New York City Comptroller John Liu on Friday convened the first meeting of a task force charged with examining and recommending best practices for community-benefits agreements on subsidized economic development projects. The recommendations are due in six months.
“Public benefit agreements have become more and more prevalent when private developers seek public assistance, from tax subsidies and no-bid contracts to rezonings and invocation of eminent domain,” Liu said in a press release. “It is sensible to have clear standards that ensure benefits for the public when private developers receive benefits from the public.”
Liu said the agreements should have clawback provisions in case projects don’t fully deliver on their promises. Past community-benefits agreements were an “embarassment,” he said.
The scope of the Task Force on Public Benefit Agreements has been expanded from looking at agreements between private developers and community groups to include a review of how tax subsidies and rezonings are used to facilitate private developments.
The task force members include New York City Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO) president John Ahern; Priscilla Almodovar, former president of the New York State Housing Finance Agency and the State of New York Mortgage Agency and current chief operating officer for the community development banking group at JPMorgan; Barry Gosin, chief executive officer of the real estate firm Newmark Knight Frank; and Joyce Moy, professor of small business management and entrepreneurship at the City University of New York.
Since coming into office in January, Liu has called for greater oversight on economic development projects and voted down directly, or through a representative, several subsidized projects that came before the boards of the New York City Industrial Development Agency and the New York City Capital Resource Corp. on which Liu is an ex-officio member.
The comptroller stated at the time that his concern was not with the merits of the projects themselves, which included a $20 million bond deal for a development in downtown Brooklyn. Rather, he said further examination of how public resources are used was needed.
