Less than two weeks before a decision is made as to who will be the U.S. candidate for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games there is opposition to New York’s 2012 bid from several community groups.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that some New York citizens are complaining the proposed $1.6 billion Olympic Village is a huge construction program that would be needed to bring the Games to New York and could disrupt life for years and be ruinously expensive.
John Fisher of the Clinton Special District Coalition, a neighbourhood group located in the Hells Kitchen area on the West Side of Manhattan where the Olympic Stadium would be built, told the newspaper “we’re not against sports. We’re against the impact the Olympics would bring”.
The newspaper reports that central to New York’s bid is an ambitious development plan for the West Side, an area referred to by bid director Jay Kriegel as “desolate, a wasteland” and “the last frontier of Manhattan”.
According to the newspaper the area is not served by mass transit so there is a proposed extension of the No. 7 subway line from Times Square which would cost $1.5 billion. Critics say that if the city is going to spend that kind of money on mass transit, it should instead extend the subway along Second Avenue, where a lot more people live and work.
To pay for the West Side development, bonds would be sold and paid off through future tax collections. Twenty million square feet of office space in the proposed West Side development area would be needed to build a tax base capable of paying off the bonds over the next 30 years.
Fisher added, “like any tool, it might work well. If not, it’s a disaster. That’s one big problem. (The repayment plan) presumes there will be predictable development over a period of years. They don’t take advantage of real estate cycles and trends”.
Neil de Mause, author of “Field of Schemes”, a book about stadium construction and “creative” financing in U.S. cities, said of the plan, “to be generous, it’s an ambitious plan. To not be generous, it’s a potential mess. Speaking as a New Yorker I’d be perfectly happy for San Francisco to get the bid. It seems like San Francisco would have less disruption”.
Another bone of contention for some community groups is the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park area of Queens, the proposed venue for tennis, rowing and whitewater canoeing.
There are plans to drain two adjoining lakes in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Meadow and Willow to create one large body of water for rowing, canoe, kayak and whitewater events. Bid officials say the lakes are polluted anyway, so a new, man-made lake would be an improvement.
Pat Dolan of the Queens Civic Congress, a coalition of 105 neighbourhood groups in the borough agreed that the lakes were polluted and said, “if they want to clean them up, we’ll welcome that. But they want to join the two lakes and turn them into a giant bathtub”.
He said construction of the unified lake would almost certainly imperil one or more of the park’s “world-class soccer fields used by people in the neighbourhood. These are beautiful soccer fields. There’s no way they put a whitewater facility there without tearing up a field or two”.
