journalism for Justice,” “there was a silence in Texas about racism, poverty and corporate power. As Ralph Yarborough never let us forget, we ranked dead last among the major states and next-to-last in the South in education, health care and programs for the poor. … We were Texas, a backwater braggish and bigoted and brutal, slow and rich and poor.”

The state’s daily newspapers at the time were flaccid. They were, in the words of Larry L. King, “slavishly adoring of the reigning powers.” Dugger hearkened back to a more bracing tradition reflected in the populist protest journalism of the late-19th century, the fearlessness of William Cowper Brann’s Waco-based Iconoclast and the plain-spoken honesty of Holcomb’s State Observer. Dugger and the state’s small band of liberals also found allies in the labor movement, with its roots in the New Deal. Yarborough was their champion. 

As Morris noted in his classic North Toward Home, Dugger “began writing about what actually happened.” With associate editors Billy Lee Brammer (author in years to come of the renowned political novel, The Gay Place), with Lawrence Goodwyn and Robert Sherrill and an informal roster of contributors that included J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb, the young editor opened up for Observer readers “the operations of the state legislature, the courage and disarray of a pathetically small political opposition in the state, the effect on Texas’ culture of highly organized know-nothing groups working on civic clubs, school boards and high school government classes.” 

When the legislature left town, Dugger left too. He slid behind the wheel of his battered ’48 Chevy and hit the Texas backroads, the car packed, as Morris remembered, with a jumble of camping equipment, six-packs of beer, cans of sardines, galley proofs, and old loaves of bread. When the ill-treated Chevy—Dugger called it “the Green Hornet”—broke down in some little town, as it inevitably did, Dugger would stick around until he could get it fixed, meanwhile talking to local folks, scribbling notes, and coming to understand the beguiling, confounding Lone Star State. Often, he was getting out the fortnightly journal—“fortnightly” was a Dugger word, Observer editor Kaye Northcott noted—pretty much by himself. 

“One afternoon,” Morris recalled, “Dugger telephoned me from a small town in East Texas. ‘Something radical’s happened,’ he said. ‘The motor fell out.’ That car was an indispensable contribution to Dugger’s understanding of Texas.” 

Dugger was earnest, indefatigable, almost manic in those days. “One week, early on,” King recalled in his book In Search of Willie Morris, “he actually worked 120 hours; he drove all over Texas, goading, questioning, preaching, writing ‘red hot’ stories and smash-mouth editorials, trying to sell Texas Observer subscriptions – his goal was 10,000 subscribers rather than the 6,000 he had – and hoping to awaken the masses to how shoddily they were being served by most of their alleged representatives.” 

It was a quixotic quest, to be sure, but as King also acknowledged, “I seriously doubt whether the paper would have lasted out its first year without Ronnie, without his total commitment, all his resources and his crackling nervous vitality.” 

He was born Ronald Edward Dugger in Chicago on April 16, 1930, to William LeRoy Dugger of Shafter and San Antonio and Mary King Dugger, a native of Glasgow, Scotland, who was known as Dolly. 

According to family lore, Dolly had left Scotland when her mother refused to allow her to go to college. Also according to family lore, Dolly and LeRoy met in a Galveston boarding house, in a room where residents had huddled together to ride out a hurricane. LeRoy had considered becoming a priest but fell for Dolly instead (again, family lore). A lifelong Republican until Watergate, he worked as a bookkeeper, she as a salesperson in a San Antonio department store. 

Their son graduated from San Antonio’s Brackenridge High School and received his undergraduate degree with high honors from the University of Texas at Austin in 1950. He also did graduate work in economics and philosophy at UT and political theory and economics at Merton College, Oxford, in 1951-52. 

He had been born, Dugger recalled, “into a devout, hard-working Catholic family in San Antonio, raised believing in good and bad. Our rented first-floor of a house in the King William district at 302 Washington Street was across the street from the San Antonio River, beyond which the Mexicans lived on their vast West Side, acres and acres of poverty, misery and the other kinds of violence.” 

Molly Ivins and Ronnie Dugger (Alan Pogue)

He was a loner as a child, a voracious reader. In high school he was “ethically impressed” by the novels of Charles Dickens and by Marx’s labor theory of value. “At UT,” he recalled, “I imbibed the values of the public good which prevailed in the Veblenian school of economics called institutionalism, which was then dominant there. ” 

Dugger always remembered what he called “the decisive ethical event of my life.” In a Mexican border town, he happened to notice a little boy in ragged clothes standing on a street corner. Their eyes met, and Dugger realized that “to him I was a rich American, and I felt deeply for him.” 

Back in Austin, he recalled listening “as demagogues berated every attempt to favor the poor in legislation as socialist or communist and realizing that business bribery was the legislature’s way of life. I understood that my state had been corrupted by the major corporations and that the daily newspapers, silent or abusive about almost everything that mattered, were a part of that corruption.” 

Regarding power, he conceded his innocence. “Probably because the Catholics had convinced me to believe, by deductive implication, in the power of virtue, when I started putting out the Observer I thought that if you just showed people wrong they would make it right.” 

He came to realize that he himself was wrong. “In a democracy that works,” he wrote in 2004, “the truth should do it, but during my eight years’ reporting on the Observer I had my first close encounter with the radical fact, still leering brutally at us all, that democracy the way we have and practice it does not produce sufficient justice.” 

The chastened young idealist did not give up, but after eight years he gave out. He hired Morris as associate editor, stayed around for a few months and then headed for the hills with, as Morris recalled, “everything Thoreau ever wrote.” 

Morris was the first in a succession of young and often inexperienced colleagues who shared Dugger’s dedication to fair and accurate reporting, his reverence for the written word, his fascination (and frustration) with Texas. “He taught those of us who passed through the Observer en route to our more personal work how to view public life as an ethical process, how to be fair,” Morris wrote in North Toward Home.

Morris left the Observer after two years to become the youngest editor in the history of the venerable Harper’s magazine. He was arguably the best known of the Observer editors—until Dugger, looking for a second editor in 1968 to help associate editor Northcott, found a young Houston native whose brash Hello Dolly personality and irrepressible sense of humor would leaven the earnestness of the liberal publication (and, to some extent, its founding editor). 

“Everybody applied, because there was nothing else in Texas except daily newspapers,” Northcott recalled. Most of the applicants, she said, were young men, except for a rookie reporter at the Minneapolis Herald-Tribune. Her name was Molly Ivins. 

“We made the bold step of flying her down from Minnesota, and we had no money,” Northcott said. “But anyway, we got Molly down here, and she stood out because of her humor. Neither of us found anything odd about the fact that she brought a six-pack for lunch. Just for her.” 

Northcott became editor and Ivins co-editor—Northcott as Ms. Inside, Ivins as Ms. Outside. While Northcott was in the office taking care of production chores, Ivins would be prowling the Capitol, kibitzing and cracking jokes, scribbling notes in the women’s restroom about the daily circus unfolding under the pink dome and hanging out later in the day with lawmakers, lobbyists, and fellow reporters at Scholz Garten. 

Such is the legend, although Northcott says she “was out and about too.” She laughs. “In fact, every funny thing I ever wrote has been attributed to Molly. We wrote a whole lot together.” 

Ivins also helped with production chores, including staying up all night with editorial assistant John Ferguson to make sure the issue was in the printer’s hands by the time the sun came up. Northcott and Ivins worked together amicably. Both also learned from their boss, the consummate reporter. They appreciated the fact that he had hired two young feminists to run the Observer.

Dugger, who debated the erudite William F. Buckley over Vietnam during an appearance at UT, was a serious man. Northcott recalled that he read the Roman historian Livy over breakfast. Still, he was able to appreciate Ivins’ humor. 

“As she got funnier and funnier I enjoyed it like everybody else,” he told Ivins biographers Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith. “She was like Will Rogers but in an entirely new way, in that she was as vulgar as a stevedore’s daughter.” 

Some things irritated him, though, including the fact that Ivins and Northcott brought their dogs to the office. “I had given her this dog,” Northcott recalled. “It was a puppy, the last of the litter, and it had a little glob of shit on its forehead, so I called it Shit as a way to tell it from the other little black puppies. Of course, Molly called it that, and Ronnie disapproved of that.” 

That sense of propriety would become a source of friendly contention between Dugger and his close friend Bernard Rapoport, the wealthy Waco insurance magnate who, in the early 1960s, succeeded Frankie Randolph as the Observer’s primary benefactor. 

Rapoport’s clients were labor unions. “That was the commonality that Dugger and Rapoport had,” said Don Carleton, executive director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at UT-Austin. “The bridge was labor.” 

“Ronnie is more of a purist, and I am more of a pragmatist,” Rapoport wrote in his memoir, Being Rapoport: Capitalist with a Conscience. “Unfortunately, I think he is committed to being too pure, and that does seem to make him appear to be a little bit phony. He really isn’t phony personally. … But he desperately wants to be pure, and he wants to set the standards for that purity. That gets him into trouble once in a while. He and I fight about that, because I know I’m not pure and I know he’s not pure; the difference is, I don’t want to act like I am.” 

However pure he was ideologically, the student of Livy also could be a bit Machiavellian. In a special election in 1961, the Observer endorsed Republican John Tower for the U.S. Senate seat that LBJ had to relinquish when he became vice president. In an effort “to free their party from the dead weight of the Dixiecrats,” Dugger urged liberals to oppose the conservative Democrat, Bill Blakely, who had been appointed as interim senator by Governor Price Daniel.

Dugger contended that “Dollar Bill” Blakely was no Democrat at all but “a cynical millionaire racist.” A good Democrat could beat him when he ran for a full six-year term. As Larry King wryly noted, the state’s “kamikaze liberals,” including Dugger, “miscalculated by almost thirty years.” 

With the Observer in dependable hands (if not paws) by the mid-’60s, Dugger began to look beyond Texas politics. His first book, Dark Star, Hiroshima Reconsidered in the Life of Claude Eatherly of Lincoln Park, Texas, published in 1966, was his initial foray into nuclear war, an issue that would become a lifelong concern. Eatherly was the reconnaissance pilot who on August 6, 1945, ordered the message sent to the plane carrying the atom bomb that weather conditions made Hiroshima a suitable target. 

“[Dugger] tells in detail the story of a Texas boyhood, of his life as an Army flier, and of a bizarre adventure in gun-running after the war; he makes plausible, even inevitable, Eatherly’s eventual confusion, loss of identity and torment,” sociologist John Ferguson wrote in a positive review in The New York Review of Books. 

Decades later, Dugger was still ruminating about nuclear war. “I don’t think most of the American people have any idea where we are, ethically, with nuclear weapons,” he told Brad Buchholz of the Austin American-Statesman in 2012. “If we don’t deal with this, it’s going to kill us all.” 

For his second book, Our Invaded Universities, Dugger returned to Texas politics. As Daily Texan editors, both he and Morris regularly went to war editorially against the governor and the legislature, who felt compelled to meddle in the affairs of the sprawling academic institution a couple of blocks north of the Capitol. Shortly before Dugger’s arrival at UT, the aggressively conservative board of regents had fired UT President Homer Rainey, primarily on ideological grounds. 

“Texas itself, its chronic xenophobia fed by the passions of the McCarthy period, was not an entirely pleasant place in those years,” Morris wrote in North Toward Home. “There was venom in its politics and a smugness in its attitude to outsiders and to itself.”

Two decades later, with politicians still meddling, Dugger resolved “to stroll into the haughty facades the universities put up.” By focusing primarily on his alma mater, he explored how America’s academic institutions have been “invaded” by politics and big business, thereby undermining the rationale and purpose of “the most important institution in Western civilization.” He offered proposals “that might help restore – or perhaps the word is provide – the vigor and balance, independence and humane values, freedom from fear of ideas and enjoyment of debate and freedom that higher education must give us or fail us.” 

UT was important to Dugger for many reasons, including the fact that he met Jean Williams on campus. Both 21 when they married in 1951, Ronnie and Jean Dugger stayed married until 1976. 

In 1982, Dugger married Patricia Blake, an associate editor of Time magazine, and moved to Wellfleet, Massachussetts, New York City, and later Wellesley, Massachussetts. His publisher, W.W. Norton, was clamoring at the time for his long-overdue biography of Lyndon Johnson. (The first volume of Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of LBJ had just appeared, adding to Norton’s urgency.) 

Dugger had interviewed Johnson at his Hill Country ranch in 1955. The state’s senior U.S. senator was the new majority leader and, in Dugger’s words, “hell-bent on the presidency.” As he would write in The Politician, Johnson was “rude, intelligent, shrewd, charming, compassionate, vindictive. Maudlin, selfish, passionate, volcanic and cold, vicious and generous.” 

At the ranch, the two of them sitting beside the pool on plastic chaise longues, Johnson proposed helping the Observer increase its circulation tenfold by transforming it into “not a party organ, but a Johnson pipe organ that his nod could cause to bellow forth with Wagnerian splendor.” Dugger considered the offer a bribe. 

Dugger interviewed Johnson several times in the White House for his biography, including one evening in the family dining room in December 1967. Dugger asked him about nuclear weapons and a president’s responsibility for deciding whether to use them. Johnson exploded.

In Dugger’s words, “his gorge rose now against me and my question, against the dissenters, the criticizers, the kibitzers who have none of the burden, none of the inside knowledge and none of the responsibility. ”

Dugger continued: “Pushed completely back from the table now, glowering at me with his inescapable power for mass nuclear killing fresh in his being and his feelings, he exclaimed that he is the one who has to decide whether to bomb, he is the one who has to decide whether to send in troops – he shouted at me with a terrible intensity, jamming his thumb down on an imaginary spot in the air beside him, ‘I’m the one who has to mash the button!’” 

Johnson continued meeting with Dugger, even though Dugger was passionate and very public about his opposition to the Vietnam War. Their final conversation took place on March 23, 1968. A week later LBJ announced he would not seek a second term. 

Johnson always seemed intrigued by the man who could not be bought. As former LBJ aide Bill Moyers once observed, Johnson “loathed what Ronnie wrote about him because it was so on target.” Moyers thought he was fascinated by Dugger. 

Fascinated or not, LBJ couldn’t resist a bizarre insult. “If you investigate that boy’s bloodline,” he growled to a staffer, “you’ll find a dwarf in there somewhere.” 

Dugger’s LBJ biography came out in 1982. He continued writing for The Nation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other publications and in 2011 received the prestigious George Polk Career Award. 

After Patricia Blake’s death in 2010, Dugger moved back to Austin, where he lived alone in a small house not far from the university. “He was very happy to be back in Texas,” recalled daughter Celia, a longtime New York Times reporter and editor. “It’s home, and he felt that in his bones. People here knew him, and admired him, and remembered the contributions he’d made to the state. And that meant a great deal to him.”

In addition to his daughter and her husband, Barry Bearak, of Pelham, New York, survivors include his son, Gary Dugger, of Carmel, California, and six grandchildren. 

As much as he was happy to be back home, Dugger was appalled by the grudging retreat of progressive politics and ideals in the face of hard-right Republican advances and then near-total dominance. “What happened?” he would ask Northcott, who almost felt guilty because she had stayed in Texas and had been unable to stop the slide into retrogression. 

Although writing poems, hundreds of them, was perhaps a distraction, he was still the journalist. His mission was to thwart Donald Trump in any way he could, throughout his first term and then as he launched his campaign for a second. Until near the end, Celia Dugger said, her father remained passionate about the failure of this nation and the world to do anything substantive to avert nuclear war. 

At press time, the Observer—which without Ronnie Dugger would never have been the independent muckraker it became—is still going strong at 71 years old.

The post Ronnie Dugger, 1930-2025 appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Authorities have lifted all remaining evacuation orders for a pair of large wildfires that have been burning for over two weeks — but have become increasingly contained lately — north of Duluth.

As of 8 a.m. Monday, all evacuation zones around the Camp House and Jenkins Creek fires are longer active in St. Louis and Lake counties, the Eastern Area Complex Incident Management Team said.

While Bundle Lake Road is being reopened, Skibo Road and Forest Road 113 remain closed as wood clearing and chipping continue. A swath of the Superior National Forest near the Jenkins Creek fire remains closed, restricting access to campsites and other recreation sites.

The blazes, known collectively as the Brimson Complex Fires, have charred more than 28,000 acres in east central St. Louis County and neighboring portions of Lake County.

As of Monday, the Camp House Fire, near Brimson, is 90% contained, and the Jenkins Creek fire, centered east of Hoyt Lakes, is 78% contained. Containment of both fires remains unchanged from Sunday.

Eastern Area Complex Incident Management Team said that even as the fires slow, the risk remains.

“As the Camp Creek and Jenkins Creek fires wind down, we mustn’t let our guard down,” the management team said. “While these incidents are nearing full containment, changing fire weather conditions in the region are signaling a shift in activity, not a pause. Warmer temperatures, lower humidity, and increasing winds are setting the stage for new ignitions and rapid fire spread. Fine fuels are drying quickly, and receptive landscapes remain vulnerable.”

At present, a 9-acre fire called the Horse River Fire, is burning in an isolated area of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in extreme northern Lake County in the Kawishiwi Ranger District. Detected Thursday afternoon, it is believed to be caused by lightning. Its reported size did not change from Sunday to Monday morning.

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The end has come for four newspapers in northwest Minnesota, but not for the commercial printing side of the publishing business associated with them.

Dick Richards, who in 1972 founded Richards Publishing alongside his wife, Corrine, said the age of social media is a hard time for newspapers, especially those on the smaller side.

“I think we all realized what’s happening, and that it’s going to social media,” he said. “Everybody’s got their thumbs on their phones and that’s the way it’s going to be.”

The Leader Record (which covers Clearbrook, Gonvick and nearby small communities), Grygla Eagle, Red Lake County Herald and McIntosh Times all will be closing at the end of May, with final issues coming out May 28. The announcement of the closure was written by Kari Sundberg, editor of the Grygla Eagle. It was a decision made after taking a hard look at revenue vs. expenses. Richards said the commercial printing part of his company makes up 80% of the business, and the newspapers 20%. However, the newspapers make up much more than 20% of the costs. Part of the issue has been fewer subscribers and especially fewer advertisers, he said.

“I think the trouble started with Walmart coming into our towns and shutting down our main streets, our grocery stores, our hardware stores,” Richards said. “Then COVID was kind of a nail in the coffin when everything shut down and advertising stopped. … (Advertisers) didn’t come back to newspapers — they stayed with social media and that sort of thing. I think you can look at any newspaper and see that.”

Sundberg wrote, “while we explored all possible avenues, including the idea of going fully digital to cut printing and postage costs, the numbers simply couldn’t support the path forward. In 2024 alone, the combined revenue for all four of our newspapers totaled less than our expenses.”

Lisa Hills, executive director of the Minnesota Newspaper Association, said it’s always a sad day when a community loses its newspaper. People need to subscribe to and support their local newspapers, she said.

“That’s really the way the community gets its accurate information,” she said. “They’re the heart and soul of the community, and so news (of closures) is always heartbreaking and sad.”

It’s tough in this day and age to be a community newspaper, she said, considering how the advertising base has changed — there are fewer locally owned businesses — as well as skyrocketing postage rates.

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Richards recalls coming back to the area with his wife in 1972 and founding the company, and the 50-some years since. He has been focused on the production in the printing, marketing and sales side, while Corrine has focused on the production of the newspapers. She also does some of the reporting.

The closure of the four papers feels like “a death in the family,” Richards said. He hates to lose the papers, but there is a bit of relief from lifting the financial burden off the rest of the business. People are understanding of it, he said. He mentioned a recent school board meeting his wife covered.

“They all knew this was going to be the last report that she’d make for that school board, and they had a gift for her and thanked her for her services over the many years,” Richards said. “That’s kind of the way the community feels about it. They hate to lose the newspapers but they understand the situation.”

“I can’t vote yes on a project in which the majority of the community doesn’t know what’s going on,” Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who sits on the task force that will vote on a final proposal for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, said at a rally in early April. “I’m on the task force and I don’t know what’s going on.”

City and state officials are seeking to redevelop the underused Brooklyn Marine Terminal site into a “Harbor of the Future,” which will potentially include thousands of new apartments. (Caroline Rubinstein-Willis/Mayoral Photography Office)

In Gowanus, the thud of jackhammers, the scent of fresh asphalt, and the glare of glass towers have become part of daily life as luxury high-rises claim their places by the dozen. 

A 2021 rezoning of the area, in the works since 2016, opened the floodgates for this caliber of development, where the median monthly rent now tips over $4,000, according to data from StreetEasy.

Just next door, residents of Red Hook and the Columbia Street waterfront are bracing for a similar building boom. 

Stretching from the south of Brooklyn Bridge Park down through Red Hook, the 122-acre Brooklyn Marine Terminal (BMT) is one of the last bastions of New York’s working waterfront, despite decades of disinvestment. 

The New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) has put forward plans to redevelop the site into the “Harbor of the Future,” with a modernized working port, a hotel, approximately 7,700 new apartments, sorely needed resiliency upgrades, and transportation improvements. Supporters say it’s an opportunity to build quickly on public land to help address a “crushing” housing shortage.

However, the move has invoked the specter of mega-developments past, as residents and public officials have rallied against a planning process they say lacks transparency and would also bring luxury development to a flood-prone and transit-poor community.

In a deal cut with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey last year, the city exchanged the Howland Hook Terminal on Staten Island for site control of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, which EDC will manage while the state retains ownership. 

The move allows any development there to bypass the typical city land use approvals, including City Council review. Despite managing much of New York’s revenue-generating public land, EDC is not a city agency but rather a public-benefit corporation.

Normally a proposal of this magnitude would go through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Process or ULURP, which requires proposals to move through several stages of public review.

Instead, the Brooklyn Marine Terminal’s redevelopment will be governed by the state’s development process, known as a General Project Plan (GPP). Compared to ULURP, critics say it offers less transparency and inclusivity. 

There are no clear rules for how a GPP gets approved, and once a plan is filed the state is only mandated to hold one public hearing, according to its regulations. The level of transparency and public input is generally at the discretion of those leading the development, John Kaehny of the good government group Reinvent Albany told City & State in 2018, when officials were debating Amazon’s controversial proposal to open a headquarters in Queens, which also would have been dictated by a GPP (the project was ultimately dropped following community pushback).

In the case of the BMT, EDC and Empire State Development would be the authorities ultimately responsible for creating the GPP.  Currently in its visioning stages, the  EDC has convened a 28-member task force to vote on a final proposal for the site, as well as advisory groups representing local interests including housing, businesses, NYCHA, and the environment. 

However, some members working inside the process have expressed frustration and concern at the way EDC has engaged with them and the larger community.

“Their whole thing has sort of just been trying to undermine the task force and sell us on something we’re not interested in, instead of addressing concerns,” says Rebecca Kobert, a representative of Brooklyn Community Board 6 on the task force. “I think people assume a certain level of agency when you say a task force, and I don’t think that’s been especially true.”

The task force was initially slated to vote on a proposal for the site by the end of 2024, only four months after the visioning process began. However, opposition from community members, organizations, and elected officials—some of whom are on the task force—led EDC to push that deadline back multiple times. 

“I can’t vote yes on a project in which the majority of the community doesn’t know what’s going on,” said Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who sits on the task force, at a rally in early April. His office will host a public presentation with the EDC on the plans on June 4. “I’m on the task force and I don’t know what’s going on.”

Elected officials, including Councilmembers Alexa Aviles and Shahana Hanif, State Assemblymember Marcela Mitaynes, Congressman Jerry Nadler, and NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams spoke at the demonstration, which was organized in part by of Voices of the Waterfront, a coalition of residents and local organizations that has coalesced in response to EDC’s plans for the site. 

One by one, speakers asked EDC to “slow down” the process, with many expressing concerns about the negative impact new market-rate housing would have on the community. Congressman Nadler is specifically asking officials to move ahead with the port redevelopment plans, but to “defer housing decisions for later through the ULURP process.”

The task force’s vote is now expected to take place on June 18, a timeline which still outpaces comparable redevelopment projects that went through a GPP, like those for Atlantic Yards and Penn Station. 

Currently, the proposal would construct up to 7,700 units of housing on the site, 35 percent of which would be income-restricted, while the remainder would be market-rate rentals and condominiums. Some opposed to the plan want a greater share of affordable units, considering much of the housing would be constructed on public land. 

City and state officials unveiling plans to redevelopment the waterfront site in 2024. (Caroline Rubinstein-Willis/Mayoral Photography Office)

The EDC has argued that there is insufficient funding and that the port alone will not generate enough profit to support necessary infrastructure upgrades and major public improvements. Last December, midway through the visioning process, EDC released analyses showing that market-rate housing would be needed to cover the lion’s share of those costs.

According to memos and presentations EDC has shared with the task force and which have been made publicly available by Community Board 6, EDC has stated that without market-rate housing, the port will continue to deteriorate until its piers will “fall into the water.” 

However, some task force members are skeptical of that assertion. Carly-Baker Rice, head of the Red Hook Business Alliance and a member of the task force, said EDC could seek out additional grants and explore additional private investment opportunities, and questioned how fully it assessed the port’s current and projected revenue.

According to Kobert, consultants doing the environmental, financial, and market analyses were brought on after the task force was formed last September, developing plans for a complex site within an extremely compressed time frame. “They’re comparing this to Hudson Yards, they’re saying it’s a city within a city. We don’t want that,” said Kobert. 

When asked how it’s responding to concerns around transparency and housing affordability, a spokesperson for EDC disagreed with any characterization that it hasn’t involved the community thoroughly enough. 

“Over the last eight months, NYCEDC has continuously engaged with the Brooklyn Marine Terminal task force and advisory groups in addition to over 3,000 community members who have attended our public workshops, site tours, webinars, and feedback sessions,” said Jeff Holmes, EDC’s vice president for public affairs, in an email.  

That process has helped identify “key community priorities,” Holmes added, including “the need for a modern and sustainable port focused on getting trucks off our streets, improved transportation options and connections, increased waterfront open spaces, resilient infrastructure and protection from climate change, affordable housing and the development of workforce training and career pipelines.” 

“After decades of disinvestment and neglect the port is falling deeper and deeper into disrepair. This is a unique opportunity to deliver a project that will benefit generations of New Yorkers,” he said. 

Tiffany-Ann Taylor, a member of the task force and vice president of transportation for the Regional Plan Association, similarly stressed the opportunity the site represents. Redevelopment could bring pedestrian-first streets, potential express bus and additional ferry service, an expanded greenway, and the prioritization of commercial uses on the site. “I am encouraged by the idea that the city is taking resiliency very seriously in this neighborhood,” she said.

However, she echoed concerns about public engagement. “Having worked there and now being on the receiving end, there honestly is quite a bit to be desired as it relates to the city’s engagement on this project,” said Taylor, who used to hold a position in EDC’s transportation department.

On the proposal to construct market-rate housing on the site, Taylor pointed out that “we are talking about brand new development, and partially market-rate development, right across the street from lower income housing.”

“I think it’s right to question, not only is this the best method, but what improvements could be made to the local housing today. Why are investments only being considered for the future residents of the neighborhood? I think those are very natural questions and levels of concern people would have,” she said.

Some critics point to EDC and the city’s history of offering public land to private developers, sometimes despite vocal public opposition.

Development along this potentially lucrative section of the Brooklyn waterfront has long attracted interest from the real estate sector. According to the New York Times, Related Companies—the global real estate developer EDC hired to develop Hudson Yards and now Willets Point—had been lobbying state and local officials to open the site for development long before the land swap, even drafting a proposal for up to 40,000 high-rise housing units. 

In November, EDC Chief Operating Officer Melissa Burch presented the planned BMT redevelopment at a panel on real estate investment opportunities, which included Related Companies. (As the proposal is still in its visioning stages, a developer has not yet been selected for the site.)

Additionally, Related Companies has made several political donations in recent years to Congressman Dan Goldman, who chairs the task force and recently authored an op-ed in support of the draft plans. A spokesperson for Congressman Goldman said the contributions have no bearing on his position, which they describe as rooted in a desire to preserve the port.

“Congressman Goldman’s first and most important priority has always been to save and revitalize the Red Hook Marine Terminal, which has suffered from decades of neglect and disinvestment but remains a critical economic, environmental, and national security imperative,” Goldman’s Senior Advisor Simone Kanter said in an email. 

He pointed out that future revenues will not be enough to pay for the port’s upgrades, “nor will the federal grant the Congressman helped obtain,” he added, stressing that redevelopment of such a complex property “requires compromise between numerous competing priorities from the communities surrounding the BMT, as well as the City and State governments, which have not been willing to fully finance the necessary investment with public money.”

“The Congressman views his role as the Chair of the Task Force as an advocate to empower these diverse community interests and ensure that EDC is incorporating them in good faith,” Kanter said. 

In a Daily News oped, Goldman cited the project as an opportunity to address the city’s “generational housing crisis.”

“We need our community and elected leaders to find a way to get to ‘yes,’ rather than too often catering to legitimate but parochial reasons to get to ‘no,’” the lawmaker wrote.

However, some who are critical of the process believe that framing this simply as an issue of diverging interests obscures imbalances in power and resources among those involved. They also reject characterizations of NIMBY-ism. 

“Nobody in the group is opposed to housing. Nobody is opposed to resiliency upgrades. But the process has been pre-determined from the beginning, so all of the community input, what does it even mean?” says Benjamin Werner, a member of Voices of the Waterfront.

Both Atlantic Yards and the Gowanus rezoning, while still fraught, promised 100 percent affordable housing on the public lands included in those redevelopments. “If there is going to be any housing, and it’s publicly owned land, then why wouldn’t it be 100 percent affordable?” Werner asked.

Others said pushback to the proposal is driven not by blanket opposition to development, but by the community’s desire to help shape the future of their neighborhood.

“Why put us as part of a process if you’re not going to meet us where we are at?” says Tiffiney Davis, co-founder of Red Hook Art Project and a member of the NYCHA advisory group weighing in on the proposal. “You can bring in low-income [housing] to a community like Red Hook, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to benefit the people that’s directly here.”

“I would hope that the EDC understands their role here,” Davis added, “that this is our community and that they need to follow the leaders here and understand what we are asking. My fear is that it may not be up to us.”

The reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org.

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