Transformation From Post and Base To Public Benefit
In October 1995 the United States Coast Guard announced it would close its largest base, at Governors Island, as a cost savings measure. The Coast Guard had established the base on the island in 1966 after the U.S. Army closed Fort Jay, an Army post since 1794. Thirty years later, in 1996, the Coast Guard closed the base and conveyed it as surplus property to the federal government's General Services Administration for disposal through transfer or sale.
The closure was at the initiative of the Coast Guard, then a bureau of the U.S. Department of Transportation, which was seeking to close a $400 million budget gap. The closure of the base represented an estimated 30 million dollar savings. Since the closure was an initiated action by the Coast Guard, it was not subject to the Base Realignment and Closure process.
At the time of the closure announcement in October 1995, President Bill Clinton and New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan reached an informal agreement to convey the island to the city and state of New York for 1 dollar if a plan for public benefit could be developed.
In August 1997, as part of legislation to balance the budget, Congress directed that the entire island be sold with a right of first offer to the State and City of New York.
Read more about this topic: Governors Island National Monument
Famous quotes containing the words post, base, public and/or benefit:
“I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
Those undreamt accidents that have made me
Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
Being but a part of ancient ceremony
Notorious, till all my priceless things
Are but a post the passing dogs defile.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“screenwriter
Tony Pastor, the pioneer of vaudeville, played the theater in 1876.... He had been preceded by P.T. Barnum, and an occasional performer such as Professor Simmons, “Great, Weird, Wondrous, and Invincibly Incomprehensible ... Basiliconthamaturgist.””
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)