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What's the Big Deal?
by Justin Park
Syracuse New Times |
As downtown church bells rang out May 16 at precisely 6 p.m., Syracuse Mayor Matt Driscoll, Onondaga County Executive Nick Pirro and Pyramid Companies president Bob Congel emerged from City Hall and strode down the steps toward a podium. The event, a press conference announcing an agreement struck over Mother's Day weekend on a proposed expansion of Carousel Center, displayed all the appearances of a historic occasion. Or at least an occasion that attracted every media outlet in town, some represented by multiple reporters.
News trucks from WTVH-Channel 5, WSTM-Channel 3, WSYR-Channel 9 and Time Warner Cable's News 10 Now broadcast the "event" live to their audiences--not coincidentally during the 6 p.m. newscast. Behind the cameras and reporters stood a crowd of roughly 100, composed largely of laid-off Destiny USA employees who are now part of a pro-Destiny group called Citizens for Economic Development in Central New York. The CED-CNY members wore company-issue jackets; one bystander was at the edge of the crowd in jeans, a Destiny USA T-shirt and a hard hat, perhaps a leftover from the last big Destiny non-event, the October 2002 groundbreaking for the Grand Destiny Hotel.
The made-for-TV moment was really not all that historic since the deal, reportedly still being fine-tuned, requires Common Council and County Legislature approval. While steel rots across Hiawatha Boulevard from Carousel, ground has yet to be broken and will not be, according to Congel, until about August or September. And that's assuming the deal gets approved.
But the press conference did unofficially mark a paradigm shift in Driscoll's dealings with Congel and Pyramid. Throughout the 2005 mayoral election, Driscoll played the defender of John Q. Taxpayer from Congel's thirst for tax breaks for pie-in-the-sky Destiny dreams before narrowly defeating a Pyramid-backed Joanie Mahoney in that race.
Through the cheers of CED-CNY members at the press event, flesh-pressing with Congel and by touting the project's benefits himself, Driscoll effectively swallowed the Kool-Aid. "We're here because it's time to stop talking and start building it," Driscoll announced to the crowd, appropriating the same language used against him when he opposed the project.
Driscoll defended his decision to make a deal. The terms, he said, including more than $50 million paid to the city from the sale of bonds by the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency over 12 years and some guaranteed sales tax revenues, would "provide revenue for not only today's needs but for the mayor that comes after me." Driscoll also declared that the agreement would pull the dispute out of the court system. "Court action is a gamble that's not worth the price," he explained. Earlier this year, state Supreme Court Judge John Centra ruled that the mall expansion was a "public project," that the developer had met the financial requirements and that the city needed to sell bonds to allow the project to move forward.
Driscoll, Pirro and Congel characterized the deal as a win-win situation and Bob the Builder went so far as to call it a "miracle deal" that somehow requires substantial support from the city and county while costing the taxpayer nothing. Howie Hawkins, former Green Party mayoral candidate who is now running for U.S. Senate, recently sent a letter to Driscoll, and copied it to local newspapers. In it he asserted that the deal is a clear loser for taxpayers, who are giving up $374 million in city and school property taxes from the existing mall and proposed expansion in return for only $123 million of guaranteed revenue.
Hawkins also took Driscoll to task for contradicting his own "green" goals as set forth in the non-binding Urban Environmental Accords he signed in the heat of last year's election (see "Turning Green," the June 29, 2005, New Times cover story). Hawkins wrote, "The Carousel expansion undercuts many of the actions prescribed in the accords relating to renewable energy and greenhouse gas reduction, sprawl and good jobs for low-income people."
At the press event, Congel vaguely referenced promises that the Destiny USA vision will be earth-friendly or even "oil-free." A May 16 press release from Destiny USA's 1 Clinton Square world headquarters proclaimed, "We are focused on what it means to be an American, on the need to free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil to the independence of renewable energy." However, there are no announced provisions of the deal that will require the three-part expansion to restrict itself to renewables, though phases two and three will adhere to some level of Green Building Council standards.
Hawkins pointed to a study conducted by SUNY-College of Environmental Science and Forestry researchers that concluded that even if the expanded mall used only renewable energy sources such as wind or hydroelectric power, it would still create a net increase in fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
As usual, Pirro kept his remarks brief, touting the project's potential benefits, as he has for years. "When people are working our neighborhoods are strengthened and their wages are spent in other local businesses," he said, even though Carousel and the proposed expansion house mainly national chain stores with no local ownership. Hawkins' letter criticized the jobs that the project will create, repeating a frequent criticism that the mall only offers minimum-wage, part-time jobs.
While the deal as announced doesn't stipulate any compensation requirements, Congel is on record saying that most workers, including the construction staff, will receive at least the $60,000 base salary that the CED-CNY folks were once given. Last fall, Destiny USA unveiled an unconventional business model in which all workers would be paid a high wage, hired for "potential," not specific, jobs and trained to run various aspects of the company.
Despite giving Congel a big hug, Common Council President Bea Gonzalez foreshadowed a rocky approval process for the deal in the Common Council in her remarks. She asked Driscoll with more than a hint of impatience when she and her fellow councilors could expect to see details. They received them May 19, but it isn't clear if they are final or even complete.
Even though she endured a contentious interview with WSYR-AM 570 afternoon-drive blabbermouth Jim Reith before the press conference on May 16 and again a week later, Councilor-at-Large Stephanie Miner declined to comment on the deal for this article. And she was conspicuously absent from the media melee. She said she hadn't had time to "digest and analyze" the documents, which, it's worth noting, are marked "draft." The County Legislature must also approve legislation regarding the project but legislators hadn't received those documents as of press time.
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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