« Brucie and Bloomie Fight For Planet Blandora | Main | Prokhorov takeover of Nets imminent »
April 19, 2010
Three months after AY was approved last year by the ESDC, the Development Agreement allowed for even gentler deadlines
Atlantic Yards Report
Would you believe that, in three short months last year, the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) took gentle deadlines for the Atlantic Yards project and relaxed them further?
Um, yes?
In doing so, it made further mockery of its dubious claim that the Atlantic Yards would be completed in a decade.
The ESDC's September 2009 approval of the Atlantic Yards 2009 Modified General Project Plan (MGPP) proposed penalties for delays on only the first three towers and claimed, vaguely, that Forest City Ratner would have to "use commercially reasonable efforts" to build the project in ten years.
That was all to come in a secretive process, the professed arms-length negotiation of the Development Agreement.
And when those documents were signed in December 2009, the state agency provided even more generous deadlines regarding those first three buildings, no teeth to the term "commercially reasonable," and an completion date of 25 years.
The timing of the ESDC's release of the development agreement would be comical if it weren't so deeply corrupt.
Delayed revelation
The penalties were not revealed until January--when the Development Agreement was finally made available for inspection to those of us willing to visit the ESDC offices.
That was one week after the oral argument in a state Supreme Court case challenging the ESDC's professed ten-year timetable in the project--and two weeks after the ESDC initially said the documents would be made available.
Was the ESDC's unwillingness to reveal the Development Agreement before the oral argument an effort to avoid uncomfortable facts? It sure seems so.
The Development Agreement's provision of a 25-year deadline is now the subject of two motions--by groups allied with Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn and BrooklySpeaks--asking state Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman to reconsider her decision deferring to the ESDC's ten-year timetable. (The Development Agreement was also not entered into the record of the case.)
Posted by eric at April 19, 2010 9:57 AM