A member of the Brooklyn Museum is angry that the museum’s Board of Trustees is honoring developer Bruce Ratner at their annual Brooklyn Ball. He wrote a letter to the board of trustees that was sent to me yesterday and is posted on the Develop Don’t Destroy Website:
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, New York 11238-6052Re: Inappropriateness of the Brooklyn Museum’s “Honoring” Bruce Ratner
Dear Brooklyn Museum Board of Trustees:
I write this as an open letter to the Brooklyn Museum.
My wife and I came home on Wednesday, March 12th, opened our mail from the Brooklyn Museum, an institution important to us, and were dumbfounded and aghast to discover that we were being invited to a Brooklyn Museum Ball “honoring Bruce Ratner.”
It is uncomfortable to step up and point out why it is inappropriate for the Museum to be “honoring” Ratner, but it is crucial. If it helps that I am not only a longtime Museum supporter but also a lawyer, an urban planner and have had a long career in government with the State Finance authorities, then it is probably all the more incumbent upon me to speak.
I do not believe it is appropriate for a respected public institution like the Brooklyn Museum to be honoring Bruce Ratner. To many of us this is obvious but I will explain the many reasons why.
A museum should be a good neighbor to its community. You cannot be a good neighbor by promoting the activities of someone who is a bad neighbor, and worse, to the community.
Where I come from in government, garnering public subsidy via influence and sidestepping a proper bid process can wind up with the perpetrators going to prison. Using influence and sidestepping a proper bid process is exactly the way that Bruce Ratner is proposing to develop the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment. As a lawyer, I could almost certainly make a distinction between what Mr. Ratner is doing and what sends people to jail but it would be so technical I am not sure most people would understand or regard it as important. And I am not sure if there would be an accompanying moral distinction. Nor could I assure you that, if the facts were fully known about Mr. Ratner’s influence and access, that there would be a legal distinction. I leave it for the people who want a special distinct status to set Bruce Ratner apart to explain what and why that should be. I will point out the main appreciable difference: Ratner’s proposed no-bid subsidy grabbing is on a sheer magnitude of scale that is incomparable. The proposed no-bid subsidies Ratner intends to collect from the public are easily in excess of $2-2.5 billion. That far exceeds anything I am familiar with in other analogous situations.