Whatchoo Talkin’ ‘Bout, Willets?

Before the City Council agrees to Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to transform Willets Point by building housing, retail, hotels and a convention center at the site, can someone explain why anyone would want to build housing, retail, hotels and a convention center on an apparently highly polluted site in the flightpath of planes landing at LaGuardia? Because I’m really, really curious about that one:

City hall officials struck an eleventh-hour deal Wednesday to transform gritty Willets Point into what they called the city’s next great neighborhood.

The City Council is expected to ratify the agreement by today’s deadline by granting a host of zoning and other measures required under the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure.

The $3 billion redevelopment plan will turn the heavily polluted 62-acre tract near Shea Stadium in Queens into a modern complex of residential, retail, entertainment and commercial uses, including a hotel and the city’s first convention center built outside Manhattan.

Mayor Bloomberg hailed the agreement with Council officials “as one of the big, important wins for New York City’s economy” at a time when it needs it the most.

He said it will create 18,000 construction jobs and 5,000 permanent jobs and will generate $25 billion in economic benefits in the next 30 years, including $1.3 billion in direct tax revenues.

The redevelopment, which will take a decade, is to include 5,500 units of housing, and the new deal calls for boosting the affordable housing component to 1,920 units, or 35% of the total. That’s up from 1,100 units, or 20%, in the original version. Some 800 of the affordable units will be targeted to families earning less than $37,000.

Location Scout: Iron Triangle.

Officials Say Tribes Must Weigh In . . .

. . . and I’m sure they would agree that traffic sucks on the BQE, especially when it gets congested leading up to the LIE onramp:

Crossing the traffic-choked Kosciuszko Bridge is hard, but tearing it down is proving even more difficult.

After a year of bureaucratic delays, the $630 million project to replace the aging span has hit another snag: getting an okay from Native American tribes who have long disappeared from the region.

The feds have refused to sign off on the project until the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans in Wisconsin and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma are given a chance to weigh in, state and federal officials confirmed.

The two tribes once called this area home. The holdup — the third major delay in a year — has further angered Queens and Brooklyn landowners whose future remains unclear as officials try to figure out how to replace the bridge, which opened in 1939.

. . .

For six weeks, the feds have been mulling final approval to replace the Kosciuszko, which carries the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway over Newtown Creek.

But late last month, the state Historic Preservation Office notified the feds that “some ancestral land” of the two tribes may be affected by the project, said Federal Highway Administration spokesman Doug Hecox.

Federal law requires a Native American tribe to be notified when a federally funded project affects its ancestral homeland.

“They have to consult with us to find out if we have a defined interest in that area,” said Tamara Francis, the Delaware Nation’s Cultural Preservation Director. “Ordinarily this was something the state would do,” Hecox said. “Simply put, the action did not occur, so we are now doing it.”

The feds are mailing letters to the tribes this week. They will be given 30 days to respond.

Renaming Infrastructure Is Not Cheap

A lot of plastic bags, in fact:

New York State will have to spend $4 million to replace road signs changing the name of the Triborough Bridge to the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, a spokesman for the State Department of Transportation said on Thursday.

The spokesman, Adam Levine, acknowledged that the state is in a financial crisis and he said the money would not be spent right away.

He said that it will take time to survey the existing signs and design new ones, and that a contract for the news signs is not expected to be put out for bids until 2011.

“If the fiscal climate does not improve by 2011 the law does give us some flexibility so we will be able to perhaps make some adjustments to the schedule,” Mr. Levine said.

The are 139 signs that must be replaced, he said, on roadways in Manhattan, The Bronx and Queens leading up to the bridge.

In addition, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Transportation said it will spend $100,000 over the next six months to replace 12 large overhead road signs and 40 smaller signs. The reason the cost to the state is so much greater appeared to be because it must replace a larger number of the more costly overhead signs.

Location Scout: Triborough Bridge.

Damn, Damn Yankees . . .

So not only did the Yankees use their planning money to lobby the city but they went ahead and deducted more than allowed from that $5 million credit so that now the city has to go after the team for what is, in effect, “back rent”:

The Yankees have agreed to fork over $11 million to the city in back rent — money the team probably would have preferred to spend on an ace starting pitcher for next season.

The team underpaid the city the equivalent of Mike Mussina’s salary between 2003 and 2006, according to an audit by City Comptroller William Thompson.

Under the team’s rental agreement, the Yankees pay the city a percentage of all revenue from tickets, parking and cable television, officials said.

During that three-year period, the team took in more than $1 billion and paid the city $17 million.

But according to the audit, the Yankees improperly deducted costs above and beyond the $5 million permitted for planning for the new stadium.

More than $9 million was improperly deducted for stadium planning in 2006.

The team also low-balled its gross revenue during the three years, costing the city another $2 million, the audit states.

Just What We Need — For The Bronx To Look Even More Like Seattle

It actually looks more like a cross between Terrace on the Park and a corkscrew:

Motorists, bike riders, and pedestrians may someday see a tall structure not unlike the Seattle Space Needle rising up from near the Willis Avenue Bridge, welcoming outsiders and residents to the new and exciting Bronx.

In a press conference held in Riverdale on Wednesday, October 22, Assemblyman Jose Rivera and the New York District Council of Carpenters were on hand to endorse the Yes the Bronx campaign to build a 176-foot tower with event space for 500 people and observation deck at the top. The construction cost is estimated at $25 million.

While the exact location for the Yes the Bronx Observation Tower has yet to be determined, and the fund raising for the project has only just begun, the builders expect the tower to rise somewhere east of the Willis Avenue Bridge.

“For people coming from the Tri-borough Bridge, this will be an instant symbol of the Bronx,” said Kevin Kennon, the architect for the project. “I always saw the Bronx as a vibrant community, so if we can take that community spirit and lift it up into the air, it would literally be keeping the community up.”

The building is to be entirely constructed of recycled materials that have their origins in the Bronx, making it a true Bronx structure. The tower will be about 20 stories tall, and feature a 80′ by 80′ observation deck where locals can enjoy the view of the Bronx, Manhattan, and beyond.