State Senator John Liu

3850 Bell Blvd, Suite C

Bayside, NY 11361

Dear Senator Liu,

As community leaders representing the diversity of your district and the greater Queens community, we are writing to urge you to join us in supporting Metropolitan Park. The 50 acres of vacant asphalt around Citi Field are a wasted opportunity, isolating the local neighborhoods and actively making local climate challenges worse. We can’t afford to do nothing and we must not be distracted by dreams that won’t solve the problems of unemployment and lack of green space in our area. For nearly 100 years, that parking lot has taken a great toll on our neighborhoods. We must act now to capture the benefits of the Metropolitan Park project.

The $8 billion privately-funded Metropolitan Park plan offers us a transformative opportunity. As community leaders with a constituency, we wholeheartedly endorse converting this asphalt into a vibrant economic and community hub that will create 23,000 new jobs. These jobs are desperately needed in our neighborhoods, which are still recovering from the pandemic. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our community.

The Metropolitan Park plan has been formulated by having so many of us at the table from the very beginning. For the past three years, we have been actively engaged by the project’s representatives. They have sought our input on our vision for the space and implemented many of our ideas into the design. They have even gone so far as to hire an outreach team to knock on over 40,000 doors in the community to have conversations with our neighbors to determine how they could benefit from its transformation, as well as how we could participate in its future.  The bottom-up approach is clearly evident in the resulting proposal. The project will create jobs, build a public park, renovate the train station, and include over $1 billion in direct community benefits.

Metropolitan Park will provide numerous opportunities for local residents to thrive. It will create thousands of good-paying, union jobs, prioritizing the hiring of local residents and contracting with local minority and women-owned businesses. Importantly for our community, it will include a new public park space with athletic fields. This new greenspace will provide environmental resilience, opportunities for active recreation and passive enjoyment, and improve neighborhood connectivity with safe pedestrian walkways and new bike lanes to the waterfront and surrounding community.

Your leadership is valued and we are confident that your efforts will be remembered as instrumental in improving our community. The path forward is clear, and the time to act is now. We need Metropolitan Park! Senator Liu, as community leaders, we urge you to support this vision to convert 50 acres of asphalt into the great destination our community needs and deserves.

Sincerely,