February 24, 2005
Miller vows to block Jets stadium funds
Throw another log on the New York Jets stadium controversy: city council speaker (and mayoral candidate) Gifford Miller, in his State of the City speech today, said he'll introduce legislation to require council approval of any stadium spending. Said Miller:
Over the last year, the Mayor has tried to pull an end run around this Council to get approval for his stadium. Heís sought to bypass the people's elected legislature by backdoor approvals through obscure and unaccountable state bureaucracies. He's tried to arrange a massive expenditure of public funds without any oversight from the City's publicly elected representatives.So I will introduce legislation to stop the Mayor's plan to finance the stadium through a slush fund and make sure that every public dollar our City spends goes through our public budget process.
The question now is: Can he do it? The Bloomberg slush fund, you'll recall, is a plan to divert payments in lieu of property taxes (PILOTs) paid by developers to the city's Industrial Development Agency, before they reach the city treasury. Despite poring over the General Municipal Law and the city charter, some of the best minds in city politics are still baffled as to whether this would be legal. If it is legal, though, there would seem to be little the council could do to stop it (the IDA is authorized under state law, and the city charter can effectively only be changed with approval of the mayor); and if it isn't legal, then the council doesn't need legislation, it needs to file a lawsuit.
I posed these questions to Miller's office this afternoon; as of the end of the business day, I still hadn't heard back.
Meanwhile, how the ongoing Jets war is resolved will have a profound impact on New York's other proposed sports subsidies, for the Nets, Yankees and Mets. I take a look at some of the parallels - including the possibility of more PILOT slush funds for these projects - in an op-ed in today's Newsday.
