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March 18, 2010
The Darryl Greene asterisk on minority contracting (not that Paterson noticed), the Bloomberg asterisk on the CBA, and now the City Bar's CBA critique
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder continues his series analyzing last week's Atlantic Yards groundbreaking ceremony.
The irony was crushing: moments before New York's political luminaries posed proudly at the ceremonial groundbreaking event, a not dissimilar deal, much criticized for its lack of transparency, was being unceremoniously dumped.
Aqueduct Entertainment Group (AEG) was gone from the Aqueduct racetrack video casino deal, and with it, a process seen as tainted by Governor David Paterson's political ambitions and the role of a shady consultant named Darryl Greene--a consultant key to the Atlantic Yards project.
And Jay-Z, the rapper and entrepreneur who drew fawning treatment from the likes of Barclays' Bob Diamond and Brooklyn President Marty Markowitz, had only days earlier extracted himself from the wrong side of the AEG deal.
The CBA irony
There was another obvious irony: even as developer Bruce Ratner and the Rev. Al Sharpton buffed the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), Mayor Mike Bloomberg refrained from pointing out that he considers CBAs to be "extortion."
Three days earlier--though it didn't surface widely until the New York Observer's Eliot Brown reported on it yesterday--the Association of the Bar of the City of New York issued a sober but tough report cautioning against CBAs:
They may be appropriate conditions to impose upon developers in return for economic development subsidies, but we urge the City to clearly and firmly reject any consideration of CBAs in the land use approval process.
(In the case of AY, there were both subsidies and an override--by the state--of the land use approval process.)
Some of the issues raised in the report--transparency, representativeness, accountability and enforceability--emanate from criticisms of the Atlantic Yards CBA. Though the report could've been much tougher on the CBA, none of these concerns surfaced.
Posted by eric at March 18, 2010 11:03 AM