The Beczak Environmental Education Center
By Dan Murphy
The Beczak Environment Center, located at 35 Alexander Street on the Hudson Riverfront in Yonkers, recently got a reprieve from a letter they received instructing them to vacate their county owned building within 30 days for failure to properly maintain the building as part of their lease with Westchester County.
When told about the letter, from Westchester County Department of Public Works Commissioner Hugh Greechan, County Executive George Latimer told Yonkerstimes.com on Friday May 10 that he recinded the letter and that no action will be taken for 90 days until further review.
Beczak has a lease with the county that will expire in July of 2025. The building is currently being shared with the Sarah Lawrence College Center for the Urban River at Beczak.
The letter from Greechan, dated April 23, was recently shared with the public, so we reached out to Latimer, who immediately rescinded the letter. We wanted to share that information with anyone who may have read Greechan’s letter.
At issue are repairs, or the lack thereof, being made at Beczak. Last year, Westchester County sent Beczak a letter identifying $1.9 Million in construction work and repairs that they claim are required to properly maintain the building.
But Beczak claims that most if not all of the repairs are not required. A walk through of the building last year included all stake holders. After that walk through, there was no correspondence between the county and Beczak regarding the requested repairs.
Architect Stephen Tilly reviewed the list of required repairs and wrote that most were not necessary and could be completed in other ways.
Several community groups are now using the building through Beczak. They include the Yonkers NAACP, the Black Women’s Political Caucus, and HRCA, the Hudson River Community Association. The recent troubles with the Nepperhan Community Center have resulted in these and other groups looking for other places to hold their meetings.
We spoke to Marcia Cooper, the President of the Beczak Center, “I would like to sit down once and for all, and hash this out. I would also ask that our lease be honored, through July of next year, and then we can work on a license agreement.”
Latimer said that he is hopeful that all parties can come together and reach an agreement on the repairs and the sharing of the building between Beczak and Sarah Lawrence.
Currently, there are negotiations between the County Attorney and the attorney for Beczak over a license agreement referenced by Cooper above. The license agreement would replace the existing lease that Beczak has with the county.
The county is looking to move forward with the license agreement before the lease expires, and in exchange the county would pay for the maintenance -repairs.
Those negotiations continue.
