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October 12, 2007
Moment of Truth: Court to determine if Ratner gets land
The Brooklyn Paper
Gersh Kuntzman reports from Appellate Court, where justices heard arguments regarding the reinstatement of the Atlantic Yards federal eminent domain case, Goldstein v. Pataki.
Judge Robert Katzmann asked [plaintiffs' attorney Matthew] Brinckerhoff why it mattered that the project benefits Ratner when it will also have a public benefit — affordable housing, a basketball arena and seven acres of new open space.
“But in this case, the motive was to benefit a private individual,” he responded. “Why [was] this decision was made without considering any other developer or any other plan or any other properties?”
Judge Edward Korman jumped in and suggested that the government had merely decided that Ratner was “best suited to carry out” the project. “Does that taint [the process]?” he asked.
Brinckerhoff said it did: “The decision to take the property was made after the developer was chosen. … Normally, you would assume the governmental would want to maximize the public benefit by finding a developer who could do the project for the lowest cost. … In this case, the process was predetermined.”
Though it appeared that the justices were aggressive in their questioning, they saved plenty of buckshot for ESDC lawyer Preeta Bansal.
In her opening remarks, Bansal said that “this matter begins and ends … with the multiple public benefits of Atlantic Yards. … This project will alleviate blight in 63 percent of the site. In and of itself, that is enough to end the case. This is a valid public project.”
...When challenged by both Katzmann and Korman, Bansal said that even if the process had been fixed for Ratner, the condemnations would still be legal.
“Even if there [was] some ‘smoking gun’ memo [where] a public official said, ‘We want to do this for Bruce Ratner, that would make not an iota of difference,” she said. “It would not negate that this would remediate blight and make a stadium and affordable housing.”
She added that privately generated projects are not bad.
“The fact that this developer came to the city and proposed this project is of no constitutional bearing,” she said.
Posted by lumi at October 12, 2007 6:10 AM