A top Forest City Ratner official for the first time this week acknowledged that the development company has been paying large sums of money to organizations offering what they’ve presented as grassroots neighborhood support for the proposed Atlantic Yards development.

As reported by The Brooklyn Papers two weeks ago, Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development (BUILD) reported on its non-profit tax filings that it would receive $5 million from developer Bruce Ratner.

Dated Dec. 20, 2004, the 501-c3 filings were completed six months before a so-called “community benefits agreement” (CBA), a non-governmental pact between the developer and supportive community groups, was announced.

BUILD President James Caldwell is being paid $125,000 a year and two other BUILD executives — Marie Louis and Shalawn Langhorne — each receive $100,000 a year, according to the IRS filing.

Forest City Ratner Executive Vice President James Stuckey, who is the Atlantic Yards project manager, defended his company’s dealings with BUILD.

“We created a community benefits agreement and I think we’ve raised the bar for how to do affordable housing,” he told a reporter outside Tuesday’s public hearing on the project. “We have a long tradition as a company in doing that.”

Project opponents have called the BUILD funding a “payoff” for the group’s support and have decried the CBA as giving the impression that the “community” supports Ratner’s plan.

Though initially BUILD denied having received the funding, and Forest City denied paying it, Stuckey on Wednesday released a statement confirming funding commitments both to BUILD and to the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, another CBA endorser.

“Forest City Ratner is 100 percent committed to meeting the targets in the CBA and that means we will have to partially fund many of these programs,” Stuckey said in the statement.

He said BUILD had received $100,000 for “project implementation” and had twice been paid $38,000 by the company to distribute Ratner’s promotional tabloid, The Brooklyn Standard.

The Rev. Herbert Daughtry, who signed the agreement and whose organization, Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance, will be commissioned to help create an intergenerational center as part of the Ratner plan, received $50,000, the statement read, to “retain staff to begin to develop a program to create these facilities.”

©2005 Community Newspaper Group