Communities: Public Review

One of the most contentious issues surrounding the Atlantic Yards project is the decision to bypass the City’s Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP), a procedure requiring extensive public review. Instead, “under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQR), the economic development agencies of the city and state have designated a state agency, the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), as the lead agency to conduct the project’s approval process.

New York City’s local approval process, ULURP, requires public hearings to be held by community boards, the borough president, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council. The City Council may either approve or disapprove a project, subject to Mayoral veto. The State process, which applies to ESDC projects, requires environmental review but less public participation and no local approvals. Control is vested in a state agency and in the governor, senate majority leader, and assembly speaker, leaving the ultimate fate of the project up to officials in Albany, rather than in City Hall. 

Critics and independent observers alike express misgiving at the project’s avoidance of ULURP. Jeremy Soffin, Director of Public Affairs at the Regional Plan Association, an independent, not-for-profit organization that has not yet taken an official position on the project, said, “It is worrying that you could build something of this scale without substantial public input.”

Daniel Goldstein, a spokesperson for the opposition organization Develop Don’t Destroy, had harsher words for the Atlantic Yards approval process: “The process is a joke. The people writing the Environmental Impact Statement are not treating the process as an opportunity for public input. They are covering their bases, basically.”

Proponents of the project, however, such as Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development (BUILD), claim that critics of the SEQR process are only playing politics. A statement on their website reads, “The opposition has adopted a strategy of promoting this city level review process instead of the state level public review process as a tactic to [block] the implementation of the Atlantic Yards project.”

The legal justification for the project to be exempt from the City Charter-required ULURP process is that the 22-acre site rests, in part, on land owned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the state-affiliated public authority that runs the region’s public transportation system. Because the property is effectively state-owned, it is not subject to local laws and regulations. 

The MTA also owns the Hudson Yards, the site of the unsuccessful West Side development plan that would have hosted a football stadium for the Jets. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver eventually gave that project a fate-sealing “no” vote in his seat on the Public Authorities Control Board. The Atlantic Yards project will go before the same board as early as July 2006.

The two projects’ avoidance of ULURP has raised eyebrows over whether or not a practice of avoiding local public review of large-scale developments has arisen. “There is definitely a trend to move large development projects as far away from public input as possible,” Goldstein said.

However, Soffin said that the State’s role in developing MTA-owned land over both the Atlantic Yards and Hudson Yards makes it “a unique situation in that regard.” He also noted that the circumnavigation of ULURP does not mean that public opinion is irrelevant to realizing large-scale development plans. Neighborhood voices are heard at both the local and state levels. “The lesson from the West Side is: to reach approval in Albany, you need to win over public opinion at the local level,” Soffin said.