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Willets Pt. summit stirs new city & biz negotiation
Willets Pt. summit stirs new city & biz negotiation

BY JOHN LAUINGER
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Thursday, August 28th 2008, 7:06 PM

A new round of talks is shaping up between the city and some of the largest businesses at Willets Point after State Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith (D-St. Albans) helped kick-start stalled negotiations, the Daily News has learned.

Smith arranged a closed-doors summit at his Manhattan office this month that brought together top city officials and a dozen representatives of the Willets Point Industry and Realty Association, a league of 16 of the largest businesses at the so-called Iron Triangle.

Smith - who could become one of Albany's most powerful figures if Democrats take the Senate from Republicans this fall - urged both sides to return to the bargaining table, according to sources at the meeting.

"Basically, he asked that everybody work out their differences and at least talk to each other," said Anthony Fodera, whose family has run a baking goods distribution business out of Willets Point since 1930.

Since the Aug. 6 powwow, the city has scheduled meetings with Fodera and about a dozen other businesses in the group, city officials confirmed yesterday.

Last week, the city reached a verbal agreement to acquire one of the association businesses, Crown Container, and move the operation to Maspeth, said owner Dave Antonacci. However, the city would not confirm the deal.

Andrew Brent, a spokesman for Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber, said the Smith-brokered meeting was "helpful." He added that Smith recognizes that "honest discussions between the city and the businesses that have to be relocated are critical."

A spokeswoman for Smith, who is in Denver for the Democratic National Convention, confirmed the meeting about Willets Point took place but would say only that the senator "is a big proponent of economic development across the state."

The city already has inked four confirmed deals to acquire land at Willets Point, part of Mayor Bloomberg's plan to transform the gritty industrial area into a gleaming megadevelopment.

But those deals amount to only a sliver of the 62-acre site, and the approval clock is ticking on the controversial redevelopment plan.

The City Council is expected to take a critical vote in November.

"That puts pressure on both sides," said a source in the business group. "We are all watching that clock carefully."

jlauinger@nydailynews.com

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BLACKMAIL AT WILLETS POINT - New York Post
BLACKMAIL AT WILLETS POINT

Posted: 3:53 am
September 1, 2008


Hiram Monserrate

It's time for the fooling around on Will ets Point to come to an end.

The city wants to rezone the long-blighted area - now dominated by auto-body shops, scrap yards, towing companies and the like.

Under proposed rezoning, the area would be opened for hotels, a convention center, offices, retail and residential space. However, as is typical, local politicians are up to mischief.

The ringleader this time is City Councilman Hiram Monserrate. With one eye squarely on higher office - the state Senate - he's working against the rezoning.

Last month, following an hours-long protest outside of a City Planning Commission, Monserrate led a boisterous crowd in shouting down a news conference organized by the Economic Development Corp.

Days earlier, he got 32 of the council's 51 members to agree that the Willets Point project won't go forward unless the city promises not to use eminent domain to remove some 200 small businesses in the affected area.

Eminent domain - a process whereby a municipality may confiscate certain properties with appropriate compensation for a larger public purpose - is controversial, and should indeed be debated.

But that's not what Monserrate is up to. Rather, he's trying to hold up the project in order to squeeze out more "community" benefits.

Two years ago, he threatened to block a new Mets ballpark until Queens got a deal similar to what the Yankees gave The Bronx when building their new stadium.

Eventually, the Mets agreed to set aside various percentages of jobs to Queens residents and to minority and women contractors.

This time around, Monserrate claims, "There are still questions that haven't been answered."

Such as, how much "affordable housing" will be made available.

In fact, one-fifth of the residential space is already set aside for low-income housing. Yet Monserrate still has "questions."

Rezoning Willets Point will intrinsically benefit the area, the borough of Queens and the city of New York.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn needs to show some leadership here, squelching Monserrate's continued bad-faith blackmail attempts, prior to the Planning Commission vote in the coming weeks.

This project needs to go forward.

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TalB

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/ny...l?ref=nyregion
Hearing on Columbia Plan Elicits Emotional Speeches

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: September 4, 2008

The Empire State Development Corporation board this week held its only public hearing before it decides whether to use eminent domain to allow for the $6.3 billion expansion of Columbia University into Manhattanville.

But while the two-day hearing featured testimony from a former mayor, members of the State Legislature and the president of Columbia University, the group that will make the ultimate decision, the development corporation’s board, was not there.

Instead, a lone hearing officer, a lawyer named Edward C. Kramer, listened stoically to more than 13 hours of often emotional testimony.

The public hearing, which was held on Tuesday and Thursday, followed a pattern: Speakers who were employed by, seeking employment with or otherwise had business ties to the university came out in support of the plan. Most other speakers opposed it.

“Columbia University’s expansion plan follows the worst example of Robert Moses,” said one opponent, Mario Mazzoni, a public high school teacher. “This plan makes a mockery of the gravity of eminent domain.”

Expansion supporters typically did not mention eminent domain. Instead, they focused on the fact that the project would create thousands of jobs, on the importance of Columbia’s medical research, and on the school’s efforts to repair its frayed ties with its neighbors in Harlem.

“I have studied the university’s Manhattanville proposal and am convinced it can and will be positive for Columbia and its neighbors,” said former Mayor David N. Dinkins, who teaches public policy at the school. “Columbia University could have no better partner in this undertaking, and it goes the other way around, too.”

If the board approves Columbia’s request for eminent domain rights in 17 acres adjacent to the Hudson River, the area would be transformed from a low-rise, light-industrial neighborhood with century-old buildings to a sleek, glass-walled extension of the university’s campus that will house its business and arts schools and a science building.

All but two of the dozens of buildings in the area — bounded roughly by Broadway and 12th Avenue, and 125th and 133rd Streets — would be bulldozed. Columbia would pay to relocate some 300 residents.

Most of the opposition to the expansion has centered on the university’s intent to use eminent domain to force two holdout businesses to leave. One of the businesses is a large moving and storage company that owns several buildings in the area. The other is a pair of gas stations owned by an immigrant family.

Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia’s president, said the university needed to expand in order to keep pace with other Ivy League institutions and to continue its core missions of teaching and research.

“The reason why a great university needs more space is knowledge,” he said. “As knowledge grows, a university needs more people, more classrooms, more laboratories.”

Opponents, however, repeatedly returned to eminent domain, the taking over of property for private economic development considered beneficial to the public.

“Do you really need every square inch of land to find a cure for Alzheimer’s, Mr. Bollinger?” asked Tom Kappner, a Columbia graduate and a founder of the main opposition group, Coalition to Preserve Community.

Some speakers pointed to the absence of the development corporation’s board members at the public hearing as a sign that the agency had already decided to grant the university eminent domain rights.

But Warner Johnston, a spokesman for the development corporation, said it was the agency’s practice to hire a hearing officer during eminent domain testimony rather than having the board listen to testimony firsthand to ensure that “the process is as judicial and impartial as possible.”

Mr. Johnston said the agency’s board members would be briefed by the development corporation’s staff and would review written testimony before voting at the end of this year or early in 2009.

Nellie Bailey, executive director of the Harlem Tenants Council, linked the university’s expansion and proposed use of eminent domain with gentrification taking place elsewhere in Harlem.

“This is a diabolical plan that is racist in nature and intended to drive us out — and they don’t care where we go,” she said, referring to the area’s working-class, predominantly black and Latino residents.

Aman Kaur, the teenage daughter of the family that owns the two gas stations and has so far refused to sell to Columbia, urged the development corporation not to invoke eminent domain.

“Our livelihood depends solely on the profits of these two properties,” she said. “Can they not spare two properties that mean so much to us? In just one moment, Columbia wants to take our dream and break it.”

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TalB

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/ny...pagewanted=all
A Dilapidated Tract of Queens, and a Fight to Control Its Future

By FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: September 8, 2008


Richard Perry/The New York Times

The Mets’ new stadium, Citi Field, was built across from the auto body shops that are so prevalent in Willets Point, Queens.


Richard Perry/The New York Times

Jorge Sabando works at New York Auto Repair, one of many businesses that would be displaced by a city development plan.

With their patched zinc roofs and graffiti-covered walls, the auto repair shops are the most visible and unsightly presence in the bedraggled industrial triangle known as Willets Point. Squeezed between the Mets’ new stadium and the Van Wyck Expressway, near the No. 7 line’s penultimate stop in Queens, the area has no sidewalks or lights to brighten its unpaved roads, no sewers, piped water or heat.

In most of the shops, and in the junkyards speckled among them, buckets double as toilets and kerosene torches serve as radiators, while the constant trickle from a hydrant functions as a communal sink. It gets so cold in winter that men who have worked there for a while, like Jorge Sabando, 56, a mechanic from Ecuador, wind up with arthritis and take over-the-counter painkillers to carry them through the day.

“This,” Mr. Sabando said, “is not a place for the frail.”

No one seems to disagree that Willets Point needs help. But when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled a plan last year to overhaul the area with a hotel, school and convention center, homes, offices, parks and retail stores, two distinct groups rose up in opposition.

One comprises the owners of the area’s largest businesses, who own half the land in Willets Point and who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbyists, consultants and political contributions to the City Council members who will vote on the city’s plan.

The other consists of auto shop workers and shop owners who rent space in Willets Point. They are, for the most part, poor and Latino, and can afford to do little more than print T-shirts denouncing the project.

In public, the two groups present a picture of perfect unity, waving signs and chanting, “Justice for Willets Point.” But in reality, each side is motivated by different concerns and fears about its survival.

The Bloomberg administration has stepped up efforts in recent weeks to find new space for the big-business owners, offering above-market prices for some of their land.

But most owners say they will not leave Willets Point and will fight the city should it try to seize their properties by eminent domain. The small-business owners, on the other hand, are willing to move, but city officials said that they could not relocate the renters until the city had acquired all the land in Willets Point. And even then, there may not be a place to put all of them.

The small-business owners say they feel neglected by the deep-pocketed big-business owners and are unsure of their future.

“This is a power game, and we’re the weakest player,” said Arturo Olaya, an immigrant from Colombia who has run an auto body shop for 15 years at a rented garage on 36th Avenue.

There are an estimated 255 business in Willets Point and about 90 percent of them are thought to operate from rented space, according to city figures, which are imprecise because of the patchwork nature of the neighborhood.

The larger companies employ about 1,200 people and have held billions of dollars in contracts with the city over the years — to provide sewer and water pipes, repair bridges and roads, and clean up the World Trade Center site after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But now the owners say they feel betrayed by city officials.

“The very hands that fed them are the hands they’re going to shoot,” said Daniel Feinstein, owner of Feinstein Iron Works, which produces most of the structural steel used in public school construction in the city. “But guess what: We’re fighting back.”

The Bloomberg administration is already facing hurdles. In a letter to the city’s Planning Commission, 32 City Council members said they would reject the plan if the city did not take eminent domain off the table. And just as the city reached a handshake agreement with the owner of a waste management company, a previous deal with a junkyard owner hit a roadblock when it was discovered that zoning rules did not allow that kind of business at the site where it was to relocate.

The area’s largest business owners, who have formed a group called the Willets Point Industry and Realty Association, have held weekly meetings to discuss strategy and, one person familiar with the meetings said, to compare offers they have received from the city.

Since 2006, when the Bloomberg administration asked developers for proposals to revamp the area, Mr. Feinstein and the other members of the association have paid almost $200,000 to the lobbying firm of the former City Council speaker Peter F. Vallone Sr. and hired the public affairs firm that employs the former mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer, who will try to persuade the Council to reject the project this fall. The association also filed a federal lawsuit against the city in April for failing to provide basic utility and public works services in Willets Point.

The group’s members have contributed almost $180,000 since 2006 to the campaigns of eight City Council members from Queens, including $45,000 to Melinda R. Katz, who chairs the Council’s Land Use Committee, and $60,000 between January and July to Councilman Hiram Monserrate, whose district includes Willets Point and who has been one of the development plan’s most vocal opponents.

The auto repair shop owners and their workers, for their part, have had little beyond determination and $4,000 in cash to press their point. Earlier this year, Mr. Olaya, the Colombian immigrant, and Sérgio Aguirre, a community organizer who once repaired cars in Willets Point, started their own group, the Willets Point Defense Committee, with 40 paying members who contributed $100 apiece to finance their efforts.

They have used the money to buy the white-and-green shirts they wear at protests, print signs and rent a bus that took them to a public hearing held last month by the Planning Commission, which will vote on the project on Sept. 24.

One of the group’s members, Blas Olivares, an arthritic 52-year-old from Chile who has an auto-glass repair shop on 36th Avenue, said some of the lobbyists working for the big-business owners’ association have offered their services. “Five thousand dollars a month is one of the prices that I recall,” he said. “We wish we could have the help, but we can’t afford it.”

Meanwhile, the city has set up a job training program that will be available even to illegal immigrants, who are believed to make up about 40 percent of the work force in Willets Point — an area that Mayor Bloomberg once called a “euphemism for blight, ” but which represents a lifeline to the barely trained men and women who toil in its automotive shops and to the vendors who peddle juice, socks and cellphone holders along its pockmarked streets.

Robert C. Lieber, the deputy mayor for economic development, said the city was still in the “relatively early stages” of devising a relocation plan for the Willets Point tenants. For now, Mr. Lieber said, the priority is negotiating with owners of businesses and property in the area. Finding adequate land for the types of business found in Willets Point had been one of the biggest challenges, in part because of a scarcity of heavy manufacturing zones in the city, Mr. Lieber said.

Another city official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the project, said that the city would probably not be able to relocate all the auto repair shops. The reason, he said, was that some neighborhoods might simply not want them.

__________________
I have respected your views, so I expect you to do the same for me.

TalB

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/ny...pagewanted=all
Brooklyn Arena Builder Plans to Break Ground in December After Delay

By CHARLES V. BAGLI
Published: September 9, 2008


Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Bruce C. Ratner in Brooklyn at the Atlantic Yards, which he has hopes to transform.

The developer Bruce C. Ratner has told state and city officials that he plans to break ground in December on his long-delayed $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, which will feature thousands of apartments and offices in 16 towers built around a glamorous basketball arena for the Nets.

But it is unclear whether Mr. Ratner will be able to meet his own deadline to start one of the most ambitious projects in Brooklyn in decades, given the softening economy, the crisis in the debt markets, rising costs and a persistent group of opponents who have filed one lawsuit after another.

The developer has been rushing to have a November closing on his deal with state officials and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns a section of the 22 acres he plans to use for the project.

Mr. Ratner, who is the chairman of Forest City Ratner; his bankers at Goldman Sachs; and David Stern, commissioner of the National Basketball Association, also met last week with bond-rating agencies to discuss the proposed financing for the $950 million arena, which was designed by Frank Gehry. (Forest City Ratner was the development partner for the new Manhattan headquarters of The New York Times Company.)

But that financing plan for the arena, known as Barclays Center, is dependent on a favorable ruling by the Treasury Department in the coming weeks that would allow Mr. Ratner to use tax-exempt bonds and a final victory over court challenges. If he is barred from using tax-exempt bonds, his costs will increase substantially for what would already be the most expensive arena in the world.

Either way, bankers and real estate executives say it will be difficult to sell bonds for an arena at a time when New York’s real estate boom has quieted and investors and lenders are wary of backing large-scale projects.

Indeed, Mr. Ratner has asked government officials recently for as much as $100 million in additional cash for the project, citing rising costs and problems in the bond markets, according to two officials who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the negotiations. The city and the state have already agreed to provide $300 million in subsidies and tens of millions in tax breaks.

Still, in a conference call with stock analysts on Tuesday, Charles Ratner, the chief executive of Mr. Ratner’s parent company, Forest City Enterprises, said that Atlantic Yards was the biggest project in their development pipeline and that he was confident that “we can make it happen” by the end of the year.

Joseph DePlasco, a spokesman for Bruce Ratner, said his company had drawn up documents for a tax-exempt bond offering that would enable them to move quickly after the Treasury Department issued its ruling. But, he said, Forest City and Goldman Sachs were also confident that they could obtain taxable financing, if needed.

“While it is a tough market, we have secured more than $1.5 billion in construction loans this year so far,” Mr. DePlasco said. “And this is the most exciting project in the country and the most exciting arena in the world.”

One reason Mr. Ratner may be forging ahead is his deal with Barclays Bank, which officials say provides him with $20 million a year for naming the arena after it. The naming rights contract requires Forest City to close on the land and the financing by the end of November.

Mr. DePlasco declined to discuss the company’s arrangement with Barclays.

But opponents, who object to the size of the project, its impact on the surrounding neighborhood and the use of eminent domain by the state, said that Mr. Ratner would fall short of his goal.

“There’s no way they’ll get control of the land they need, get the financing, end the litigation and break ground by December,” said Daniel Goldstein, a spokesman for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, the project’s primary opponent. Andrew DeSouza, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, declined to comment on whether a decision concerning tax-exempt financing for stadiums and arenas was imminent. The Internal Revenue Service issued proposed regulations in 2006 that would make it more difficult, if not impossible, for tax-exempt bonds to be used for private sports teams.

The Treasury Department has been soliciting comments ever since. Both the city and the state have lobbied on behalf of the Atlantic Yards project, as well as for the Yankees and the Mets, which are already building stadiums with tax-exempt bonds.

It is unlikely that Mr. Ratner will be able to get more cash from the city or the state, but he is also negotiating for tax subsidies to ensure that at least 30 percent of the 6,000 apartments in the complex would be affordable for low- and moderate-income families. Talks are also continuing with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

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