Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn is reaching out and touching someone — someone’s wallet, that is.
In a bid to pay off an ever-growing mountain of legal bills, the most-vocal opponent of the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment has begun a round of fundraising calls — even calling The Brooklyn Paper for cash (we declined, thank you very much).
“We have a good opportunity here,” the earnest DDDB volunteer said last week, begining his pitch to a potential donor, the always-objective Brooklyn Paper staffer.
The volunteer discussed the need to fight the state’s decision to seize land via eminent domain and turn it over to developer Bruce Ratner. Then, he got down to business.
“So we’re building up our legal fund,” he said, “and we’re reaching out to friends and supporters…”
DDDB spokesman Daniel Goldstein said that the organization has relied on such telephone fund-raising campaigns quite a bit over the course of its three-year battle against the state-supported 16-tower, arena, hotel, office space and residential mega-project.
“It’s a direct connection with a person that is able to discuss issues,” he said, “It’s a two-way conversation.”
A two-way conversation that opens on a particular slant, that is. Like developer Bruce Ratner’s much-criticized — and anonymous — “push poll” surveys, the DDDB phone pitch doesn’t lack for spin.
But Goldstein said there’s a difference: “We say who we are and why we are calling.”
Goldstein added that DDDB called only people who provided contact information at meetings or public events, while Ratner’s “surveyors” used the phone book indiscriminately.
How indiscriminately? In one famous episode, one of Ratner’s tele-surveyors dialed diehard project opponent Patti Hagan — and a re-reading of the hilarious transcript reminded us how she made him regret the call.
