Columbia University Campus Expansion - Upper West Side

[ablarc]

The theory I was referring to was her campus-fringe theory.

[infoshare]

CU has a bad attitude!

COLUMBIA'S BAD ATTITUDE
By JORDI REYES-MONTBLANC

November 27, 2006 -- COLUMBIA University wants to expand its Morningside Heights campus into the adjacent area of West Manhattanville, damn the torpedoes. Well, torpedoes is exactly what the university's trustees will find if they attempt to shove their views down the throats of area residents.
Columbia is a great institution, with a genuine need to expand - but it should have a better understanding of and empathy for the surrounding community.
For almost 20 years, our community - represented by Community Board 9 Manhattan (CB9) - worked, with input from Columbia, among many others, to develop a plan that gives form and substance to our diverse community's desires. This plan would allow Columbia to expand but without displacing other successful elements of the community. The quality of life would be enhanced for the whole of the CB9M district, which runs from West 110th Street to West 155th Street and from roughly St. Nicholas Avenue to the Hudson River, including our three historic neighborhoods of Morningside Heights, Manhattanville and Hamilton Heights.
But now Columbia's seeking to overturn that plan. It has targeted 17 acres for its expansion - but it has not been able to buy every property. So the university has gone to the Empire State Economic Development Corp. and paid $300,000 to produce a blight study. The plain intent is to paint a grim picture that will lead to condemnation, the exercise of eminent domain and the conveying of all properties within the 17-acre area to the university. All but three buildings in the parcel would be torn down. (The university also has requested the rezoning of another 18 acres in the area, a move that residents suspect would lead to even more expansion down the road.)
Within the 17 targeted acres are a number of apartment buildings and many small businesses, which employ more than 1,100 people - mostly district residents now threatened with loss and displacement.
Families that have run businesses in West Manhattanville for generations are now subject to pressure to sell - pressure so strong that many call it harassment. Some have already sold out - fearing that they'd wind up with far less if Columbia does get the state to use eminent domain to force sales.
Yet an impartial study would show that the only blight in West Manhattanville is thanks to Columbia. For years, the university has been acquiring properties, then leaving them to stand vacant or underused. Existing businesses in and near those buildings have closed and moved out.
Columbia's heavy-handed tactics and demand for eminent domain have antagonized the community. Residents' best hope now is that the public-review process will be independent of any political influences Columbia can bring into play. Any possible changes to CB9's original plan will go through the same open, public and participatory deliberations used to create the plan.
Columbia has stated that it wants a "partnership with the community." The community would welcome a partnership of equals. We will not be a minority partner and even less a silent partner. We shall be equal partners or no partners at all.
Jordi Reyes-Montblanc is chairman of Community Board 9 Manhattan.

[ablarc]

Jordi Reyes-Montblanc is chairman of Community Board 9 Manhattan.[/COLOR][/SIZE]

This is all about this jerk's personal aggrandizement.

Talk about a bad attitude!

[Xemu]

From the same interview Kris quoted in the NYT Tower thread:

One of your New York projects involves Columbia University’s expansion in Harlem. So you’ve been exposed to our famously contentious public process. What has your experience been?
Our site office is on Martin Luther King Boulevard and Broadway. It’s an old factory where they used to pasteurize milk at the beginning of last century. When I visit there and go out for lunch, I talk Italian to the Spanish lady. I know the neighborhood reverend. So, generally speaking, the level of understanding of the scheme is quite good. Everybody’s very keen about making it a good one. We are concerned about making a new complex where the university is not separated from the community. It’s not the same kind of campus they designed a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s a different story today.

You can’t have a campus on a hill—the way the existing campus, as beautiful as it is, is closed off from the community.
Today it is more about dialogue, more about reciprocal enjoyment. So we’re making a scheme where there is a kind of public layer on the first and second floors. It is more about those functions. None are purely academic. They are about cultural activity, shops, clinics, new little companies. So it’s a scheme of light and the edge between architecture, human design and social being. Especially because Harlem is a place with a very strong DNA, a strong character, and we love that of course. But in this process it is never so easy because sometimes the common interest must be understood in association with local and specific interests.

http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2440

I like this quote: He talks to the Spanish ladies in Italian so it's all good, nothing to worry about people of Northeast Harlem. And he knows the neighborhood reverend? Al Sharpton maybe?

[antinimby]

I feel better about this after reading Piano's comments about integrating the campus and community better.

[antinimby]

Columbia Faces Two-Front Opposition to Expansion Plans


By Staff Reporter of the Sun
December 7, 2006

Parents fighting a plan to put a Columbia University-affiliated secondary school in the same building as a Harlem elementary school have joined forces with residents battling a university plan to expand its campus farther north.

At a Community Board 9 meeting last night, parents from P.S. 36 were supported by a contingent of community activists fighting Columbia University's proposed expansion into Manhattanville as they fired angry questions at Department of Education officials about the plans to temporarily house the new school inside the elementary school. The department, which will finance and oversee the Columbia Secondary School of Math, Science, and Engineering due to open next year, announced last month it is considering the elementary school, which is next door to the university, as a temporary location. Department officials have emphasized that the decision is not final, but parents were skeptical.

"Stop trying to snowball us and give us a clearly defined answer," one P.S. 36 parent said before storming out of the raucous meeting.

Part of the reason for calling the meeting was to push the department to include parent input and allow the board to learn more about the plan, the chairman of Community Board 9, George Reyes-Montblanc, who has been a leader in opposing the university's Manhattanville expansion, said.

"The fact that the DOE didn't consult us really bothers me," he said. "We're not here to crucify anything, we're just here to find out what's going on."

Parents have said it would be inappropriate to put a secondary school inside P.S. 36, which serves 3- to 8- year-olds. The school is too small, they say, with toilets outfitted for smaller-size people and a low-ceilinged cafeteria that triples as a gym and an auditorium.

The principal of the new school, Jose Maldonado, addressed P.S. 36 parents for the first time, apologizing for not involving the community in earlier planning stages for the secondary school and assuring them that the school would be representative of the community.

Eventually, the school will be housed on land provided by Columbia University. Its expected location at 125th Street and Broadway is currently home of a McDonald's and the corner of a 17-acre area of Manhattanville the university is eyeing for an additional campus.

The zoning change needed to build the school there must first be approved by Community Board 9.

© 2006 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Mr. Bollinger’s Battle

Can Harlem and Columbia Ever Agree on the Benefits of a Bigger Campus?

By: Matthew Schuerman
Date: 2/19/2007

It was more than two years ago, over a couple of beers at the West End in Morningside Heights, that Jordi Reyes-Montblanc first told a Columbia University official that he wanted a community-benefits agreement.

These devices—contracts that force developers to promise jobs or other goodies in exchange for political support for a project—had been circulating in urban-planning circles since 2001. The idea, which has been likened to extortion or to the subversion of democracy by critics, has made recent forays in New York City, appearing at Atlantic Yards and again at the Bronx Terminal Market shopping center.

“Whenever people come to the community to develop something, it is seldom, if ever, resulting in any benefit for the people who have made this place real,” Mr. Reyes-Montblanc told The Observer recently. “We want it in writing, we want it contractual—in a way that it can be fulfilled, that it can be verified.”

Mr. Reyes-Montblanc, a Cuban-born international-shipping consultant who heads the local community board, was holding a relatively strong hand: His board was working on a zoning plan that would compete with the university’s. The Pratt Institute was offering advice, and the Bloomberg administration seemed to view the whole thing as an interesting test case.

Columbia, meanwhile, was eager to heal the wounds that Harlem residents still felt from the university’s attempted takeover of Morningside Park back in 1968.

And so, the Ivy League official sitting across the table from him, senior executive vice president Robert Kasdin, indicated that he would be amenable to “talking with legitimate representatives about how our expansion should benefit the surrounding community,” Mr. Kasdin recalled.

Finally, after months of preparation, the negotiations for the community-benefits agreement began last month. Once completed, the C.B.A. may set a precedent for all other large real-estate projects in New York City, a precedent which, based on the way it has evolved so far, would be much more rigorous than those already established in the Bronx or Brooklyn.

Or it could provide more evidence that negotiations like this, outside the halls of government, come to no good.



PRACTICALLY SPEAKING, THE COMMUNITY-BENEFITS agreement will likely provide the key that Columbia needs to unlock city approval for its 17-acre expansion into West Harlem—an expansion that the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, has pretty much staked his tenure on.

Mr. Bollinger has known of the city-locked university’s desperate need for space since his very first interviews to get the job. His inaugural address in October 2002 even mentioned Manhattanville—the university’s preferred name for the southernmost section of West Harlem—as a possible expansion site well before the school went public with its plans.

“It turns out, at least from my point of view early on, that it was space that was the critical determinant in whether, over time, Columbia would maintain its greatness and achieve its potential,” Mr. Bollinger, a broad-shouldered man with salt-and-pepper hair, said recently in his office in Low Library. “Because of the crisis of the 1960’s, part of which involved space, Columbia has struggled for several decades to address the issue. While other universities were growing significantly, Columbia was making do with a building here, a space there, and it really had to, in my view, address this in a more comprehensive way.”

Mr. Bollinger considered a site along the Hudson River in the West 50’s, but decided in favor of West Harlem, in part because of its proximity to neighboring Morningside Heights and in part because, he said, “Harlem is a place of great magic, of mystique, of tremendous creativity and accomplishment.”

Ironically, by choosing Manhattanville, the man who became a champion of affirmative action shortly after becoming president of the University of Michigan, whence he came to Columbia, is putting himself in the position of displacing about 132 ethnically diverse households. Columbia has promised to relocate the residents in comparable or superior lodgings, but, according to LaVerna Fountain, Columbia’s assistant vice president for communications, details about how long tenants would enjoy comparable rents haven’t been worked out.

Mr. Bollinger said that he doesn’t see a contradiction between his University of Michigan and Columbia personae, but he does acknowledge that relations between the university and Harlem need to improve.

That’s where the community-benefits agreement comes in.

“The C.B.A., first of all, provides a context to build a relationship with the surrounding communities, and I don’t mean just engaging in a discussion about what Columbia can do and wants to do, but what the communities would like to see, and their aspirations and needs,” Mr. Bollinger said. “Secondly, it provides clarity of those things that we can agree to do for the surrounding communities—so we get that sort of settled. Lastly, it builds a base of trust. Over time, that is equally important, maybe more important, because the limits of what Columbia will do for surrounding communities will not be set by the community-benefits agreements.”



WHEN THE COMMUNITY BOARD STARTED TO FORM an entity that would negotiate on West Harlem’s behalf, one thing was certain: Harlem didn’t think much of the community-benefits agreement for Atlantic Yards, in which developer Forest City Ratner negotiated directly with nonprofits that would end up making money from the agreement.

“Ratner and the city got together with one big, national not-for-profit and a set of local sycophants and put something together which doesn’t seem to have satisfied too many people, except for those who are benefiting directly from it,” Mr. Reyes-Montblanc, the chairman of Community Board 9, said.

The community board wanted to keep out elected officials as well, at least until 2008, when their clout might be important to force Columbia to comply with the agreement. The point was to avoid the conflicts of interest that were apparent when Bronx City Council members negotiated a “community-benefits program” with the Yankees that called for, among other things, a $32 million charitable trust fund that would be indirectly controlled by the same elected officials who negotiated the deal.

Instead, the West Harlem community board began selecting representatives from the different public-housing projects nearby, as well as someone from the local business organization, another to represent the commercial-property owners—in other words, representatives from different constituencies, rather than heads of organizations that might benefit from the agreement.

Then, during the first meeting between the local development corporation and Columbia in August, a string of elected officials, with U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel at the head of the line, walked into the meeting room on 125th Street.

The politicians, who had been invited out of courtesy, argued that if they were going to be asked to enforce an agreement, they should help forge it. And besides, given all the difficulties of selecting true representatives of the community, why not go with some duly elected representatives?

“It was absolutely clear to us, by the time the meeting ended, that if we didn’t include their representatives on the board as voting members, that we would be doing so at our own peril,” said one development-corporation board member.

After several more weeks of give-and-take with the elected officials, the local development corporation went back and revised its by-laws to permit them as voting members to the board—but only after the corporation raised questions about whether or not there would be conflicts of interest with their official roles in the land-use approval process. The corporation asked the elected officials to seek legal counsel on this point.

Susan Russell, the chief of staff for City Councilman Robert Jackson, said that only two of the elected officials now on the development corporation’s board—Mr. Jackson, who represents West Harlem, and Inez Dickens, who represents an adjacent district—would also vote on the land-use application. (The other five elected officials are state legislators, Mr. Rangel, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who only issues recommendations on land-use plans.)

“Elected officials bring experience to the board,” Ms. Russell said. “They bring the power of their office. And they help legitimize and broaden the base of representation of the board.”

The community board is struggling to maintain a united front against the use of eminent domain—the government’s right to take private property, with compensation for the owner, so long as it goes to some sort of public use, with “public use” being variously defined. Tom DeMott, a former post-office employee who is a tenants’ representative on the development corporation’s board, fears that the involvement of elected officials may dilute that resolve, even though they profess solidarity.

“The problem with having elected officials on the local development corporation is that one of the constituents they represent is Columbia University,” Mr. DeMott said. “There is immense potential here, but there is also immense potential to get screwed.”

The views on eminent domain among the current 19 board members of the local development corporation—including representatives from elected officials—is actually diverse and nuanced, according to the corporation’s president, Patricia Jones, a certified public accountant who lives in Hamilton Heights.

“Some believe that eminent domain is a land-use issue, and therefore outside the purview of the C.B.A. Some believe that because the Empire State Development Corporation will make the ultimate decision as to whether or not eminent-domain powers ought to be used, a lot of people say that’s a state issue,” Ms. Jones said. “You’ve got others who say, ‘I don’t care whose issue it is, it needs to come off the table.’”

Right now, Columbia says that it owns 67.5 percent of the 17 acres it wants. Another 20.5 percent is owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and other public agencies. Just 12 percent is privately held.

“In my view, it would be irresponsible to take eminent domain off the table,” Mr. Bollinger said. “I don’t know if we will ask for it—I hope not—but certainly I think that, when there is an economic interest that is standing in the way of a public purpose, like major work on the brain that may cure diseases like Alzheimer’s, I think we should be in a position to use it or call for its use.”

It may turn out that the community-benefits agreement will become the price that Columbia has to pay for the right to take that final 12 percent of property by eminent domain. Consider: The university softens up the local development-corporation members with enough well-meaning promises that a majority of them would overlook the eminent-domain issue. The City Council takes its cue from the local development corporation and approves the land-use changes that Columbia needs to turn an industrial slum into gleaming scientific laboratories.



IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN that way.

Officially, the city considers C.B.A.’s separate from the zoning changes that the Planning Commission and City Council decide, but in practice they are intertwined. The Related Companies and the Yankees negotiated their community-benefits agreements until just hours before the City Council took its vote on the land-use plan, because the Council was waiting to see that the affected neighborhoods got something for their pain.

And since the state will make the decision on eminent domain, that City Council vote is really the only one where local officials could block Columbia from taking property away against the owners’ will.

Meanwhile, the official city policy on C.B.A.’s is murky. Why, it was just 10 months ago that the Mayor called an attempt at creating a C.B.A. for the new Mets stadium “a ransom.” Yet the Bloomberg administration has sanctioned the Columbia C.B.A. to a greater extent than any others.

It was the Mayor’s office, for example, that drafted Jesse Masyr, a developer’s attorney who represented the Related Companies for Bronx Terminal Market, to work pro bono for the community group.

And the city’s Economic Development Corporation has allocated $350,000 to pay for a mediator and underwrite certain other expenses.

“What we have attempted [is] to play the role of honest broker in discussions between the community and Columbia,” Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff told The Observer in January.

But Mr. Doctoroff added that he didn’t see the use of a C.B.A. in West Harlem as necessarily a model for future large-scale development plans.

“We’ve learned that community input is absolutely essential,” he said. “We’ve also learned that every community is different, so we continue to take a very tailored approach to every situation.”

Mr. Masyr acknowledged that C.B.A.’s raise many beguiling issues, but said they are the wave of the future. One question is how closely related the benefits that a developer promises must be to the project undertaken. Another is whether, by linking votes on the C.B.A. with the ones that the City Council takes on land use, the C.B.A. doesn’t amount to extortion.

“It’s an evolving issue,” Mr. Masyr said. “I can easily anticipate in the future seeing more involvement from government, not less.”

copyright © 2006 the new york observer, llc | all rights reserved

[Eugenious]

Mr. Bollinger’s Battle

Can Harlem and Columbia Ever Agree on the Benefits of a Bigger Campus?

By: Matthew Schuerman
Date: 2/19/2007

It was more than two years ago, over a couple of beers at the West End in Morningside Heights, that Jordi Reyes-Montblanc first told a Columbia University official that he wanted a community-benefits agreement.

These devices—contracts that force developers to promise jobs or other goodies in exchange for political support for a project—had been circulating in urban-planning circles since 2001. The idea, which has been likened to extortion or to the subversion of democracy by critics, has made recent forays in New York City, appearing at Atlantic Yards and again at the Bronx Terminal Market shopping center.


copyright © 2006 the new york observer, llc | all rights reserved

Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence or a lawsuit which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence or lawsuit is sufficient to commit the offense. The simple four words "pay up or else" are sufficient to constitute the crime of extortion. An extortionate threat made to another in jest is still extortion.

[infoshare]

I recently found this webpage that has some good news coverage on this Manhattanville project. Inside there are many web-links, one of which has a youtube-type video that is narrated. All-in-all I found this to be an informative and enjoyable webpage.

Enjoy the tour: it may be as close as we may ever get to seeing the actual built project.

[ablarc]

Mr. Masyr acknowledged that C.B.A.’s raise many beguiling issues, but said they are the wave of the future. One question is how closely related the benefits that a developer promises must be to the project undertaken. Another is whether, by linking votes on the C.B.A. with the ones that the City Council takes on land use, the C.B.A. doesn’t amount to extortion.

“It’s an evolving issue,” Mr. Masyr said. “I can easily anticipate in the future seeing more involvement from government, not less.”

Building something will take ever longer and cost more and more.

Development by payoff.

[pianoman11686]

From http://cityrealty.com/new_developments

Borough President Stringer calls for rezoning of West Harlem 18-APR-07

Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer proposed in an "opinion" article in today's edition of The New York Post a rezoning of West Harlem to deal with the "ripple effects" of a planned major expansion by Columbia University.

"The success of city zoning often depends on whether planners have properly drawn the boundaries of the area to be rezoned. That's why I've proposed that, instead of focusing solely on the eight or so blocks that Columbia University seeks to develop for its new Manhattanville campus, we rezone all of West Harlem - from 125th Street to 145th Street, and from Convent Avenue to the Hudson River - as a new special-purpose zoning district.

"A West Harlem Special District would widen the lens through which we have been viewing the consequences of Columbia's expansion, ensuring that we plan for the needs not just of Columbia, but of the whole community.

Otherwise, the expansion's ripple effects could overwhelm the larger neighborhood.

"Under any circumstances, Columbia's expansion - a $7 billion, 17-acre plan with dozens of modern glass buildings, some reaching 25 stories - will be felt throughout West Harlem. But public debate has so far focused mainly on the direct impact that Columbia's new campus will have on businesses and residents in the expansion zone.

"The area will experience obvious benefits from the new campus, including jobs, investment dollars and new resources for the arts and culture. There are real issues as well: a community-benefits agreement to be hammered out; legitimate outrage over the prospect of Columbia using eminent domain to condemn people's homes, and more."

Mr. Stringer wrote that tenants in "historic tenements" in Hamilton Heights outside the immediate area that the university wants to expand into "have legitimate reason to worry that their homes will be replaced by glass towers in a newly 'hot' college neighborhood."

"Similarly," he continued, "Broadway's thriving commercial corridor north of 135th Street is also outside the expansion zone - but local storeowners fear that they will be pushed out to make way for retail catering to students and visitors. Overall, a quarter to a half of the nearby properties are vulnerable to redevelopment. There's a clear need for broader rezoning and a West Harlem Special District."

Mr. Stringer proposed a housing program to channel development dollars toward construction of new housing "that's truly affordable for current residents" and to adopt anti-harassment and demolition-restriction provisions like those in other special districts; these impose serious penalties on landlords who harass tenants or demolish viable housing."

[pianoman11686]

Columbia's Harlem Lobbying Effort Gets Expensive

Land Use

BY ELIOT BROWN - Special to the Sun
May 24, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/55153

Columbia University is ramping up lobbying efforts for its planned 17-acre campus extension in Harlem, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into an attempt to gain city approval for the contentious project.

Between January and April, the university paid more than $440,000 to lobbying firms, according to data released to the New York Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, a marked increase compared with the approximately $190,000 the institution spent in the first four months of 2006. Since 2004, Columbia is listed as paying more than $1.5 million to lobbyists for land-use or expansion-related subjects, mostly targeting city and local elected officials.

For developers seeking city approval for giant projects, it has become an almost obligatory step to throw fistfuls of money into lobbying in an effort to win needed support of officials. Columbia's plan to expand its campus north has drawn strong resistance from many in the community, and opponents are vowing a fight as the proposal enters the city's public review process in coming months.

Perhaps seeing the storm clouds on the horizon, the university last year hired as a lobbyist the longtime political insider Bill Lynch, who has received about $200,000 so far this year.

A spokeswoman for Columbia, La-Verna Fountain, said the dollar figures in state records also include services other than lobbying, such as community outreach and land-use legal services.

Opponents of the plan have hired a lobbyist as well, though the university's spending easily dwarfs the $28,000 paid to Richard Lipsky, who frequently does lobbying for small businesses.

The owner of rental storage properties in the project's footprint, Nicholas Sprayregen, who hired Mr. Lipsky, said he, like Columbia, is just trying to get officials to hear his position.

"These eminent domain fights are David vs. Goliath and in the case like this, the thing one guy like me can do is try to get his message out," Mr. Sprayregen said.

Particularly for large development projects that require city or state approval, policy analysts say lobbying has grown tremendously in the past decade.

"It just seems that one of the greatest growth industries in the city and state is our lobbying industry," the executive director of the advocacy group Citizens Union, Richard Dadey, said. Regarding the money Columbia is putting into their campaign, Mr. Dadey said: "It is a fair amount of money to spend on a lobbying campaign to influence these decisions, but it is what institutions are increasingly willing to pay to win on their issue."

Columbia's spending on lobbying this year tops that of any major developer in the city, though the developer of Brooklyn's $4 billion Atlantic Yards Project, Forest City Ratner, is listed as spending more than $300,000. In 2006, the Brooklyn-based development company ranked third in the state for lobbying expenses, spending more than $2.1 million leading up to the approval in December of the giant mixed-use project that seeks to build a basketball arena and residential towers near downtown Brooklyn.

Columbia is awaiting the completion of a state-administered blight study for the area, a required step for the use of eminent domain. A spokesman for the state's development agency said the state is hoping to complete the study in June.

© 2007 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC.

[ablarc]

For developers seeking city approval for giant projects, it has become an almost obligatory step to throw fistfuls of money into lobbying in an effort to win needed support of officials.

Plato points out "democracy" inevitably degenerates into oligarchy. And oligarchy is based on money.

Sad.

What do you think that money actually goes into to get the message out? Power lunches? Paid vacations in Orlando? Free visits to the Hustler Club?

[pianoman11686]

Does it even matter? The only people who really "win" in this kind of arrangement are the lobbyists.

[pianoman11686]

Columbia expansion plowing ahead

By: Anne Michaud
Published: May 31, 2007 - 3:06 pm
http://www.newyorkbusiness.com/apps/.../70531008/1102

Columbia University's 17-acre expansion into West Harlem will enter into the city review process on Monday, following three years of delay and controversy.

The review, which takes seven months, would rezone several city blocks near the Hudson River to create a satellite campus for the university. Science labs, an arts building and a business school are planned.

Charges that the university is mishandling community relations have dogged the project -- sometimes triggering student protests -- and local leaders are objecting to the timing, which means that public hearings will be scheduled during the summer vacation months.

"It is the opinion of the West Harlem Local Development Corp. that a summer certification date for this proposal, which has been under review at the Department of City Planning for years, will offend the essence of the [land-use review] process which is designed to seek community comment and involvement," wrote Patricia Jones, president of the LDC, in a letter to City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden.

Ms. Jones' group is responsible for negotiating a package of community benefits with the university to offset any local hardship. Tension surrounds the prospect that Columbia will ask state officials to take the land of unwilling sellers by eminent domain.

The university's rezoning application and environmental impact statement are in final review today by the Department of City Planning, a spokeswoman said. Planners expect to present it Monday to the City Planning Commission for certification, launching the review process known as Ulurp.

City planners say the public will have plenty of time to offer input.

"The Ulurp process extends for seven months and will allow many opportunities along the way for public comment," says Rachaele Raynoff, department spokeswoman.

A representative of Columbia University said there is probably never a good time to start the process.

"We understand the challenges," said a spokeswoman. "This has been a long time coming, and we are simply ready and willing to keep working with everyone."

Entire contents © 2007