After calling previous win in timetable case a "meaningless victory," the Brooklyn Paper deems latest decision "minor victory"

Neither the New York Times nor the New York Daily News saw fit to cover Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman's ruling requiring a Supplemental Environment Impact Statement regarding the Atlantic Yards timetable.

A day late, the Brooklyn Paper ran an article :

A judge handed Atlantic Yards opponents a minor victory this week, ordering a new environmental review of Bruce Ratner’s $4.9 billion project — but one that is unlikely to halt the development of the under-construction Barclays Center.

(Note that the Brooklyn Paper last November called a previous iteration of the case a "meaningless victory.)

My comment

My comment on the latest article:

You can call the victory "minor" in the sense that it will have a minor impact on the project under construction. It could have a much larger impact on Phase II.

But it is much more than a minor victory in court, if you consider that judges almost always defer to government agencies, which need merely a "rational" basis for their decisions. The ESDC's ten-year timeline didn't pass that very minimal "rational" basis test.

Why should it have passed that test? After all, the ESDC's own CEO, in April 2009, admitted that Atlantic Yards would take "decades."

In other words, the decision confirms the belief--at least among many opposing the project or watching it closely--that the state has leaned over backward to accommodate the developer, Forest City Ratner.

And that's why it's still news.