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August 17, 2006

Develop Don’t Delay Brooklyn

Our Time Press
By Errol Louis

NoLandGrab: We're assuming Louis came up with this great headline which, in our early morning pre-coffee stupor, seemed like a reference to Texas Congressman Tom "The Hammer" Delay, who recently resigned under the cloud of the Jack Abramoff scandal.

Could "Develop Don't 'Delay' Brooklyn" become a new rallying cry against the collaboration between special-interest powerbrokers and NY State's public authorities?

Seriously, Errol Louis's number-one reason to approve the project posthaste is:

a postponement might deny the Pataki administration – not just the Governor, but his top economic development aides – the satisfaction of seeing the project clear a key hurdle, approval by the Public Authorities Control Board later this year.

Whether Pataki gets credit or not for Ratner's next urban-planning mess is probably the farthest thing from people's minds these days.

The two other reasons Louis gives are:

Stopping the development clock would only allow the opponents more time to prepare their legal papers. It would also give them a measure of the thing they most want: to draw out the process long enough to whip up more anti-development fervor and bleed the project of money by tying up the developer in court.

article

NLG: We can't be sure, but our best guess is that DDDB has probably already started working on its legal strategy. Also, if more people grow to dislike the project as it gets more press, then that's their choice. It's not the public's fault that Ratner proposed a project that has become the next urban-planning-disaster case study.

Posted by lumi at August 17, 2006 7:41 AM