February 13, 2009

Nets hire D'Amato to lobby for stimulus funds

And the first "shovel-ready" has been thrown out for a sports facility! Brooklyn Borough President Marty "Those tears of joy are swelling up in me!" Markowitz this week declared of the New Jersey Nets' Atlantic Yards arena project in Brooklyn: "This project is shovel-ready, and the jobs it would create are needed now."

And Nets owner Bruce Ratner, it appears, is already hot on the trail of stimulus funds to bail out his stalled arena project. New York magazine reports that Forest City Ratner officials "have been pushing the idea with Governor David Paterson's office, trying to elbow to the front of the line before any of the roughly $17 billion in federal aid arrives"; the New York Observer, meanwhile, observes that former Senator Al D'Amato's lobbying firm filed federal disclosure papers last month showing they'd been hired by Ratner's development company to lobby for, among other things, "stimulus spending."

Could it happen? During a conference call with reporters yesterday, both Gov. Paterson and Sen. Charles Schumer denied knowing whether Atlantic Yards would be eligible for stimulus funds. A Brooklyn resident asked the state's Atlantic Yards ombudsman - yes, this project has its own obmudsman - on Wednesday whether any stimulus money would go to defray Ratner's costs or the state's; his reply: "We're not there yet."

As for whether Paterson and the others would throw money Ratner's way even if it's legal, the Observer's Eliot Brown sums it up well:

Should the project turn out to be eligible to get money, it would require a major political step by Mr. Paterson to allocate the relatively scarce stimulus money. The project has always been a political hornet's nest, and to date, neither Mr. Paterson nor his predecessor Eliot Spitzer have had to take any overt, highly public steps in support of it. Given that there are far more projects than there is stimulus funding, it's safe to say that money to Atlantic Yards would come at the expense of some other project in the area. If eligible, the question then becomes whether or not Bruce Ratner, Al D'Amato, supportive politicians and groups could push Atlantic Yards toward the top of the stack at the same time that other politicans are fighting for projects of their own favor.