Every which way but loose

Pro-stadium forces in New York are scrambling in the wake of Monday’s negative Public Authorities Control Board vote, and as anticipated, they’re scrambling in every direction at once:

• The Jets say they might now wait for the city to rezone the West Side rail yards, in a last-ditch attempt to keep their $2.2 billion Manhattan stadium plans alive. DRAWBACKS: They’d still need to find an additional $300 million in funds to replace what the state was supposed to contribute, plus somebody to sell the $450 million worth of tax-exempt bonds that the state was to have taken on. Even if the city council agrees to the rezoning, it could take up to a year to get final approval, during which time the Jets could lose the opportunity to go in with the Giants on a stadium in New Jersey instead. If state assembly speaker Sheldon Silver kills the #7 subway line extension as threatened, Jets fans would have no way of getting to the new stadium even if it were built. And finally, if the Jets don’t wrap up their stadium plans by the end of the year, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority says it may put its property up for bid again.

• Mayor Michael Bloomberg, meanwhile, declared the West Side stadium “history” yesterday on his radio show. (Not surprising, given that the stadium brouhaha appears to have cost him his lead in the polls for this fall’s mayoral race.) Bloomberg said he’ll instead focus on maintaining tax breaks for office and residential development in the Hudson Yards zone. DRAWBACKS: Since the commercial development is what Silver was objecting to in the first place, this seems a sure way to prompt a veto of the subway extension. And as Jeremy Soffin of the Regional Plan Assocation noted, “it’s safe to say there won’t be significant commercial development there for a while” without a subway line.

• The city’s Olympic committee appears to be focusing elsewhere entirely, reportedly setting its sights on Queens as a fallback plan to resuscitate its 2012 bid. (That sound you just heard was Brian Hatch cheering.) The New York Times reports that NYC2012 is considering either retrofitting Shea Stadium as an Olympic venue, or building a temporary stadium nearby that would then be torn down to make way for a new Mets stadium. DRAWBACKS: No one knows how much a temporary Olympic stadium would cost, or for that matter how a new Mets stadium would be paid for. And while an Olympic-sized track could be shoehorned into Shea, the sightlines would be less than ideal in a circular facility designed for baseball and football.