Without mentioning Atlantic Yards by name, Mayor Bloomberg signaled last week that he’ll side with opponents of Bruce Ratner’s mega-development in a coming legal battle against the “undemocratic” process that is pushing the project to its likely approval later this year.
In his weekly radio show last Friday, Bloomberg questioned why the three members of the state’s Public Authorities Control Board — Gov. Pataki, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno (R-Rensselaer) and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) — “have a veto over everything.”
“Why is there [such] a structure at the state level?” the mayor asked. “I’m not sure why that’s constitutional. Maybe somebody wants to take a look at that. I don’t happen to think it’s good democracy to give the governor, the Speaker of the Assembly and the majority leader of the Senate [such power].”
The mayor’s comments came days after Silver held up a vote on the conversion of the Main Post Office in Manhattan into a grand new train station named after Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan — and the mayor was incensed last year when Silver used his vote to block the West Side stadium project.
PACB votes must be unanimous.
Bloomberg didn’t mention Atlantic Yards, but his support for reforming the PACB was seized on by project opponents this week.
“I agree fully with the mayor,” said City Councilmember Letitia James (D-Fort Greene). “‘Three men in a room’ should not have control over development in our city — not at Moynihan Station and not at Atlantic Yards.”
James said she expected Bloomberg to support an inevitable lawsuit against Atlantic Yards on the grounds that the PACB is unconstitutional.
“I believe Mayor Bloomberg is principled and consistent, and knows that what’s true in Manhattan is also true on the other side of the East River,” she said.
The latest flap over the state’s so-called “three men in a room” form of government yielded at least some good news this week: renewed buzz for a political memoir by former state Sen. Seymour Lachman. The book, conveniently titled, “Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American Statehouse,” details how so many vital decisions in New York are made in a “corrupt, inefficient and undemocratic” manner.
“Two of the three men in the room don’t even represent the state, but in Silver and Bruno’s case, only the people in their districts,” Lachman told The Brooklyn Papers. “Nothing gets done in Albany without those two people.”
Lachman said the lack of democracy makes it impossible “to get a full airing on projects like Atlantic Yards.”
A spokeswoman for Silver told the Daily News that when Silver votes on the PACB he “gets input from all his colleagues [and] votes in the interest of his conference.”
