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June 15, 2010
Leroy Comrie: The Sheriff of Land Use
The Commercial Observer
by Jotham Sederstrom
In January, Leroy Comrie was appointed chairman of the City Council’s powerful Land Use Committee, taking over where Councilwoman Melinda Katz left off. The 52-year-old Queens councilman, who was first elected in 2001, spoke to The Commercial Observer about his once-frenzied, now relatively sluggish committee amid an economic downturn and hypothesized about land-use issues he would have liked to have seen come before him, like the Atlantic Yards project and the World Trade Center.
...Among the few city land-use issues that, in one way or another, managed to avoid City Council scrutiny-say, the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn or aspects of ground zero-are there any that, had you been the land-use chairman at the time, you would've liked to have had come before the committee for review?
Those things happened before I was chair, but I definitely want the Council to be involved in every project. I think Atlantic Yards and ground zero should've come before the Council, definitely. I think the Council is the most transparent and open process. Those processes were not open, and I think the public is still upset about the outcome of both of those projects, only because they didn't have the full opportunity to air their grievances.
The Council is a democratic party, a transparent body. We have a responsibility to make sure that anybody who comes before the Council has an opportunity to air all of the aspects of a project so that at the end of the day the residents can know exactly the pros and cons and why we came to the decisions we've made after hearing those pros and cons.
Posted by eric at June 15, 2010 11:31 AM