Late Push in Albany For Expansion
BY MEGHAN CLYNE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 17, 2005

With only a week left in Albany's legislative session, an eleventh-hour push is under way to get the state Senate to permit the proposed expansion of the United Nations' offices. Signs indicate the efforts are bearing fruit.
That legislation has been moribund for months, since the Senate's majority leader, Joseph Bruno, a Republican of Rensselaer, refused in early December to bring to the floor a bill that would have begun the process of securing a city park on the East Side for the world body's use. The United Nations, with the backing of the Bloomberg, Pataki, and Bush administrations, seeks to erect a 35-story, 900,000-square-foot office tower at Robert Moses Playground, just south of the world body's campus. The swing space would house U.N. staff while their Turtle Bay headquarters undergoes a $1.2 billion renovation and would serve afterward as consolidation space for staff scattered around the city. Including an esplanade that would be built along the East River to compensate the community for the loss of the playground, the new construction would cost $650 million.
A host of factors, ranging from questions about the building's financing and safety to, most influentially, fury over recent U.N. scandals, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism, fomented strong enmity to the bill in Albany. There, Senate Republicans - led by two legislators from the city, Martin Golden of Brooklyn and Serphin Maltese of Queens - have shown no interest in taking steps toward helping the United Nations expand onto the Moses playground.
Until now. Senate Republicans debated the legislation in conference yesterday, and Senator Bruno and the speaker of the state Assembly, Sheldon Silver, Democrat of Manhattan, are expected to discuss the project in the next few days. As the legislative leaders contemplate the expansion project, they have been made aware that time is of the essence, because swing space must be ready by 2007, when the United Nations wants to begin renovations.
If there's a delay and we miss this session, that's going to kill the project, the president of the United Nations Development Corporation, Roy Goodman, former Republican state senator from Manhattan, said yesterday. The legislative session ends June 23.
On Wednesday, members of the city-state development corporation met with key legislators in a last-ditch appeal for the expansion. The development corporation chairman, George Klein; a director of the corporation and the commissioner of the New York City Commission for the United Nations, Consular Corps, and Protocol, Marjorie Tiven, sister of Mayor Bloomberg; a high-ranking representative from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, Howard Stoffer, and Mr. Bloomberg's lobbyist, Anthony Skip Piscitelli, met with Mr. Bruno and New York City's four Republican state senators: John Marchi of Staten Island; Frank Padavan of Queens, and Messrs. Golden and Maltese. The development corporation has dispatched emissaries to Albany before to lobby the senators. During those meetings, Messrs. Golden and Maltese set forth criteria for gaining their support for the project.
One was that the expansion's proponents prove that the new building would not pose a safety hazard to the city, especially because it would sit atop the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, identified as a terrorist target. Another was that the lobbyists procure a letter of support for the project from the Bush administration. Messrs. Golden and Maltese also wanted some indication that the Assembly - where the December bill was sponsored by a Democrat from Turtle Bay, Steven Sanders - would pass the legislation.
According to Mr. Golden, the chairman of the state Senate's Committee on Veterans, Homeland Security, and Military Affairs, Michael Balboni of Long Island, reviewed the project and assuaged safety concerns. A letter from the Bush administration was, Mr. Golden said, forthcoming. A source said the letter came from Secretary of State Rice, expressing her strong support of the project.
The Assembly, however, seemed unlikely yesterday to fulfill the senators' requirements, and instead is waiting to take its cue from the Senate. If the Senate is not prepared to do the bill ... I'm not printing a bill in the Assembly, Mr. Sanders said.
Nonetheless, the latest round of lobbying - augmented of late by Albany visits by leaders of construction unions - has achieved what previous meetings have not: action from Mr. Bruno. Yesterday, a legislator familiar with the project said, Mr. Bruno brought the issue before the Senate Republican conference, which was close to evenly split on the matter. So they left it to Senator Bruno to decide whether he's going to bring it to the floor, the legislator, who asked not to be named, said. If Mr. Bruno does bring the bill to the floor, he will do so over the objections of around 60% to 70% of his colleagues, Mr. Golden said.
The project's most visible and effective opponent in Albany, Mr. Golden has maintained that he would not support the U.N. legislation unless the world body's secretary-general, Kofi Annan, resigned. And the development corporation lobbyists, he said, dangled a series of impending U.N. reforms as a persuasion technique in their meeting Wednesday.
But you've still got the cat in charge of the henhouse. It's still just smoke and mirrors, Mr. Golden said.
Though there is no indication Mr. Annan will remove himself from Turtle Bay, and Mr. Golden still opposes the legislation, he said he will not do anything to try and stop it.
Despite weakening resistance by Senate Republicans, it is far from certain that the world body will have its way with the Moses playground. Observers pointed to the obstruction by Messrs. Bruno and Silver of the West Side stadium as evidence that the duo are more than willing to buck the mayor and the governor on development issues in Manhattan.
But I think it's fair to say that it is not DOA for the remainder of the session, the lawmaker said.
Mr. Sanders, for his part, said the chances were less than 50-50 that the bill would pass. Said Mr. Golden: It's a long way from the floor yet.
If the legislation does come to the Senate floor, it would meet with a divided Republican conference, which holds 35 seats to the Democrats' 27. According to the anonymous lawmaker, the Democratic conference would vote for the bill by an overwhelming majority. Given the Assembly's significant Democratic majority - 104 to 46 - observers have said that if the legislation passes the Senate, it will probably receive the Assembly's approval, too.
If the legislation passes, however, the United Nations still has a long way to go before breaking ground in Robert Moses Playground. Mr. Sanders's legislation does not give the park over to the United Nations, but rather allows for a land-use review process to determine the impact of the construction on the community.
A second piece of legislation, called a park alienation bill, would ultimately determine whether Robert Moses Playground becomes part of the U.N. complex.