`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal--Part 6

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 5)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“In summary, Allee King Rosen and Flemming [AKRF] provided a study with a methodology effectively tailored to deliver the result that the area was blighted, despite a fundamental absence of background economic conditions associated with blight. AKRF, with the knowledge, participation and approval of Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC], suppressed contrary evidence, avoided evaluation of casual relationships, and, most importantly, avoided any accounting for activity, omissions, and responsibility of the single most important player and causal factor in Manhattanville: Columbia’s activity as a purchaser, owner, and operator of over 75% of the properties in the area.

“…The New York State Supreme Court, Justice Shirley Kornreich presiding, found AKRF to not only be serving an advocacy function on behalf of its client Columbia, but also that AKRF itself had an interest in ESDC’s adoption of Columbia’s General Project Plan [GPP]…ESDC took an appeal to the Appellate Division, First Department.

“On July 15, 2008, this Appellate Division issued its decision…finding AKRF’s relationship with Columbia to be `tangled.’…

“…Of the 37 buildings AKRF…determined to be in poor conditions, at least 16, or 43%, are likely to have crossed that line during the time of Columbia’s ownership or control due to Columbia’s discontinuation of maintenance and its failure to perform repairs…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 5

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] decision to allow the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street. (See below for parts 1 to 4)

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Columbia did undertake cosmetic interior renovations in certain properties, but left underlying waterproofing conditions unaddressed, allowing structural elements to deteriorate…

“Columbia also posted on buildings it owned `For Rent’ signs, creating the appearance of available commercial rental property and flagging demand, even as Columbia had no intention of renting its vacant properties. Calls to the phone numbers listed on such signs, by both Manhattanville owners, and other prospective renters, yielded only answering machines and unreturned calls. In May, 2007, an attorney representing a number of businesses being forced out of a Columbia owned building upon inquiring as to the possibility of relocation into one of the vacant Columbia owned buildings in the area was informed by Columbia’s attorney that `There is no space available in Manhattanville.’

“In late March, 2006, Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] turned to Columbia’s Consultant, Allee King Rosen and Flemming, Inc. [AKRF,] to perform a new blight study of Manhattanville.

“In sworn affidavits, AKRF and ESDC stated that in retaining AKRF, ESDC had required the erection of a `Chinese Wall’ separating employees working on the Blight Study for ESDC from those working on the environmental review for Columbia, and that such separation had been strictly maintained…On May 19, 2008, ESDC admitted that such a wall had not in fact been maintained. Billing records indicate that as many as six AKRF employees worked on both sides of the alleged barrier…

“Far from keeping the study confidential from Columbia, ESDC permitted Columbia to control access to the properties, accompany surveyors, review and comment on reports, and to be present at meetings and reviews…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhatanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 4

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street.

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“In properties Columbia acquired, Columbia allowed or maintained accumulation of garbage and trash.

“In most buildings it acquired, Columbia refrained from attending to even minor repairs or preventive maintenance, causing existing conditions from water infiltration to become significantly exacerbated. At 635 West 125th Street, for instance, for failure to repair a broken pane in a skylight, sufficient water entered the building as to cause flooring to buckle and ceilings to collapse, such as a building identified as in `fair’ condition in 2006 was in `poor’ condition by 2008. At 623 W. 129th Street, a roof drain was left clogged, causing significant water damage in the building below.

“On the basis of Petitioner’s review of individual building reports, it appears that in 34 out of 51 Columbia owned buildings, or 66.6%, conditions were allowed to deteriorate significantly over that period…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 3

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street.

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“Manhattanville is a riverfront community in West Harlem…

“…The number of jobs in the area was rising until Columbia began buying the area up in 2002.

“…At least since the 1960s Columbia has been looking to expand beyond the confines of its Morningside Heights campus, to acquire land and to build in Manhattanville and West Harlem. Already in 1960 Columbia was seeking to take over the Manhattanville industrial area with a…development scheme. Columbia’s attempt to take over part of nearby Morningside Park to build an athletic facility brought community relations to a boil in 1968…

“After 2002, Columbia’s acquisition activity in Manhattanville accelerated. By the end of 2005 it had acquired or entered into contract on 28 of 67 properties in the area. In approaching property owners, Columbia sought to portray the use of eminent domain as certain and inevitable, urging owners to sell now at the low price they were being offered or have their property taken by eminent domain.

“As Columbia acquired property, it applied pressure to remove all tenants except for the few it intended to incorporate into ground floor retail spaces in its proposed campus.

“Columbia refused to renew leases except on commercially unreasonable one year terms, and with provisions effectively providing for summary termination at Columbia’s sole discretion.

“Columbia exaggerated alleged building defects as a pretext to require tenants to relocate, but in relocation, offered smaller spaces and covered only a fraction of relocation costs.

“Columbia refused to perform repairs when asked by tenants. At 609 West 125th Street, for example, Columbia refused to repair major leaks from skylights and roof over the space rented by the Eritrean Community Center of Greater New York, a tenant it sought to remove, even while it replaced the roof over the section of the same building rented by Floridita, a restaurant it had designated for incorporation into the new project.

“Columbia refused to conduct façade repairs, and left in place indefinitely sidewalk sheds obscuring tenants’ store fronts and signage, without compensation.

“Columbia added inappropriate charges to rent, including for structural repairs that were the owner’s responsibility, and refused to recognize lease modifications by the prior owner.”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 2

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street.

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“This case raises the question of whether allegedly public purposes attributed to a project long after it was fully conceived, and that involve almost no use of the land or facilities proposed to be developed, or that are diminutive in relation to the private benefit conferred by the project, constitute `civic’ or `public’ purposes, or whether they are not, in fact, pretext.

“This case presents the question of whether the desire of any private university to expand, or the acquisition of proprietary knowledge, constitute a `civic’ purpose.

“And this case raises the constitutional question of whether the use of eminent domain for economic development alone, under the Supreme Court of the United States’s 2006 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, constitutes a public use, benefit or purpose in the absence of a carefully considered plan with public purposes determined prior to selection of a developer and reached through a transparent and accountable public process.

“…Columbia and Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] have refused to compromise, and ESDC…has condoned and enabled Columbia in its drive to achieve 100% physical, economic, and cultural control of the entire area…For Columbia’s preference to have it all is what this struggle is being fought for. Columbia’s preference to have it all does not constitute a public use, benefit or purpose…”

`COLUMBIAGATE': Is Columbia University's West Harlem-Manhattanville Campus Expansion Project Illegal?--Part 1

In a January 21, 2009 petition to the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division, a New York City civil liberties lawyer named Norman Siegel presented the legal case against allowing the Columbia University Administration to move forward on its 17-acre campus expansion project in the West Harlem-Manhattanville neighborhood, just north of West 125th Street.

According Siegel’s January 21, 2009 petition:

“This case is about the abuse of the government’s power of eminent domain to secure for a developer a contested area of West Harlem it had long sought to control and for which it had formed a fully blown plan.

“This case is about the secret collaboration between Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] and New York City agencies in a complex plan to give that developer, an elite private university, everything it wanted, without compromise or limitation, while evading public review and accountability.

“This case is about favoritism shown to an elite private university over community interests, clearly and consistently expressed through the local Community Planning Board, over multiple well established public planning processes, and over competing development proposals for existing local business and property owners, for purposes that in the end amount to no more than the speculative estimation that what is good for Columbia University is good for New York.

“And this case is about how ESDC, in its determination to maximize Columbia’s private benefit, overreached its statutory authorization, made findings in bad faith, and fabricated pretextual purposes to cover up the illegality of its dominant purpose…”

Columbia University's Goldman Sachs Connection & West Harlem Construction Project

Columbia University Trustee Armen Avanessians is Goldman Sachs' director of FICC Strategies, Equity Strategies, Investment Banking and Financial Group Strategies and became a partner in Goldman Sachs in 1994.

In addition, Columbia University Trustee Ann Kaplan is a member of the Goldman Sachs Bank USA board of directors and Columbia University Trustee Esta Stecher is Goldman Sachs Group's executive vice president and general counsel.

Also, Columbia University Trustee Richard Witten was a Goldman Sachs partner and managing director from 1990 to 2002.

Coincidentally, if Goldman Sachs merges with the M&T Bank Corporation, the head of the Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] which approved the use of eminent domain in Columbia University’s 17-acre West Harlem-Manhattanville construction project, M&T Bank Corporation CEO Bob Wilmers, may personally benefit from a business relationship with the Columbia University-linked Goldman Sachs firm.

As Thomas Hartley observed in the October 1, 2008 issue of the Baltimore Business Journal, one of Ireland’s largest independent securities firms, NCB Stockbrokers, noted in a 2008 report that: “Remember that M&T’s CEO, septuagenarian Bob Wilmers, has been at the bank for 25 years [and] might be tempted to roll his 10 percent holding into something larger driven by Goldman Sachs.”

Speaking of the latest real estate development and land grabbing project of the tax-exempt “Goldman Sachs University of Morningside Heights,” an interesting article by Damon W. Root, was posted on the www.reason.com website. In his February 9, 2009 article, titled “Exposing Columbia University’s eminent domain abuse,” Root noted:

“Consider the following: In 2006, the Empire State Development Corporation [ESDC] hired the planning and engineering firm Allee King Rosen & Fleming, Inc. (AKRF) to perform an `impartial' neighborhood blight study. AKRF was certainly a bold choice, given that the firm was already on Columbia's payroll and actively working on the contested Manhattanville plan. According to billing records that…civil libertarian Norman Siegel, turned up via the state's Freedom of Information Law, as many as six AKRF employees worked on both the blight study and the redevelopment project, which is practically the definition of a conflict of interests.

“The report itself proved to be just as flawed. For starters, AKRF failed to mention that Columbia owns 76 percent of the neighborhood and was thus directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of blight that the report alleged, ranging from overflowing basement trash heaps to major roof and skylight leaks. (Columbia has been performing maintenance on several buildings it plans to preserve for their historical significance.) As numerous tenants have now reported, the university refused to perform basic and necessary repairs, which both pushed tenants out and manufactured the ugly conditions that later advanced Columbia's long-term interests….

“AKRF admitted as much in preliminary findings delivered to the ESDC, which identified `Open violations in CU Buildings' and `History of CU repairs to properties' among its `issues of concern.' On top of that, AKRF relied on misleading and in some cases inappropriate evidence, including irrelevant crime statistics and building code violations that had zero relationship to actual physical conditions (such as the failure to file an annual boiler inspection).

“In fact, the ESDC-Columbia redevelopment scheme fails to meet even the generous standards set by the Supreme Court's notoriously eminent domain-friendly decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005), which permitted the transfer of property from one private party to another so long as the taking was part of a `comprehensive redevelopment plan.’ But as Justice Anthony Kennedy's concurring opinion in the case also made perfectly clear, `transfers intended to confer benefits on particular, favored private entities, and with only incidental or pretextual public benefits, are forbidden by the Public Use Clause.’… “