By Cynthia Koons
City Councilman Tony Avella (D-Bayside) said this week the city agency that chooses developers for projects has ignored his official requests to obtain information about competing proposals submitted for the defunct Flushing Airport site.
Two months ago Mayor Bloomberg stopped in College Point to unveil plans for a wholesale business complex at Flushing Airport which have generated intense opposition from the surrounding community because there is no provision for extensive recreation.
Avella claims the Economic Development Corp. has been resistant to his Freedom of Information Law requests for access to documents related to the selection of a developer for that piece of land.
“This seems to be a pattern with the EDC,” Avella said. “EDC is an example of these quasi-agencies, which we have no direct control over.”
In a flow chart he created to illustrate his point, he said he sent two FOIL requests to the agency, one on July 22 and a second on Feb. 12. He sent the first one after all of the developers submitted their proposals for the property and the second one after Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Korean businessman Pil Jae Im was selected to build a facility for 180 wholesalers on the property.
“The first FOIL was after all the RFPs were in,” he said, at which point the agency told him they could not release information until they had made a decision.
“Now they’ve announced who they’re going with and they’re still refusing to give me information about the other developers,” Avella said.
EDC spokeswoman Janel Patterson said the agency’s decisions on when to keep documents private is completely justified.
“The first (FOIL request) was denied because we had just received the proposals. We had not completed our review,” she said. “It’s our position that to release the proposals would impair present or imminent contract awards.”
Avella said he appealed the EDC’s denial of his first FOIL request on Aug. 13, after which the agency denied him again on Jan. 15. He said the agency violated the 10-day response period and missed the deadline by 140 days.
“They are just not responsive,” Avella said. “That’s no way for employees — and they are employees of city government — to be acting.”
Patterson said the city continued to refuse Avella’s requests on the basis that no contract had been formally awarded.
Even the announcement about the wholesale development, Patterson said, is only a project in negotiation — not a signed contract.
“Because no contract is awarded, if this project doesn’t go ahead and we have to repeat this process again, then it would affect future negotiations,” she said of the potential for other contractors’ bids to be publicized.
After learning about the wholesale development on the Flushing Airport site, Avella immediately criticized the plan for not developing recreation on the property that is adjacent to the College Point ballfields, a park that has been closed for the past seven years due to contamination during construction of the park.
Community members protested against the city last month for not considering the potential traffic impact of the project. The city, however, maintains that it will spend $8 million for the reconstruction of the adjacent Linden Place and that the developer will contribute $100,000 toward the construction of new recreational facilities in College Point, Patterson said.
The project’s announcement prompted Avella to renew his FOIL request on Feb. 12. Since then, he said he has sent follow-ups and appeals to EDC’s second denial on three separate occasions in March.
He has not been granted access to the other proposals that contractors offered for that site.
“If you believe in open government, and I believe in open government, then they should be forced by the mayor to start acting like it,” he said. “I think they’re afraid for this information to get out and for people to see how good some of the other proposals are.”
To the EDC it is not about denying access to records, it is about principles.
“If information in the competing proposals were made public, that would compromise our negotiations,” Patterson said. “It’s our policy not to release this sort of information while we’re still negotiating.”
Reach reporter Cynthia Koons by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 141.
