It’s a tale of two parks.
City bureaucrats only care about parks where tourists go — leaving a local gem in the forgotten borough to drown in raw sewage, according to Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella.
Fossella this week ripped the toxic double standard that’s left Clove Lakes Park to rot — as he urgently called for a summit of city and state agencies after The Post revealed that a collapsed sewer line from a lakeside restaurant has been spewing human waste into the waters for decades.
“If this were Central Park, people would be flipping out,” Fossella told The Post during a tour of the park’s verdant trails overlooking the deeply polluted lake.
It took the city Parks Department a week after The Post’s reporting to finally shut down boating and fishing at the park, and Fossella claimed that city agencies are still leaving him in the dark about the full extent of the problem.
“What the public deserves is a safe, fun, healthy, public recreation area, and they don’t have it right now,” the Republican beep and former congressman said.
He recalled his own childhood days playing baseball in the idyllic park, while calling for a full investigation into the pollution crisis.
“What’s very unsettling and troubling is that it appears that this has been sort of going on for quite some time. We need to know who knew what and when,” the borough president said.
The extent of the damage may be more severe than what’s currently known.
On Wednesday, Parks Department employees were observed performing a dye test to determine if other sewer lines in the park were malfunctioning. A Parks Department employee said that they were testing every building in the park.
When asked if more collapsed sewer lines were found, a different Parks worker sighed and said, “I plead the Fifth.”
The park’s public bathrooms were locked during the testing.
The Parks Department told The Post that they were not aware of any other sewer lines leaking into Clove Lake and that they are working with the Department of Environmental Protection regarding next steps.
One parkgoer said that he had heard of plumbing problems at the site The Stone House restaurant occupies going back 50 years.
“The basement always had sewage. I had a friend who worked there, he’d have to take his shoes off when he got home,” Tad, 71, a trucker who frequents the park said.
Fossella took city regulators to task for not addressing the problem sooner, and slammed them for not possessing or releasing crucial data regarding fecal coliform contamination.
Parkgoers were outraged.
“There should be repercussions up and down the line,” said radiologist Sydney Russel, 25.
“I’m upset about it, really. Because it was beautiful. I took my kids here, and they were little,” said retired Staten Island nurse Donna DeWaters, 71.
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