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May 10, 2010
Does belatedly-released Development Agreement change nothing? So claims FCR; Justice Friedman faces motions to reopen case regarding AY timeline
Atlantic Yards Report
"The Development Agreement changes nothing."
So declares Forest City Ratner in a blistering and brazen defense of the ambiguous document, kept under wraps until late January, that sets an outside date to complete Atlantic Yards in 25 years but also seems to obligate the developer to build the project, as promised, in a decade.
(The obligation involves penalties, by my calculation, that are only about $5.5 million for a 15-year delay, on top of $5 million for each of three Phase 1 towers if they're late and $10 million for a late arena.)
The Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) is a bit more circumspect, stating the agreement's "terms are consistent with the information that was in the administrative record reviewed by this Court." The ESDC blames "petitioners' coordinated scorched-earth litigation strategy of filing multiple motions against the Atlantic Yards Project."
FCR and the ESDC point to clauses in the Development Agreement that point to daily fines for delays of $1000 or $10,000--more likely the former, as noted below--and say those are not trumped by larger penalties for delays in three towers.
Pending legal battle and judicial skepticism
The statements come in legal papers filed before State Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman, asked to revisit her March 10 ruling that the ESDC's ten-year timeframe for Atlantic Yards was reasonable, thus not requiring a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to reflect the burden of a 25-year project on communities or an annulment of the 2009 M0dified General Project Plan (MGPP).
Friedman already has reason to be skeptical of the developer and the ESDC, given that she previously wrote that the latter's rationale was "marginally sufficient to survive judicial scrutiny" and that its consideration last year of plan modifications "lacked the candor that the public was entitled to expect."
And she didn't consider the Development Agreement, signed in December 2009, three months after the project was approved, but released publicly only in January, a week after oral argument in this case.
Posted by eric at May 10, 2010 9:18 AM