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Ratner commits to select groups

More than 100 supporters of developer Bruce Ratner’s plan to build
an arena for the New Jersey Nets basketball team and 17 residential and
commercial high-rises in Prospect Heights showed up Monday at Fulton Ferry
Landing to celebrate the completion of a community benefits agreement,
or CBA, between the developer and community groups that have supported
his project.

Group members and elected officials beamed from a slightly elevated stage
set up facing the Brooklyn Bridge at the end of Old Fulton Street.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg congratulated the developer for agreeing to sign
a legally binding document committing community involvement, as did Public
Advocate Betsy Gotbaum.

“This community benefits agreement is the largest private-sector
investment in Brooklyn’s history,” said Bloomberg. “The
development of the Atlantic Yards shows that Brooklyn — from Coney
Island to Williamsburg — is bursting with opportunity.”

But no city entity is bound by the document and the legally binding agreement
would be subject only to privately financed litigation between the community
groups that signed it and Ratner.

The document provides for an “Independent Compliance Monitor,”
which will be paid for out of an escrow fund to provide oversight on behalf
of the community. Regular advising and evaluations will be conducted by
the Downtown Brooklyn Advisory and Oversight Committee (DBAOC), which
has played a longstanding role in negotiating the hiring of minorities
and women in local development projects and whose leaders were involved
in the benefits agreement negotiations.

Ratner seeks to build an arena for the New Jersey Nets basketball team
he purchased last summer, surrounded by four soaring skyscrapers that
would be the borough’s tallest, as well as 13 other high-rise apartment
buildings, on property emanating from Atlantic and Flatbush avenues. The
plan includes a mix of office space, retail and 7,300 units of mixed-income
housing.

To build the project, which Ratner calls Atlantic Yards, the developer
will also need to purchase the air rights over roughly 11 acres of Metropolitan
Transportation Authority rail yards. The remaining 13 acres are subject
to state condemnation for Ratner’s use under eminent domain laws.

The MTA in May opened up the bidding process for the site and the deficit-ridden
agency is under public pressure to obtain maximum value for the property.
No MTA officials were at the June 27 CBA signing.

Joining Ratner, Bloomberg and Gotbaum at the public document signing were
City Council members Lewis Fidler (Canarsie-Mill Basin) and James Saunders
(Queens), Assemblyman Roger Green (Prospect Heights), Borough President
Marty Markowitz, and several executives from Forest City Ratner, the development
company.

The CBA ranged in its outline from very specific amenities to the community,
to grander promises of active roles in oversight of job development, hiring
and training; contracting with small businesses; environmental precautions;
creating community facilities; equitable creation, monitoring and placement
of people in affordable housing units; and tending to the educational
needs of the area.

The contract commits that a minimum of 35 percent of construction jobs
will go to minorities, and an additional 10 percent to women. Thirty-five
percent of each of those categories will be journeymen-level workers,
and a pre-apprentice training program will “help new workers develop
the kinds of skills they can use beyond this project.”

“Atlantic Yards will use union labor,” the document commits.

For small and local businesses, the document promises that “at least”
5 percent of pre-construction contract dollars will go to minority-owned
firms, and 3 percent will go to women-owned firms.

During construction, the numbers will increase to 20 percent of the construction
contract dollars for minority-owned and 10 percent for women-owned businesses.
Twenty percent of the total contract dollars are to go to minority- and
women-owned businesses for purchasing and service contracts.

The housing component of the project commits 50 percent of an estimated
4,500 rental units to go to low- and middle-income residents. All of nearly
3,000 additional units are expected to sell at market rate.

“[Forest City Ratner] will also work with renters in the project
footprint to find temporary housing during construction and then provide
them with comparable size units at a comparable rent,” reads the
document.

In addition, the company commits to building a health care center and
intergenerational facility as part of the project, six acres of open space,
and community access to the arena for 10 events a year for “reasonable
rent with no profit to FCRC. Net proceeds would be used for non-profit
programs.”

The icing on the cake, for sports fans at least, is the 50 upper-bowl
tickets, four lower-bowl tickets, and one open luxury suite that would
be set aside in the basketball arena “for community use with priority
for young people and seniors,” in addition to the 2,000 “screecher
seats” that will be made available nightly by the Nets at prices
described as affordable.

“This is one of the greatest things that ever happened in Brooklyn,
with this community benefits agreement,” said James Caldwell, president
of Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development (BUILD), which will
be entrusted with oversight of the job programs.

Touted as being the first of its kind on the East Coast to implement hiring
and contracting quotas for minorities and women — the “labor
of love,” as one of the signers of the agreement, ACORN Executive
Director Bertha Lewis, called it — the CBA binds Forest City Ratner
to eight invited community groups who worked together since last August
to negotiate the contract.

Sharing seats at the table were the ACORN Housing Corporation, a local
chapter of the nationwide advocacy group; BUILD, a Prospect Heights-based
community group; the DBAOC; the All-Faith Council of Brooklyn; the First
Atlantic Terminal Housing Committee; the New York State Association of
Minority Contractors; Public Housing Communities, which coordinates with
several public housing projects; the Downtown Brooklyn Educational Consortium;
and the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance. No community groups that
voiced opposition to the plan were invited to the CBA negotiations.

Word of the community benefits agreement first emerged when The Brooklyn
Papers reported last Oct. 2 that the chairpersons of community boards
2, 6 and 8 had been invited to the closed-door meetings, although without
the participation of the boards themselves, as well as three other organizations
selected by Ratner to represent the community — BUILD, ACORN and
the DBAOC.

Many neighborhood groups critical of the plan were not invited to the
CBA negotiations, and several stood outside the press conference site
Monday, cordoned off by barricades, protesting their exclusion.

The notion of a CBA, a non-governmental agreement between a developer
and community members related to a specific project, derives from the
2001 Staples Center CBA in Los Angeles.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the first part of the agreement on May
19 — a commitment of city subsidies to finance an affordable housing
scheme setting aside half of the originally proposed 4,500 residential
units for low-, moderate- and middle-income renters.

Up to 7,300 units in total may be built, according to more recent outlines
by Forest City Ratner, and include market-rate and luxury units. All of
the market-rate and luxury units are to be studios and one-bedrooms.