Is the
New York City Economic Development Corporation
(EDC) cooking up different sets of job numbers for the City Point project depending on its audience?
Conflicting figures in hearings, meetings, official documents, and the press over the past week are cause for some raised eyebrows at the very least.
City Point
is a large mixed-use project planned for Downtown Brooklyn that was just approved for $20 million in tax-free financing in the form of
Recovery Zone Facility Bonds
(RZFBs), a new program created by the federal stimulus bill (ARRA). The bonds are intended to finance the project’s first phase, consisting of 184,000 square feet of retail space.
Brooklyn activists
testified against the deal
at a September 10 public hearing on grounds that EDC is failing to leverage the subsidies to ensure jobs will pay a living wage, provide benefits, and go to local residents. Activists also want to see 10 percent of space in the new facility set aside and made affordable for small businesses that were displaced to make way for City Point.
But it’s hard to stay focused on issues of job quality when you have to spend time sorting through the different claims on job numbers.
Here’s a breakdown:
Those who testified on the project did so based on a formal
cost/benefit analysis
posted on EDC’s website shortly before the hearing. In these documents, EDC projected that City Point will create 68 new permanent jobs and 108 construction jobs during the first phase of construction. (This round of bonds is only intended to finance the first phase, not the entire development.)
Less than a week later, on September 15, EDC staff told New York City Capital Resource Corporation (CRC) board members who were to vote on the allocation that the project would generate 208 permanent jobs and 328 construction jobs. (CRC is part of EDC.) According to EDC, these higher numbers incorporate jobs projected for a later phase of the project that has nothing to do with the current bond allocation, but which they believe will be indirectly catalyzed by completion of the first phase.
A majority of CRC board members
voted to approve
the financing.
EDC also touted the bigger numbers to the media, though a typo in their September 15 press release on the project explains why Amanda Fung reported in
Crain’s New York Business
that City Point would create 108 (rather than 208) permanent jobs, and 328 construction jobs.
These inconsistencies look especially bad in light of passionate participation at the three and a half hour hearing on September 10. Turnout was impressive. There was real debate. It was democracy in action.
But the EDC’s handling of these numbers undermines that process.
It’s misleading for EDC to promote figures that were not included in its official analysis, and that the public wasn’t given. Shouldn’t board members vote on the project based on the same numbers furnished to the public?