Governor Kathy's Garden Party on the Hudson is a load of crap.

  

Buffalo Chronicle

Governor Kathy Hochul is preparing to relocate Madison Square Garden to a permanent new home on the site of Dewitt Clinton Park, a 5.8 acre city park in a trendy section of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River between 52nd and 54th Streets.  The relocation of the nearly 20,000-seat multi-use arena event center is intended to accelerate Hochul’s sweeping improvement plan for Penn Station, which sits under the 60s-era venue that critics have always lamented as congested and misplaced.

The Governor believes that the new arena’s construction could be completed in as little as three years, and she wants to hire a ‘star architect’ with deep ties to New York to begin designing the facility as soon as possible.  Hochul envisions that the arena will ‘sit on-top’ of glassy television studios at street level, which she hopes that businessman James Dolan will populate with nationally-broadcasted sports and entertainment programming on MSG’s television network.

Many of the studio spaces will include in-studio audiences and others will overlook the Hudson River.  Hochul believes that national programing will help improve the city’s image, believing that New York City’s waterfront has gone under-appreciated in the national consciousness.

“The new arena is expected to be a super-modern, super-comfortable venue in a corner of Manhattan that is very centrally located but doesn’t feel as hyper-congested and gritty as the 33rd Street location,” an official with Empire State Development explains.  “The new arena’s construction cost is expected to cost New York State taxpayers $800 million, which is the estimated fair market cost of using eminent domain to acquire MSG’s interests in the property.”

Dolan, the longtime CEO of MSG, prefers to collaborate with the Hochul administration, and is likely to ink a public-private partnership deal in order to avoid a costly drawn-out litigation with the State.

Hochul is willing to use eminent domain to acquire the park from the City, but believes she will have the endorsement of Mayor Eric Adams — who shares her goal of expediting transit and public space improvements at Penn Station.  While Adams is concerned about the loss of public space in the neighborhood, Hochul plans to replace the 5.8 acres of public space by acquiring and redeveloping additional piers as park space along the Hudson River in the immediate vicinity of the facility.

The facility will accommodate boxing, mixed martial arts, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, and national concert tours.

The old Madison Square Garden will be demolished and it’s 250,000-square-foot site between 33rd 31st Streets will be repurposed as a large public square that will sit above Penn Station’s loading platforms and in front of a glassy new entrance atrium that was announced by the Governor last month.

this story is literal fake news — a badly-done satire claiming that Madison Square Garden will be relocated to DeWitt Clinton Park in Hell's Kitchen — but it has all of the neighborhood Facebook groups in a total frenzy.

not great https://t.co/PjjcEJtzvj

— Nick Garber (@nick_garber) January 13, 2022

This post is for all you readers of Queens Crap that pay property taxes in this state

Gothamist


Governor Andrew Cuomo's latest pitch to expand Penn Station is an overflowing grab bag of promises to commuters and city residents to improve what the governor called in his budget speech yesterday the station’s “seven levels of hell”. The governor is proposing 40 percent more train capacity, airier concourses and unspecified new development in a "cohesive transit-oriented district." 

The plan also boasts an accordingly mammoth price tag: $8 billion to buy up an entire block of Midtown property, according to one estimate, most of which Cuomo hasn't yet identified specific funds for beyond the idea of siphoning off future retail rents and property taxes.

Meanwhile, sitting atop the now-buried train station is one of the state's biggest poster children for corporate tax giveaways: Madison Square Garden, which thanks to a state law passed at the behest of then-mayor Ed Koch in 1982 has now gone 37 consecutive years without paying property taxes. 

The total cost in lost revenue to the city over that time period is now $555 million, according to the latest calculations by the city's Independent Budget Office. If current property value trends continue, MSG's total tax break could clear $1 billion by 2030.

It's an alarmingly high figure, made even more so by the fact that the tax break, first proposed by Koch in order to encourage the Knicks and Rangers to renovate rather than moving to New Jersey, was, according to the mayor, initially supposed to end after just ten years. ("I went to bed at night believing it was a 10-year abatement," Koch told the Times years later.)

In the decades since, MSG's eternal tax break has become a white whale for budget reformers and enraged Knicks fans alike; possible repeal has become a recurring feature of IBO's annual budget options documents offering ways to saving the city money.

Asked for an explanation of the continued need for the tax break, a Madison Square Garden spokesperson provided this statement to Gothamist: "We appreciate that people have their opinions about our location, but the truth is that Madison Square Garden’s tax abatement pales in comparison to the billions in public benefits received by the other New York sports venues.”

 The decades-long inaction can partially be explained by the odd nature of the tax break: It's the city losing tax revenue as a result, but the city council has no say over state law. While the state legislature could repeal the law at any time, it's under little pressure to do so given that none of the money would go toward filling state budget holes.

And then, there is the considerable pressure the legislature is likely under from Cuomo, who has long counted MSG owner James Dolan and his family as major campaign donors, though that seems to be on the wane since they sold off Cablevision to Dutch telecom giant Altice for $17.7 billion in 2016. (Then-MSG business partner Irving Azoff did give $10,000 to Cuomo's reelection campaign in 2017, and MSG itself is a regular donor to both Democratic and Republican state legislative campaign committees.)

 

Progress at Farley, but what about Penn?

From PIX11:

The 106-year-old Farley Post Office Building is across the avenue from the busy transit center. New entrances have opened in the facility that lead to railroads.

A big project has been underway since 2016 and it is scheduled to open in 2020.

The new train hall will feature new platforms and tracks for LIRR and Amtrak and there will be commercial space.

From The Real Deal:

The City Council and James Dolan’s Madison Square Garden Company appear to be headed toward another clash over plans to relocate the iconic sports stadium.

Madison Square Garden is now at the midway point of the 10-year timetable the city laid out in 2013 for the stadium to relocate and make way for a modern Penn Station.

But with five years left on its special operating permit, MSG appears to have taken no significant steps toward what would be a years-long process of acquiring a new site and constructing a new stadium.

“We have not provided any public information” on the matter, MSG spokesperson Kimberly Kerns told The Real Deal.

Stakeholders such as the Regional Plan Association and the Municipal Arts Society that have called for the Garden to move said they have not been informed of any plans to do so. Madison Square Garden has not filed an application with the City Planning Commission to extend its special permit, and sources said the City Council hasn’t been made aware of the stadium’s future plans.

The City Council made it clear five years ago that it expected MSG to be gone by 2023, but a Council spokesperson would not say whether the legislative body expected the Garden to stick to the deadline.

Music festivals not coming to FMCP next year

From the Times Ledger:

The city Parks Department Monday denied applications from three entertainment giants hoping to use Flushing Meadows Corona Park for music festivals this summer after opposition from Borough President Melinda Katz. Madison Square Garden, AEG Live and Founders Entertainment were seeking to close off large portions of the park in order to stage for-profit, multi-day events, but were denied permits for the second year in a row.

“Without a fair policy in place, I remain opposed to any applications from for-profit organizations to run paid-admission events in Flushing Meadows Corona Park,” Katz said last week. “The absence of a revised policy, including a set selection criteria and process approved by the community, renders the process arbitrary and unfair. Cutting off public access to our treasured parks flies in the face of the very principle behind our parks, which is space designated for public access and equity.”

Parks had no further comment and AEG Live could not be reached, but Tom Russell, co-founder and partner of Founders Entertainment, understood Katz’s opposition.

What happened to Moynihan Station?

From the NY Times:

The owners of Madison Square Garden have been given an ultimatum: Make life more bearable for the hundreds of thousands of commuters who shuffle daily through the corridors of Pennsylvania Station crammed beneath the arena or face eviction.

The New York City Planning Commission voted unanimously on Wednesday to extend the Garden’s operating permit for 15 years, during which time the arena’s owners could either make plans to move or substantially improve the transportation hub.

“The best possible outcomes for the city would be a relocated Madison Square Garden coupled with a rebuilt Penn Station,” said Amanda M. Burden, the city’s planning commissioner.

The vote was the latest chapter in a continuing campaign that has been waged on and off for the last 50 years, ever since the original Penn Station was torn down. The destruction of that elegant station prompted a landmarks preservation movement that has saved numerous historical treasures in the city and across the nation.

MSG gets $16M in tax breaks that won't end under Cuomo

MSG Press Release by Queens Crapper

From the Daily News:

Gov. Cuomo said he opposes efforts to revoke a lucrative city property tax hike for Madison Square Garden.

“I haven’t heard any argument that’s convincing for eliminating that,” Cuomo said Tuesday.

At an earlier press conference, Assemblyman David Weprin and Sen. James Sanders, both Queens Democrats, said they are pushing the bill to revoke the three-decade-old tax credit that saves the Garden an estimated $16 million a year because the cash-strapped city can use the money more than a rich corporation.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver told the Daily News Monday that getting rid of the tax break would be “troubling.”

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg had no comment.

Common Cause/New York released an analysis that showed Cablevision, which purchased the Garden in 1994 but spun it off into a separate company in 2010 with the Dolans retaining a controlling interest in both companies, is a major campaign contributor to Cuomo and other key officials.

Cuomo, the top individual recipient of Cablevision donations since 2005, has received $359,150 as governor an additional $50,100 as attorney general from the company.

Former Cuomo aide Irene Baker last year left the administration to join MSG as its senior vice president for government affairs.

From CBS New York:

Silver told the News the deal is to encourage development.

The tax break has been in place since 1982.

1) Yes, developers need to be "encouraged."

2) MSG is already developed.

3) If the tax break is eliminated, they won't be going anywhere.

4) Cuomo is a bullsh*t reformer.

The Doorman vs. the Dolans

From the Daily News:

A city council member says it's time for Madison Square Garden's massive tax break to go the way of the New York Americans hockey team.

The historic arena's longstanding, multimillion-dollar property tax exemption is "questionable at any time - and unjustifiable in these difficult economic times," Councilman Eric Gioia (D-Queens) told the Daily News Saturday.

Sunday, the estimated $14 million a year the Garden would pay in taxes could be used to hire cops and teachers and provide public services, Gioia said.

I suppose the same could be said for the tax exemptions being given to developers along the part of the waterfront he represents. I'm sure he'll also be vehemently against the big huge breaks and discounted land to be offered to TDC at Willets Point, too. Or is his outrage only directed toward owners of Manhattan properties with high name recognition in an election year?