...That is the same distance as the arena in Newark. This new information prompted another question: What makes the Atlantic Yards arena sufficiently different from the Newark arena that it will not require street closings?

That, Mr. Riegelhaupt said, was a security question to be directed to the Police Department. The Police Department has said that it does not comment on such matters. The department’s security analysis, which found that the arena was safe and streets need not be closed on game days, would stand.

That is wrong. The security analysis cannot stand as is, without independent study of the NYPD's decisions on this issue, which are still be made in a box.

Why did it take the passage of nearly one year since the project's political approval for Ratner to reveal that his arena is too close to the street? Why was this not revealed in the Environmental Impact Statement? Did the NYPD and Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) know about these insufficient setbacks when their Board approved the proposal in December 2006? If they did know, why have they been so grossly irresponsible to the public by hiding it? And if they didn't know until reading the Times' article, why have they been so grossly irresponsible to the public and what are they going to do about it now that it has been revealed? Is it possible that the ESDC's official line in the Environmental Impact Statement—that a terrorist bomb attack is "not a reasonable worst case scenario" worthy of analysis—was based upon no knowledge of the inadequate distance between the arena and the streets?

Are Albany, Spitzer, the ESDC, and the Bloomberg Administration so in thrall to Forest City Ratner that they would ignore what any independent security expert would tell us, which is that: It's a security flaw and problem to have a glass-walled arena, 20 feet from major streets, surrounded by glass-walled skysrapers.

As the eight elected officials wrote to Spitzer and Bloomberg nearly one month ago, there needs to be an independent security study of the Atlantic Yards project.

With this newly revealed information it's time for Governor Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg to stop ignoring the situation, and at the very least, answer this question: the Ratner arena is 20 feet from the streets, the Newark arena is 25 feet from the streets and they are closing the streets, yet the NYPD says they don't plan on closing streets abutting Ratner's arena. How, exactly, is the situation in Brooklyn different than that in Newark?

Not to answer this question would be grossly irresponsible.

...Lately, months after the project near Downtown Brooklyn was approved and preliminary site work began, another question has arisen: How far will the project’s basketball arena be from the street?

The arena’s precise location matters because elected officials and opponents of the $4 billion project have raised questions about security at the site based on how far the arena is set back from the roadway. In Newark, where a new arena recently opened, the city decided at the last minute that at 20 feet from the curb, the arena was too close to the street for comfort, so now Newark closes streets around its arena during events as a precaution against truck-driving terrorists.

The critics characterized any street closings in Brooklyn as potentially disastrous. This is because the arena is set to be built at the intersection of two of Brooklyn’s main arteries, Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, an area that is already a congestion choke-point even before a single brick has been laid for the project. Atlantic Yards is slated to include more than 6,000 apartments and a few million square feet of commercial space, in addition to the 18,000-seat arena...