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September 13, 2012
The Culture of Cheating: Ratner claims efforts to comply with construction regulations, but record tells a different story (and the state backed off plan for $10K/day fines)
Atlantic Yards Report
Barclays Center developer Bruce Ratner, appearing 9/11/12 on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance," managed to smoothly rewrite the history of Forest City Ratner's (FCR) noncompliance with construction protocols (noise, dust, traffic) and the state's failure to stop such violations.
The failure, actually, goes beyond FCR's noncompliance and a TV host's inability to be skeptical. It implicates the "culture of cheating"--nothing illegal, but a framework that lets private interests trump public interests.
The failure goes back to the December 2009 Memorandum of Environmental Commitments (MEC) that FCR negotiated with Empire State Development, the state agency that has the dicey duty of both overseeing and promoting Atlantic Yards. The MEC was supposed to bind Forest City to construction practices that protected the neighborhood.
In fact, according to documents I viewed via a Freedom of Information Law request, the state at one point sought a $10,000 daily penalty for violations of the MEC. Forest City opposed the penality. The developer clearly prevailed--though the documents I saw didn't explain how the resolution was achieved.
Think about it: even assuming that the state first issued a warning in response to violations, Forest City could have been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars--likely millions--for letting its subcontractors cut corners in the breakneck effort to get the arena and associated infrastructure finished under a tight deadline.
Posted by eric at September 13, 2012 12:54 PM