NEWS: Shenanigans at the BSA over the Minerva Building
From the Downtown Brooklyn Star
http://www.brooklyndowntownstar.com/StoryDisplay.asp?PID=4&NewsStoryID=4340
Vest Me Once, Shame On You…
By Nik Kovac
The vesting battles of south Park Slope and Greenwood Heights are finally nearing resolution. So far, four smaller properties have been allowed to vest – i.e. were grandfathered in under the older, more permissive zoning – and the biggest of them all in proposed mass – 182 15th Street – has been refused the same privilege.
There are still two left for the Board of Standards and Appeals (BSA) to decide, including the most famous of them all – the so-called Minerva building on 614 7th Avenue. It is so famous because, as first proposed, the 7-story building facing Greenwood Cemetary would have blocked the Minerva statue’s view of the Statue of Liberty, a historic gaze corridor which helps commemorate the Battle of Brooklyn during the Revolutionary War.
The BSA had originally scheduled a decision on the Minerva building for June 6, and then rescheduled it for this past Tuesday, August 15. It has once again been pushed off – until September 12 – but after Tuesday’s hearing it now seems clear that the writing is on the wall.
The legal team defending the Minerva developer – Howard Hornstein and Peter Geis of Cozen & O’Connor – are the same pair who lost the 182 15th Street application. And they didn’t just lose that one – they practically got their clients put in jail over it.
Near the end of the BSA’s July 25th unanimous decision to deny that vesting, it reads, “The Board notes that the developer’s misrepresentations during the administrative hearing process on this application, even though not made under oath, provide an independent ground on which the Board may deny the application.” In other words: You lied, and you got caught doing it.
Their rhetorical tactics on the Minerva building were, if possible, even more suspect. It appeared that all was lost for them earlier this spring, when the Department of Buildings (DOB) retroactively ruled that the plans for the building – designed by the infamous and now de-certified architect Robert “Mezzanine” Scarano – were illegal, and therefore appeared to make the vesting application an open and shut case.
Hornstein and Geis, however, tried to pull a rabbit out of a hat, claiming that the DOB had ruled the “wrong plans” illegal. They claimed in their June 27th brief that the DOB was “confused” and that their audit was defective.
This immediately sent Mic Holwin and her husband Aaron Brashear – two community activists who are serving as the de facto attorneys opposing Hornstein and Geis, scurrying to the DOB’s archives across Joralemon Street from Borough Hall. “Aaron and I checked the microfilm,” recalled Holwin. “The actual job folder has been with the BSA since January, but the microfilm should have had records of this mysterious second set of plans, but there was nothing on file.”
By this month, things had gotten even more ridiculous, as Geis presented yet a third set of plans before they BSA, claiming they were the proper plans, and stating the DOB should have known this all along. “Look, they’re perforated,” he said, referring to the DOB’s standard procedure of stamping plans before filing them.
“The fact that they were perforated and stamped,” shot back DOB lawyer Angelo Rubino-Martinez at Tuesday’s hearing, “doesn’t mean they were approved. We have no record of these September 1st plans.”
That last sentence she repeated at various points throughout the hearing, sometimes interrupting the BSA commissioners to insist on it. They were convinced, and it appears that the Minerva building will not get vested. Nothing is official until the DOB submits Rubino-Martinez’s statements into a more formal, written brief, but by September the residents of south Brooklyn who have been fighting overdevelopment in their neighborhood for months should expect a massive victory.
“Nothing has been decided yet,” cautioned Holwin. “I fully expect another Hail Mary play from them before September. Aaron and I and the rest of the community are waiting for the next rabbit they’ll try and pull out of a hat.”
A final decision on the only other property with a vesting application still pending – the so-called Lake Windsor building on 8th Avenue – is scheduled for next week, but could easily be delayed.