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After dragging its feet for two years, the Empire State Development Corporation signalled yesterday that it would finally release documents containing financial information about the Atlantic Yards project. After the ESDC fought a freedom of information reques last year, Assemblyman James Brennan teamed up with state Senator Velmanette Montgomery on Monday to file a lawsuit against the ESDC for improperly withholding the financial documents. One reason opponents of the project are so curious to see the documents is to get a better view into how profitable the project is expected to be for Bruce Ratner, hoping that big numbers would undermine his argument for needing to make the site so dense. The craving for transparency is due in part to the fact that the project gets to by-pass the city’s land-review process because so much of the land is state-owned.
Lawmakers Push for the Release of AY Financial Documents [NY Sun]
Photo by nautical2k


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  1. anon 7:35pm, ‘go bake some cookies’?
    You, my friend, are the one displaying your sheer stupidity in addition to your sexism. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re also a proud subscriber to and advocate of other additional denigrating ‘isms’.

    The statement ‘Good riddance’ would be better applied to you. Unfortunately, like taco bell-kfc rats, you’re just a plague that the rest of us has to deal with.

  2. regarding eminent domain/jobs…
    what bloomgerg & co are doing is taking land and power away from small and midsized business owners -usually locals, and giving it to megacorporations, and giving them state subsidies on top of that – this isn’t even ‘free market’ at work but big government helping big businesses at the expense of the middle class.

    Its bad for brooklyn – power is being transferred outside the borough – and bad for democracy – its part of the ‘war on the middle class’ that lou dobbs described.

  3. OOHHH, the BROOKLYN Nets! Gosh, wow, that makes all the dIfference. Why, that alone totally justifies anything Ratner and company do. Sticking Brooklyn in fromt of anything makes it all good! Are we still in elementary school?

    Well, after the dust settles in about 2014, and promises are not kept, windows start popping out of buildings, traffic is snarled for years,and the investigations start on the largest boondoggle in the city’s history, we’ll see if calling something “Brooklyn” will be as magical. More like “Bruce Ratner pulled a Brooklyn on us, and we let him do it because he gave us the Brooklyn Nets.”

    Well – got some cookies to bake. Later.

  4. Frm AUSA – dont lie, you cant track anyone down – you barely could prosecute a mule case. You spent yrs building paper thin cases and got pleas post-indictment b/c the sentencing guideline coerced pleas.
    Now you are stuck-up troll working at some investment bank pretending you are’street’ and that you know something about crime b/c you were a pseudo-prosecutor in Brooklyn for 3 yrs. The only thing AUSAs are any good at is giving head.

  5. David,I think you are ascribing an awful lot of “build it and they will come” theory to AY. If AY was the only area of building, what you say is true. But it’s not. And brooklyn is an enormous borough. And as far as blaming a scaled down project for greater stress on the subway/mass transit system, what you’re proposing then is that we not worry about the outer areas and their poor mass transit, but simply improve it for those who can afford to live in the AY. Which means those people further out will still need to rely on their cars, which they will drive everywhere, including into AY. A hub is not just the big station, its a central feed for the system and the problem is with the outlying lines.

    and that doesn’t change the fact that the outlying areas are going to remain heavily car dependent and polluted,while people who don’t have the financial resources to live in the AY will be displaced further and further out. All AY is doing is overloading an already crowded area (around the yards) and putting increased strain on already strained transit hub, area resources and traffic.

    Above and beyond the fact that people are not sardines, what kind of civic planning concentrates on overbuilding in one area creating new problems, while not addressing the old problems? Because one area will impact another. I don’t see that scaling back the project is what causes the problem of people “who can’t live/work in NYC”- that’s happening because their neighborhoods are being gentrified and all the building going on seems to be luxury housing. Certainly not working class housing- but then neither will AY be.and while the biggest industry in NYC may be the financial markets, it’s the working class that keeps the City running and it seems to me AY will not help their situation anyway.

  6. He’s trying to get the entire thread deleted by Mr. B. He know that the Press routinely views this site for possible stories and this is about to turn into something very big. I’m sending a copy of this thread to the reporters from the NY Daily News and the NY Sun who wrote multiple articles last year on Moses Fried.

  7. I’m still reeling with the new found information given that “white people are deathly afraid of Coney Island”(Anon 3:21) Kinda flies in the face of all those photos and movies of nothing but white people at Coney Island, then and now. As 3:27 said, “Brooklyn wouldn’t be Brooklyn without Coney Island”. Now we’re tossing it to the curb?

    I’ll never understand rabid sports fans. I thought we had the NY Yankees, NY Mets, NY Rangers, NY Knicks. I didn’t know they really belonged to the borough that their stadia were in, I thought they belonged to the whole city. If the Nets were here, wouldn’t they be the NY Nets? Why the big pissing contest? It’s going to take Bensonhurst Joe longer to get to the new Nets Stadium that it would take him to get to Madison Square Garden. Bensonhurst Joe is not going to get on the subway, either. Tickets are going to cost more too, betcha. So’s the popcorn and soda. But shake the hand of the worker who gives you your food. He’ll be one of the few “Ordinary Joes” who will be employed in a minimum wage dead end job at Netsville, although he certainly won’t be able to afford to live anywhere in the complex. This is so wrong.

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