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January 29, 2007
Bloomberg Adding $226 Million for Nets, Mets, Yanks?
Power Plays, political blog of The Village Voice
By Neil DeMause
Buried in the nether reaches of the preliminary capital budget that the mayor released last Thursday are some curious details on the three new sports facilities—that's Yanks, Mets, and Nets, for those scoring at home—that the city has in the works. Namely, total city capital funding for the projects appears to now be as high as $586 million—a nearly two-thirds hike from the $360 million (not counting tax and lease breaks) that Bloomberg had promised taxpayers would be on the hook for when the projects were first announced.
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It's all enough to make one wonder if New Yorkers are really meant to know what our elected officials are spending our money on. "The city budgets, while they have become increasingly transparent, still are not organized in a way to allow the kind of public scrutiny necessary to evaluate these sorts of items," admits Citizens Union director Dick Dadey, though he says the problem may be less "intentional effort to obfuscate" than the fact that " our city budget is far more complex than most states'." Council speaker Christine Quinn, he points out, has pressed for more transparency in the budget process; it will be interesting to see if an unexpected $105 million invoice will be enough to get the speaker to start asking tough questions of her pal the mayor over the project that would eat Brooklyn.
Posted by lumi at January 29, 2007 9:35 PM