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November 20, 2009
BrooklynSpeaks attorney Butzel: "ESDC has just handed over the entire keys to the kingdom to Ratner"
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder has more on yesterday's press conference by the BrooklynSpeaks coalition, announcing their lawsuit against Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project. Click through for more coverage and analysis, including video footage of the event.
Though most news reports--and even Forest City Ratner, which erroneously claimed that "opponents who pledged to sue early and often are still suing"--treated yesterday's lawsuit filed by BrooklynSpeaks and allies as more of the same, the biggest news, as I pointed out, was the simple fact of the lawsuit: the radicalization of groups that once tried to negotiate with the state and the developer, and found it all came to naught.
So the rhetoric of those at yesterday's press conference at City Hall sounded remarkably DDDBesque. "We are now faced with... a ceding of ESDC's powers to Forest City Ratner to do whatever it wants over the next 20some-odd years," declared Jo Anne Simon of the Boerum Hill Association, speaking above. "We know that will not be in the best interests of the community."
Legal argument
The legal papers filed make scornful reference to developer Bruce Ratner's claims that Atlantic Yards "isn't a public project" and warn of a "failure" scenario in which the Atlantic Yards site, left mostly unbuilt, recalls the scene in New London, CT, where, despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the use of eminent domain, nothing was built and key property owner Pfizer decided to leave.
"What we're trying to do is give the communities a voice in how this site is ultimately developed," stated attorney Al Butzel (right) of the Urban Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit group set up to help community groups. Butzel led the legal fight in the 1970s-early 1980s against Westway.
"Litigation is not the best of all instruments; politics is the best of all instruments," he said. "But when you have an administration like you have in New York City with its complete ties to the development community, and a state government which really isn't paying attention and an ESDC which has largely lost its focus, litigation is one of the ways you gain attention and hopefully stop this project."
Posted by eric at November 20, 2009 9:21 AM