« From the District Service Cabinet meeting: "Day Two” task force; report on hiring; construction timing; plans for parking for TV trucks | Main | City Rejects Call For Barclays Area Parking Permits »
July 15, 2012
An Additional Heaping Helping of Sports Glummery: Penn State Scandal Investigative Report- Power of College Football Out Of Control
Noticing New York
This blog post begins by observing the lack of whistle-blowers who might have prevented the Penn State football scandal, and moves to a similar lack in the ESDC and the Atlantic Yards development.
ESD is the state agency that was co-opted by developer Forest City Ratner to sponsor its mega-monopoly-enhancing Atlantic Yards megadevelopment. ESD’s designed-to-fail whistleblowing policies and practices did fail. ESD was the state agency that participated in scamming Justice Marcy Friedman’s state Supreme Court with false representations that the agency had a legitimate expectation that the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment would be completed within ten years (instead of twenty-five, very possibly forty+) which was the basis for the environmental review done for it. No whistleblowing state employee came forward from ESDC to inform Justice Friedman of the scam.
...
With no state employee coming forward to reveal the state’s misrepresentations, those misrepresentations were temporarily accepted by Justice Friedman as veracious. Had that not been the case it would have been incumbent upon Justice Friedman to rule, as she eventually did, based on the actual facts, that the mega-project had never been the subject of a proper environmental review. Had she made such a timely ruling the issuance of ESD bonds for the Ratner/Prokhorov (“Barclays”) sports arena oughtn’t to have proceeded. Since the issuance of those bonds were subject to an IRS deadline (the ending of a special exemption from the law against tax-exempt financing of private arenas and stadia) the developer’s private arena would never have been built and the entire megadevelopment would have fallen apart, probably being taken away from Ratner and distributed amongst multiple developers in the process.
Posted by steve at July 15, 2012 6:17 PM