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February 27, 2009
Lawsuit coverage round-up: missing the story and, in most cases, the big picture
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder notices something interesting about yesterday's coverage of the appellate court decision rejecting the case challenging the Atlantic Yards environmental review - there's really not much of it. For example, neither the Post, nor Times have the story in their print editions and the News only has a three-sentence item.
Also, what coverage there is misses some key points:
While it is important to point out how the decision helps the project proceed, the court ruling and surprisingly bitter concurrence indicate that something's wrong.
Concurring Justice James Catterson believes that the Empire State Development Corporation's blight study was in many ways bogus, calling one argument "ludicrous."
And the main opinion, upholding the blight study, made no attempt to assess whether it was arbitrary for the state to call a house built to 60% of allowable development rights as underutilized.
Nor did those justices acknowledge, as Catterson did, that the original contract for a Blight Study required consultant AKRF to study market trends in and around the project site, but AKRF did not do so.
So, when Bruce Ratner says, “This project has been reviewed as thoroughly as any in the city and now it is time to put these cases behind us and get to work,” not only should it be pointed out--as NLG did--that nobody's getting to work just yet, but also that a formal and apparently extensive review by the unelected ESDC does not mean a truly thorough review.
Posted by steve at February 27, 2009 8:43 AM