Be afraid, be very afraid, of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ambition to wrest control of planning authority for the Penn Station area from City Hall — despite his pretending to have backed off from it.
Improving miserable Penn Station certainly belongs on Cuomo’s agenda. Albany has much more money and clout to modernize it than the city does, even though the state has mostly failed for decades to accomplish it.
But Albany has no business butting into the thriving, if not particularly beautiful, commercial zone around it. Cuomo’s notion to promote large-scale office development to help pay for a new Penn Station is absurd in a district where there’s zero demand for new office towers.
Worse, it promises corrupt dealmaking of the kind to which New York voters are all too inured.
It’s true that Cuomo’s spending proposal, approved by the Legislature late last Friday night, made no mention of giving the Empire State Development Corp. condemnation power or the right to override city zoning laws. But excluding Cuomo’s previously declared ideas was merely a tactical retreat following an outcry by lawmakers and business groups.
In fact, the “Pennsylvania Station Public Safety Improvement Act” tucked into the budget made it clear that Cuomo has hardly given up. Making unspecified changes to the station “is a major objective for the state to resolve and should be made a top priority,” it said.
Sure, it said the state “should coordinate and consult” with the community, business groups and federal and city government. But it also said, ominously, “the state will provide funds to UDC [Urban Development Corp., the legal name for the ESDC] to begin with the planning of any such redevelopment.”
That automatically puts Albany in the driver’s seat, because ESDC has all the authority it needs to run roughshod over the city and local businesses. It can buy out owners of “blighted” (a highly subjective term) properties and demolish them. It can hand out tax breaks to developers willing to play ball.
Although the spending bill made no mention of eminent domain, the words appeared on a slide show presentation Cuomo gave at the Capitol last Friday.
Meanwhile, Cuomo is big-time beholden to owners of major properties in the area.
Real-estate giant Vornado (which is working with Related Cos. to redesign the Farley Post Office building across the street from Penn Station into a shops-filled passengers’ facility) owns 9 million square feet of commercial property in the district, including two office towers and the Hotel Pennsylvania.
Vornado chairman Steve Roth and his wife, Daryl Roth, have donated over $344,000 to Cuomo election campaigns since 2007, including $95,000 to Cuomo’s re-election campaign in 2016.
There’s nothing wrong with that. But Steve Roth has never gone ahead with his long-held dream to knock down the Pennsylvania Hotel for a super-tall office tower because no tenant was willing to sign on for it. A state agency with authority to reshape the neighborhood could change that, no matter what impact it might have on everything else nearby.
Hello, conflict of interest?
Then there’s Madison Square Garden, which sits right on top of Penn Station. Its operating permit with the city has only seven more years to run and its future after that has been a subject of heated debate.
Garden CEO James Dolan channeled more than $500,000 to Cuomo’s campaigns through subsidiaries of his former company Cablevision. Plus, Cuomo’s former top aide Joseph Percoco, recently convicted on federal corruption charges, held the title of senior vice president at Madison Square Garden Co. until early this year.
Hello again, conflict of interest!
Businesses and residents around Penn Station had better be on guard for their interests — or they’ll find their neighborhood pulled out from under them.
