What If The Media Is Caught Flatfooted About The “Barclays” Center? (The Ratner/Prokhorov Arena Named For That LIBOR Scandal Bank)

I am not saying it will happen. . . I am not saying how long we will have to wait to know if it will. . . . But it could happen. . .   And what would happen if it does?

What will happen if, after all the dutifully stenographic PR hype and hoopla promulgated by the media about how great the “Barclays” Center is, the “Barclays” Center fails?  What if, for all that media hoopla instructing the public to have positive emotions and adoring respect for the “Barclays” arena, the public actually rejects the arena and the arena goes under?

What will the press say then?  Will they say: “We saw it coming!”?

That seems almost impossible to conceive given the present hyperbolic celebrations of the arena, but given the media’s bottomless ability to rewrite history, paying attention only to whatever is the temporal fashion of the moment in reporting reality, they might very well do that.

The so-called “Barclays” Center has fans.  And it will no doubt have fans into the future, whatever that future holds.  But it's easy for the “Barclays” Center to have fans, even some local fans, and still be vastly unpopular in the neighborhood and borough it has decimated in spearheading the takeover of so much neighborhood for Forest City Ratner’s mega-monpoly.  Similarly it can have fans and still fail financially.

In the end, it is a question of how many people go to the arena, paying its high prices, ignoring its symbolism, and, similarly, how many performers consent to perform there.

Failure could look like this: Attendance is lower than what is needed to support the arena financially.  Ratner and Prokhorov, the owners, raise prices (on tickets together with all the extra hidden incidentals) to cover costs, driving attendance down further.  It becomes a vicious cycle.  Meanwhile, many performers decide not to perform at the not-so-adored arena, limiting the number of quality shows, curtailing ticket sales still more.  An increasing negative perception of the arena (and those willing to perform there) grows, resulting in more performers shunning the arena that unspeakably promotes the “Barclays” bank.

That’s why there is such a concentration on advertising now, as the arena promoters try to make a first and lasting impression that convinces potential ticket buyers and performers alike the arena is something special and good for the community that people should want to go to.  But if, and especially as, the arena fails, all of that far too desperately ubiquitous advertising we have been subjected to will also have to be cut back, subsiding and falling by the historical wayside in another cycle of decline.

What happens if the arena goes under financially?  Ratner and Prokhorov might lose ownership of the arena, which would teach them a well-deserved lesson.  It could also forestall the rest of the Ratner Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly and lead to better development practices around the city.

And, by the way, I’m staying away from the arena for a good long while.

Oh, and another by the way, you have heard that government tax-exempt bonds recently issued in New York City to support a large new sports venue are failing?:  Those were the municipal bonds ($237+ Million) issued for Yankee Stadium's vast new parking garages despite warnings from, and over the objection of, the community.

The Miscalculations Encouraged By the Fuzzy Math of Subsidies: Yankee Stadium Bonds on Verge of Default- A Case Study

Noticing New York is not a fan of subsidies for sports venues like stadia and arenas. Even when the schemes behind those subsidies work out as the public officials dispensing them intended they tend to amount to crony-capitalism style transfers of more wealth to the already wealthy and connected. As in the case of the new Yankee Stadium they can replace taxpaying businesses with freeloading businesses exempt from the tax rolls. As in the case of the Atlantic Yards Prokhorov/Ratner basketball arena they wind up being significant net losses for the public. Add to all of this is the fact that these schemes may not even work out as public officials intended. They may work out a lot worse. To consider the implications of that point more thoroughly let’s direct our attention to a new Transportation Nation story about bonds issued to subsidize Yankee Stadium that are on the verge of defaulting: After Hundreds of Millions of Dollars of Public Subsidies, Barely Used Yankees Parking Garages Face Financial Collapse, May 19, 2011, by Jim O'Grady.

(The WNYC Transportation Nation story has also been substantially reprised in this WNYC story: Yankees Parking Garages Driven to Brink of Financial Collapse, Thursday, May 19, 2011, WNYC, by Jim O'Grady.)

Defaulting Bonds

The bonds issued in connection with Yankee Stadium that are in jeopardy of possible default are $237 million in tax-exempt bonds that were issued to finance a 21-acre parking garage complex for the new stadium. The stadium was subsidized by the public in multiple ways, not just by these parking garage bonds; other subsidized bonds were issued for the stadium itself. At the moment it's just these parking garage bonds that are in danger of default and not the other bonds financing the stadium directly. Those stadium bonds are presumably OK for now (unlike the bonds issued around the same time to finance the stadium for the financially flailing Mets) but the financial difficulties associated with the garage bonds highlight how the city’s public officials made a number of fundamental miscalculations when handing out these subsidies.

No Problem, Says Bloomberg

The Transportation Nation story includes information about Mayor Bloomberg cavalierly dismissing the screw-up:

Mayor Bloomberg says private bondholders, not taxpayers, will be on the hook if the Bronx Parking Development Company defaults on the bonds. On his weekly radio show, he shrugged off the Bronx Parking Development Company’s possible collapse.

“The city has no downside,” he said. “If they were to go bankrupt, it doesn’t hurt us. It wouldn’t be good for the project.”

Notwithstanding Bloomberg’s blithe dismissal, defaults on municipal bonds that are issued and promoted by the city administration are bad. Bad for the city, not just for the bond holders who also get shafted when things go wrong after the city convinces them to buy their product. When bond holders get shafted by a New York issuance, how do you think they will feel about buying bonds the next time a New York issuance comes out? Especially when you have a top city official like the mayor dismissing their interests, sounding like the mistake was all on the part of the investors who bought what the city was selling.

And, by the way, as we will be discussing, there is a long list of additional downsides for the city.

Who’s Watching?

This default was on the Forbes radar screen as of last fall: Yankee Stadium Parking Garage Bonds Are Among Shaky Muni Bonds, Sep. 21 2010 as well as that of the Bond Buyer, Yankee Stadium Parking Garages on Track for Default on $238M of Debt, Tuesday, September 14, 2010, By Ted Phillips and Crain’s, Yankee Stadium parking strikes out: Bronx outfit faces default on bonds as fans park elsewhere and residents fume, by Hilary Potkewitz, March 13, 2011.

The WNYC public radio stories note that the garages were also defended in 2006 by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Bloomberg’s regular comrade in crime when it comes to promoting developer-promoted over-development.

Underwriting Immediately Proved Wrong

The bonds were issued by the city’s Industrial Development Agency in 2007. That means that there was hardly the blink of an eye between the underwriting of the bonds and the proof, through failure, that the underwriting was terrifically wrong. The New Yankee Stadium opened in April of 2009, so the bonds took only the first two seasons to go bust, given that before that, during construction, interest on the bonds would have been paid out of capitalized interest (i.e. funds borrowed from the bond holders up front.) WNYC reports that the garage facility is $17 million behind in back rent and other payments owed to the city.

When the Fuzzy Wuzzies Come to Bear

The default is illustrative of a danger everyone should be on guard against when it comes to development through subsidies: Beware of miscalculation because those involved in development are likely to have put away their sharp pencils. Subsidies, generate fuzzy math, fuzzy thinking and they take peoples' eyes off reality and real costs. Those who are expert at working City Hall to finagle subsidies do not necessarily have the same skill sets as those who know how to shave a profit out of the real world, and frequently there is also the danger that their thinking is that if and when they are off on their numbers they will be patching things together at the back end with additional subsidy flows, perhaps with a “too big to fail” argument. That seems to be the case with Atlantic Yards. (The latest about Atlantic Yards fuzzy math was reported upon by Atlantic Yards Report yesterday.)

In the case of Atlantic Yards, say for example with the mega-project’s implausible initial job-projection numbers, fuzzy math is cultivated as a habit to get a foot in the door for what would otherwise have been an unacceptable project. Atlantic Yards' false projection of a ten-year build-out rather than a multi-decade build-out is another example.

Listing, We Sink With Miscalculations

So what were some of the miscalculations made with respect to the issuance of these now defaulting bonds for the new Yankee Stadium complex? Here is a list:

1. That there was no need for 9,000 parking spaces* in the eleven garages in the onsite complex directly serving the stadium. (With the stadium’s reduced 50,287 seat capacity- the reduction was between 4,561 and 7,459 seats while 2,000 parking spaces were simultaneously added- that’s one parking space with the new configuration for every 5.587 seats for a baseball game. And games are not selling out.) WNYC reports that on game days the garages are two-thirds empty and Crains reports they have never been more than 60% full. This is an odd miscalculation for officials serving the public to make in a city where the policy should be to encourage mass transit and discourage the onslaught of vehicular surges through stadium neighborhoods. (Atlantic Yards planning is similarly biased toward providing parking spaces.)

(* It should be noted that of the 9,000 parking spaces there were 250 additional parking spaces, previously intended for “public use” that were given to the Yankees “for the private use of Yankees officials, players and others” so that the Bloomberg administration “intent on obtaining a free luxury suite for its own use” could get a suite with twelve seats. Because the city and state codes governing public official ethics are different, this was not technically an ethics code violation although Governor Paterson’s obtaining a set of free tickets to a Yankee game was and consequently earned him a $62,125 fine. The overriding caveat, however, is to beware of public officials obsessed with using the office they hold to attend sports games for free.)

2. That the new, more expensive stadium parking would be attractive enough at the new, more expensive prices to attract sufficient utilization to support the bonds. Was that a good bet when they underwrote the bonds in 2007? In spring of 2009, concurrent with the first season’s opening, Noticing New York reported on the skepticism of two old-timers, both baseball scouts. They thought $29 was too much to charge for parking (Sunday, March 15, 2009, Inside Baseball.) The price of parking has recently been hiked to $35, probably worsening the situation. Will we now see a vicious cycle of price hikes intended to compensate for low utilization?

3. That other existing cheaper local private sector garage and parking facilities wouldn’t out-compete the subsidized Yankee garage facilities. (WNYC reports competitors are charging as little as $15.)

4. That high prices wouldn’t cause those who do drive to the stadium to roam the streets looking to usurp the street parking that was previously available to those who live in the neighborhood. This part of the miscalculation nullifies some of the environmental assessments made when the new stadium was first considered and winds up being contrary to assurances that Yankees president Randy Levine offered the City Council during at least one public hearing.

5. That the alternative transportation options provided by the new Metro-North stop added next to the stadium as part of the reconfiguration wasn’t essentially a duplicative and conflicting public investment.

6. That having all of this unutilized new parking infrastructure was more desirable as a public investment than the alternatives that were available. Some of the alternatives:

a. New York State didn’t need to spend $70 million in taxpayer dollars to build Parking Garage B, the private VIP garage with direct access into the stadium. Using the way-back (time machine) capabilities of the Internet (and their inventory of previous posts) to hold everyone accountable to the facts and a consistent story, No Land Grab pointed out that in 2006 “discredited” “sports economist” Andrew Zimbalist Jr., wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed that “all parking revenue would go back to the state and more than pay off the investment.” - One more fuzzy math miscalculation.
b. The neighborhood public parks and trees sacrificed to create the parking could have been kept instead. 377 mature oak trees might have been kept or at least some of them. 25.3 acres was taken. The "replacement" parkland for the community includes space on top of one of the stadium's parking garages, some already mapped parkland, and a patchwork of other plots ranging up from less than a half acre in size.
c. The city wouldn’t then have to be paying all of the $195 million it is supposed to be paying to replace parkland it gave to the Yankees.
d. The local community needn’t now be dealing with the fact that the “replacement” parkland has been slow to materialize and inferior.

A Jane Jacobs Digression

In her The Economy of Cities, urbanologist Jane Jacobs at one point digresses as she is discussing how new kinds of work evolve out of previously existing tasks and occupations. One of Jacobs' themes in this book is her endorsement of cities for their ability to foster these new, generally productive, ingenuities but she cautions that while it is ordinarily a good thing that new trades can evolve from old ones, the particular evolutions that result are not always to be desired. As she declares (page 54) not all the results are necessarily “useful, legal or innocuous.” In a long list she catalogs examples of things that are not “useful, legal or innocuous” and includes police that take bribes (or burglarize) and government officials who stuff ballot boxes and to this list she adds:

some city-planning departments take to scouting out and processing profitable deals for favored real-estate operators and also to organizing and running fraudulent “citizens’ organizations” to help overcome public opposition.

This observation can be readily adapted to say that while the work of government officials administering subsides may, when they start out, be doing the job of serving the public (a useful and desirable vocation), when they become captives of the development industry they have embarked upon a qualitatively different kind of pursuit (one that isn’t useful or innocuous and may not even be legal). When the miscalculations associated with administering subsidies become profuse as with the list above perhaps it is time to believe that the administering public officials have transitioned into the captive class. (Consider the concept of “Agency Capture.”)

In the End the Community Pays the Price

The WNYC Transportation Nation story begins and ends with an anecdote about a local community high school varsity baseball team that can no longer play its games in the community because the Yankees built one of their parking lots on the field where the varsity team used to practice and the team is still waiting for promised replacement fields. Jim Dwyer of the Times also wrote about how the varsity team now buses out of the community to its games. (About New York, Yankees Claimed a Park; Children Got Bus Rides, October 23, 2009. Putting the miscalculations in terms of the losses to the community and public is really the only way to put appreciate what the miscalculations actually mean.

Here is a cruel irony about how badly the local community has been shortchanged that may be added to the list of miscalculations- - it doesn’t seem to have been noted in any of the coverage to date: Since some of the “replacement” parkland for the community includes space on top of one of the stadium's parking garages, the community might now stand to lose that parkland (as inferior to the original replaced park as it might be). As Crain’s notes, “A default could set up a seizure by bondholders and would leave the garages' future in question.” Presumably the future of that parkland as well.

Sports Culture Capper: Yankees, Professional Sports and Criminals Wearing Yankee Hats

(Above, a Yankee hat for sale on the web, one of Jay-Z’s Yankee hats, a New York City Police Department drawing of the wanted Yankee hat-wearing perpetrator of a crime as it appeared in the New York Times.)

I don’t usually pay much attention to the world of sports fan culture when I analyze the urban planning concerns of locating huge stadia in the middle of the urban fabric or complain about the unfairness of how these private profit-making enterprises are being financed on the backs of all of the rest of us, but I have an irresistible temptation to write about the subject now and before I’m through maybe I will have made clear why I personally am not much of a professional sports fan. . . .

. . . . Did everyone catch the story on the front page of the New York Times last week about how New York Yankee caps and baseball jackets seem to have become the apparel of preference for the city’s criminal element?:

A curious phenomenon has emerged at the intersection of fashion, sports and crime: dozens of men and women who have robbed, beaten, stabbed and shot at their fellow New Yorkers have done so while wearing Yankees caps or clothing.

For more of the story’s information about the police data and statistics documenting the criminal fashion trend see: Crime Blotter Has a Regular: Yankees Caps, by Manny Fernandez, September 15, 2010. The Times story detailed the police data and statistics documenting the criminal fashion trend.

Easy Explanation?

The Times wrote: “Yankees caps and clothing have dominated the crime blotter for so long, in so many parts of the city and in so many types of offenses, that it defies an easy explanation.”

Somehow it did not seem so surprising to our Noticing New York sensibility that predatory criminals, the bank robbers and thieves written about in the article, should identify with the Yankees who along with their owners have turned professionalized theft from the community into a business. While the recent new stadia including Yankee Stadium have fewer seats (to boost prices) the Yankee Stadium is actually bigger than the old in order to suck up “inside the cloister of its privately-owned walls the economic activity that once upon a time existed in the surrounding Bronx community.” (See: Saturday, November 14, 2009, The Yankee’s Hoggish New Stadium Monopoly Taxes The Rest of Us.) As reported by WNYC, and what we wrote in that story, the new Yankee Stadium includes: “a `mega-mall’ that is in decimating competition with local merchants taking away the business that used to be theirs.”

Criminally Excessive Transfers of the Public Fisc

Whether we are talking about a reduced number of private-profit-making-stadium-seats or the inclusion of private-profit-making mall space, the public pays for more than a 100% the cost of what gets built with tax-exempt bonds, subsidized transportation access and diverted real property tax revenues. The chart below addresses the less-than-transparent issue of diverted real property taxes. If you want to get into the subject more deeply start with our prior article.

Then there is the seizure of land. Building the new Yankee Stadium involved building over the community’s newly refurbished parkland, replacing that land and its 377 mature oak trees with inferior and slow-to-materialize substitutes. (See: Yankees Claimed a Park; Children Got Bus Rides, by Jim Dwyer, October 23, 2009.) The "replacement" parkland for the community includes space on top of one of the stadium's parking garages, some already mapped parkland, and a patchwork of other plots ranging up from less than a half acre in size. Land seizures to enhance profit has, of course, gotten to be a dishonorable stadium building tradition. For George W. Bush his scheme to build the Texas Rangers stadium in was an excuse to take extra land by eminent domain to generate speculative real estate profit much the way that Bruce Ratner (now partnering with a Russian oligarch and perhaps 498 Chinese millionaires essentially buying green cards) has followed suit.

Turnaround Morality

These sports guys sure are able turn right and wrong around. Just the other day as I was channel switching I came across a couple of Yankee business types, “suits” being interviewed in the Times Center (it was probably a more extended version of this interview with Randy Levine and Brian Cashman) and I swear that these talking suits were asserting that other teams in the league had a moral obligation to go out build new (probably highly subsidized) stadia just as they had done so they wouldn’t be a drag on inter-team revenue sharing pool arrangements. Really? Good God, does that mean worse is yet to come and other cities better be prepared?

Power and Gangsta Success

The brazen aplomb with which these individuals accustomed to power can toss out the suggestion that stadium building falls naturally on the positive side of society’s moral equations supports the diagnosis offered by the Times that the criminal fashion spree is because: “criminals are identifying with the team’s aura of money, power and success.” The other leading theory the Times reports to explain the syndrome referred to as “the Jay-Z effect,” is that the hip-hop artist’s regular wearing of the Yankee’s hat gives the hat a “kind of street rep, a coolness.” Maybe the perps like Jay-Z’s platinum “American Gangster” album or maybe as they contemplate the distinct possibility of arrest when undertaking a big heist they find themselves soothed by Jay-Z’s similarly platinum “Reasonable Doubt” album considered to be an example of “Mafioso rap”.

It’s all hangs together perfectly though because Jay-Z is a 1% investor and PR front man (assisted by his super-celebrity wife, Beyoncé) for Forest City Ratner’s mega-land-grabbing Atlantic Yards Nets Arena. Is it possible the perps are really revering Jay-Z for the larceny associated with this multi-billion dollar raid on the public treasury? Are they astute enough to also know about Jay-Z’s similar role in the “unwholesome process” of developer selection in the Aqueduct racino deal?

Iniquitous? Ubiquitous!

Another concern I have about criminals in Yankees hats is touched upon by the Times article. As you would expect it is the general ubiquity of professional sports gear fashion accessories, the Yankees and other teams included. Obviously, if you are going to rob a bank you are going to want to blend in while making your escape. It seems doubtful that bank robbers would be wearing these garments if they weren’t already in general terms as the Times says “hugely popular” and widely worn so the fleeing suspects don’t call more attention to themselves than necessary.

I’ve got to ask: Why are professional sports as popular as they are such that we see so many sports garments?

A Few “Waisted” Thoughts About Sports Enjoyment

It is not that I have never enjoyed baseball. I wasn’t good at playing it myself. The kind of hand/eye coordination associated with hitting the ball wasn’t my strong suit, but I fondly remember going with my father to Brooklyn Dodger games (yes, he also took me to Yankee games). Still, I suspect the experience of attending a game now is not quite what it was then. What I remember then is smelling the freshly cut grass and the spilled beer and garlicky hot dogs with the taut skins breaking under the pressure of your teeth.

The thing is, particularly now as I age, I prefer sports that I do as opposed to sports that I sit and watch. Swimming, skiiing (preferably water skiing), hiking, biking are all great, but being a spectator to professional sports leaves something to be desired. These days it is a fight to keep my waistline from notching out to the next hole on my belt. I’m not doing badly. Everyone can bring to mind the stereotype of the star high school athlete who eventually can’t play like he used to and then balloons up, continuing to consume the same number of calories while engaging in a more sedentary life style. I’m sort of the opposite, the nerd who while he wasn’t really that interested in sports way back in school is almost as fit now as in those salad days of yore.

More Time to Waist?

I know that the average sports spectator doesn’t, per se, represent the highschool athlete-gone-to-seed stereotype. Nevertheless, let me make a few points. The average baseball game is a three hour affair (with extra innings they run longer). The movies Schindler’s List or Gandhi are hardly any longer. An NFL football game, which is comprised of 4 fifteen minute quarters actually runs about a three hours as well. Basketball games, technically only 48 minutes, run a little shorter, around two and one half hours. Work just a few of these games into your schedule, let alone conscripting yourself to the role of avid fan, and a good portion or your week is destined to be rather sedate. You may have problems burning off your beer and peanut calories. Dare we then be so indiscreet as to mention that the physique of the typical fashionable fan may sport a bit of paunch?

My own life is busy enough so that I have to make a concerted effort to fit in the sports I do for exercise. (The unfortunate ill effects of sedentary writing has to be countered.) Fitting in biking has multiple advantages: I can listen to the news, music or podcasts like On the Media, I can run errands and I can head out to inspect and explore my city, giving me a professional advantage so that I don’t make mistakes like the New York Times reporters who inaccurately report that the Atlantic Yards will be on top of rail yards, a misstatement that is only 40% true.

Our Friend “Ernie B”

Even if professional sports attracted me I can’t see enjoying watching them. I have a friend, let’s say his name is “Ernie B”; Ernie B. knows a huge amount about professional sports. Among other things he can speak for hours with eloquent cynicism about what a money racket the whole thing is and how the public is being soaked. But then he’ll go out and watch the games. For me the cynicism, the idea that I was being fleeced, would take the joy out of it all. Ernie B. also has some similarly themed uncharitable views about where our politics and politicians are headed but doesn’t initiate or engage in much actual oppositional activity.

Potential for Combustible Pizzaz?

It is not that being a professional sports fan is something that we can’t do with pizzaz in our family. We have a good family yarn about how my father was involved in mobilizing the Rockefellers to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn. (It’s a story we promise to tell here one day in a later Noticing New York post.) And one of the stars of the extended family, my cousin Buster Olney, has earned acclaim as a sports columnist, analyst and commentator. Working for ESPN now, for a number of years Buster was actually covering the Yankees (and Mets) for the New York Times.

Far from dismissing sports as brainless, I recognize that there is a lot to say for the top-notch qualities that make for an analytical sports mind like Buster’s. Commendably his talent has taken him to the pinnacle of his profession. It is just that my personal enthusiasm for these things is more on a par with my cousin Mickey’s, Buster’s mother. When Buster recently played “Not My Job” as a guest on NPR’s Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! (the subject was Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens) he described how the rest of his family “had no interest in baseball.” He told the story of how as a Little Leaguer with a burgeoning nerdishness at the age 10 he recited for his mother in the family kitchen all of the plays and every pitch in every inning. Buster recounted: “after about two games, my mother said to me: Buster, you have tremendous potential to be very boring.”

Putting One's Potential Skill With Tedium to Work

When it occurs to me that a fair portion of the public actually has a marked facility for becoming immersed in such potentially boring statistics and play-by-play accounts of sports competitions, I am struck with a fair amount of wonder that essentially this same facility to deal with the tedious could be brought to bear in another context where it isn’t: to keep track of politics and what our elected representatives are doing (or not doing) to represent us, for instance, keeping the stats on how individual New York City Council members voted when Mayor Michael Bloomberg had them extend his term limits or how those City Council members have voted on rigged real estate projects like the Dock Street project, whose extra tall height will obscure sight lines to the iconic Brooklyn Bridge.

We wonder what the average professional sports fan keeps track of politically. Do they know that Mayor Michael Bloomberg's business, Bloomberg, L.P., creates conflicts of interest with almost every company of any size in New York simultaneously doing business with Bloomberg as both businessman and Mayor? Do they know the statistics about how since Bloomberg entered politics his wealth went up tenfold, faster than any other New Yorker’s, propelling him from a somewhat wealthy individual to New York’s wealthiest man? Do they know that Bloomberg’s regularly set up schedule is to leave early Friday morning for long weekends in Bermuda. Do they know he keeps his vast wealth offshore? Do they know how he uses his charities for political purposes and how he has now taken unprecedented and unrestrained power over Governors Island (and Brooklyn Bridge Park) even after he fielded the idea that Governors Island could be used as the home for his charities? Do they know about his national ambitions for higher political office? Or perhaps as professional sports and Yankee fans do they at least know how during Bloomberg’s “negotiations” to finance and provide city land for Yankee Stadium Bloomberg’s desire for a 12 seat luxury suite for the city’s (mayor’s) use, and particularly that it be stocked with free food, became a foremost priority? (To start learning about these things you might want to begin here.)

Engaging in Competition

Personally, I find that the scrutiny it takes to hold our politicians to account and remember their votes doesn’t leave me with much time to memorize batting average statistics. I’d rather spend time figuring out which new politicians have honest potential rather than projecting next year’s lineups or who is going to get what rookie picks in a draft lottery. That doesn’t mean that I am deprived of satisfying spectacle, the thrill of victory (or the agony of defeat)*. The one thing above all others that sport contributes to politics is a cornucopia of useful sports-term metaphors (“end run,” “Hail Mary pass,” “three strikes and you're out,” “level playing field” “sprint to the finish” “frontrunner,” etc.) and that’s because the game of getting yourself politically represented, if you pay enough attention to it, has so much in common with sports. One difference though between politics and professional sports is that when it come to politics a member of the public can actually get in the game.

(* The melodramatic catchphrase “The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat” comes from the introduction for ABC's Wide World of Sports.)

Because I engage in sports like swimming and biking, noncompetitive sports where my goal is admittedly only to exceed whatever ever-receding personal best remains to me as each succeeding year pushes me further into my decrepitude, you may conclude I am not competitive. Not so! I am quite competitive. When it comes to the game of politics as it can be played to properly serve the public I have a very competitive spirit. In fact, it is probably because I do that I have problems with other games where all I can do is sit on the sidelines.

Invictus vs. a Sports Movie With Invective

I recognize and appreciate that sports can be praised for its use as a tool to bring people together. I will eventually get around to seeing Clint Eastwood’s movie Invictus and when I do I am sure I will enjoy it and appreciate its message about the unification of South Africa and races and the role of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in dismantling apartheid. In the beginning of that film Nelson Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, realizes that the blacks attending a stadium game, hostile to how their home team is a representation of the old power structure, are cheering against the team.

I am quite capable of enjoying all sorts of sports movies but my favorite one is not about sports bringing people together. It actually falls more properly in another genre I like better, science fiction. It is the movie Rollerball, the original 1975 version with James Caan directed by Norman Jewison (the 2002 remake should be shunned). That movie’s climatic ending involves a crowd cheering in opposition to the power structure behind the sports team central to the action. The film, set in the year 2018, is all about power and how a world of global corporate monopolies coordinate to use a the game of Rollerball (invented for the film) to manipulate, distract and pacify the public as those companies apportion and dole out society’s resources, paying particularly lavish attention to a thin privileged upper crust that includes highly rewarded sports stars. A key tenet the monopolies conscientiously promote is the futility of individualism and individual effort. Outlets and opportunities for opposition to the system don’t seem to exist. In the film, the global monopolies and teams they sponsor have superseded governments which have apparently disappeared.

In Rollerball the invented sports game is used to support a power structure where sports are basically an expenditure and distraction. Real wealth in the society is accumulated directly from the control of resources. For instance, the Houston team for which Jonathan, the principal James Caan character, plays is sponsored by the Energy Corporation which controls all the world’s energy. Other monopolies control such things as transport, food, communication, and housing. There is even a corporate monopoly specializing in the control and delivery of “luxury.” In our current, pre-2018 era, the accumulation of wealth by professional sports moguls is a tad more direct. Sports are more the immediate source of wealth rather than an incidental expense to its control. That is not to say that corporate sports moguls annexing cooperative government officials like Bloomberg, Pataki, Spitzer and Paterson as appendages (together with a host of public authorities employees) haven’t been branching out substantially. They do engage in the fringier areas of public subsidy collection and eminent-domain-abusing real estate transactions.* Nevertheless, the basic idea is the same: That a public that keeps its eye on the sports ball probably isn’t keeping its eye on the ball in the wealth and politics game. It has also been around for a while.

(* The pending NFL players strike and potential lockout is apt to heat up the question of stadium finance and owner profit in an interesting way. Both sides are fighting over who should pay for and get the benefit of the league’s highly subsidized stadiums and in this regard the players are fighting for the release of the owners’ financial statements and books telling the true story.)

Historical Tradition Over the Millennia?

In 1975 Rollerball looked forward to a distraction of the public with sports in 2018. Michael Moore’s 2009 activist documentary Capitalism: A Love Story opens by suggesting that we can improve our comprehension of the public’s present-day sports focus by looking back two millennia to the Roman Emperors' use of events in the Coliseum (starting circa 70 and 72 AD) to socially control and distract the public from, for instance, “the city’s ruins left from Nero’s despotic rule.”

Dispensing With the Sports Section

Do I follow professional sports? Not really. The first thing I do every morning to simplify my day and have one less thing to read is throw away the New York Times sports section. I get the sports news that is important to me from such sites as Field of Schemes and Atlantic Yards Report when it covers the public theft involved in building the proposed Nets arena. Sometimes, however, those sites miss something. As far as I can tell neither of them reported on the bad-guy bandit Yankee hat wearers. Thank goodness that the Times put its story on the front page.

Coming Back to Cap It Off

I don’t mean in my crankiness to begrudge or deny professional sports fans their pleasure. Certainly, I would like it if they were to join and fight a few of populist battles alongside the more regular political activists but each to his own. I recognize the pleasure that professional sports can be even it isn’t mine. Still, when I see a guy in a Yankee hat (or a Nets jersey) my reaction is not purely one of live and let live. It is one of unease. I think about how that fellow may be interested in the theft of my property and that is something I thought about long before the Times told us on the front page that we really do have to be careful about the larcenously antisocial instincts of people wearing such garb.

The Yankee’s Hoggish New Stadium Monopoly Taxes The Rest of Us

If you haven’t yet heard WNYC’s October 28, 2009 Ailsa Chang story about how the new Yankee Stadium is sucking up inside the cloister of its privately-owned walls the economic activity that once upon a time existed in the surrounding Bronx community, take seven minutes to listen to it now, without further delay. WNYC also provides a text transcription of the story at its site. (See: News: Main Street NYC Returns to 161st Street in The Bronx, by Ailsa Chang.)

Waking Up to Some Singular Facts

Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn dubbs this arresting story (broadcast on the evening of the World Series kick-off): “A Cautionary Tale for Local Businesses Around the Proposed Atlantic Yards Arena Site” (10.28.09). Irrespective of whether Yankee Stadium is in all ways precisely analogous to the proposed Atlantic Yards Nets arena (Atlantic Yards Report analyzes that it isn’t, see: Saturday, October 31, 2009, Would the AY arena, like the new Yankee Stadium, suck retail inside?), the situation at Yankee Stadium should wake up virtually anyone to the fact that projects sold to the public as providing “economic development” may deliver just the opposite. Why is that? In order to consider Yankee Stadium in terms of what it does and why it is important to consider it first for what it is: a monopoly.

Larger “Sports” Complexes Fewer Sports Seats

Listening to the WNYC story made us think about the stadium’s monopolistic characteristics when we described how sports arenas and stadiums in this country are becoming much bigger (three or four times the park sizes of 40 to 50 years ago) even when the number of seats in them is, if anything smaller, and that is because these sports parks are trying to capture inside their walls all the shopping and eating drinking that their patrons might be doing when they visit. Yankee Stadium is just one example. The WNYC story points out that while the new ball park has “4000 fewer seats” it has become a “mega-mall” that is in decimating competition with local merchants taking away the business that used to be theirs.

We are not sure about the above reported figure of “4000" fewer seats: The reduction seams to be even greater. The Yankees’ own site says the reduction was 4,561, from 56,886 to 52,325, but the latter of those two figures (52,325) is only good if you oxymoronically include 1,886 standing room “seats.” Going by the figures in Wikipedia the reduction was 7,459, a reduction from 57,545 to 50,086 and Field of Schemes estimated that the it was about a 14% reduction in real seat terms. (See: February 26, 2009, Yanks exec: Yes, we have no seats.)

Cartel Behavior

No matter. A reduction of supply to boost prices is a characteristic of cartels. The Times reported that the Mets cut back the number of seats in their ballpark by 25% in order to stoke demand (See: Fewer Seats and More Sellouts Were Mets’ Priorities, by Richard Sandomir, March 27, 2009.) The new Mets Citifield stadium has 42,000 seats, far fewer than their average fan attendance in recent years (51,165, in 2008). That same article reports the seats in the new Yankee Stadium are below the “team’s 2008 attendance average of 53,069.”

Learning Not To Share

The more important point, however, is how the new Yankee Stadium contains a much bigger mall full of national chain stores, and that it doesn’t share its patrons with the surrounding neighborhood. In fact, transit facilities in the area have been redesigned to facilitate this lack of sharing. The WNYC story includes an interview quote from Stanford University economist Roger Noll who it says “has looked at every stadium built in the last 20 years” to conclude they don’t give “a real, substantive boost to neighborhood businesses” which often actually end up “doing a lot worse.” Says Noll: “The whole point of a modern athletic facility – whether it’s an arena for hockey and basketball or a stadium for football or baseball – is to get all of the money to be spent inside the stadium.” There is juicy stuff here, so listen to the WNYC story about how the stadium has vacuumed up much of what was the community’s economic activity into their private walls where they will be paying rent to the new stadium’s owner.

Grabbing Some Commodified Culture

The beginning of this October we attended an afternoon session at a Kingsbourough College conference on Brooklyn development that focused on Atlantic Yards. One of the presentations was by Stuart Schrader of the CUNY Graduate Center. It dealt, in big picture terms, with Atlantic Yards as an effort to seize and monopolize the culture of what is Brooklyn. Mr. Schrader’s paper is not yet available but he directed us to another paper that he said had influenced him, The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly and the Commodification of Culture,
by David Harvey (08.27.06). The overall point of all this is that although we tend to think in terms of monopolies as being with respect to certain industries and commodities, the interest in capturing a monopoly can extend to being an exclusive conduit for virtually anything, even culture.

One can probably detect from the term “monopoly rent” and thinking about the concept of “surplus rent” and the modern day use of the more recently-coined term “rent-seeking” that there is a bit of classical dialectic underlying these concerns that hearkens all the way back to Marx, but it is hard not to be conscious of the urge that Forest City Ratner and others have to appropriate native culture such as Brooklyn’s unto themselves. As we once previously quoted Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report writing about the Ratner organization’s use of the image of the Brooklyn Bridge “which happens to be closer to the Brooklyn Paper's longtime DUMBO offices, rather than the generic MetroTech office park” . . . “Forest City Ratner has not been shy about appropriating Brooklyn Bridge iconography in advertising.”

The tragedy is that, to the extent that monopolistic takeovers of culture succeed, what almost invariably ensues is its replacement with something less authentic and more generic and cookie-cutter like the aforementioned MetroTech.

Putting the “Mega” with the “Monopoly”

We wanted to mention Mr. Schrader ‘s presentation but we have probably gone too far afield in doing so because it is unnecessary to get into esoteric concepts about the monopolization of culture in order discuss the many monopolistic characteristics in which Atlantic Yards is throughly steeped. So much so that these days we find that we are nearly as apt to routinely refer to the Atlantic Yards project simply as a `mega-monopoly’ as we are to refer to it as a `megadevelopment.’

Layers Upon Layers of Monopoly

Mega-monopoly probably describes Atlantic Yards better than any other single word given that:

• The gestating seed of Atlantic Yards was a big league sports franchise. These franchises are exempt from antitrust rules and if you search the Atlantic Yards Report site you will find a lot of discussion of their monopolistic nature by economists and other experts. (You will also find a lot of our own comments about Atlantic Yards as a monopoly.)

• Atlantic Yards’ birth was midwifed by another monopolistic expedient, the award of the project to Forest City Ratner on a no-bid basis, which was essential to preclude any possible competition.

• Its succor and the basic sinew of its composition is the eminent domain abuse that chases away all other competitors and transforms what was the competitors’ into Forest City Ratner’s.

• Atlantic Yards has been further coddled by government agencies that have lavished on it additional hundreds of millions of dollars from the taxpayers on a no-bid basis, given its extraordinarily valuable naming rights and exempted it (and these many gifts) from the requirements of appraisal and bids under the Public Authorities Accountability Act.

Maturing Into a Tax Base Problem

Take away any one of the above special monopolistic favors, for instance by subjecting Atlantic Yards to the requirement of a fair bid, or by take away its privilege to abuse eminent domain, and the project fails, it withers unwholesomely on the vine quite as it deserves.

On the other hand, allowed to mature, the mega-monopoly becomes something rather monstrous that drains the resources of the community at large. Here is something important that the WNYC report on Yankee Stadium neglected to mention. The community economic activity in the Bronx that existed before the new Yankee Stadium was built was all increasing the value of local property paying property taxes. It was all contributing to the city’s tax base. But Yankee Stadium is tax-exempt (courtesy of political deals present and past). It doesn’t pay property taxes. That means that when all that local economic activity was sucked up within the sealed walls of the stadium the activity that was on the tax rolls helping everyone in the city, metamorphosed into payments that now only line the pockets of the private owners of Yankee Stadium.

No Taxes? Another Special Benefit Among Too Many to Mention

The privilege not to pay taxes! That’s one more of those special benefit that keeps projects like Yankee Stadium and Atlantic Yards alive. When it comes to Atlantic Yards the list is so long, it is hard to remember all the special benefits. For instance, shouldn’t we mention the zoning override that will selectively apportion an extraordinary amount of extra density on the Ratner property as opposed to other property tax-paying owners in the borough?

Are Taxes Intercepted and Redirected Back for the Private Benefit of Those “Tendering” Them Truly Taxes?

Now it’s time to get a little bit technical because Yankee Stadium’s monopolistic removal of pre-existing economic activity from the tax rolls provides a marvelous opportunity for us to elucidate upon an important, sometimes debated point. Sometimes people say that Yankee Stadium is not off the tax rolls. And sometimes the same people say that Yankee Stadium is not financed with the city taxpayer’s money. (The same applies to the proposed Atlantic Yards Nets arena because the same R-TIFC-PILOT" agreement scheme- pronounced "Artifice-PILOT"– or "Return Total Intercepted For Costs-Payment In Lieu Of Taxes"-- that was used to finance Yankee Stadium is proposed to be used for the arena.) We think that these people are wrong and are trying to promote ideas that are mutually self contradictory. We admit that there are areas with certain shades of grey which we will get to in a moment, but in the end they are not so important.

Basics Before Nuances

Before we get into the nuances, let us review the basics. The owners of Yankee Stadium pay “theoretical” real property taxes (sometimes called “synthetic” property taxes in the community of lawyers financing these deals just so that nobody confuses them with the real thing). The reason the taxes are only theoretical is because the government never gets them; they never go into the public coffers. Instead they are intercepted and used to pay the personal obligations of the Yankee Stadium owners, most importantly the bonds that were issued to finance the Stadium.

We have been quoted as explaining it this way:

The setup is basically like paying taxes on your home and then having the government use that money to help you pay off your mortgage," said Michael D. D. White, a former vice president and top lawyer for the state finance authorities.

(See: Your 'Net' Loss, $2b in Taxes to Ratner, By Rich Calder, April 14, 2008.)

So basically, if you want to think of the Yankee Stadium as being on the tax rolls you have to think of it as being publicly financed with taxpayers’ money because all the taxpayers’ intercepted money goes to the privately owned sports team. Conversely, if you want to think of the stadium as being privately financed then don’t think of it as being on the tax rolls. You can’t have it both ways- - Something we’ll come back to in a moment. One more thing: This neat little bit of legerdemain is the basis upon which the interest on Yankee Stadium bonds was theoretically made tax-exempt which constitutes a whole other raid on the city, state and federal taxpayers. (We’ll get back to that too.)

We described this in more detail with respect to Atlantic Yards (shortly before the official numbers increased a lot) in this Huffington Post article we authored: More Money for the Very Rich: An Unsporting Pursuit? March 17, 2008. Just recently the same subject was visited with a similar explanation by Daniel Goldstein in this Huffington Post article: Wrong Way PILOTs Would Crash into Atlantic Yards, November 3, 2009.

Bloomberg Leads the Stadium Bond Duplicity

Who are those who would try to have it both ways? Mayor Michael Bloomberg for one, someone who was no doubt just trying to confuse the voters since he surely ought to know better. We took Mr. Bloomberg to task on this in: Stadium Finance: Mayor, Professing to Know Numbers, Should Know He Can’t Have It Both Ways (Unless He’s Keeping Two Sets of Books) (Monday, December 15, 2008) For another article where we took the mayor further to task about Yankee Stadium bonds, getting into other objections about them, see: Another Lulu: Revisiting the Yankee and Mets Stadium Scams (Tuesday, January 13, 2009).

Acknowledging Some Difficult Nuances

Now for some nuances, and then we will get to why the way that Yankee Stadium is taking economic activity from neighboring properties off the tax rolls relates to these nuances.

We are about to set forth some distinctions that are difficult to discern and understand. We will do so for the purpose of acknowledging a different point of view even though we don’t exactly agree with it. We warn you that the level of sophistication involved in these distinctions might be a bit daunting but if you bear with us we think we will be able to describe then to you.

It might help to begin with an event that dramatizes a point.

City Parks Commissioner Benepe, Toes the Mayor’s Line on Yankees’ Bonds
(above: City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe at Brooklyn Bridge Park meeting.)

We had an elucidating exchange about the Yankee Stadium bonds with New York City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe when the subject came up at a January meeting where plans for the Brooklyn Bridge Park were being presented. Mr. Benepe was there to provide figures to put into perspective the perceived high cost of that park. During the question and answer session one member of the audience who had concerns about the luxury development planned for the park brought up Yankee Stadium (also mentioning the similar Mets stadium) as an example of Bloomberg’s propensity for giveaways to his wealthy and connected friends. Mr. Benepe responded, like a good commissioner, apparently taking a page from Bloomberg (see our above link about Bloomberg’s statements the month before). Benepe wound up saying exactly those things that we said we disagree with:

Just to correct the record. The city isn’t paying for either stadium. Both the teams are paying for the stadiums. The city is paying some related costs around the stadium. The billion dollars is being paid for by the Yankees, . . the $800 million being paid for by the Yankees . .

Someone in the audience, perhaps the original questioner, interrupted to say the “The bonds, the bonds.” Mr. Benepe continued:

Yeah and they’re paying back the bonds. They have to pay them all back.

At this point it was our turn to interrupt to correct Mr. Benepe and we called out that the bonds were being paid with city real estate taxes and that he was wrong. Mr. Benepe, before he decided that silence was the better part of valor, said:

They don’t pay property taxes, haven’t paid them before.

The Yankees Don’t Pay Real Property Taxes and Weren’t Paying Them Before

After the question and answer session concluded we spoke with Mr. Benepe, telling him that while we disagreed with him and consider that the Yankee Stadium bonds are being paid with intercepted taxpayer money (just as the city has certified to the IRS), we understood his point about the Yankees just not paying taxes at all. There is an argument that people like Mr. Benepe apparently subscribe to that it should be accepted as a forgone conclusion that the Yankees just don’t pay taxes, or at least that there will be a lot of taxes from which we can expect that society will automatically excuse them. We don’t agree in such a forgone conclusion and that conclusion is somewhat at odds with the theory that entitles Yankee Stadium bonds to any possible tax exemption. But, if one makes it a forgone conclusion that the Yankees are entitled not to pay taxes then the “taxes” that they don’t pay and use instead to pay off their own private bonds can be viewed by people like Mr. Benepe and Mayor Bloomberg as a kind of magic found money that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

Not That Simple: Some Complications

Additional Real Taxes At Least Someone Else Might Have Paid

Stop! It’s not that simple. Complication number one: It may be easy to conceptualize that since the Yankees were not paying taxes on their old stadium that maybe at least that same amount, the amount they were already not paying, should be regarded as an amount it would be impertinent for timid public officials to request them to pay later on. But what about any taxes beyond that? Say for instance, when that tax exemption is expiring or when a new stadium on new land increases the value of what the Yankees own and should be taxed? (We are coming back to this in a minute.)

And what if such a change in status is displacing another possible thing of taxpaying value? In the case of the proposed Atlantic Yards Nets arena, the arena which won’t pay taxes is to be built on a central Brooklyn site above subway stations, a site that would certainly otherwise be occupied by a taxpaying commercial property such as an office building or housing. Yankee Stadium arguably didn’t replace another possible taxpaying commercial property: What it did replace, rather sadly, was the community’s parks. (The city has so far been slow to construct even the inadequate replacement amenities that are supposed to compensate the public.- A responsibility that is partly Mr. Benepe’s.)

Additional Really Truly Completely Fake “Synthetic” Taxes

Finally, one more complication: Beyond the taxes that the Yankees wouldn’t pay because they `traditionally’ don’t, and beyond the taxes that the Yankees perhaps should pay and don’t as a result of the convoluted R-TIFC PILOT financing scheme, there are some additional theoretical “synthetic” taxes that would never ever be paid by the Yankees or anyone else under any circumstances because the taxes are entirely a fiction meant to sucker the IRS into considering the Yankee’s bonds tax-exempt. These additional theoretical “synthetic” taxes were created by the New York City Finance Department by artificially inflating the assessed value of the stadium to an absolutely unrealistic figure. (See: Sunday, April 12, 2009, Bloomberg Update: Fire and Ice (Part II) and also Sunday, April 19, 2009, Keeping up with Bloomberg and Friends: Stark New Scandals and Is it True WSJ Readers Don’t Commit Murder?) (We told you this was complicated.) So to the extent that these “taxes” never in fact existed or could even possibly have existed and were just created as a fiction to swindle the IRS they, are indeed, more magic found money. Though these fake taxes don’t actually divert real property taxes even though they do cost city, state and federal taxpayers money in the end.*

(* How intercepted real estate taxes should be categorized, affects a precise calculation of subsidy that big projects like these are receiving, for instance the $2-3 billion in subsidy that we calculated is going to Atlantic Yards. To the extent that one admits that a portion of the tax payments theoretically intercepted are simply fictional shams meant to fleece the IRS, then it is appropriate to somewhat reduce the total subsidy figure. Similarly, the Benepe argument with which we disagree would be that the total subsidy figure should be further reduced by disregarding the amount of subsidies the Yankees have already been routinely pocketing.)

Declaring the Yankee Stadium Bonds Taxable

What about the fact that the Yankee Stadium bonds are not actually entitled to be tax-exempt because of this last illegal ruse? (See: Saturday, November 8, 2008, Does Questionable Assertion of Attorney-client Privilege Point to Yankee Stadium Bond Taxability?) We still think that irrespective of whatever activity there has been by bond lawyers skulking about in Washington, D.C. in their efforts to persuade the IRS not to declare the Yankee Stadium bonds taxable as a result of this abuse, the IRS should finally get around to lowering the boom and declaring the Yankee Stadium bonds taxable. New York City officials went too far: The IRS should let them know that. The IRS needs to send a message and dismiss the lobbying.

In Chart Form

The forgoing seemed complicated enough so we thought it might be worthwhile to put it in chart form. So here it is (click to enlarge):

But, With WNYC’s Insight, Let’s Add One Important Thing to the Chart

We thought we had all the bases covered with above chart. That was until we heard the WNYC story and we realized that we had never thought about the way that the new Yankee Stadium/Mall would absorb the local taxpaying economic activity into the shelter of its tax exempt walls. It occurred to us that this needed to be added to our chart of the taxes not being paid. Below then is the revised chart of the taxes the Yankees are not paying (click to enlarge).

As the addition to the above chart observes, the mall-ifcation of the new stadium has created new off-the-tax-rolls shopping mall property. It means that taxpaying economic activity that once involved many local merchants outside the stadium has been simultaneously monopolized and converted into property that is off the tax rolls. Further, because the in-stadium shops are off the tax rolls they are more likely to out-compete the taxpaying mom and pop enterprises that will still try to exist in the community. Commissioner Benepe may have been correct in pointing out that the Yankees had a tradition of not paying taxes on their old stadium but now with the regime going into effect at their new stadium the Yankees are starting a new tradition of not paying taxes on a whole lot more than what they never paid taxes on before. In other words, this is an example of how Bloomberg’s “economic development” projects are anything but.

As we said at the beginning of this article, if you haven’t yet heard WNYC’s October 28, 2009 Ailsa Chang story about how the new Yankee Stadium is sucking up the economic activity that once upon a time existed in the surrounding Bronx community take seven minutes to listen to it now, without further delay. We hope these additional insights about the monopolistic characteristics of the development government officials are fostering helps to further inform your listening.

City Council Races (33rd and 39th): Candidates’ Positions on Development and Effective Action They Would Take to Stop Atlantic Yards (Part I)

This will be a three part series.

The candidates for City Council have been showing up in various venues and forums that give us an opportunity to learn about them and their positions. This series is intended to provide a comprehensive resource (including links to other coverage) to learn about and consider the positions of the candidates for the 33rd and 39th Council Districts with respect to development, and particularly the emblematic touchstone of Atlantic Yards.

Inventory of Candidates’ Positions: In Their Own Words

We will provide the candidates’ positions on development and Atlantic Yards in their own words, together with commentary of our own respecting Atlantic Yards. We will also provide, as a comparative reference, the positions of the two current City Council office holders, David Yassky and Bill de Blasio, whom the candidates are seeking to replace.

We expect to supplement what we do here with future pieces similarly covering the positions of candidates running for other City Council seats and also those running for city-wide positions.

In certain cases we have had conversations following up on candidate’s positions where it seemed particularly helpful to provide an overview.

The first part of this series will examine the exceptional importance of development issues to the City Council races and the kind of coverage these issues are getting and which is possible.

The second part of the series will inventory the positions of the candidates for the 33rd City Council District, while the third part will inventory the position of the candidates for the 39th. Overall, we will keep returning to the question of what we should be looking for from political office-holders in terms of effective action to stop Atlantic Yards. This series reviews the positions of fifteen candidates in the current political race. They unanimously oppose Atlantic Yards. It seems as if the only remaining question is how they will be effective in stopping the project.

We proceed-

Part I

Background: Development & Politics

What we care about here at Noticing New York, what we focus on, is the city-shaping development that is going on in New York. We therefore find ourselves writing an extraordinary amount about politics. Often when you look at a project, especially some of the megaprojects currently fashionable under the Bloomberg administration, Atlantic Yards being the perfect example, they look less like true development projects than like what they actually are: The result of the abuse of politics to package and deliver benefit at taxpayer and community expense to a connected crony. In the case of Atlantic Yards, that crony is wealthy, subsidy-collector and sports team owner Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner.

The question then is: When you see this kind of abuse, what do you do about it? We’ll come back to that. It’s an important part of our theme.

As we noted in or introduction, none of the candidates (or those whom they will succeed) purport to like Atlantic Yards.

How Exciting the Possibilities of Politics “Reportedly” Are

Before anything else, we should take note of the coverage of the candidates’ thinking that has already occurred.

April 20, 2009 Candidates Forum (33rd District)

We consider politics relating to development inherently exciting when those politics breathe with possibility of change, reform and community spirit. And the possibilities for change are always very much at the forefront in the election process. We believe that unless the public maintains the excitement for the potential of change that is in the political air. We therefore found ourselves confounded when the Brooklyn Paper promoted the impression that an April 20, 2009 city council candidates forum was a “yawn.” We found it quite the opposite, especially because the subject of development was so prominent throughout the evening. At the paper’s website, we commented as follows:

While the candidates running to replace City Councilman David Yassky (33rd District) may not differ as much on substance as they conceivably might, the candidate forum evening could hardly be considered a “yawn” given the candidates’ pretty much universal objections to the current administration’s development policies and big project initiatives. Isn’t Bloomberg’s ability to create such unity a fascination in itself?

The candidates were nearly unanimous in opposing; Atlantic Yards as the worst, most destructive project in Brooklyn, opposing housing in Brooklyn Bridge Park, opposing the Walentas Dock Street project near the Brooklyn Bridge, wanting a federal superfund clean-up of the Gowanus Canal and in calling for stronger community boards and a stronger City Council. How can such clearly marshaled opposition to the status quo be boring? Or is the Brooklyn Paper’s message simply this: Strong opposition realistically means nothing because: 1.) the office of the mayor is supreme over the City Council, and 2.) Bloomberg’s claim to the mayoralty is not subject to practical political challenge?

(See: Candidates to succeed Yassky yawn it out in Brooklyn Heights, by The Politicrasher, April 21, 2009.)

The night of the forum was a rainy one. It would be a pity if those who did not make it to the St. Francis auditorium the night of the hearing gleaned an impression from the Brooklyn Paper that it was worthless.

April 25, 2009 “Dazzle Me” Candidates Forum (39rd District)

We think the fictionalized “Politicrasher” who wrote about the night at St. Francis (a self-described “grizzled old newshound”) is actually the paper’s editor, Gersh Kuntzman, since 1.) he was there covering the event for the paper, 2.) it seems to be his style, and 3.) the byline cartoon even looks a little like Gersh.

The “Politicrasher” wrote another similarly boredom-themed story covering an April 25, 2009 “Dazzle Me” forum of candidates for the 39th Council District election to replace City Councilman Bill de Blasio. (See: Dazzle me? How about underwhelm me? By The Politicrasher, April 29, 2009.) Among other things that report started out by reiterating its verdict of disinterest in the earlier forum to set low expectation for this new one: “The Politicrasher had low expectations . . . And last week’s non-“dazzle me” forum for candidates hoping to succeed David Yassky in the neighboring district was pretty banal.”

http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/32/17/32_17_politicrasher.html

We weren’t there on April 25th to be able to give our own view but we suggest that you contrast the Brooklyn Paper’s listless disenchantment with the way Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn’s begins its coverage of the same forum: “Who knew politics could be such fun?” (See: Monday, April 27, 2009, City Council Candidates Try to Dazzle in the 39th District.) For other coverage from someone who found themselves more engaged (with some nice photos of the candidates) see Pardon Me For Asking’s: Saturday, April 25, 2009, 39th Council District Candidates Submit To Tough Questioning At 'Dazzle Me' Forum.

As OTBKB reported (and the Brooklyn Paper echoed): “Probably the most discussed issue was Superfund designation for the Gowanus, a subject near and dear to the Carroll Gardens neighborhood.” Both reports make clear that, as with the first forum on the 20th, issues concerning development predominated in the discussion. According to the BP:

“The vast majority of queries were about land-use issues, especially about the clean-up and development of the Gowanus Canal, a hot-button issue tearing apart the neighborhood and dividing the candidates.”

The BP follows this immediately with the paragraph:

“No wonder no one ‘dazzled,” griped one participant. “It was three hours of land-use questions. This wasn’t a forum. This was a requirement that the candidates supplicate themselves to the altar of anti-development!”

While this centrally featured paragraph takes its words out of the mouth of an unnamed participant, it feels like the BP’s point of view in the story. But opposition to the current style of development being promoted Bloomberg and company should not be conflated with opposition to development in general. (Noticing New York views itself as pro-development, although this may not be easy to discern when there is so much bad development we react to these days.)

Spicier Development Coverage

We note that the Brooklyn Paper historically has defined itself by imbibing much of its energy from coverage of local development. Historically, its reporting reflected a healthy skepticism of big development and a corresponding sensitivity to community concerns. Given a history of what was once the Brooklyn Paper’s vigorous opposition to Atlantic Yards (Wednesday, February 11, 2009, A Brooklyn Paper Editorial & Atlantic Yards: With Nothing Else Good To Say, We Are Stimulated To Say. . .) would it not be natural to expect that the Brooklyn Paper would seek to be alert, as we try to be, to the “anti-development” fertile ground whence will come defeats of the Bloombergian development tide with the demise of Atlantic Yards, et al.

And from a development standpoint aren’t City Council races important to watch given the notorious amount of developer campaign contributions that go into them?

Channeling the Brooklyn Paper on Development and the Gowanus

We are, however, not sure what to expect of the Brooklyn Paper these days and are wondering if, with their recent change in ownership, we detect a pro-Bloombergian development bias creeping in. (See: Saturday, March 21, 2009, Tales of Two Landlords Bridged by an Iconographic Clash.)

Whether the Gowanus Canal should be cleaned by being designated as a federal Superfund site is a hot topic and hard to avoid in what we are talking about. Now is probably an excellent time to get into it. Because is a major current topic it allows us to reflect a bit more about what Brooklyn Paper is currently doing.

We have noticed that most of the public is quickly embracing the idea of a Superfund clean-up of the Gowanus because that would likely result in the most thorough clean-up of the Gowanus but the Brooklyn Paper had been quick into the breach with what looks like support for those who would like to eventually fall in line behind Bloomberg. It is clear that the city’s plan, which does not involve a full, deep dredging of the contaminated sediment out of the Gowanus, would not clean up the Gowanus to the fullest possible extent. We doubt that a shallow dredging of the Gowanus, followed by the overlay of a clean sand cap on the contaminated muck, is a desirable strategy for a storm surge area. We are definitely inclined to favor a more thorough approach to clean-up and therefore probably the Superfund designation.

We are not sure why the mayor’s office is not proposing a more extensive clean-up that includes a deep dredging. We also discount the idea, promoted by the Toll Brothers developers and the Bloomberg administration, that the reason not to designate the Gowanus as a Superfund site is that the “naming” of it as a Superfund will somehow hurt the brand when they market the real estate. To borrow back terminology from the Wall Street financial crisis, everyone knows that the Gowanus is a “toxic asset” and rebranding it as “legacy asset” won’t change anything.

The strategy of those keeping open their Gowanus options for an ultimate shift to back Bloomberg seems reminiscent of the oil companies’ fight to stave off environmentalists and science community Cassandras on the subject of global warming: Rather than start by zeroing on the basics of what is likely needed, they first sell the idea of uncertainty and then promote inertia by directing people’s focus to their short-term comfort. If the city can, by similar means, fend off a superfunding of the site and if it thereafter becomes safe for a certain set of politicians to fall in line behind Bloomberg, the city can thereupon figure out how much less of clean-up of the site it can get away with. This analysis does not amount to our actual endorsement of superfunding the Gowanus. That is something about which we are still doing more research, but it comes close to such a recommendation on our part.

The Brooklyn Paper had an April 30, 2009 editorial the main import of which is to emphasize what is not known about superfunding while minimizing what is known. (The editorial came quickly on the heels of a April 16, 2009 editorial, making similar points: Superfund hype.) The paper’s approach in its last editorial results is some pretty tricky wording that sometimes just doesn’t seem to work:

How dangerous is the canal? We know we wouldn’t want to go swimming in it, thanks to those noxious chemicals in the sediment, but is the canal unsafe to be around? . . . cancer or illness . . In short, does the Gowanus Canal represent an actual health threat beyond its stinkiness after heavy rains?

(See: April 30, 2009, Superfund answers are lacking.)

The editorial’s last point about what is “unknown” is the most direct appeal to the public’s short-term interest:

And finally, who will pick up the tab? Last week, we learned that municipalities are often holding the bag — which would put city taxpayers right where we started.

(Another thing that confuses us about the city’s position on the Gowanus clean-up is this: We find an inexplicable inconsistency in the city opposing the Gowanus clean-up by saying that it will a.) prevent the city from spending city funds for the clean-up they planned to, and , b.) require more city expenditures for the clean-up. This seems altogether too ambidextrous on the city’s part.)

We are impressed with the rate at which the Brooklyn Paper is producing articles on the subject of superfunding the Gowanus such as:

City could be holding bag for feds’ Gowanus clean-up, By Mike McLaughlin, April 23, 2009

Gowanus divided: Is the Superfund supergood or superbad?, By Mike McLaughlin, April 13, 2009

Superfund or Superbad? Let the Explainer explain it all to you, April 16, 2009

We are not only impressed by the rate at which these articles are coming out, we are also impressed by how much more informed they purport themselves to be than we think we are. (In our former government career life we worked with toxic site problems, including the rehabitation of Love Canal.)

Better Reporting on April 20, 2009 Candidates Forum (33rd District)

For a better report on the April 20, 2009 city council candidates forum for the 33rd district (Yassky’s current seat) focusing on things particularly with respect to Atlantic Yards, see Atlantic Yards Report: Thursday, April 23, 2009, Looking at the 33rd district race, AY, and some undercurrents.

Here also is an audio recording of the evening posted by NNY.

Predomination of Development Issues

We ourselves thought that the main story of the April 20th forum was how development issues predominated during the evening. Not only did development issues, including Atlantic Yards, come up importantly in the candidates’ self introductions and their summing up at evening’s end, but the audience questions predominantly focused on development issues, evoking a remarkable degree of consensus on how city development policies have gone astray.

During the evening the candidates responded to 11 audience questions and only two of those questions, one on gay marriage and one on mayoral control of public schools, did not involve development issues in a significant way. (Development aside, the mayor also does not seem to be winning points on his handling of the schools.) There was one question very important to issues of how future development proceeds in the city that was not directly about development: All the candidates agreed that Bloomberg’s extension of term limits to procure himself a third term was wrong.

Power Balance: Mayor and Community Boards

If Bloomberg receives a third term it could be critical to projects like Atlantic Yards which depend significantly on the mayor’s stubborn determination to override the community and what makes sense to other politicians. This aligns with a related theme of the evening: that there should be greater power outside the mayor’s office. The candidates all felt that community boards should be more empowered than they currently are, including receiving more technical assistance and resources to be involved in planning. In this regard, Ken Baer mentioned the purge of Community board 6 by Borough President Marty Markowitz after its board members voted their consciences to oppose Atlantic Yards. Issac Abraham similarly noted that the appointment of community board members by elected officials was a problem.

Power Balance: Mayor and City Council

The candidates also favored a stronger City Council that would adhere to principles and conscience and respect the will of the community by taking on the people in power. For Jo Anne Simon this meant the council working together, not with developers. This came up in the context of a question that asked whether the candidate, if elected, would follow a tradition that City Council members usually vote on local land use issues following the lead of the council members from the local community involved. It may be counterintuitive to understand, but that can lead to many situations where council members vote against their principles, against their conscience, and, ironically, against the community. The example given in the question being responded to was the controversial 125th Street rezoning and Columbia’s expansion into West Harlem (abusing eminent domain for real estate profit). Isaac Abraham pointed out that part of the problem is that the mayor has too much control over individual local city members. (This means the mayor can exert controls over development votes by pressuring individual City Council members to vote against their constituencies. Abraham mentioned as an example that the mayor’s taking away parking privileges when city council members don’t vote his way.

This question eliciting the candidates’ opinions that the City Council needs to be strengthened was therefore a very sophisticated and nuanced one that presupposes a lot more knowledge about the council than many New Yorkers probably have. It was also a long question but is worth setting forth at length. See below:

This is about the culture of the New York City Council. The mayor and the speaker have a tight grip on the city council members. We saw that in the term limit extension vote. We know that the speaker does not allow bills on the floor that she does not approve of. But not only that, there is an expectation that the council will follow the lead of the local council person on development and other issues in the neighborhood that pertain to the council member’s district. For example, when Robert Jackson and Inez Dickens supported the rezoning of 125th Street or the expansion of Columbia University into Harlem, then almost every other council member votes the way Jackson and Dickens had led, even as some of those council members state they vehemently oppose the planned use of eminent domain for private gain. The question here is how do you see yourself acting differently as a new council member. Should you be able to challenge the climate of going along to get along that exists right now in the council? Would you fear retaliation if an issue came up in your district if you oppose the local council member?

Regarding the “tight grip” of the City Council Speaker Christine Quinn referred to in the question, Ken Diamondstone suggested that electing the proper speaker (presumably not Ms. Quinn) was key.

Antagonism to Bloombergian Development

Not surprisingly then, throughout the evening the theme was the candidates’ antagonism, on behalf of the community, to the projects that are being handed down by the Bloomberg administration. To wit:

1. Opposition to Housing in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The candidates unanimously opposed Bloomberg’s (investment banker style) idea of putting private housing in Brooklyn Bridge designed (in a cumbersome interrelated fashion) to pay the cost of maintaining the park. In this regard, they all seemed comfortable following the lead of State Senator Daniel Squadron, whom several of them mentioned, who defeated former Senator Martin Connor by distinguishing himself with his position on this matter and also Atlantic Yards. (Squadron supports a moratorium on State aide for Atlantic Yards.- See: Saturday, September 6, 2008, This Just In- Gyllenhaal Jilted? Squadron Pulls Ahead?)

2. Opposition to Dock Street Tower Proposed to Obstruct the Brooklyn Bridge. The candidates unanimously opposed the Bloomberg administration’s Dock Street project which will soon be up for a City Council vote. (It has already gone through City Planning.- See: Sunday, April 26, 2009, Markowitz, McCullough, Me and Other Merry Minions of the Blogosphere.) Ken Diamondstone made the essential point that we made about the city administration’s abuse of process by “bundling” the project together with the community’s ability to get a school. This means the community will get a project that it doesn’t want together with a school in the wrong place and whose design won’t work well into the bargain. (See: Saturday, March 14, 2009, At the City Planning Commission Hearings on Proposed Dock Street Project: A Reprise.) If you were a reader of the Brooklyn Paper’s story covering the evening’s forum you would find that Mr. Diamondstone was mocked for his position. The “Politicrasher”managed to do this by misquoting Mr. Diamondstone. Although what Mr. Diamondstone said at that moment was not phrased with particular eloquence, we do not think the paper’s “quote” was a fair representation of what he said. We went back and listened to the recording. The Brooklyn Paper is in an odd position on Dock Street: They editorially support the project (its developer was their landlord when they took that position) but they are reporting on the investigation of the scandal involving administrative arrangements whereby the School Construction Authority colluded with the developer to bundle the project with the school.

3. Support for Federal Superfunding of the Gowanus Canal. The candidates were nearly unanimous in supporting superfunding of the Gowanus Canal, putting themselves once again in opposition to the Bloomberg administration’s ideas on development. While no candidate opposed the superfunding, Jo Anne Simon took no position on it, saying that she did not have enough information to make a decision, while not sharing the preliminary ideas factoring into her thinking. As we noted earlier, the Brooklyn Paper is editorially promoting the uncertainty about the desirability of superfunding and we have identified this as what we think is the strategic position of politicians preserving the option to fall in line behind Bloomberg once they don’t believe they will be paying too high a price with the community. That gives Bloomberg time for more PR for a more minimal clean-up under city auspices. Readers of the Brooklyn Paper coverage found the “Politicrasher” praising Ms. Simon’s position for its sobriety “calm, intelligent professionalism.” We found ourselves agreeing with several other observers of the evening that it seemed one more instance during the evening of a noncommital wishy-washyness on Ms. Simon’s part. We will speak of that more as we get into the subject of Atlantic Yards. (Note: It was talking with candidate Biviano, an environmental engineer- who also worked on Love Canal- that we started discussing the issues of storm surge in the Gowanus.)

4. Willingness to Fight for the Community Against Developer-driven Projects Using Eminent Domain (Generically Put, but Sounds like Atlantic Yards). It was actually the second audience question of the evening (after gay marriage) that raised the specter of Atlantic Yards, putting forth the question generically in terms of fighting for the community against developer-driven eminent domain abusing projects. The question specifically was:

On the topic of development. Under Mayor Bloomberg we have seen many developer-driven projects in New York City. Many of those projects include the threat or use of eminent domain. The question is: How do you envision the community role in development? Are you willing to fight for the communities against the developers? What tools would you use to fight for the community?

Mr. Baer talked about fighting vigorously against Atlantic Yards and getting the Sierra Club to join the opposition’s law suit. Doug Biviano talked about the evil of eminent domain used for the wrong purposes and Atlantic Yards in particular. He talked about taking the initiative by getting out in front with the press. Ken Diamondstone similarly talked about exposing wrongs and the collusion with respect to Atlantic Yards, and ensuring community involvement. Evan Thies talked about the problems with the (careless?) “ready-aim-fire” style of Bloomberg’s development approach, and spoke of 360 degree community development planning and using skills he had developed to stop a project in Red Hook. Isaac Abraham did not mention Atlantic Yards.

Interestingly Jo Anne Simon also did not mention Atlantic Yards by name. In fact, rather than speak in term of fighting against projects being thrust upon the community by the Bloomberg administration, Ms. Simon spoke in positive terms of fighting for the origination of future projects through community planning. Without mentioning Atlantic Yards directly; however Ms. Simon did speak of how we have given too much authority to public authorities which desperately need to be reformed and desperately need transparency. Though she did not thereby mention Atlantic Yards directly, for those familiar, her words evoked the Brooklyn Speaks coalition’s approach to Atlantic Yards which has focused on reforms to curb the misbehavior of the Empire State Development Corporation which, it is supposed, would indirectly improve the project. The “mend-it-don’t-end-it” shorthand has been used to describe Brooklyn Speaks. Ms. Simon objects to that shorthand.

5. Taking Effective Action Against Brooklyn’s Biggest Boondoggle Project. While it may have seemed a fluke that Ms. Simon did not take the opportunity of the previous question to do some effective railing against the Atlantic Yards project, it seemed more likely a deliberate strategy when later Ms. Simon did not mention Atlantic Yards in response to question number nine asked about halfway through the evening. The question was:

What Brooklyn project is the biggest boondoggle and the most destructive to the city and borough and what would you do to take effective action to stop that project?

One would think that the first part of that question would be a softball. Of course, having answered it, the second part of the question respecting “effective action” is the more difficult. Because it is the difficult part of the question, it is the more important and the most likely to distinguish the candidates. We will give it the most ink before we conclude. A matter of disclosure: The card with the above question on it was submitted by us.

To our surprise, Ms. Simon said she could not identify the biggest boondoggle project in the borough. She did say that it was hard to know which project was because “we don’t have good numbers, Atlantic Yards being an example.” She spoke about how “a lot of this has been speculative assumptions.” She also mentioned that “single site control is an issue respecting a lot of these projects.” If she is speaking of Atlantic Yards in this regard (and she should be), she would be a step ahead of Brooklyn Speaks. Brooklyn Speaks should be (but is not yet) calling for breaking up the Atlantic Yards site and the use of multiple developers to develop a reconstituted, redesigned project. But if the effective action she is thinking of is reform of ULURP as Ms. Simon mentioned that is a rather late after-the-fact proposal which would not stop Atlantic Yards or any project so similarly far along that it needs to be stopped.

While Ms. Simon mentioned Atlantic Yards in discussing possible candidates for the worst boondoggle, candidates Ken Baer, Ken Diamondstone and Evan Thies firmly identified Atlantic Yards as the worst. While Mr. Biviano did not (he talked about the school system), he can perhaps be forgiven in light of his vigorous criticism of Atlantic Yards in response to the previously set forth question. Isaac Abraham criticized the New York City Housing Authority. Given how underfunded NYCHA is for the big job they do, we are not inclined to share such criticism. Probably the best answer to this question was from Evan Theis, as follows:

I would have to say Atlantic Yards as well just because of the sheer size and cost of the project. I know it was a Brooklyn question, but the baseball stadiums are just an incredible waste of taxpayer money. I love baseball. I love it. I love going to watch the Yankees and the Mets but we could close the budget deficit with the amount of money we spent on those things. (But I am sure the $20 sushi is great.) On Atlantic Yards, it’s an example of everything that the city and state do wrong with development: There’s no real community process; they didn’t really do any real evaluation of infrastructure, as Ken said, and we spend millions and millions of dollars and get absolutely nothing for it. It is a gaping monument to how bad the city and state have gotten at these developments and how nearsighted they are. We should get that money back, by the way, along with the money we gave to the Yankees and the Mets, and spend it on something we need such as real affordable housing. I hope that eventually we will develop something on that site that does create the jobs that they promised but also creates affordable housing at a reasonable size.

Rent Regulation and Vacancy Decontrol: Significant Development Implications

There was one question respecting real estate in the city that has significant development implications and where we found ourselves disagreeing with the candidates and wish they had not been unanimous. The candidates were asked what measures would they would take to protect the rent-stabilized housing stock and what was their position in on vacancy decontrol of those units. They were all against vacancy decontrol and in favor of preserving the rent-stabilized housing stock. Vacancy decontrol has it problems. It creates an enormous incentive for landlords to harass particular tenants to get them out of their apartments and that needs to be protected against. Still, reflexive perpetuation of rent regulated units stymies the kind of natural development forces that should be producing new units in the city. Producing units by harnessing natural economic forces would be far healthier than being embroiled in the cronyism of Atlantic Yards. Further, rent-regulated units occupied by the wealthy should not be viewed as a form of `affordable housing program.’ (BTW: This question, like the question of gay marriage, will ultimately be decided in the state legislature, not the City Council.)

Evan Thies had the most knowledgeable and detailed answer on the subject of regulated units, getting into a discussion of the affordable units created by inclusionary zoning programs. This is not to say we agree with his conclusions but they would provide the basis for a good discussion. This seems to have contributed to the Brooklyn Paper saying he “came off as the wonkiest of the bunch.” If so, we consider wonky a good thing and we would probably also give credit to lawyer Jo Anne Simon’s capability for a fair amount of wonkiness even though the paper did not give her stars in this regard.

Summing Up: Community vs Power

Almost all the summing up for the evening emphasized standing up for the community against the powers that be. Ms. Simon said that she was the one to vote for “if you believe that community voices need to be heard.” Ken Diamondstone spoke about the problems with the power structure of the Democratic party, saying that support for reform and for Assemblyman Vito Lopez didn’t go together and that community had to be put first. Doug Biviano called for protecting communities and courageous leadership at the local level. Ken Baer spoke of the need for transparency and standing up to power and objecting to things like the mayor’s term limits extension. Isaac Abraham complained about the misdirection of public funds. Evan Thies spoke about how the city wastes funds on projects like Atlantic Yards and how now is the time for leaders to come forward who can be effective in City Council. We’d like to think that means recapturing those Atlantic Yards moneys as Evan spoke of. More on this later.

Zipping Up Part I

That then is our report of the St. Francis evening. It is less quippy and zippy than the Brooklyn Paper’s account. In fact, it probably sounds like an entirely different evening. We hope it gives you a better feel for the issues being discussed.

In Parts II and III we will look more at the candidates’ positions on development and Atlantic Yards.