April 06, 2005
Lawsuits! Getcher lawsuits!
As expected, Cablevision has filed suit against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's sale of its West Side rail yards to the New York Jets, charging that the agency violated its "legal and fiduciary duties" by doing so. (Among the specific charges: That the MTA accepted a lower bid, that it accepted a bid contigent on zoning changes after previously saying that was against bidding rules, and that it did not allow enough time for bids.) In an interesting twist, the suit includes an affadavit from former MTA chair Richard Ravitch calling the bid process illegal - Ravitch has become one of the plan's more prominent opponents of late, getting to play naysayer to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's stadium boosting in a lengthy (though not especially revelatory) article in last week's New Yorker.
Across the Hudson, meanwhile, the New York Giants fired their own legal salvo, suing the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority to stop construction of the neighboring Xanadu entertainment complex and force the authority to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain Giants Stadium as "state of the art," as required in the team's lease. As the state already sued the Giants over these issues after new-stadium talks broke down last month, this isn't expected to change things much - and, in fact, Jersey sports czar George Zoffinger declared: "I welcome the Giants' lawsuit. Now an independent third party will settle once and for all the state-of-the-art issue."
