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It's Auto-PILOT for Forest City Ratner
The Daily News's Juan Gonzalez takes a much needed look at the City's
use of PILOTS (Payments in Lieu of Taxes). These PILOTS enable large corporations
to avoid paying their property taxes. Of course
PILOTS are a huge part of Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards project. These
payments they'll make in lieu of property taxes, instead of going into city coffers
for the common treasury, will go to paying off the construction bond debt for
their Barclays Center arena and to the State of New York.
One year to the day since the poiltical approval of Atlantic Yards by the
Public Authorities Control Board and still nobody has any idea what the
amount of Atlantic Yards PILOTs will be. Nobody.
Gonzalez highlights the Ratner PILOT history and plan for Atlantic Yards, placed
alongside some of the the biggest corporation's in the city. Why might you not
have heard much about this issue before? One reason, Gonzalez explains, is that
Forest City Ratner's business partner and parent of the Paper of Record, the New
York Times Company, "feeds at the same trough."
The Gonzalez column:
Deals
that lead to lost property taxes
New York City lost more than $100 million in property taxes last year because of privately negotiated deals with some of the world's richest companies.
The companies - including behemoths like JPMorgan Chase, Pfizer and NBC - have paid a fraction of their normal property tax bill for years through these little-known deals, commonly called PILOTs (Payments in Lieu of Taxes).
An internal Bloomberg administration report obtained by the Daily News shows:
- The giant American International Group paid nothing in PILOTs for fiscal 2007, saving $4.1 million on its annual property tax bill.
- The American Stock Exchange, that symbol of the free market, paid a mere $1,070 in PILOTs - far less than a South Bronx homeowner would pay in taxes. The exchange's tax break from City Hall saved it nearly $1.5 million.
- JPMorgan Chase paid just $1.9million in PILOTs, 20% of the $9.6 million in property taxes it normally would be assessed.
Most New Yorkers are aware of the outrageous $10 million property tax exemption
Madison Square Garden has enjoyed for decades, courtesy of the state Legislature.
So why haven't we heard much about these other tax giveaways in, say, the liberal New York Times? Maybe because the newspaper of record is feeding at the same trough.
The Times paid $219,000 in PILOTs last year for its new printing plant in College Point, Queens, the report said. That's a paltry 13% of the $1.7 million assessed tax on the Times plant.
The undisputed king of PILOTs is real estate developer Bruce Ratner. His Forest City/Ratner firm paid the city $9.7 million last year for half a dozen commercial buildings the company owns in downtown Brooklyn. That sounds like a lot of money - until you realize it's only one-third of the company's actual $26.3 million property tax bill.
That doesn't even count PILOTs that have yet to kick in for Forest City's Atlantic
Yards mega-project.
Forest City spokesman Loren Riegelhaupt defended the company's success at landing PILOT subsidies.
"A lot of those buildings in MetroTech were constructed when downtown Brooklyn was not what it was today," Riegelhaupt said. "Many businesses were fleeing to New Jersey in the 1990s, and we were willing to invest in that area when others wouldn't."
...
Yes, Ratner's folks should be proud of how great they are at feeding at the public
trough. Forest City Ratner's defense of their use of PILOTs for Metrotech is that
in the 1990s "downtown Brooklyn was not what it was today." Then what,
exactly, is their defense for receiving PILOTS for their Atlantic Yards project
near that Downtown Brooklyn which is what it is today -- a booming real
estate market where many are willing to invest.
...It should come as no surprise that some of the city's powerhouse
companies landed the juiciest deals. Just 15 companies enjoyed more than two-thirds
of the total tax savings in fiscal 2007, the report shows.
Besides Forest City, AIG, Chase and The Times, top beneficiaries include Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, NBC, Pfizer, McGraw-Hill and the Hearst Corp. In NBC's case, the company has received three separate PILOT deals over the past 20 years from Koch, Giuliani and Bloomberg.
Full
article
Posted: 12.20.07
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