ESDC Forced to Cough Up Financial Docs on AY
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…
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
kudos to Brennan and Montgomery for forcing the release of this information. Would that all our public officials were so diligent.
I’m not angry, I’m afraid. All home owners should be afraid of the abuse of eminent domain, which Forest City Ratner has used as leverage to bully this project forward.
The plan to bring a team back to Brooklyn wasn’t to get the deal through the government as much as it was to dupe the public into thinking they were getting some sort of benefit.
With the substantial subsidies for this project (read OUR tax dollars), and the liberal use of eminent domain for a private commercial enterprise, every part of this process should be transparent. The timing of this info release can’t help but engender cynicism.
shahn – you’re just being cycnical and emotional here…and angry…why? the real estate market in the area is trading at historical highs…the market is telling Ratner and NYC that AY is OK with them…if the market thought it was going to be a total POS they would be selling in droves not buying. CHP – it was part of the deal – Ratner was “bringing a team back to Brooklyn.” All part of the plan to get this thing through the various levels of gov’t…the public subsidizes real estate deals every day, this is just another…bigger, yes.
I think Shahn Andersen took more of an outsized risk partnering with Arthur Wood to make condos out of Broken Angel than Bruce Ratner did partnering with George Pataki to make a stadium and condos.
I fail to see how buying a sports team constitutes some kind of exciting and excusible risk factor. No one made him do it, and it certainly is not a necessity for either Ratner’s business or personal life. It’s a vanity toy, the kind of ego trophy only the big players can have. Why should we, the public, subsidize it?
The difference with organic local development and evil back door development deals like the Atlantic Yards is that small developers like me do not borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers with little return to them for their investment, steal property from its righful owners by way of eminent domain, and then thumb our noses at the public when they want to make any reasonable input on how their money is going to be spent.
I don’t think a 1000% – 2000% return on an investment made with money from political and college buddies in an outsized risk at all.
10:06 —
Why do you think people have been screaming bloody murder all this time?
to be fair, we are all buy property as an investment – shahn andersen included – and i don’t think anyone is going to srutinize his ROI on Broken Angel – it is fair to say Ratner has been given outsized subsidies but lets not forget that he is also taking outsized risks – risks unimaginable to the average brooklyn homeowner…like buying an NBA basketball team, for instance.