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January 29, 2009
City budget whiz says Bruce’s Yards deal needs retooling
The Brooklyn Paper
By Gersh Kuntzman
George Sweeting, deputy director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, sent a shockwave through Tuesday morning’s Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce annual “Economic Outlook Breakfast” when he stated that “it may be time for the city to take another look at the mix of incentives” that it offered to Ratner because “it doesn’t look like there will be much progress in the next few years” on the $4-billion mini-city.
Sweeting said that the escalating costs of the proposed publicly financed basketball arena at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues — now close to $950 million, from an original pricetag of $400 million in 2003 — might eliminate the supposed benefit to the city coffers.
In 2005, an IBO study found that the arena would get $950,000 in surplus revenues every year during the arena’s 30-year financing period — puny revenue projections in a city whose annual budget is $60 billion.
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“If amenities are scaled back and the overall scale of the project is reduced, it’s reasonable to stop and look at whether the city’s contributions and the MTA land deal still show a positive in the cost-benefit calculation,” Sweeting said. “Some of the benefits to the public may now be less than originally assumed. A lot has changed since 2005, when we found that the arena was basically a break-even proposition.”
Posted by steve at January 29, 2009 7:19 AM