« Blight Fight | Main | Storm knocks down construction fence on Dean Street, offers back view of 24 Sixth Avenue »
September 17, 2010
Zoning Changes for Comptroller
The Wall Street Journal
by Eliot Brown
Reportorial whiz-kid Eliot Brown has apparently made his way over to the WSJ, where he reports today on efforts by City Comptroller John Liu to change the way Community Benefits Agreements are done.
A task force commissioned by City Comptroller John Liu is poised to call for a major change in the way that the city determines what amenities—such as affordable housing and parks—to extract from real-estate developers in exchange for approving their plans.
Those decisions are among the most controversial parts of the city's rough-and-tumble land-use approval process and are often criticized for the inconsistent way in which they are made. A draft report by the task force, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, recommends that new groups made up of community representatives—and monitored by the comptroller—negotiate benefit deals with developers involving major rezoning decisions.
Currently there's no formalized way in which these deals are made. Rather a collection of interest groups typically participate, including elected officials, community organizations and others, with the ultimate decision on the zoning being made by the City Council.
Under the comptroller's proposal, the City Council would still get to vote on the zoning decision. But the negotiations with the developer for parks, affordable housing, job training or other benefits would be removed from the council because they would be completed months before the zoning vote.
The draft, issued by the task force this week, has immediately stoked concerns among city officials, some real-estate executives and others that the new negotiations would add cost and time onto an already-lengthy development process and give new power to the comptroller. Mr. Liu's office cautioned that the report on so-called Community Benefits Agreements is not final and is subject to change.
The question of how community benefits are determined was an early priority for Mr. Liu when he took office in January. Benefits agreements struck on projects such as Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards and the Columbia University expansion have been criticized as being inconsistent, unpredictable, unenforceable, and possibly illegal. Those are typically negotiated with input from the City Council during the rezoning process.
NoLandGrab: Of course, in the case of Atlantic Yards, there was no rezoning, and the Council had no input into CBA "negotiations," which were, for the most part, carried out between Bruce Ratner and organizations created and funded by Bruce Ratner.
Posted by eric at September 17, 2010 11:37 AM