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…)