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August 29, 2006
New hearing, more questions
Metro NY
By Amy Zimmer
Metro's coverage of the addtional hearing also includes some pointed rhetoric from 52nd Assembly District Leader Jo Ann Simon, who wrote in a letter to the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) head Charles Gargano:
“This hearing treated the environmental process as an inconsequential hoop to sail through and be done with,” Jo Anne Simon, state Democratic committeewoman for the 52nd district, wrote in a formal complaint to ESDC Chairman Charles Gargano last week.
She was upset most backers neglected to comment on the hearing’s stated purpose — the Draft Environmental Impact Statement that ESDC released last month — and that a hearing was scheduled for primary day, Sept. 12. “That’s very Robert Moses-like,” she told Metro.
“Under the law, the public has both a right and a duty to comment on the impacts disclosed,” she wrote. “Instead, [ESDC] permitted the developer’s associates (labor unions and ACORN) to admit scores, if not hundreds, of their members ahead of those who had been waiting for hours to enter the building.”
Metro also published this bulleted list of criticisms of the Ratner "affordable" housing plan:
According to Forest City Ratner’s numbers, 40 percent of affordable units will be for families earning between $71,000 and $113,000 a year.
Ratner has not provided a schedule for when those units would be built. The “general project plan” states the project’s first phase — expected to be completed by 2010 — would have a mix of rentals and condos with “between approximately 1,275 and 2,350 residential units,” 50 percent of which would be affordable. It did not, however, specify how many of the units will be rentals.
Should FCR not meet its housing obligations, it has agreed to pay $500,000 to a fund for community groups backing the plan.
Posted by lumi at August 29, 2006 9:36 AM