Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

There was an interesting aside in Bill Mahoney's report in Capital New York' yesterday, Real estate money fuels controversy in Assembly race , concerning the very contested race to succeed Karim Camara in Brooklyn. Most of the article deals with the real estate support for candidate Shirley Patterson--support via the Independence Party, gaining contributions from real estate investor Alexander Rovt and direct support from Leonard Litwin’s Glenwood Management. But Working Families Party candidate Diana Richardson, who has pledged not to take money from landlords and developers, is not completely pure, suggests Mahoney: The W.F.P. itself has also taken money from wealthy developers. It received a combined $25,000 from Bruce Ratner and his wife last October . More on Ratner Why would Ratner and his wife Pamela Lipkin support the Working Families Party? Perhaps they were asked by WFP co-founder Bertha Lewis, longtime Atlantic Yards ally/partner, who now heads the Black In...

There wasn't a lot Atlantic Yards-related, actually, in the latest six-month campaign disclosures filed this week by candidates in New York city and state. But a search of the database brought one contribution from the latest period and two I didn't notice last year. On 11/18/12, developer Bruce Ratner gave $5000 to Attorney General Eric  Schneiderman's 2014 re-election campaign. That happened to be just a few weeks after the closing of Community Benefits Agreement signatory BUILD (Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development), which had been the subject of a complaint to the Attorney General. (There's been no reported action on the complaint.) Was there a connection? Who knows--Ratner was already giving to the AG. In May 2012, the developer also gave $5000 to Schneiderman's 2014 re-election campaign. Earlier, in October 2010, Ratner gave $12,500 to Schneiderman's campaign that year. (Did that have any impact on the AG's unwillingness to pursue...

Update July 6: note that a Naked Capitalism commenter points out that the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership is not listed as an LDC under the jurisdiction of the Authorities Budget Office , which is true. On the other hand, the DBP does not, as the commenter suggests, present itself as a "purely private nonprofit" but rather as a "not for profit local development corporation." There was something curious about an announcement yesterday by state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, first reported by the Wall Street Journal in City Agency Admits Illegal Lobby Effort: New York City's economic-development agency and two related organizations admitted in a settlement Monday that they illegally lobbied the City Council on behalf of projects at the heart of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's redevelopment agenda. The concessions came after a three-year probe by the state attorney general's office. Investigators found that the Economic Development Corp. worked behind ...

To architect Frank Gehry, whose grasp of development politics appears (in retrospect) enormously shaky, Bruce Ratner is "politically like me" and a fellow "liberal, do-gooder" . But a look at Ratner's pattern of campaign contributions again suggests otherwise. Would a "liberal, do-gooder" in New York State give $7500 to the New York State Senate Republican Campaign Committee, as Ratner did on 11/1/10? Or would that donor more likely be, as I wrote in February 2008, someone who "plays hardball when it counts? The Schneiderman contribution Ratner on 10/28/10 also gave $12,500 to the campaign of Democratic Attorney General candidate Eric Schneiderman, who won his race with 55 percent of the vote. (The contribution limit in statewide elections is $37,800.) Could that be an effort to ensure that Schneiderman not pursue a lingering investigation from the Andrew Cuomo-led AG's office into the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership's lobbying on behal...

Is new state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman continuing an investigation of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership's (DBP) lobbying? I couldn't get an answer when I inquired a couple of weeks back, but the DBP, aiming to insert itself into the last Atlantic Yards lawsuit, surely has lobbied state agencies regarding Atlantic Yards. As I wrote 10/27/10, in Cuomo has apparently put on back burner investigations of Willets Point, Downtown Brooklyn Partnership lobbying , a New York Times article that day about Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, about to win election as Governor, noted: For example, an investigation into whether the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and some public officials violated lobbying laws in their redevelopment efforts is still unresolved after two years. (Mr. Bloomberg last month endorsed Mr. Cuomo’s campaign for governor.) That referred to Cuomo's investigation of questionable lobbying by the Flushing-Willets Point-Corona Local Develop...