Community Board 9 voted unanimously for its delegates on the West Harlem Local Development Corporation to turn down Columbia's community benefits agreement for Manhattanville.
At around $150 million, the benefits agreement has been developed over the past several years as part of the University’s campus expansion project into Manhattanville, and designates Columbia funding for affordable housing, building a public school, and other local programs. Drafted with neighborhood representatives who comprise a group called the West Harlem Local Development Corporation, the agreement’s release has been long anticipated.
The purpose of the CB9 executive board vote was to decide on a recommendation for how the two community board members who serve on the local development corporation should vote Tuesday night, when the LDC will vote on whether to accept the CBA. The LDC has 20 members, and a supermajority of 13 ayes is required to for the agreement to pass.
Though CB9 Chair Pat Jones and LDC President Julio Batista—who was also present at the meeting Monday evening—expressed they could not predict how the full LDC would vote, Batista told the board, “I’m going to vote, and I’m going to urge my members tomorrow, to vote yes.”
CB9 member Walter South said, “I think the bottom line here is, no matter what we say tonight, it’s not going to make one damn bit of difference.”
After a digression at the start of Monday’s executive board session over whether the community board’s by-laws would allow for it to take place, rather than a full CB9 meeting, a stir began to rise from the crowd gathered at the Broadway Houses at 583 Riverside Drive. Friends muttered to each other “We’re going to fool around, and we’re going to lose this again,” as others raised their voices above the din, “After being strung along for years, why tomorrow?”
A motion was suggested that CB9 recommend the development corporation delay its vote, but this seemed an impossible option. “We have tried to negotiate the delay of this process, the process being the Public Authorities Control Board,” said LDC member Cecil Corbin-Mark, who indicated that this board vote could take place within three days or a week after the CBA decision.
The Public Authorities Control Board is a group of New York state officials appointed by the governor to oversee the state’s “project-related financings,” according to the Web site of the state’s Budget Division. The PACB will vote on Columbia’s Manhattanville expansion project, though the community benefits agreement is not officially under this state board’s purview. Since the CBA is not included in this state's process, scheduling the corporation’s vote prior to that of the PACB is motivated by “politics,” some said Monday evening.
Corbin-Mark also noted that the West Harlem Local Development Corporation’s negotiation process with Columbia has “been ridiculously drawn out.”
“Although we are full time and we get paid, the local development corporation is a group that was formed specifically for this purpose, and most of them have day jobs, they have kids and they have other things that they do,” Maxine Griffith, Columbia’s executive vice president for government and community affairs, said at a meeting with Spectator in March, explaining why the agreement had taken so long to finalize.
But ultimately, “We negotiated a very good agreement—in fact, it’s an outstanding agreement,” said Susan Russell, chief of staff for New York City Council member Robert Jackson, who represents West Harlem and Washington Heights. “Council member Jackson is supportive of the agreement. He’s been wanting to see this situation resolved and the community benefit from the upcoming project.”
Griffith noted that corporation members “were very interested in knowing what we were doing anyway, so that they would not ask for that, so they wouldn’t replicate benefits that were already being shared. They realized there were going to be a lot of leveraging opportunities. There was an interest in meshing what we were able to bring to the table with funds that could be found elsewhere.”
In December 2007—on the morning of the city council’s vote on the University’s expansion plan—Columbia and the development corporation signed a memorandum of understanding as a legally-binding commitment of the unfinished benefits agreement. Many of the memorandum's critics were skeptical of the agreement’s contractual legitimacy as well as the process by which its stipulations were drafted.
“This can be an extraordinary opportunity for Columbia and our local community to work together on enhancing the many educational and health care services the University already provides, as well as supporting the local community so it can be full participants in the economic opportunities that our expansion will create,” University President Lee Bollinger said at the time.
Of the total sum, $76 million is “unencumbered,” meaning the local development corporation could choose to allocate it however it wanted.
Yet this open-ended allocation of money made some CB9 members uneasy. “This is a very loose document. It really is a bad agreement,” said CB9’s Savonna Bailey McClain, who asked for more details about how the $76 million would be prioritized and spent. “It just looks like the community is going to fight over $76 million.”
Batista defended the language of the community benefits agreement, saying that its purpose is to provide an outline for funding. “That is just a road map,” he explained.
Other local activists—particularly members of the Coalition to Preserve Community, a group that opposes Columbia’s expansion process—criticized the scheduling of the corporation's vote for the day after the CB9 executive committee vote, arguing that the time frame left no opportunity for the full community board to vote.
“There’s no accident here at all in terms of, the vote by the executive committee is going to happen today and then there will be no time for the board members to hear about it, no time for the community to hear about it, and for there to be any discussion,” Tom DeMott, a member of the Coalition to Preserve Community, said. “It’s basically a situation where we’re being completely shut out of a very significant process.”
“We’re hoping to go ahead and get this community benefits agreement completed,” Russell said.
A spokesperson for city council member Inez Dickens, who represents Morningside Heights and West Harlem, said Dickens “supported Jackson in his efforts to get a very strong community benefits agreement.”
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