Well, the Public Authorities Control Board voted down the West Side Stadium yesterday. It wasn't exactly a resounding defeat - Sheldon Silver and Joseph Bruno abstained instead of giving a no vote. Amazing.
If anyone wants to know why New York State and New York City are in the fiscal and economic shape they are in, look no further than the three stooges in charge of the state government (and you can throw in Mayor Bloomberg as Shemp if you like). Governor Pataki, Speaker Silver, and Senate Majority Leader Bruno are the three men in charge of the state. Their word is as good as law. They can make and break every single project in the state with a word.
So, what's their excuse this time? Silver wants to hold off on developing the West Side until the Ground Zero issues are resolved. Earth to Silver. You have been mostly silent in the Ground Zero development problems, so it is curious that you'd spike a project on the West Side that would create jobs and development in what is currently a black hole in Manhattan real estate.
What's Bruno's excuse? He doesn't have any, except that he wants to make sure that money heads upstate rather than down to the City, which would benefit from the economic development.
Gov. Pataki voted for the project to go ahead, yet he wasn't able to get the others to assent.
Great.
So we now have no development on the West Side. No development at Ground Zero, and the chances of bringing the Jets back to New York, let alone the Olympic bid, slip away.
So, here's my compromise solution.
Sack Bruno, Silver, and Pataki. None of them have shown even a modicum of leadership in the economic development of NYC, nor the vision to rebuild Ground Zero and under utilized areas of the City.
Failing that, here's a novel idea: rebuild Ground Zero immediately, get the Jets to sell their interest in the West Side stadium property to the highest bidder, and use the proceeds to buy property adjacent to Shea Stadium in Queens. Build the expanded convention center, housing and offices over the Hudson Yards, along with the 7 line expansion. The proceeds from the sale will benefit the city with increased economic development, new real estate and other tax revenues, new jobs created, and expanded convention center revenues. The stadium in Queens would still get the Jets out of New Jersey, and benefit the City.
And, it would still make it possible to host the Olympics.
The only problem is no one wants this to come to pass out of a lack of vision, leadership, or both.
UPDATE:
Welcome Hugh Hewitt readers. Take some time to check out the site. If you're wondering about my alternative proposal for rebuilding Lower Manhattan and the West Side project, don't worry. I'm going to be working on a more detailed and serious posting about what really needs to happen.
6 comments:
Sorry, but I disagree.
The choice of New York over San Francisco for the U.S. representative city for the 2012 Olympics was a horrid decision, based entirely on dreams and emotion, and that very decision is now fueling the problems you elicit in your post.
The grievous amount of infrastructure damage caused to Lower Manhattan by 9/11 created a practically impossible hurdle for anyone to overcome, much less the "can-do" folks of NYC. The only greater hurdle I could see would be asking Sarajevo, Bosnia to host the next Winter Olympics.
Attention and money can usually only go two directions - rebuild WTC, or prep venues and infrastructure for Olympiad. In this case, those two options were absolutely mutually exclusive.
San Francisco already had a large chunk of the venues ready to go (having already been secondary locales for the 1984 Olympiad, World Cup, and the like).
By reaching too far, too fast, NYC has effectively handed the Olympiad in 2012 to Paris, prolonged the hole in the ground at Ground Zero, and indefinitely preserved the West Side urban blight.
I'm sorry, but I don't see it that way at all. NYC has also handled World Cup competitions, and has world class track and field venues built (Icahn Stadium on Randall's Island), plus two baseball parks. Giants Stadium for soccer is nearby.
BTW, San Francisco did not have any venues for the 1984 games. All of the competition was held in Southern California. The main venues were at the LA Colesium, USC and UCLA.
Frankly, I disagree with the presumption that money can only go in one of two ways - "Attention and money can usually only go two directions - rebuild WTC, or prep venues and infrastructure for Olympiad. In this case, those two options were absolutely mutually exclusive."
The money to rebuild Lower Manhattan is set aside by the federal government and from insurance proceeds won in court battles and settlements with the insurance companies and Silverstein Properties. The money is available. The will to see it built is not.
The West Side Stadium is a separate pool of money, coming from state, local, and private (the NY Jets and the NFL) sources. A yea vote by the Public Authorities Control Board would have allowed the project to move ahead, but two of the three votes on the board had ulterior motives to spike the stadium.
Silver wants to control the process and hasn't said much about Lower Manhattan despite the fact that he represents the area. He recently got $800 million committed by the city and state for redevelopment, yet that wasn't enough.
Bruno's son represents anti-stadium groups, so there's a conflict of interests there as well.
Also, the infrastructure in Lower Manhattan has already been restored. With 18 months, not only has the debris been cleared, but PATH restored and the subway system through lower Manhattan been repaired to its pre 9/11 state with the exception of a single train station at the WTC, which is awaiting opening. All that needs to be done is have the buildings on the site restored - and that is up to the developer and the public authorities (controlled by the governor).
The situation in Lower Manhattan is not a hurdle to the Olympic bid by any stretch of the imagination. However, the inability of the politicians to build on underutilized sites throughout the city despite the demand for action is a major problem.
Then again, as for the Paris bid, it's overlooked that the French like to take holidays during the summer, and I wonder who will be on hand to treat anyone who gets sick in the summer should Paris get the bid. The last time they had a heat wave, more than 10,000 senior citizens died, and the country gave a shrug. And one can only wonder if the French unions wont decide to strike to get higher wages in return for working during their vacation season.
Sorry, but you and Hewitt are just plain wrong on this. That stadium was a white elephant, a boondoggle vanity project for Mayor Mike who tried to use the Olympic bid as blackmail for ramming through a stadium this city needs like a hole in the head.
Bruno and Silver acted out of fiscal sanity and sound public policy concerns.
But what the hell. It's not like it's your, or Hewitt's, tax dollars and city involved.
Also interesting that Hugh turns into a big-spending economic liberal when it's someone else's tax dollars at stake.
What exactly was Silver's fiscal sanity? He's got no problem feeding at the trough any less than Bloomberg.
The fact is that the West Side Yards have been decrepit and derlict for 50 years. Someone actually shows an interest - the Jets - to build a stadium and all they need is the infrastructure to make that happen - the money is to build the platform on which everything will eventually rest. No one else showed an interest at all.
The Cablevision folks (and Bruno's son represents them!) don't want competition and therefore preserve their monopoly on large sports and concert scale events in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, what is forgotten is that the stadium would have been part of the expanded Javits Center, which is forced to turn away conventions because it isn't big enough.
That's real money lost by the city to other locations. Money that the city can ill afford to lose.
Neither Bruno or Silver know what fiscal sanity is - because if they did, the State wouldn't be facing the economic mess they're in (for starters, they would have had ontime budgets for the last decade, instead of going as long as four months before passing a budget). The late budgets add up to billions in costs incurred by municipalities in the form of higher interest rates for borrowing, that must, in turn, be passed on to taxpayers.
Yeah, that is fiscal sanity. Only if the sane are drunk 24-7. But, in Albany, anything is possible. After all, what happens in Albany, stays in Albany.
"[a]ll they need is the infrastructure to make it happen."
Yeah, that would only run a few billion dollars.
The stadium was a losing idea for the city and didn't stand on its own merits. Which is why Bloomberg had to go through the pathetic exercise of blackmail through the city's Olympic bid (which was never a realistic proposition to begin with, and not something we New Yorkers were all that jazzed about).
Now, should something go there? Absolutely. But whatever it is should make sense for the city. And it should be based on logic and reason, not the kind of absurd emotionalism like Mayor Mikey has been blubbering about.
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