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February 8, 2007
MAYOR BLOOMBERG PRESS CONFERENCE
7 FEBRUARY, 2007
Here's Mayor Bloomberg's complete response to a question about eminent domain posed by a reporter from a local daily newspaper at yesterday's press conference:
Q: Do you have a comment on the federal court fight on Atlantic Yards in reference to eminent domain?
A: Without eminent domain, we’d be living in a city that was built 100 years ago and nothing ever been done. You never would have redid Times Square without eminent domain. There just, you won’t, you’d never do any of these big projects. And we have to build something for our children.
Nobody likes to take away somebody else’s property, but we have in society made decisions that in the interest of continuing society we make sacrifices. In war time, we draft our young men and women and send them to risk their lives to fight and die for us.
In terms of development, you can’t let one little person, one person that owns one little piece of property stop big developments because otherwise we wouldn’t have the housing that we need, we wouldn’t have the schools that we need, we wouldn’t have the infrastructure that we need. And when it comes to eminent domain, there’s plenty of protection.
In New York State, which is really unique throughout the country, in terms of you have access to the courts if you are, to make sure that we take property only in the case of economic development where there is blight. And there’s a lot of case law that defines it. When you take property for a water tunnel shaft or for a bridge or road that, the laws are slightly different. But the public is well protected.
But we just have to have eminent domain or you wouldn’t have any building going on. And I think in this case it really has nothing to do with eminent domain. These are just people trying to stop a project, which will create housing and jobs and entertainment and revitalize our city, particularly a part of Brooklyn which was going to be a new Ebbets Field, just to show you how long that piece of property has stood vacant with just some rail tracks on it.
NoLandGrab: There's nothing in the Mayor's comments about taking land from "one little" private citizen, or from a dozen for that matter, to give to politically connected developers who approach the government with a plan to expand their massive real estate holdings (Bruce Ratner owns both malls across the street).
The mayor doesn't have a clue what he's talking about when he mentions Walter O'Malley's plans for a "new Ebbets Field" at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. Bruce Ratner already built a mall on that site. So either the Mayor is "ignoranting" or he's lying.
Posted by lumi at February 8, 2007 8:33 AM