After more than a week of silence, several elected officials attacked Mayor Bloomberg’s Coney Island plan this week, demanding details of how the mayor intends to pay for and complete a development that has eluded the area for more than 40 years.
On Monday night, state Sen. Carl Kruger (D–Coney Island) and Councilman Domenic Recchia (D–Coney Island) posed some legitimate questions about the mayor’s plan (some of them raised in this space two weeks ago), including how much it will cost taxpayers to acquire land currently owned by developer Joe Sitt, which developer will be handpicked by the administration to build an all-year theme park, how long the project will take, and what the impact will be on Coney Island and adjacent neighborhoods.
Kruger also pointed to the elephant in the room: that Bloomberg intends to kick some existing businesses out of Coney.
“This is a backdoor approach to eminent domain,” he said.
Such questions are worth asking about any project. Yet when it came time last year to ask the very same legitimate questions about the borough’s premier mega-development — Atlantic Yards — Kruger, Recchia and others could not be bothered to question the rigged approval process in that case.
Indeed, Atlantic Yards supporters who are now foes of the mayor’s Coney Island plan pretend to be blind to the many similarities between the administration’s approach to both mega-projects:
• In both cases, the government will use the threat of eminent domain to get existing landowners to sell.
• In both cases, the financial details of the project are cloaked in secrecy, hidden from the very public that will ultimately pay for them.
• In both cases, opponents are tarred as merely being part of the Not In My Back Yard crowd, as if raising reasonable questions is a crime.
• In both cases, the government has too cozy a relationship to the hand-picked developer. At Atlantic Yards, that was Bruce Ratner. At Coney Island, the existing landowner, Sitt, is being tossed aside so that the mayor can bring in whomever he chooses. It is unclear whether the public will have any say in that process.
• In both cases, there is ample opportunity for the area to develop organically, without a top-down, master-planned scheme. It was already happening in Prospect Heights, the supposedly “blighted” area where brownstones sell for more than $1 million. And it could have happened in Coney Island, if Sitt was given a chance to send his proposal through the normal public-review process.
Kruger and Recchia say they are “standing up” for Coney Island. It’s too bad they were silent when they could have stood up for the neighborhoods around Atlantic Yards.
