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November 16, 2010
With delay in project timetable, "temporary significant open space impact" could last twice as long as the period studied in the Final EIS
Atlantic Yards Report
Remember all those promises of Atlantic Yards open space, as demonstrated in a flier sent to Brooklynites in 2004?
Even though the amount of planned open space was increased from six acres to eight acres, there's long been reason to doubt promises that the open space--not a park but privately managed--would be delivered in a decade.
And a state Supreme Court decision last week regarding the project timetable casts doubts on the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS), which concluded that the "temporary significant open space impact" upon completion of Phase I "would be eliminated by the open space provided in Phase II."
An extended "temporary" situation
After all, the "temporary" situation, as studied, was to last only six years, given that Phase 1 was supposed to be finished in 2010 and Phase 2 by 2016. (The timetable change approved last year simply nudged everything back three years.)
However, the Development Agreement imposes penalties on the project as a whole only after 25 years, so it's not unlikely that the entire project would take 25 years to finally deliver the promised open space. (It's also possible that the entire project won't be built, thus eliminating some of the promised open space.)
Even if Phase 1 takes ten or 12 years, that could mean 13 to 15 years of the "temporary significant open space impact."
Shouldn't the potential doubling of the "temporary significant open space impact" have been studied?
Posted by eric at November 16, 2010 9:07 AM