We’ve certainly had our disagreements with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, but the Manhattan Democrat earned our Hero of the Week award for his righteous broadside against state development czar Charles Gargano on Sunday.
Appearing on WNBC’s “News Forum,” Silver said what virtually no one has had the guts to say, namely that Gargano, who came to power after serving as George Pataki and Al D’Amato’s bagman, is the “most corrupt” of Pataki’s rubberstampers.
Silver excoriated Gargano for running the Empire State Development Corporation the way he worked for D’Amato — treating government as if it’s supposed to be an arm of big business.
“Take a look at what he did to economic development in this state,” Silver said. “He has interests that obviously lie opposite the state of New York during his entire 12 years in this administration.”
Silver was referring to Gargano’s reported holdings in a company that eyed gambling in the Catskills — and surprise, Pataki supported it, too. But Silver was also raising larger questions of Gargano’s vision of development as a cash machine for well-connected developers like his boss’s old law school pal, Bruce Ratner.
As The Brooklyn Papers has long reported, Gargano’s ESDC picked Ratner to develop the rail yards in Prospect Heights and got the MTA to sell the development rights for tens of millions below the agency’s own assessed value — all in a sham process that excluded other able developers and ignored public concerns.
And along the Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO waterfront, Gargano threw out two decades of work done by community leaders who hoped to build a real park, in favor of a scheme that would turn the so-called “Brooklyn Bridge Park” into a front yard for luxury condos that will reap millions for Gargano’s development pals while limiting access to the waterfront for the rest of us.
Such projects exist because “the governor [picked] his fund-raiser rather than an economic development professional” to run the ESDC, Silver said.
We couldn’t agree more. We hope incoming Gov. Eliot Spitzer will do better.
