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Tish to Gif: Look here!

Says Speaker too fixated on Jets at expense of B’klyn, Nets plan

By Jess Wisloski
The Brooklyn Paper

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Prospect Heights Councilwoman Letitia James wants Speaker Gifford Miller to stop paying so much attention to the New York Jets stadium plan championed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and get serious about the Atlantic Yards basketball arena, office skyscraper and housing development being planned in her district.

“This project is the largest that this borough has seen in over three decades,” said James, “a project that is going to fundamentally reshape the borough of Brooklyn and its landscape.”

James said she fears that the mayoral candidate from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, who has led council opposition to the Jets stadium much as she has spearheaded the airing of doubts among Brooklyn council members about developer Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards plan, is hedging on where he stands on Brooklyn.

“It was announced [in committee] that the hearing was going to take place in the first part of May,” contends James, which she pointed out, is now here. James is one of several council members who have called for the Brooklyn arena plan to go through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), from which it is currently exempt as a state-sponsored project.

Miller’s failure to schedule a hearing about the arena, to which Ratner plans on moving his New Jersey Nets as soon as 2008, leaves the rest of the city in the dark about what she often calls “selling Brooklyn at bargain-basement prices.”

In trying to get a date for a hearing on the Atlantic Yards plan specified and have a sit-down with Miller, James said she’s been referred to his staff only.

“I’m getting the runaround,” she lamented.

Miller spokeswoman Leticia Theodore agreed with James’ claim that a meeting was planned for “early May,” adding, “As soon as the speaker works it out with his legislative director, we’ll know when that is.”

She said any claims made by James that a scheduled hearing was canceled were either incorrect or misunderstood.

“That being said, there will be a hearing on the Atlantic Yards — it is an item that will be heard during the budget hearings,” Theodore added.

“We didn’t have a date set,” she said, “and today’s, what, the 3rd? That’s not to make light of it, but we have how many days in May?

“It’s on the legislative director’s radar, and we do fully intend to be scheduling a meeting in May,” Theodore promised. “The speaker respects the project and the effect on her community, so we fully expect to work with [James] in the future.”

James said the pressure is on to make sure the issues are heard before the council approves next year’s fiscal budget, the draft of which allocates $50 million to the Atlantic Yards project.

The council has only May to draft any changes to Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget before voting on June 5.

While Miller has not weighed in directly on the plan to build a 19,000-seat arena and 17 high-rises with office space and 4,500 units of housing units, he said at an economic development committee hearing in May 2004: “Together, we will find a way to bring professional sports home to Brooklyn and ensure a vibrant and strong community at the same time.”

Atlantic Yards also relies on the state’s power of eminent domain to condemn private property. In addition, like in the West Side stadium plan, it relies on the purchase of development rights over Metropolitan Transportation Authority rail yards.

Miller has raised the sale of the MTA property to the Jets as one of many points of contention he has with the developments on the West Side, and has criticized the stadium as being a “misuse of public money, without any public approval” that “will be funded on the backs of subway and bus riders.”

Opportunities, whether they be a spontaneous subway fire on the A-train line in early March that warranted a Miller press release decrying the stadium, or the $1.3 billion dollar proposed cut to the city’s education budget that inspired his “Schools, not a West Side Stadium” drive in April, seem to constantly present themselves for Miller’s outspoken press releases against the stadium.

Miller even launched a “Subways, not Stadiums” campaign this week, announcing on Tuesday that the $60 million cut to the MTA’s subway repair and rehabilitation budget could be saved by dumping plans for the West Side stadium.

But not once has he mentioned the Brooklyn stadium plan in a release.

Miller’s words, said James, ring true for both projects.

At a speech delivered to students at Columbia University in February, he bashed the mayor’s support of the Jets stadium, much as James is known for criticizing Borough President Marty Markowitz for proudly championing the Nets arena plan at the cost of residents in its footprint.

“How are we to tell our residents that they will have to do without, or will have to wait, as a number of more important projects go ignored or delayed?” fumed Miller. “Throwing away billions of dollars on the mayor’s pet project is wrong, and we must put an end to this wasteful spending of taxpayers’ valuable dollars.”

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©2005 Community Newspaper Group


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