Photo: Prospect Park Alliance
On the day the first Brooklyn snowflake falls, good news (I think). In what is being reported as a departing gesture of largesse, Mayor-for-a-bit-longer Bloomberg has apparently decided to have the city run the gigantic new Lakeside rink project for a year for free.
The implications of the financial arrangements (still uncommented-upon by some key players) are utterly beyond me; this is the sort of thing I had nightmares about covering if I ever became a metro or financial reporter (and lo, I am neither). Gothamist calls it a "wildly generous sweetheart deal," which sounds good to me as a Prospect Park lover/user (and sounds overdue, given our measly support from both the city and the private sector when compared to Central Park). Geoffrey Croft of the sharp-eyed advocacy blog A Walk in the Park (an organ of NYC Park Advocates) is less sanguine. He reports (in what appears to be the original source for this news):
The
Alliance will be required to pay the City of New York nothing for the
first year and just $100,000 beginning the second year of a 17-year deal according to the license agreement obtained by NYC Park Advocates. The
annual fee to the city increases by just a thousand dollars a year
over the life of the deal culminating with $116,097 in the year
2030. The
lucrative license agreement -potentially worth tens of millions of
dollars over the life of the agreement - seeks to reward the
public/private partnership handsomely for raising $19 million of the
Lakeside Center's $74 million dollar budget, while also requiring
the group to continue to raise private money for the general operation
of the public park which they have done for years.
Croft takes the Parks Department and the Alliance to task for not releasing projected revenue figures for the rink; he accuses the city of trying to abdicate its responsibilities through public/private agreements that he calls "pay-to-play funding schemes" that "hand over enormous power and decision-making authority to..groups with little transparency and accountability on what is supposed to be public land." I have a hard time picturing the Prospect Park Alliance as a secretive or nefarious presence. Croft really loses me with this claim:
Influential
park groups are increasing relying on revenues generated from parkland
being diverted from the City's general fund into their coffers.
Sorry, I don't get it; how is that a bad thing? Shouldn't a reasonable amount of the revenue from Lakeside go back into historically underfunded Prospect Park? Or is the agenda here to spread the moolah evenly throughout all parks--especially to some of the even more historically underfunded parks, like poor wretched Flushing-Meadows Corona Park? (Prospect Park may play Cinderella to Central Park, but we're the envy of many obscure outer-borough green spaces with no established advocacy group.) To borrow some current agency jargon, it all seems to be a matter of "silos" and "buckets." I will invite Mr. Croft to illuminate his objections further, and welcome others to explain the ramifications of this in language suitable to a six-year-old clutching her allowance.
Speaking of journalistic acumen, even the New York Post covered this story, and managed to work in "animal sacrificing rituals," God bless them. See, I coulda been a metro reporter after all.
LAKESIDE SKATING PRICES REVEALED
Okay, everyone including me "buried the lede": The NYC Park Advocates report, citing the city's license agreement they have "obtained," claims that ice rink admissions will be $5 on weekdays and $8 on weekends and holidays, with skate rental $5 at all times. That sounds about what the old rink charged, causing me to breathe a huge sigh of relief that they won't be jacking it up to Rock-Center levels. The minimum public hours of operation for skating have been set for Fridays (3 to 9 pm), Saturdays (10-10) and Sundays (10-6), with another 20 hours a week Monday through Thursday on one or another of the two rinks.
Comments