It would be safe to expect a fair contribution from the state as well?
This is the sort of infrastructure development that government should put funds into. And we’re hoping for federal assistance as well.
The city has asked the state to be a 50/50 partner with Governors Island, but last year the state gave less money than the city. Will the state be matching the city’s commitments this year?
The deal is a 50/50 partnership, and we will do that in due course. I think the time lag until now has been the failure to define with any specificity what we’re doing. We’re fully funded for the next two years in terms of our ability to do the design work, the environmental reviews that we need. We’re going to be there doing our part. We have a $4.3 billion deficit right now, but in the long haul, we’ll be doing our part.
About the Javits Center expansion—is a renovation of the facility the most likely option at this point? [Editor’s note: On Dec. 20, the day after this interview was conducted, Governor Spitzer’s development chief Patrick Foye said at a State Assembly hearing that the state would scrap any large-scale expansion plans for Javits.]
This has been a difficult analytical process, primarily because the cost structure turned out to be very different from what we were told and what we expected. … The numbers were not what we were led to believe they were, and I don’t say that to impute anything improper; but the numbers—when people went back and we said, ‘Check the numbers, make sure we’re dealing with data that’s good’—the cost structure came in in a very different place than we anticipated, so that required some reexamination of some of the premises and some of the financing decisions that had been made.
Though isn’t an expansion a pretty strong driver of economic development?
That’s actually something that’s been a topic of significant debate. I think for different cites, the role of [a] convention center plays a different role. … With hotel occupancy rates what they are, with the draw to New York what it is for people, tourists—44 million tourists a year, I think, is the number—it may be less critical that we actually have a convention center that is the largest in order to keep our hotels filled and to keep the tourists coming here.
If you moved to not expand Javits now, would your administration push to have a more long-term plan, to perhaps build a convention center in Sunnyside, Queens?
I don’t want to speculate about that right now.
The city has tens of millions of square feet of commercial development planned, but we still have, overall, fewer jobs than in 2000. Do you think the city could be overdeveloping?
I don’t want to quite say that if we build it, they will come; but, certainly, if we build the additional commercial space that we project we need, I have no doubt that it will be filled.
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