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State pleads Yards’ case
Last-minute blitz to save Ratner plan from Shelly’s ‘Silver’ bullet
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del.icio.usBruce Ratner’s boosters in Albany spent most of Tuesday trying to convince Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D–Manhattan) of the benefits of his Atlantic Yards project.
Just hours after New York 1 reported that Silver — who has already killed two big development projects with his vote on the Public Authorities Control Board — would block Ratner’s Prospect Heights Xanadu before its expected approval Wednesday, Empire State Development Corporation project planners arrived in his office.
“We are in the process of being briefed on the project,” Silver spokeswoman Eileen Larrabee said.
As a result, it now appears that the PACB vote will indeed happen Wednesday. The other two men on the board — Gov. Pataki and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno (R–Rensselaer) — support the project, making Silver the target of project opponents’ last-minute hopes.
Ever Sphinx-like, Silver said last week that he had “questions” about the financing of the 22-acre arena, residential, office, retail and open space project that the ESDC had failed to answer.
The $4-billion project would require hundreds of millions of dollars in direct and indirect public subsidies, but the actual size of the taxpayer contribution to the project has never been released.
But Larrabee said that “some” of the missing financial analysis had been provided by the ESDC at Tuesday’s briefing.
The public cost of the mega-development became even murkier last week, after new state documents disclosed that it would only reap $944 million in tax revenues over 30 years — $456 million less than the ESDC said it would create when a slightly larger version of the plan was moving through the public approval process this summer.
In the recent past, Silver has used his PACB vote to block other Pataki “legacy” projects, including the West Side stadium and the Moynihan Station project.
But in the three years preceding this final stage of disclosure and debate over Brooklyn’s largest ever development, the speaker has said he generally supports the project.
Pataki’s spokesman said that enough review had been done and that the governor expected to approve the project Wednesday.
“This project has undergone thorough public review,” said the spokesman, John Sweeney.
©2006 The Brooklyn Paper
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