[NYguy]

I'm with Cuomo on this one. I'm sick of these idiots holding everything hostage, and settling for nothing.



https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-e...icle1-headline

Cuomo likely to steer Amazon project around City Council
Plan would allow governor, tech giant to bypass Queens councilman

DANIEL GEIGER
November 9, 2018

The Cuomo administration will likely use a controversial planning process to shepherd Amazon's potential headquarters in Queens around the normal city review, Crain's has learned.

Several sources familiar with the negotiations to bring the tech giant to a sprawling office and mixed-use campus around Anable Basin on the Long Island City waterfront say the state is planning to create a general project plan to rezone the roughly 20-acre site, which today can only accommodate low-rise manufacturing uses.

That would give the state the authority to remake the area without having to secure approval from the City Council, which usually holds power over major development projects in need of a rezoning.

The general project plan still requires an environmental review, allows the community to comment in a public forum and is subject to nonbinding input from the City Planning Commission and the local community board.

The approach was used on controversial development projects such as Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards, which also drew scrutiny for using eminent domain to make way for a large arena—now the Barclays Center—and more than a dozen residential and mixed-use buildings. The advantage for Gov. Andrew Cuomo is that the Amazon project could not be held hostage by Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, per the council's tradition of deferring to the local member on rezonings.

"I'm not just surprised, I'm angry," said Van Bramer. "I think it would be shocking if this was done in a way that bypassed the city land-use review process. This is the most top-down approach to a project I have seen so far, with no community involvement. This is the governor and the mayor and [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos sitting in a room together.

According to several sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal with Amazon is still in negotiations, the $800 billion tech giant is focused on a large site owned by the plastics company Plaxall Inc. and on two large adjacent sites owned by the city that officials had previously sought to redevelop into a technology innovation center.

Plaxall had already begun moving forward with plans to rezone its sites to allow for the construction of 5,000 apartments along with mixed-use space like light industrial and retail and a large public esplanade that would ring the basin. It released a draft of its proposal for the site last year, when the company was planning to gear up for the city's review process, known as Ulurp. The declaration of a general project plan would allow the sites to be transformed into a campus of millions of square feet of state-of-the-art office space, apartments and mixed-use space, potentially denser than the City Council might otherwise endorse at a time when there has been public pushback against large-scale development and Amazon in particular.

"A general project plan would streamline a major project like this and is the most efficient regulatory structure to deal with the entitlement issues and the environmental review," said Mitch Korbey, chair of land use at Herrick Feinstein. "This is precisely the kind of project that GPPs are for."

Some sources speculated that cutting Van Bramer out of the process would be a form of retaliation against the Queens Democrat, who endorsed Cynthia Nixon over Cuomo in the Democratic primary for governor this year.

The city also had backed off recent plans to rezone areas of Long Island City after Van Bramer chaffed at the proposal—although that rezoning may now be poised to advance again, sources said.