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May 11, 2007
In Court, the Atlantic Yards Blight Fight
Brooklyn Downtown Star
By Norman Oder
The pending eminent domain lawsuit in federal court was supposed to be the best chance for opponents of the Atlantic Yards project to block it, but after the May 3 hearing in state court on a separate lawsuit challenging the project's environmental review, opponents had another reason for some optimism.
Challenges to such an environmental impact statement (EIS) rarely succeed, because the agency issuing the EIS-in this case, the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC)-is required merely to have taken a "hard look" at the project and disclosed potential environmental impacts. Thus judges generally defer to the governmental agencies. And the Atlantic Yards EIS was thousands of pages.
In court, however, lawyers representing the 26 civic and community groups, including Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) and the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN), pressed hard on whether the proposed project site is blighted, and whether a basketball arena operated for profit could be considered, under state law, a "civic project."
Courtroom arguments also covered the designation of the property as blighted:
Though Atlantic Yards was announced in December 2003, only in September 2005 did the state announce a goal was to eliminate blight. Baker pointed out that the ESDC did not undertake a blight study before the project was announced. Rather, he argued, Forest City Ratner chose the footprint, and "the extent of the blight matches the footprint."
...why there's a curious chunk in the middle of the project footprint:
Madden wanted to know why the rest of that block, Block 1128, was excluded from the 22-acre footprint. "The blight study concerned the footprint of the project," Karmel responded. He noted that, to determine an area blighted, each lot need not be seen as blighted.
...and the threat of terrorism:
The ESDC had stated that it would not examine the potential impact of terrorism regarding project design, deeming it not a "reasonable worst-case scenario." "They completely changed their tune," Baker said, noting that the ESDC now acknowledges that Forest City Ratner conducted a security study, but "it's too sensitive" to reveal.
Posted by lumi at May 11, 2007 6:26 AM