Jersey: Move Nets to Newark

The 18,500-seat arena for the Devils, who currently share a home with
the Nets in the Jersey Meadowlands, was spearheaded by the former Nets
owners in 1998, and dropped in 2002 when funding was denied by the state.

But with a hockey arena that will still facilitate local basketball tournaments,
Newark Mayor Sharpe James told the press he still expects Ratner’s
Nets to wind up, not in Prospect Heights, but in Newark, keeping Jersey’s
home team at home.

According to Ratner, it is out of the question.

“If it’s the last thing I do, I will make sure [the Brooklyn
arena] happens,” Ratner told the Associated Press this week. Last
week, he told the New York Times that if Brooklyn fell through, he’d
consider keeping the Nets in the Meadowlands.

Yet the approval by Newark’s city council and the windfall of funds
that have been secured after much deliberation by the city suggest a Newark
arena may be built before Ratner’s development company, Forest City
Rater, can bring his Brooklyn dream to fruition.

In the two years since the former Nets and Devils ownership dropped out
of negotiations for a Newark arena, where both teams would have relocated
after an expired contract at the Continental Airlines Arena at the Meadowlands,
the city has done some hard negotiating and turned an arena into a vision
for revamping all of the downtown Newark area.

At the time the Nets walked out of the deal — a year before Ratner
bought the team — the New Jersey Legislature had refused to put up
the $160 million being requested for the arena investment. But in the
same year, Newark renegotiated the Port Authority’s lease on Newark
Liberty Airport, creating a constant cash flow to go entirely towards
the redevelopment of the area. The Devils have promised to put up $100
million.

Mayor James, a cheerleader for the Newark Devils arena much as Borough
President Marty Markowitz advocates a Nets arena in Brooklyn, is overjoyed
at the recent approvals by the city’s council, and considers the
arena an anchor for a longer-term growth incentive called the Downtown
Core Redevelopment Project.

“This is the most important economic and social engine in the history
of Newark,” James said. “Construction of this project will move
this city to a higher level, bringing tourism and luster to our city.”

Additionally, the Devils pledged that more than 50 percent of arena jobs
and 35 percent of construction jobs will go to Newark residents, and 150,000
square feet is planned for office space, while 3,900 new parking spaces
will be generated with the plan.

Though Ratner’s ideas for developing the area around his proposed
Brooklyn arena doubles those retail estimates, and he has made comparable
promises of employment opportunities to locals, the housing component
of his Atlantic Yards project has been a major draw for proponents of
the development project, and generates more support among advocates than
the arena alone.

Ratner himself said he “never would have owned a basketball team
had [Markowitz] not asked him in late 2002 to help lure the Nets”
to Brooklyn, in an Oct. 31 interview with Ratner in the New Jersey Star-Ledger,
indicating that his primary interest has always been the 17 apartment
and office towers the project would build.

His own economist hired to analyze the proposal even said the arena is
a money loser, while the office and residential space is what makes Atlantic
Yards profitable.