Why Is Spitzer's "New" ESDC Allowing an Old Boondoggle?

Elliot Spitzer ran on reform. He promised change. To that end, he appointed a new ESDC chairman and promised that the ESDC would not become a tool for political patronage as it so obviously was under the charming (if you find sleeze charming) but corrupt "Charles" Gargano.

So why is the "new" ESDC supporting biggest boondoggle from the Pataki era - Ratner's Atlantic Yards? Foye and Spitzer have had numerous opportunities to put the breaks on step back and review this project (instead they have chosen to spend ESDC resources to DEFEND Ratner's project in court). Neither have indicated any interest in doing so. Why?

Do they believe this project is all above board? If so then they are far more incompetent than I had imagined. Unless they have been utterly lied to by Ratner's people (a likely prospect) they have to know about the issues of size, density and the enormous public outlays with no public benefit.

That leads us to speculation #2 - they know its a boondoggle but support it anyway for yet unknown reasons...if that's the case than we know Spizter's 'reform' speech was empty rhetoric and the "new" ESDC is business as usual for corporate welfare queens like Bruce Ratner.

I am serious: Let's Require Ratner to Clean Up the Mess He Already Made

Metrotech is a failure that is losing tenants. The Atlantic Mall is blight and failure that is losing tenants. BOTH were tax payer subsidized. IF Spitzer were SERIOUS about reform he would require that Ratner turn both into revenue producing - in other words tenants that paid taxes (not city offices stuffed in by Bloomberg, not the ESDC, not corporate welfare companies that have received tax breaks) - properties before giving that greedy, corrupt jerk another dime.

Hells Bells, as my high school football coach used to say. With all the money Ratner gets you could pull someone off the street who could build something better.

Boondoggle Bruce's Atlantic Mall Loses "Tenant"

Tenant of course would imply a paying customer who rented space for practical reasons...as the latest post at Atlantic Yards Report informs us, the ESDC was nothing of the kind:

Was it favoritism?

Was the mall site chosen out of favoritism, as some critics of the relationship between Forest City Ratner and the ESDC—which has since approved the developer’s Atlantic Yards plan across Atlantic Avenue from the mall—have charged?

That motivation can’t be proven, but it’s clear that the third-floor space should never have been under consideration by the ESDC, since it did not meet the guidelines announced in a 6/14/02 press release about the CNOs.

In the press release, state officials pledged, “Each office will operate from a street-level, retail storefront in a high traffic area of the neighborhood commercial district.” The third-floor site in the Atlantic Center mall—chosen more than a year later--is neither a street-level storefront nor situated in a high traffic area of the mall.

Why was the site selected? ESDC spokesman A.J. Carter, who joined the agency with the administration of new Gov. Eliot Spitzer, said, “That was a decision made by the previous administration.”

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I wonder, when the luxury condo market collapses will ESDC employees be required to live in Bruce's project?

In any event, it like Pataki has left quite a mess to clean up Oder further reports:

A 3/25/07 Bergen Record article broke the news that the Port Authority had spent nearly $100 million since 2003 on projects ranging from cultural support to real estate development, straying far from its transportation mission. The money came from a fund controlled by Pataki and administered by Gargano, who had been Pataki’s chief fundraiser and was appointed vice chairman of the Port Authority as well as head of the ESDC.


Now that there's all this extra space at Atlantic Mall (which is, as clearly illustrated above, a hallmark of poor design, incompetence and stupidity)...maybe Bruce should concentrate on getting 'forward thinking' tenants to fill his previous two failed boondoggles before we fund the construction of (yet) another.

Oder soberly concludes:


Even though the mall has been redesigned, there's not much to do about the blank walls that occupy at least half its perimeter.
Urban planner Ron Shiffman (now on the Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn advisory board) has described the mall as the "only pre-existing blighting influence" in the area around the Atlantic Yards project. Architectural historian and critic Francis Morrone (also now on the DDDB board), writing in the New York Sun (ABROAD IN NEW YORK, 2/23/04), called it "the ugliest building in Brooklyn."

Now there's another space left to let.