January 06, 2005
MSG to council: Make illegal stadium scheme illegal
In today's battlin' billionaire news, Cablevision (owner of Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks and Rangers) is asking the New York city council to pass a law blocking the city from spending money on a Jets football stadium without council approval. Cablevision lawyer Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani, told the New York Times that the city's rumored plan to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars in "payments in lieu of taxes," or PILOTs, paid by developers to the mayoral-controlled Industrial Development Authority would be both "unprecedented" and "illegal."
Unprecented, certainly; illegal, as I've discussed here previously, it's still hard to say. Also hard to say is whether the council has the power to block a PILOT scheme (council speaker Giff Miller, displaying his typical decisiveness, said he'd look into "what our legislative and legal authority is"), despite the fact that using existing PILOT revenues would raid the city's general fund - something, incidentally, that Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office has repeatedly promised the Jets stadium wouldn't do. More on this as things become clearer, if that ever happens...
