The Bloomberg Administration agreed to obliterate one and a half parks (and 400 trees) in the green space-challenged South Bronx with the City’s highest asthma rates in order to provide the Yankee Corporation the land for a new stadium. More and more details about this “deal” keep being revealed and it’s just as murky as you might expect.
The Bloomberg Administration aggressively pursued a bigger luxury suite and gave the Yankees 250 parking spots and three advertising billboards in their push to wrangle this. This is on top of already having given them city (park) land to put their stadium on and allocated taxpayer funds for the questionable rebuilding of the two parks.
The New York Times reported on this Sunday 11/30 in “City Pressed Hard for Use of Yankee Luxury Suite:”
The city’s push for the perks has been known, at least broadly speaking, since Mr. [Richard] Brodsky [New York State Assemblyman] began raising questions earlier this year about the stadium deals for the Yankees and Mets, from whom the city also secured a luxury box. But the e-mail messages offer a revealing snapshot of the behavior and marching orders of the people involved in the deal for the construction of the billion-dollar Yankee Stadium.
Also:
“There’s this ‘Alice in Wonderland’ quality to the question of, what is the public interest here and who’s protecting it?” said Mr. Brodsky, who conducted a hearing on the issue of public financing of sports stadiums this summer. “We can’t find the money for the M.T.A., or schools, or hospitals, and these folks are used to the perks and good things of life, and expect them.”
It’s an interesting read and is quite revealing about the methods of the Bloomberg Administration. At the same time, the city gave so much to the Yankees. It would have been great if they had fought so hard to keep our two Bronx city parks in place. It’s just another example of how arrogant and out of touch Mayor Michael Bloomberg is, always ready to put the wishes of private developers and corporations over people and their communities.
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