« Ratner Foes eye Supreme Court | Main | Brooklyn, The Borough: A Personal Wire »
February 8, 2008
James, Yassky: Ax yards funds
The Brooklyn Paper
James, Yassky: Ax Yards funds, By Dana Rubinstein
Two city councilmembers are not giving up on their bid to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in city and state subsidies from the Atlantic Yards mega-development, despite an initial rejection by the council.
Councilmembers David Yassky (D–Brooklyn Heights) and Letitia James (D–Fort Greene) asked the council’s Finance Committee to take up the matter of those Atlantic Yards subsidies while considering a resolution calling for the state to end property-tax exemptions for Madison Square Garden.
“If we are going to say this about Madison Square Garden, we should say it about Atlantic Yards, too,” said Yassky, who said the measure would be re-introduced, this time as a freestanding resolution, not an amendment.
According to the councilmembers’ calculations, the proposed arena for the Nets will get close to $700 million in subsidies from the city and state.
Editorial: Pols must hit Ratner in wallet
After hearing two major lawsuits — one challenging the state’s unjustifiably lax environmental review, the other decrying the state’s use of its condemnation power to hand privately owned property over to the profit-making Forest City Ratner — judges have turned a blind eye to egregious misuses of state power surrounding the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project.
With judges punting, the most potent challenge to Ratner’s taxpayer-funded payday rests in the legislatures, which have the power to turn off the torrent of taxpayer dollars.
For Ratner, Atlantic Yards has always been about the money — not jobs or housing, not urban design or athletic excellence, but the massive sums expected to flow from the public trough.
...
As we’ve pointed out many times, Ratner’s public revenue estimates are a fantasy. In fact, the state admitted as much last year, when it downgraded the revenue projection to just $944 million over the same 30 years — a mere $15 million per year, a drop in the bucket for a state and city whose annual budgets are in the tens of billions.
But you don’t have to believe us or the state. For the first time ever, Ratner has finally admitted that he was lying all along.
As the Atlantic Yards Report first reported this week, buried in a footnote in a recent legal filing is this admission from a Ratner lawyer:
“[M]y statement in my prior affirmation that the ‘environmental impact statement for the project estimates that the project will create ... $4.4 billion in net tax revenues for the city and the state over 30 years’ is mistaken, because ‘[t]here is simply no projection at all regarding the net tax revenues contained in the EIS.’”
Posted by steve at February 8, 2008 5:44 AM