State Board to Park Slope: 10 Years, 25 Years, What's the Diff?

Fifteen years of additional construction will have no further impact on area residents, according to a Thursday vote by the state agency that oversees the Atlantic Yards project. 

Robin Stout, an attorney for the Empire State Development Corporation, told the board that the agency's staff found that "further modification to an outside date of 2035 would not result in any new or substantially different significant impacts than those addressed" in the first environmental impact study.

Owned by developer Bruce Ratner, the Atlantic Yards Project is a 22-acre, 16-tower development that stretches from the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues back to Vanderbilt Avenue.

Residents have been trying — unsuccessfully — to hault the project since 2003. But last month Supreme Court Judge Marcy Friedman ruled that the ESDC intentionally hid their calculation that construction could take up to 25 years to avoid having to do another impact study, something that is required when the project's parameters change.

An ESDC spokesman says the board never hid the possibility the project would take 25-years, though the board's belief that the project would be likely to only take 10 years has been more prominent in construction plans.

Friedman will hold a hearing Dec. 22 on a request by the neighborhood group Brooklyn Speaks to temporarly halt construction.

Before the vote, a handful of local activists pleaded with the board to put themselves in area residents' shoes.

"I ask that you take this very seriously and not just rubberstamp whatever it is that Forest City Ratner wants you to do," said Tracy Collins, a photographer who lives nearly on top of the project on Dean Street between Sixth and Carlton avenues.

"It is inconceivable to think that something that lasts 10 years rather than 25 years would have the same impact," he added.

Several area residents complained of unbearable noise and traffic problems from the construction, which they say are exacerbated by a lack of oversight and enforcement of rules designed to limit the construction's impact. 

Construction workers park their cars on the sidewalk on Sixth Avenue, causing trucks to have to inch back into Sixth Avenue when the leave the site, blocking traffic and causing frequent beeping, Wayne Bailey, who lives across from the project in the Newswalk Building on Pacific Street.

Prospect Heights resident Patti Hagan, one of the first people to take on the fight against the project, was particularly vehement in her speech.

"Do you, ESDC people, have any responsibility, any shame, for the actions you have taken with regard to this? …  I wonder how you can present your analysis today against a new environmental impact statement and not factor in the blighting, totally disruptive effects of a 25-year buildout on what had been a stable and coherent community. I think you have an obligation to go back to the drawing board," she concluded.

But while the nearly unanimous vote (with one person recusing himself ) was expected, what was unexpected was a glimmer of sympathy from Joyce Miller, who joined the board a few months ago, Prospect Heights activists said.

"Having lived next to a construction site for a number of years, I am sympathetic," she said. She went on to ask Stout if all construction regulations regarding hours and other quality-of-life regulations were being followed. (Stout said yes.)

Afterward, Miller said she lives on the Upper West Side next to Riverside South, the sprawling development formerly owned by Donald Trump between 59th and 72nd streets.

"I know the problems that are involved," said Miller, a consultant specializing in infrastructure financing.

"I'm not against big projects, I think they are the city's future," she said, "but they have to be done with consideration for the area residents."