fyi, very relevant considering the recent St. Francis Redevelopment Plan approval and the proposed settlement of the 111/110 lawsuit.

In Major Projects, Agreeing Not to Disagree
The Jerde Partnership


By TERRY PRISTIN Published: June 14, 2006

To blunt opposition to its proposed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, Forest City Ratner promised to make half of the rental units affordable for low- and moderate-income families.

To gain neighbors' support for its new cancer care center, Yale-New Haven Hospital agreed to create an outreach program for children with asthma.

And to smooth the way for its Gateway Center retail project, which will replace the Bronx Terminal Market, the Related Companies pledged to bar Wal-Mart as a tenant.

In New York and around the country, it has become standard practice for developers of major projects to negotiate with neighborhood and other groups to forge so-called community benefits agreements ? contracts that almost always contain wage and hiring goals and may also include a grab bag of concessions, like a day care center, a new park, free tickets to sports events and cash outlays to be administered by the groups themselves.

In New York, in contrast with many other jurisdictions, the city itself is not a party to these agreements. Theoretically, at least, the pacts are not supposed to play a role in the city's zoning review process.

Since 2001, when a comprehensive community benefits agreement was struck for a hotel-and-entertainment project now being developed in Los Angeles next to the Staples Center sports arena, the trend has quickly spread to other cities, including Denver, Milwaukee, Chicago and Washington. Advocates of C.B.A.'s, as they are known, see them as an outgrowth of the Smart Growth movement ? the idea that development decisions should address a broad range of social and economic issues like transportation, jobs and housing.

In New York, however, some critics are wondering if this trend is threatening to distort the planning process. They say the danger is that local groups will agree not to oppose the projects in exchange for favors that may be unrelated to the project's impact on the neighborhood.

Critics of the Atlantic Yards (whose developer is a partner to The New York Times Company in its new headquarters building on Eighth Avenue) and other agreements have questioned whether the groups signing the document really speak for the community. "Groups pop up and you're not sure who they represent," said Patricia A. Jones, the co-chairwoman of the Manhattan Community Board 9 task force on Columbia University's expansion in Manhattanville. Ms. Jones contends that development plans ought to be reviewed by community boards, which are currently excluded from the C.B.A. process, before the benefits are meted out. "They can look at the bigger picture," she said.

Ross F. Moskowitz, a real estate partner at the law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, said developers would like the procedures to be clearer and more predictable. "The danger of a C.B.A. is that it is outside the process," he said. "There are no guidelines, no controls. The transparency is not there. You just don't know what you're walking into."

In California, leaders of the community benefits movement say New York's agreements lack the protections that are standard elsewhere. "In the C.B.A.'s we work on," said Julian Gross, the legal director of the California Partnership for Working Families, an advocacy group that has negotiated a number of agreements, "the city is closely involved in the negotiations. There's no point in the community group and the developer negotiating a lot of stuff that the city doesn't want."

Outside New York, benefit agreements are usually incorporated into the developer's agreement with the city, adding another layer of enforcement.

The local redevelopment agency was "intimately involved" in the C.B.A. that J. H. Snyder, a Los Angeles developer, negotiated for NoHo Commons, a 1.5-million-square-foot mixed-use project centered on a subway stop in North Hollywood, said Clifford Goldstein, a senior partner. "It's a very open process," said Mr. Goldstein, who is currently working on another C.B.A. for a project in South Los Angeles.

Carl Weisbrod, the president of Trinity Real Estate in New York, said that the government should be involved in any agreement that pertained to a subsidized project to ensure that "the services and the organizations that are being given money to provide the services are fully in keeping with government priorities."

There are signs that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's administration is rethinking its position on community benefits agreements. A year ago, it was the mayor himself who trumpeted the Atlantic Yards agreement between Forest City Ratner and eight community groups.

But in April, the mayor reacted angrily to the suggestion that the Mets would negotiate a C.B.A. for its new ballpark. "Every development project in this city is not going to be a horn of plenty for everybody else that wants to grab something," the mayor said. And while the Mets agreed after heated discussions with council members from Queens to contribute $50 million over 20 years to local community groups, no C.B.A. was signed.

The mayor's office declined requests for interviews with city officials, saying it was premature to discuss the administration's plans for C.B.A.'s.

Several land-use specialists said the debate over community benefits agreements was a throwback to the 1980's, when local groups in New York often leveraged their support for development projects to get libraries, parks and other amenities. Critics at that time also said it was unfair for a community's chance to get a park to hinge on its ability to attract a deep-pocketed developer, said Margaret P. Stix, a land-use lawyer.

In an influential 1988 report, the New York City Bar Association said that some politicians had approved projects solely to get unrelated benefits, thereby corrupting the zoning process. The lawyers' group recommended that any amenities promised by a developer have a reasonable relationship to the project, a practice that successive administrations adopted, said Jesse Masyr, the lawyer who negotiated the Bronx Terminal Market agreement.

In the 1990's, Mr. Masyr said, the Giuliani administration barred his client, the Blumenfeld Development Group, from providing a park to appease opponents of East River Plaza, a shopping center now under construction in East Harlem. They reasoned that testimony from people who had received a benefit unrelated to the project could taint the zoning review process, he said.

But the current administration has taken a more hands-off approach, Mr. Masyr said. "I'll tell you what I think is the most dicey part of this: there's cash involved, money payments to be made. Who monitors it?" he said. "This is about as unregulated a world as you could imagine."

In California, leaders of the community benefits movement that are party to an agreement never accept money from the developer, said Madeline Janis-Aparicio, the executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a nonprofit research group. "No donations of any kind," she said. She also said it took six months to a year to pull together a coalition before negotiations could begin. "You can't skip steps," she said.

Melinda R. Katz, chairwoman of the City Council's land use committee, said that New York officials were examining how other cities handled community benefits agreements. "We can probably learn a lot from other jurisdictions," she said. "And we're in the process of doing that."