Atlantic Yards,State Agency Over Atlantic Yards Timetable,Judge Rebukes State Agency Over Atlantic Yards Timetable

Judge Rebukes State Agency Over Atlantic Yards Timetable

It comes too late to halt construction, but a judge has issued a stinging rebuke to the state agency overseeing the $5 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, finding that it made “totally incomplete representations” in legal papers about how long it would take the project to get built, in “what appears to be yet another failure of transparency.”
On Tuesday, the judge, Marcy S. Friedman of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, ordered the agency, the Empire State Development Corporation, to justify its decision to require only a 10-year environmental impact statement. The agency’s own agreement with the developer, Forest City Ratner, allows 25 years for construction of the project, which includes a basketball arena, currently being built, and 16 residential and commercial towers. Forest City Ratner officials have acknowledged that the 10-year timetable was a best-case scenario.
The ruling, reported by Atlantic Yards Report, came in a challenge by opponents of the project to the agency’s approval of Forest City Ratner’s plan.
Justice Friedman wrote that if the agency concludes that a 10-year timetable continues to be reasonable “and that it need not examine environmental impacts of construction over a 25-year period on neighborhood character, air quality, noise and traffic, among other issues, then it must expressly make such findings and provide a detailed, reasoned basis for the findings.”