Bushwick’s own City Council member wants to close Rikers Island and then turn the 400-acre jail complex into a solar-powered, sewage-treating, compost-making climate hub. And she just co-signed a public argument that doing it is not only criminal justice, it’s environmental justice.
In an opinion piece published in City Limits on July 1, Council Member Sandy Nurse, who represents Brooklyn’s District 37, and Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, laid out the case for finishing the job the city legally committed to years ago: shutting the jail and building the “Renewable Rikers” vision in its place.
“Rikers is not only a criminal justice crisis,” Nurse and Bautista wrote. “It is also an environmental failure that demands urgency. Closing it is not just about decarceration, it’s about repairing harm, restoring communities, and reimagining our city’s future resilience.”
Here’s the background that makes the pitch make sense. In 2019, after years of organizing led largely by people who survived incarceration and their families, the City Council voted to close the Rikers jail complex by August 2027. Two years later, the Renewable Rikers Act set the plan for what comes after: convert the island into a hub for renewable energy, wastewater treatment and climate resilience. The 2021 laws transferred island land from the Department of Correction to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and required a study of whether renewable energy sources combined with battery storage were feasible there.
Nurse and Bautista argue the environmental and the carceral harms are the same injustice wearing two faces. The low-income neighborhoods and communities of color most swept into Rikers, they write, are also the ones stuck living next to peaker power plants, breathing bad air and drinking from polluted water. Rikers itself sits on top of a landfill that emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and its aging infrastructure leaks pollution into surrounding waterways, according to the op-ed.
The Renewable Rikers plan they’re backing would put solar arrays, battery storage and renewable energy connections on the island, build a modern wastewater treatment facility to cut pollution in the East River, and add composting and other regenerative infrastructure. The authors also say it would train and employ residents from communities like “Asthma Alley,” which they describe as having the highest rates of childhood asthma and air pollution in the country, building a green-jobs career pipeline for neighborhoods usually left out of new industries.
The timing of the op-ed wasn’t random. Days earlier, the Mamdani administration carried out the first property transfers from the Department of Correction to DCAS since 2021. The city permanently closed the North Infirmary Command, a vacant jail that first opened in 1932, and moved large portions of the George Motchan Detention Center and the Anna M. Kross Center, neither of which currently houses people, into DCAS’s portfolio.
Nurse cheered that move at the time. “When I chaired the Council’s Criminal Justice Committee, we fought to make the Adams administration follow the law and turn over unused land on Rikers to DCAS. The Mamdani administration is actually doing it,” she said in the mayor’s announcement. “I applaud the steps taken today to close Rikers and move us closer to the Renewable Rikers we’ve long envisioned.”
But the closure itself is behind schedule, and the administration has said so out loud. The day before those transfers, city officials acknowledged they won’t hit the 2027 court-mandated deadline, first reported by NBC New York, because construction of the four borough-based jails meant to replace Rikers has been delayed and lawmakers can’t yet say when they’ll be finished. “It is not breaking news we are not on track to meet that timeline,” Dana Kaplan, the city’s Rikers czar, told NBC New York. “We have a lot of steps along the way to get to the day when Rikers is finally closed for good.”
That’s the gap Nurse and Bautista are trying to close. In the op-ed they point to a New York City Environmental Justice Alliance report called “A Reset for Renewable Rikers,” which argues the city has to accelerate the land transfer and lock in concrete plans for renewable infrastructure. Their specific ask is passing Nurse’s bill, Intro 881, which would require DCAS to produce a full master plan for redeveloping the island by July 1, 2027.
The bill spells out what that master plan has to cover: wastewater treatment, renewable energy generation and storage, offshore wind converter stations, and composting and organic waste processing, along with cost estimates, a proposed timeline, land use and environmental review schedules, and an evaluation of how much power the island could actually push into the electric grid. It would also require DCAS to publish a draft and take public comment before submitting a final plan. Intro 881 is co-sponsored by a dozen council members and the Brooklyn Borough President.
Nurse and Bautista frame the whole thing as unfinished business with everything already in place to finish it. “We have the law. We have the plan,” they wrote. “What we need now is the political will to finish the job.”
Featured image: Photo Credit: Emil Cohen/NYC Council Media Unit)
