Arena Foes Back in Court as NBA Delays Vote

NEW YORK CITY-Arguing that crucial documents had been withheld from the public record, opponents of the Atlantic Yards project filed a motion Thursday asking the New York State Supreme Court to reconsider its March 10 ruling against them. Later on Thursday, the NBA’s board of governors announced it was postponing a vote on Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s purchase of the Nets, who would play their games at the project’s centerpiece arena.

The league’s board was scheduled to vote next week on whether to approve Prokhorov’s deal to buy a controlling interest in the Nets from current owner Bruce Ratner, chairman and CEO of Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner Cos., but postponed it indefinitely because the state has yet to take possession of all the land it’s seizing under eminent domain. In a statement, Joel Litvin, the NBA’s president of league and basketball operations, says the board will vote on Prokhorov’s purchase of the Nets “once a firm date is set for the State of New York to take full possession of the arena site, which the team expects to occur in the near future.”

A spokeswoman for the Empire State Development Corp. tells GlobeSt.com that ESDC will have possession of the land “when the remaining occupants have been relocated. We hope to accomplish this within the next month or two.”

Seeking to delay the completion of that relocation for as long as possible, the group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn and 19 other community groups filed papers asking for another round in court. They argue that ESDC didn’t release documents showing that Atlantic Yards would take 25 years to complete until after oral arguments had been heard in January. The March 10 ruling by Judge Marcy Friedman “hinged on whether or not there was a rational basis for ESDC to claim the project would take 10 years.”

The ESDC spokeswoman says the DDDB motion “raises arguments that are similar or identical to arguments that already have been rejected by the courts. ESDC will oppose the motion, and we are confident that we will prevail.”

Oral arguments for the only remaining lawsuit against the project, Peter Williams vs. NYS Urban Development Corp., are scheduled for Monday morning in state Supreme Court in Manhattan. That suit asserts that because the 2006 project plan under which the eminent domain seizures were authorized has been superseded, ESDC needs to make new “determinations and findings” based on the current plan.