Marte v. City of New York

A New York trial court dismissed a case brought by plaintiffs who contended that development of a large residential project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side would violate the New York State Constitution’s new Environmental Rights (or “Green”) Amendment, which provides that “each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” Noting that a New York appellate court had previously rejected other challenges to the project, the court declined to allow the plaintiffs in this case to use the Green Amendment as means to obtain “another ‘bite at the apple’ under circumstances where every previous request has proved unsuccessful and where, on this record, nothing substantive has changed in the intervening years.” The court found that the plaintiffs’ alleged harms, including increased carbon dioxide emissions, were concerns that had been addressed in environmental reviews under the State Environmental Quality Review Act and City Environmental Quality Review, and that there was “no basis to revisit” the environmental analysis.

A New York City Councilmember and residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court alleging that the development of a project that included three skyscrapers violated the New York Constitution’s new Environmental Rights Amendment and the State Environmental Quality Review Act. The Amendment provides that “each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” The plaintiffs alleged that the Amendment required the City to take a hard look at the Amendment’s impact on the project’s implementation and to determine whether it would implicate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. They contended that a supplemental environmental impact statement was required to look at this issue. The suit included climate change-related allegations, including that the final environmental impact statement failed to evaluate impacts on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change “as mandated by the Constitutional Amendment.”