Atlantic Yards Hearing tomorrow

puca

Public Hearing on Atlantic Yards by The City Council Economic Development Committee
Thursday, May 26th, at 1 pm.
250 Broadway on the 14th floor.
(2/3 to Park Place, 4/5/N to City Hall)
Come early (by noon if possible) to get into the hearing room. (its not that big)

anonymous

Subject: Latest Info about the Hearing from the Fort Greene Ass.

Fellow Fort Greeners,

Tish James needs your help.

An important hearing regarding the economic impacts of the development of the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards, including the Nets Arena, is to be held this Thursday, May 26th. Tish James our tireless Councilperson has had a family emergency and regretfully will not be able to attend this pivotal meeting leaving Fort Greene unrepresented. Leaders of the various Community Groups involved with maintaining our representation in this process have called Speaker Miller's office to ask for a postponement but have been denied. Now it is your turn. Please call or email the Speaker and tell him to postpone this meeting as the area which will be most affected will be the least represented. Stand up for Tish, Stand up for Brooklyn, Stand up for Fort Greene.

Contact Gifford Miller
phone: 212.788.7210
email: [email protected]

and his assistant L. Joy Williams
phone: 212.788.0142
email: [email protected]

Fort Greene Association
Box 170563
Brooklyn, NY 11217
718.875.1855 Tel.
718.783.6759 Fax
[email protected]
www.HistoricFortGreene.org

anonymous

Subject: Tish will be at the hearing, no need to call any more

just come out for the hearing. but prepare to be frustrated as the room fits only 40 people or so. but come anyway, raise a ruckus.

anonymous

Subject: Tish will be there

I was just at City Hall for another business matter and saw Tish James. She will indeed be at the hearings this afternoon. Also, noted that there were a number of union members out front of 250 Broadway with signs in support of the stadium and this was at about 10:30 this morning.

sje

Anyone able to make it care to recap for the rest of us? Thank you!

anonymous

Subject: from NY1

Developer Says Price For Nets Arena Has Skyrocketed

May 27, 2005

The developer who wants to bring a new basketball for the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn told a City Council hearing Thursday that it has already purchased much of the property needed for the new Atlantic Yards development, but in the process, the price tag for the project has skyrocketed.

NY1's Bobby Cuza filed this report.

One of the knocks against the proposed Atlantic Yards development has been that to build the sprawling residential and commercial development, complete with a new Nets arena, the state might have to condemn dozens of privately owned buildings, whether the owners like it or not.

But representatives of the company that made that proposal said Thursday that's increasingly unnecessary, because it has already bought up more than 90 percent of the owner occupied buildings, 63 percent of the rental buildings, and more than half the commercial properties it needs. However, in the process, the project's total cost has now ballooned from $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion.

“Costs, like everything else, go up,” said Jim Stuckey of Forest City Ratner Companies. “In addition to that, we have a better sense of the infrastructure that would be required for this project, and in addition to that, we’ve paid more money for land because we’ve gone out of our way to try and avoid eminent domain or condemnation.”

Representatives of Forest City Ratner told a City Council hearing Thursday they've set aside half the planned residential units for affordable housing, many for residents of the buildings that would come down.

Still, many critics aren't convinced, and question whether the housing will in fact be affordable.

"When y’all say 50 percent of affordable housing, that’s not true. It is 20 percent low-income, and 80 percent moderate to high, or market rate – a cute little term,” said Brooklyn Councilman Charles Barron. “Eighty percent we can’t afford. This is going to be instant gentrification.”

Forest City Ratner says it's also close to a Community Benefits Agreement that would, among other things, guarantee construction jobs for minorities and women.

Supporters of the project, including Borough President Marty Markowitz, maintain the project will be a huge economic boost.

“I am absolutely an enthusiastic supporter of this,” said Markowitz. “Yes, it will provide the jobs. It will. There’s no question about it.”

The project still has a number of hurdles to overcome. For one, much of the planned development would go over the MTA's Atlantic Rail Yards, which this week the agency put out for competitive bidding.

But the city and state have already agreed to contribute $100 million each to the project, and if all goes as planned, construction could begin as soon as September of 2006.

- Bobby Cuza

anonymous

Subject: another hearing round up

from fieldofschemes.com
http://www.fieldofschemes.com/news/archives/001215.html

May 26, 2005


Nets arena questions and answers (and more questions)

The Brooklyn Nets arena hearing was scheduled to start at 1 pm, and by noon, close to 300 people were outside: members of the community group ACORN and union members (SEIU, UFCW), chanting "Jobs, Housing and Hoops!"; and on the opposing side, members of the community group Develop Don't Destroy, bearing giant mock billion-dollar checks made out to Nets owner Bruce Ratner. At curbside, a man dispensed "Jobs, Housing and Hoops" t-shirts and pins from a box addressed to "Scott Cantone, Forest City Ratner."

I asked the city council security officer how many people the hearing room held. "Sixty seated. Another 10 can stand."

In the end, more than 100 people crammed into the tiny hearing room across the street from New York City Hall for four hours of testimony that made clear... well, not much, actually. Forest City Ratner revealed that it was considering cutting some office buildings and adding more housing to its development plan - a no-brainer, considering the white-hot housing market and the weak demand for commercial space in Brooklyn. Bertha Lewis, head of ACORN, discussed her group's recent agreement with Ratner to retain 50% of the housing for low- and middle-income residents (though Ratner has been insisting this would be the case for more than a year now). And George Sweeting of the Independent Budget Office, in a line sure to be quoted repeatedly by Ratner's forces, testified that after a preliminary analysis by his office, he was "pretty confident that the final results will show a fiscal surplus" for the city from the Atlantic Yards project - though most of the fiscal benefits would come from the accompanying housing and office space, not the arena, just as Andrew Zimbalist concluded last year.

Meanwhile, the list of unanswered questions about the Nets project keeps growing. Some of these can get a bit technical, but I'm going to go into them in some detail here, because they're an important example of just how difficult it can be to accurately calculate just who's paying for what in the convoluted world of sports facility finance:

1. Who gets the Nets PILOTs? Ratner's memorandum of understanding, or MOU, with the state-run Empire State Development Corporation states that the developer will pay ESDC payments in lieu of property taxes, or PILOTs, equal to the assessed value of the arena land. (The entire project site would be taken over by the state, and so exempt from property taxes.) These PILOTs would then be used to pay off the arena's tax-exempt construction bonds.

Meanwhile, the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, in somewhat of a surprise move, put out a request for proposals (RFP - take a deep breath, the acronyms only get worse from here) yesterday for bids to develop the MTA-owned rail yards where the arena would be built. And in that document, it states that the developer would pay PILOTs to the MTA. Who's right? It's anyone's guess, especially since neither the ESDC MOU nor the MTA RFP has the force of law.

2. Should the Nets PILOT payments be considered a public subsidy? This sounds straightforward, but in fact gets trickier the more closely you examine it. Ratner wouldn't be paying taxes on the arena property, which would generally be considered a subsidy. (The general term for this is a "tax expenditure.") However, much development in Brooklyn is already tax-free under a 20-year-old city program called the Industrial and Commercial Incentive Program (ICIP), which gives 15-year tax breaks to anyone building industrial or commercial property outside of Manhattan.

Would a basketball arena qualify for ICIP? I buttonholed several development experts at today's hearing, and got three different flavors of "maybe" in reply. It's an important question, because it would determine whether Ratner's "pay his taxes and keep them too" plan is a special subsidy, or an "as-of-right" one available to all developers. (The IBO's fiscal analysis, for example, considers only special subsidies to be "costs" to the city, since whatever development took place on the site would be eligible for as-of-right subsidies like ICIP.)

3. What will the Nets pay the MTA for the land? This is a repeat of the New York Jets situation in Manhattan, where the team wanted to use its PILOT payments to pay off its own stadium costs, while simultaneously paying a land price that treats the PILOTs as taxes that make the property that much less valuable. Similarly, Ratner's MOU with the MTA says that the MTA "must take into account" PILOT costs "prior to the fair market value determination" on the land - which could result in a subsidy of hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA to Ratner. The MTA RFP, meanwhile, makes no mention of this PILOT-discounted "fair market" price. Curiouser and curiouser...

4. Are there any additional public costs to the project? Beyond the $200 million in city and state cash for the project, the IBO identified less than $100 million in additional special subsidies, primarily $76 million from federal taxpayers by allowing the project to use low-interest tax-exempt bonds, and $13 million in lost property taxes that would be collected under ICIP (which phases out its exemption after 22 years) but not under the Ratner plan (which would get a 30-year exemption).

ICIP tax breaks, though, are undeniably a subsidy - it's just one that's available to anyone building outside Manhattan. (Many people have raised objections to whether this still makes sense in an age of booming outer-borough real estate, but then, screwing itself out of property taxes is the city's specialty.) Add those back in, and it's hundreds of millions of dollars more in public tax expenditures on the Ratner project. Moreover, when it comes to development projects, predicting the consequences of your actions can be a tricky business; one traffic study cited during testimony at today's hearing estimated that "the economic cost of the additional cars and density [from the Atlantic Yards project] is expected to be $76 million per year" - which, if true, could amount to an additional one billion dollar loss to the city.

The line of the day went to Mafruza Khan of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, an urban planning center at a school about a mile from the proposed arena site. Testified Khan, shortly before the hearing finally adjourned after 5 pm:
"Given the wide divergence in [subsidy] estimates, from $200 million to over $1 billion, we do want to emphasize that it is impossible for the public to know whether this project is a good deal without knowing how much it will cost to taxpayers. It is being asked to buy something without knowing how much it will cost."

And you know what they call that.