Court orders ESDC to consider whether extended timetable for project’s completion requires supplemental environmental review. In 2006, the Empire State Development Corporation approved the general project plan for Forest City Ratner Companies’ Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. The $4 billion project includes a sports arena and sixteen high-rise buildings. Ratner agreed to purchase air rights from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the beginning of the project in order to facilitate the development of six of the buildings. The project’s environmental review assumed a tenyear build out for the project and a completion date of 2016.

In June 2009, Ratner and the MTA renegotiated the terms of their agreement to permit Ratner to acquire the air rights over a fifteenyear period extending to 2030. In September 2009, ESDC adopted the project’s modified general project plan. ESDC continued to assume a ten-year build out with an estimated project completion date of 2019, and concluded that no additional environmental review was required. Two community groups, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn and the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, challenged ESDC’s adoption of the modified general project plan. The groups claimed that ESDC ignored the impacts of the renegotiated MTA agreement on the project’s time frame for construction and should have concluded that additional environmental review was warranted. (read more…)

Albert K. Butzel

Albert K. Butzel did everything he could to avoid going to law school. After graduating from Harvard College, Butzel spent a year in Paris trying to become, as he put it, Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. He made a deal with his father, who was an attorney, that he would go to law school if he did not succeed as a fiction writer. About a year later, Butzel enrolled at Harvard Law School.

Having grown up in the rural town of Birmingham, Michigan, Butzel had a natural predilection for the open country that soon turned into an interest in land use law. At Harvard, he took a summer job with Professor Charles Haar, an authority on land use law. Together, they analyzed the zoning regulations of various state governments. (read more…)

Residents argued that the project’s public uses were illegitimate. The $4 billion Atlantic Yards project calls for an 18,000-seat arena for the Nets professional basketball team, a 180- room hotel, at least 16 high-rise apartment and office buildings, and eight acres of open space. The project site includes the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area, as well as surrounding areas developed by commercial and residential structures. The project calls for the Empire State Development Corporation to condemn private land for the project by eminent domain. 5 CityLand 16 (Feb. 15, 2008).

Brooklyn residents filed a lawsuit in federal court, arguing that the proposed condemnation would not serve a public use because it would benefit private developer Forest City Ratner. (read more…)

Dolly Williams’ vote to approve Brooklyn rezoning conflicted with her investment in the Nets. On November 27, 2007, the Conflicts of Interest Board fined City Planning Commissioner Dolly Williams $4,000 for failing to recuse herself from a May 2004 vote on a rezoning plan that benefited her investment in the Atlantic Yards Project in Downtown Brooklyn.

The Downtown Brooklyn Plan sought to encourage commercial and residential development in Downtown Brooklyn, including areas within the footprint of the Atlantic Yards Project, a $4 billion private development plan that includes an arena for the New Jersey Nets. 3 CityLand 135 (Oct. 15, 2006). (read more…)