A coalition of East Village and Lower East Side groups and neighbors have filed a lawsuit over a massive storm protection project that would require razing and rebuilding the East River Park.

The $1.45 billion resiliency plan would rebuild the East River Park 8- to 10-feet higher, with a series of flood walls north and south of the park—all aimed at protecting the neighborhoods against the impacts of storm surge flooding, like that of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and sea level rise due to climate change. The City Council approved the project late last year after months of pushback from locals; a public review process eventually led to a series of concessions for the area, like a phased construction timeline to prevent the entirety of the park from shuttering at one time. The resiliency project is set to be entirely complete by 2025.

But despite its eventual approval, East River Park Action, a neighborhood group formed to fight the project, is calling for interim flood protections and a "revision of the plan to cause minimal destruction of the park."

"We don't really have much more we can get the city to negotiate with," said Charles Krezell, a plaintiff on the lawsuit. "For one thing, we don't believe that they're going to be able to complete this is in five years."

The lawsuit, led by the West Village lawyer Arthur Schwartz, who vigorously fought the 14th Street bus priority project, argues the project must receive state legislature approval to "alienate" the park for the seawall, which the lawsuit argues is a "nonpark purpose." The lawsuit adds, "creating a park on top of a seawall is sugar-coating a nonpark purpose." (Schwartz was not immediately available for an interview Friday.)

"It does not matter that East River Park is not being transferred to private use," reads the lawsuit, which cites a case regarding a contested water treatment plant proposed in Van Cortlandt Park in 2001. The city argued at the time that parkland alienation was not required because the water plant would be underground with park surfaces eventually restored, according to court papers. A judge ultimately ruled the project required alienation approval from the state legislature, which eventually passed on the last day of the legislative session in 2003, according to a 2015 report in City Limits.

"Basically, we don't trust the city. This whole process has made us not trust the city," said Krezell, also the founder of the Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens, which is not a plaintiff. "Why aren't they doing something immediately?" South of the park, a series of sandbags with plans for deployable barriers in the case of a storm are in place—but even those barriers are not built to protect residents from a storm of Sandy's magnitude.

The city's Law Department plans to "vigorously defend" the East Side Coastal Resiliency project, Law Department spokesperson Nicholas Paolucci said. The City Council's legal team determined alienation approval from state lawmakers was not necessary, according to Council staff.

"This important project will protect 110,000 New Yorkers and East River Park from the possibly deadly effects of sea level rise and severe storms," City Hall spokesperson Julia Arredondo added.

Councilmembers Carlina Rivera, Keith Powers, and Margaret Chin, who represent the east side neighborhoods, pointed to community mitigations secured during the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure process, like the rejiggered construction phasing and new open spaces.

"With the growing threat of climate change, we cannot afford to wait on much-needed waterfront protections," they said in a statement defending the project.

The "parkland alienation" process which the lawsuit argues is required occurs when a city "wishes to convey, sell, or lease municipal parkland or discontinue its use as a park," according to a state handbook on alienation.

"It's an issue all around the country—this issue of parkland alienation," said Bloomberg-era Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, now a senior vice president for the Trust for Public Land, a nationwide parks advocacy group.

Rather than a formal law regarding when alienation is required, alienation is based on a century of court rulings that have established a legal precedent, he said. Under the process, the City Council would have to pass a law approving use of the park for something besides a park through home rule legislation, the state legislature would have to pass a bill approving it, and then the government would have to replace the parkland with something of equal size or value.

"It's a slippery slope," he said of allowing non-park uses on a park. Recent cases include a high-rise proposed on an East Harlem playground, which the Trust for Public Land backed a lawsuit against, and a school to be built in a Queens park.

"We've seen that you can't count on elected officials to act in the interest of protecting public parklands because they see it as a cheap and easy way to solve more difficult city problems."

But regarding the resiliency project, Benepe said, "At the end of the day, it's going to be a park."

In the Van Cortlandt Park case, Benepe, who served as Parks Commissioner at the time, said he ultimately supported the plans after $220 million in park improvements were set aside for the Bronx. "It was a real windfall," he said.

Benepe didn't offer an opinion one way or another on the plans or the merits of the case, but added, "Generally speaking, using parks as green infrastructure to do double-duty... to protect cities from the impacts of climate change makes a lot of sense.... There is no question that climate change is upon us and sea levels are rising."