Last March, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood together and proudly announced an agreement with the Jets to build a US$1.4-billion football stadium on the far West Side of Manhattan.
The deal immediately drew fire from neighborhood groups, other elected officials and, most loudly, the owners of Madison Square Garden, who were upset to hear of a competing sports facility rising nearby.
PHOTO: AP
But both the mayor and the governor vowed to fight to the end to get the stadium built, demonstrating a kinship of economic and political interests rarely shared by Albany and City Hall. But just seven months later, Bloomberg has largely been standing alone.
While officials from both City Hall and Albany say that aides to both of the Republican leaders have made substantial progress pushing the deal forward over the last two weeks, the public face of the stadium battle belongs to the mayor.
It is Bloomberg who makes the weekly case for the stadium, both to the public and to officials in Albany, who are needed to see the stadium through, while Pataki has remained largely silent.
And it is Bloomberg who is taking the heat from stadium opponents around the state. In the most visible example, a television advertisement paid for by Madison Square Garden produced by a longtime political strategist for Pataki essentially calls Bloomberg a liar.
"This stadium is really seen as so the mayor's thing," said Christine Quinn, a councilman from Manhattan who has led the fight against the stadium. Quinn is a member of a group called New Yorkers for Better Choices, which has held several news conferences questioning the mayor's plan to use US$300 million in city funds for the stadium.
In attacking the stadium, the group never mentions the governor's name, even though the state has committed the same amount of money.
"The general feeling is that the mayor talked the governor into this one," Quinn said.
The Madison Square Garden ad so infuriated the mayor and his aides that Bloomberg has called the Garden owners, the Dolan family, liars, "selfish" and a "disgrace," and both City Hall and Jets officials have grumbled that Pataki could have put a stop to it.
When asked on Friday about the fact that the ads were produced by Arthur Finkelstein, who is one of Pataki's political allies, Edward Skyler, the mayor's press secretary, would not comment.
Noticably absent
Even some of Pataki's allies were surprised by his lack of visibility on the stadium issue, seeing it as a reversal of the tacit agreements the two men made long ago: Pataki would take the lead and credit for rebuilding Lower Manhattan, while Bloomberg would pin his legacy to development of the far West Side.
In recent weeks, the mayor and the governor's staff have begun to huddle to try to get the stadium deal completed. "We support the mayor, and we want this stadium to get done," said Lisa Stoll, Pataki's spokesman. Stoll said that Pataki's support for the stadium has never wavered.
"We want the mayor to get the credit for championing this stadium," she said. "But we are his partner in this. The governor has been fighting for this stadium, and he will like to do whatever he can to be helpful."
But one pro-stadium lobbyist who spoke on the condition of anonymity said another round of meetings was not enough.
"A deal of this magnitude can't be worked out by underlings," he said. "There is not a lot of command focus because the governor is focused on Lower Manhattan."
But a senior aide to the governor said Pataki's inner circle met on Thursday and expects to present the stadium plan to the Empire State Development Corporation Board for approval within "the next couple of weeks." That would be an important step for the stadium, but a number of hurdles remain.
Bloomberg tends to focus on single issues and talk about them over and over until he gets his way, and he has made the Jets stadium his choice cause of 2004.
Olympic dreams
Since March, he has held several news conferences in which he mentioned the stadium's potential role in a 2012 Olympics in the city. He has told anyone who would listen that New York's bid for the Olympics is doomed without prompt approval of the stadium.
Bloomberg recently attended a rally with trade unions that support the stadium plan, but Pataki has attended no rallies or news conferences about the stadium since March. The governor's aides noted that he was not invited to the recent union rally.
Further, the Jets have complained to Bloomberg and Pataki officials that the governor has not pushed Peter S. Kalikow, the man Pataki appointed to head the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to compromise on his demand that the Jets or the city pay him full value for the development rights over the West Side railyards, at a cost of up to US$700 million. The city and the Jets had hoped to resolve the issue with the MTA months ago. Officials at the MTA, who are seeking billions of dollars from the state for capital improvements while warning of another fare increase, do not want to face legislators who might complain of a sweetheart deal for the stadium property.
"We can't give away assets for less than full value," Kalikow said. "The governor has done what he's going to do. I don't know if there's a larger role for him than keeping me at the negotiating table."
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