New York Plan Hits a Political Roadblock

The complicated financing plan for a $2-billion stadium on the West Side of Manhattan stalled Monday amid fierce political infighting, leaving New York’s bid for the 2012 Summer Games in jeopardy and threatening the direction of the Olympic movement in the United States.

In a dramatic move just one month before the International Olympic Committee selects the site for 2012, the speaker of the New York state assembly, Sheldon Silver, vowed to veto the stadium project. His vote is needed for the final step in a lengthy approvals process.

Silver, a Democrat who represents Lower Manhattan, had repeatedly expressed concern in recent weeks that development on the West Side would compromise rebuilding a few miles to the south, at the former World Trade Center, destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He said Monday that the stadium plan was “at best, premature.”

Bid, city and U.S. Olympic officials have said repeatedly that without the stadium, the New York bid bears little chance in the IOC vote July 6 in Singapore. Paris, London, Madrid and Moscow are also in the race; Paris, London and Madrid received a boost with the publication Monday of an IOC report that praised each city’s bid. New York’s bid also had received high marks from the IOC, contingent on approval of the stadium plan.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a Republican who faces reelection in the fall, had said that the city had to have the stadium for the Games to show the IOC it could deliver on promises, a key issue in the aftermath of the 2004 Athens Games, which were dogged by delays in construction and preparation.

The 75,000-seat stadium, to be built by the NFL’s New York Jets atop a 13-acre platform over an operating rail yard, was envisioned as part of a far-reaching expansion of New York’s undersized convention center.

The stadium had drawn ferocious political opposition within New York’s five boroughs, fueled in part by an advertising campaign underwritten by Cablevision, which owns Madison Square Garden and which had submitted a rival bid for the West Side site.

Last Thursday, a state judge rejected a legal challenge to the plan.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, had made approval by Monday a priority, hoping to ride the momentum of the IOC report. Three times in recent weeks the vote, by the little-known state Public Authorities Control Board, had been delayed. Negotiations with Silver continued through the weekend.

Gov. George E. Pataki, state Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno and Silver control the board. Pataki’s representative on the board voted for the plan; Bruno and Silver’s representatives abstained.

The development plan for the site is now uncertain. The board could reconsider the issue, but a vote in favor of the stadium must be unanimous.

Silver said he was willing to consider more talks. But he also said at news conference, “Am I to sell out the community I have fought for?”

If the stadium is built, the NFL had announced it would play host to the 2010 Super Bowl. At a meeting on Maui in March, the league said the necessary financing and government approvals for the West Side stadium had to be in place by Dec. 31 or the league would look elsewhere. “We will review with the Jets the status of the 2010 Super Bowl,” NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said after Monday’s vote.

New York Olympic bid officials said they were frustrated and disappointed.

“Today, in an extraordinary irony, just when the IOC made clear that New York has an exceptional bid and can win, [Silver] announced that he opposed the stadium,” executive director Jay Kriegel said, calling Silver’s position “inexplicable and terribly damaging to New York’s and America’s Olympic bid.”

The contrast between the New York and Paris bids was vivid. A crowd of perhaps 1 million took to the Champs Elysees in central Paris on Sunday in a show of support for the 2012 Games, while in New York, the stadium plan couldn’t even make it out of Albany.

“If we don’t have a stadium, we cannot get the Olympics,” Bloomberg said at a news conference before the vote.

“And in terms of what we’re going to do,” meaning what kind of showing the New York team intends to stage in Singapore, or even whether New York will send a delegation if the stadium plan is stalled, “we’ll have to talk to the United States Olympic Committee.”

The abrupt turn raised questions about whether the USOC had exercised due oversight of a bid strategy that had featured the West Side plan as the sole option for a stadium. Bloomberg and other city officials had insisted on the site because only there could the stadium double as a convention-center extension.

“We are in the process of fact-finding and gathering additional information,” USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said.

The developments Monday also underscored the increasingly uncertain prospects for the return of the Games to this country -- an issue of significant concern to the USOC. Unlike other nations’ Olympic programs, the USOC is not government funded. It traditionally has depended on the Games coming to the United States every few years to lure corporate sponsors, who assure the effort’s financial security.

The United States has played host to the Games four times since 1980, most recently in 2002 in Salt Lake City. A majority of the IOC’s top-tier sponsors are U.S. corporations.

But the Games have in recent years demanded increasing governmental attention, if not intervention, which runs counter to the American model of private-sector funding and a more restricted role for government.

The Greek government, for instance, spent more than $10 billion in infrastructure readying for the 2004 Summer Games. The Australian state of New South Wales took a leading role in running the 2000 Sydney Games.

French President Jacques Chirac, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe and regional politicians are “deeply involved” in the French bid, the IOC report issued Monday said. British officials would spend $16 billion on infrastructure in advance of 2012, and the IOC noted that the bid enjoys “strong support” from Queen Elizabeth II, the national government and municipal authorities.

Paris has long been considered the front-runner in the 2012 race, pursuing a strategy that in part highlights the use of temporary venues as a means to trim expenses -- in line with IOC President Jacques Rogge’s call to cut costs as a way of taking the Games, perhaps as soon as 2016, to Africa or South America.

Paris’ would-be Olympic stadium, the Stade de France, played host to soccer’s World Cup finals in 1998.

An IOC inspection team visited all five cities earlier this year; in Monday’s report it offered not one caution, not even one negative word, about Paris’ plan. The report noted Paris’ “careful consideration” of cost-cutting measures.

London’s plan calls for a sweeping redevelopment of the city’s east side. Its proposal won praise from the IOC but also a caution that the plan is so massive it would require “careful planning” to get done on time.

Madrid was cited for planning “humanist, sustainable and environmentally friendly Games,” but was told it needs more hotel rooms.

Moscow’s low-budget plans, the report said, lacked “detailed planning” and “background information.”

French, British and Spanish officials welcomed the report, and said they intended to move into the politically sensitive area of selling each city’s story.

Noting Sunday’s party along the Champs Elysees, Paris bid leader Philippe Baudillon said Monday in a telephone interview, “We have the enthusiasm. We have the commitment. We have the will to work very hard with the Olympic movement ... to go further.”

Sebastian Coe, the middle-distance track and field champion who heads the London 2012 bid, said in a telephone interview, “We need to explain why we are hungrier than anyone else to do this.”

In an interview this year, Cherie Blair, the wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said that selling a city’s story is a delicate matter that has to be rooted in a sincere, widespread enthusiasm: “It’s art. It’s human relations. It’s a feel. It’s a passion. And I think our biggest strength is we have that passion.”