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IN THE CHAIR
While she grew up immersed in politics, Helen Foster never thought she would end up a politician. And, she said, she certainly never thought she would fill the same Bronx City Council seat her father, fellow Democrat Wendell Foster, held for 24 years.
“Being the daughter of a minister and a politician you do everything,” she said. “I knew about petitions, I knew how to organize, I knew grassroots.”
But there was a downside as well, she said.
“I was the easy target because I was the incumbent’s daughter,” she recalled.
Today, Foster chairs the Council’s Parks and Recreation Committee, a job she said gives her surprising leverage in addressing what she sees as the city’s pressing issues.
Specifically, Foster has been a vocal critic of efforts by members of the Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) administration to promote “self sustaining parks,” or parks that pay for themselves through concession money and other private deals with the city.
Foster calls that “privatization of public space.”
Recently, an agreement between the Parks Department and a group of 20 elite Manhattan schools ignited a debate over access to public space and adequate funding for city parks.
Foster, who attended one of the schools included in the deal, said the proposal amounts to wealthy schools leasing the city’s largest collection of playing fields in a no-bid contract.
“What you see is a huge difference between parks for those that have, and parks for those that have not,” she said. “This is the time that we should look to start reinvesting in parks as a city and not looking for private donors.”
But the issue that has gotten the most attention for Foster as chair of the Parks and Recreation Committee was her vote against the new Yankee Stadium, which will be in a Bronx Council district neighboring hers. While the proposal was overwhelmingly supported in the Council, Foster said the negative impacts of the project on the surrounding community and on parkland were too large to ignore.
“To date, that was probably the hardest political fight I’ve fought, but it’s also the vote I’m most proud of,” she said. “I know hands down that I did the right thing.”
Under the deal between the city and the Yankees organization, replacement parkland is to be identified and developed by 2011, two years after the current scheduled completion date for the stadium. However, Foster said, the proposed park sites are exclusively to the south of the stadium, rather than to the north where green spaces are most needed.
In all, Foster said the deal was made with baseball, not the Bronx, in mind.
“You’ve got the richest team in baseball in the poorest congressional district in the state”, she said. “and what do we have to show for it?”
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