Public and city support for a Canal Side CBA in Buffalo; developer and state resistance to negotiations

Despite broad coalition and city council support, the private developer and public sector partner of Buffalo's Canal Side project are still refusing to negotiate a CBA. This probably shouldn't come of much surprise. The project's anchor tenant, Bass Pro, is a well-know subsidy-chaser (or, as some would call it, a tax-dodger) and poverty-wage job supplier. And the quasi-public Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation (ECHDC) is a subsidiary of the New York Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), which has used its power to override local laws and its authority to use eminent domain to facilitate the Columbia University expansion and the Atlantic Yards project. Although both of those projects have CBAs, they also face significant public opposition, and ESDC's involvement has been crucial to overcome that opposition.

This week, reporter James Heaney put up a blog post on Canal Side and its CBA issues. He discusses some of the issues relating to the lack of public bidding, conflicts of interest, and the lack of a democratic process. His conclusion: ECHCD and the project's private partners might want to pursue CBA negotiations, if only to avoid protests opposing "the use of more than $150 million in public funds to create mostly low-wage, part-time jobs. Which is one of several ways reasonable people can view the project."

Previous posts on Canal Side also by Mr. Heaney can be found here, here, and here.

Columbia Spectator on the Manhattanville CBA... but what about the 197-a plan?

The Columbia Spectator published an article last week about the Columbia University CBA, going over the criticisms of the CBA process outlined in the New York City Bar Association's recent report on CBAs. The article does a decent job of recapping the CBA's negotiation, but it leaves out any mention of the preexisting community-based 197-a plan that Columbia basically got the city to throw out (with a whole lot of lobbying). And that's an important consideration in the Columbia case, since it's a lot easier to portray the CBA as community-supported when you leave out the fact that the community's own plan was rejected in favor of different plans put forward by the elite and well-connected university.

Planning conflicts in Pittsburgh

The 2008 Hill District CBA, which covers the new Penguins arena (the Consol Energy Center) in Pittsburgh, included a provision funding the creation of a master plan for the Hill District. The Penguins were supposed to hold off on further development plans so long as the master plan was finished by February, 2010, but the community coalition missed that deadline because of delays in hiring a consultant.

At a community meeting earlier this month, Penguins officials presented preliminary plans for 1,200 units of housing, nearly 100,000 square feet of retail space, and a 150-room hotel. The team's representatives say that their plans are consistent with development principles adopted by the Hill Planning Forum, a group made up of community stakeholders. Nevertheless, Penguins officials are reluctant to give the community a larger role in the development process, and they stated at the meeting that community representatives would not have a role in drafting RFPs (requests for proposals). The Penguins are still planning on delaying submission of their plans until after the Hill District's master plan is completed, but whether this is a sincere attempt to involve the community in the development process isn't clear. As one of the Penguins' officials explained during the meeting, the team doesn't want to involve the community in the RFP process in part because it doesn't want to "impose requirements" on developers.