Joe DePlasco

Forest City Ratner still does not own the 8-acre rail yard that will form the backbone of its Atlantic Yards project, but that did not keep the company from starting "preparatory work" on Tuesday. (From the looks of this photo, they needed to shovel the snow first.)

The developer agreed to buy the property from the M.T.A. back in September 2005 for $100 million, but there are some "technical issues" that have yet to be resolved before closing the deal, M.T.A. spokesman Sam Zambuto told The Real Estate.

"At this point, there is no time-frame set for closing the deal," he said.

Neither Mr. Zambuto nor Forest City spokesman Joe DePlasco would say whether the company was waiting until lawsuits were resolved before closing. Mr. DePlasco said the work was being done under a "license agreement."

Maybe that's not so surprising: Would you pay that much for a rusty old rail yard unless you were really sure you could put it to use?

- Matthew Schuerman UPDATE: Mr. Zambuto called back to add that there was no written agreement that stipulated that deal would have to wait until the lawsuits are resolved.

Norman Oder reported yesterday that Forest City Ratner had given out another $350,000 to an ally in its fight to bring the Atlantic Yards complex to Brooklyn.

Well, Forest City spokesman Joe DePlasco tells us that figure is the total amount budgeted to be given the group, the Downtown Brooklyn Educational Consortium, but that the developer has written checks for only about half of that so far.

In November, Forest City announced an $87,000 grant, and another $87,000 installment was given out since then--but never announced.

Which is funny, because the last time Forest City tried to give out money but didn't let anybody know, it caused a big headache, and they resolved to announce future gifts in the future . This headache is admittedly smaller, but it still must smart a little.

So why didn't they announce this one ahead of time?

"We hoped you would catch us," DePlasco said. "What can I tell you? We've said repeatedly that we would support groups in the community and this is an example of doing that."

He would not specify whether other signatories to the community benefits agreement had received grants since the last official announcement in November.

-Matthew Schuerman

Last night’s panel on Atlantic Yards, sponsored by Women in Housing and Finance, was painful and frankly not terribly informative. (You can check out blogger Norman Oder’s play-by-play here.) But following up, we received a statement today from developer Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco, who said: “We have also agreed to build on or off site 600 to 1,000 first-time homeowner condos and will continue to work with ACORN on this and related issues.”

That’s news—assuming that “first-time homeowners” would be low- or middle-income families. In the agreement signed last May, Ratner and ACORN said only that they would “work on a program to develop affordable for-sale units, which are intended to be in the range of 600 to 1,000 units.”  read more »

Forest City Ratner could begin demolishing the Underberg building as early as next week, spokesman Joe DePlasco told us, now that an appellate judge denied a motion for a temporary restraining order Tuesday. All that is needed now is a permit from the city Department of Buildings.

But they better hurry. Opponents of the Atlantic Yards project will get another chance to delay the demolitions of several buildings—the Underberg will be just the first--when they file a motion for a preliminary injunction March 1, according to Candace Carponter, spokeswoman for the opposition group Develop—Don’t Destroy Brooklyn. That preliminary injunction, if successful, would forestall all tear-downs until a full hearing the week of March 13.

No action Tuesday on the more unusual and far-reaching part of this case which the activists won last week: David Paget’s conflict of interest. That decision, appealed by Empire State Development Corporation, will be reviewed at the full hearing.

-Matthew Schuerman

Bloomberg aide Bill Cunningham is headed over to Dan Klores's PR firm, where he and his 2001 adversary Joe DePlasco can spend countless hours going over the fine points of Stalinism. From the press release: "Bill's experience in the public affairs and political arenas is unrivaled," [DKC President Sean] Cassidy said. "He will join DKC's ‘murderer's row' of local and national political experts, while adding valuable counsel and perspective to DKC's corporate practice areas."  read more »

Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco e-mails to say there were only "about six" focus groups with "a total of maybe 70 people," not thousands as reported in The Brooklyn Papers (and below). -Matthew Schuerman  read more »

Forest City Ratner just issued a press release coming clean with just how much the developer has given to community groups supporting its Atlantic Yards project: $138,000 to BUILD, which is supposed to run job training programs, and $50,000 to the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Association, which is supposed to set up a community center and a health center. That’s it. No more—or no more until the developer makes more payments.

The press release is a tacit acknowledgment of how much Forest City’s public relations strategy had veered off course. Instead of doing stories about how much good these community organizations were going to do for the community, the media was doing stories about how BUILD couldn't get its story straight .

“When we provide funding for programs that are good then we should let the public know about that, and when we gave these organizations money after we signed the community benefits agreement, we should have put out a press release at that time,” Forest City spokesman Joe DePlasco told the Real Estate. “If you are trying to operate in an open enough way as possible, when you miss one thing, people will say, ‘Oh you missed one thing.’”

Jim Stuckey, the project director, said outside a hearing last night that DePlasco, who is an outside public relations rep, didn’t know, when he first denied money changed hands , that BUILD had received money.

That doesn’t explain why BUILD President James Caldwell didn’t know it had received money, or that he was getting paid. Cheryl Duncan, a spokeswoman for BUILD, said that the organization’s members had been working for so long without pay, and that it had just received its first general operating support in August, and paid payroll for the first time Sept. 5. Reporters started asking about the payments in late September.

“Quite frankly, they got caught off guard by the question,” she told the Real Estate. “It’s been so long that they have been doing work voluntarily, that it was a relatively new change.”  read more »

(Of course, BUILD got money before that--in June or July--to hire people to hand out copies of the Forest City newspaper, the Brooklyn Standard. But it was $10,000, only about a tenth of which BUILD kept for administrative purposes, Duncan said.)

-Matthew Schuerman

Brooklyn residents boarding the F train at Bergen Street in Cobble Hill this morning had a choice of newspaper hawkers to deal with. Alongside the AM New York representative--headline: "THE PLAME GAME"--stood a guy with copies of the Brooklyn Standard.

Last month, the New York Sun brought word of the arrival of the new tabloid, and of its narrow editorial mission: The Standard, which describes itself as a "publication--not a newspaper," exists to solely promote developer Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project. "BROOKLYN'S BOOMING," page one declares, "Atlantic Yards Will Bring Jobs, Housing and Hoops."

Now the 16-page tab, which borrows its name from a 19th-century Brooklyn paper, is employing another old-fashioned journalistic touch: a squad of not-newsies to distribute the not-newspaper.

According to Joe DePlasco, a spokesperson from Dan Klores Communications representing Ratner, subway distribution has been going on for two weeks, with a team of 10 hawkers. They've distributed between 20,000 and 30,000 copies of the Standard's total circulation of 140,000. The team will rotate around the borough distributing copies at stations in Fort Greene, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, Prospect Heights and Cobble Hill, DePlasco said.

"It was always our intention to distribute at subways," DePlasco said. "We felt this is a great way to share information with people in the borough."

Asked if he worked for Ratner, a Standard hawker named Mel outside the Bergen Street station replied, "Yeah. You're not going to throw the paper back in my face, are you?"  read more »

--Gabriel Sherman