The Bruckner Boulevard rezoning lawsuit against the city has been adjourned until May.
The case was scheduled to appear before Justice Leticia Maria Ramirez in Bronx County Supreme Court last Friday, but lawyers agreed to adjourn the case until May 3. The adjournment will give lawyer Richard Lippes time to respond to the city’s March 31 motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
Lippes told the Bronx Times that he requested an adjournment to work on a response. He has until April 21 to do so, and the city will then have until May 1 to respond.
The Article 78 lawsuit — a proceeding that allows for appeals of government agency decisions — was filed on Feb. 13, just four hours before the deadline to challenge the rezoning. The plan, which will bring 348 apartments to the low density East Bronx neighborhood of Throggs Neck, was approved unanimously by the City Council in October. Lippes, an environmental lawyer based in Buffalo who specializes in Article 78 cases, is representing a group of residents who have long-opposed the project. In the suit, he argued that the rezoning should be overturned because the environmental review wasn’t done properly.
The city responded to the suit on March 31 with a motion calling for it to be dismissed. Nathan Taylor, senior counsel for the city’s environmental law division, argued that the case should be thrown out because the rezoning applicant Throggs Neck LLC was not listed with the city as a respondent in the lawsuit and because the city was served with the lawsuit past the deadline to do so.
Lippes — who has been practicing for more than five decades — was unfazed by the city’s arguments in an interview with the Bronx Times last week. But Roderick Hills, an NYU Law professor who specializes in local government and land use law, told the Bronx Times on Tuesday that not naming the applicant in the suit alongside the city — known as “joining” them — seems like a “rookie mistake.”
“Essentially, these…
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