Explore More

City Hall’s paralysis by analysis cost a low-income Staten Island neighborhood a $90 million donation from the Kroc family for a recreation center, Borough President James Oddo charged.

“To have it slip through our hands is unforgivable,” Oddo fumed.

Oddo sought $20 million from the city to jump-start the Salvation Army’s construction of a Kroc Center facility in the Stapleton-Clifton neighborhood.

It was to be one of 27 Kroc Centers across the country, all growing from a $1.5 billion bequest by Joan Kroc, heir to the McDonald’s fortune, to the Salvation Army. The centers were all placed in disadvantaged communities.

“These centers are transformative,” Oddo told The Post. “They save lives.”

The borough won a competitive bid to land a Kroc Center in 2006, and architects sketched out such amenities as four pools, an indoor track, an outdoor splash deck and soccer field, and space for classes and after-school programs.

The Salvation Army spent $7.6 million to buy a 7-acre site, part of the defunct Bayley Seton Hospital’s grounds, in 2009.

But the terms of the Kroc bequest required millions in local funding — raised by grass-roots groups and/or state and city governments — to confirm a commitment to long-term stability.

In 2014, with the project stalled, Oddo proposed “a marriage with the city” — a deal to help fund construction in exchange for the right to run city programs there. The area had lost its only city-run rec center in 2010, when the Cromwell Center, built on a rotting city pier, collapsed into the harbor.

Oddo pledged $5 million from his discretionary budget and began two years of meetings with Mayor de Blasio’s office and the Parks Department.

On March 1, after several deadline extensions without any answer from the city, the Salvation Army pulled the plug. “The significant financial hurdles simply could not be overcome,” Major James Betts had said.

Oddo is at a loss to explain why City Hall left him twisting in the wind about the Kroc Center. “To me this was more bureaucracy, short-sightedness and failing to recognize or sufficiently respect that this was clearly an extremely high priority,” he said.

“The problems in this community — the heroin epidemic, spiking crime, the education gap — are all the issues that a Kroc Center targets,” Oddo said.

“This is everything the mayor campaigned on.”

Austin Finan, a City Hall spokesman, said, “We ... were making progress with stakeholders when The Salvation Army decided against moving forward with the project. We remain open to working with all stakeholders on this project or similar projects.”

ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2Jlfnd7j2xmamtfqMGiwMSnZKKrnJa7pXnCoquyZZiWua15wa6loKSVmXp6fMxmm6imkam2sLqMn6arZaKasG6vxKernqpf