None Dare Call It Fraud
“The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions… They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls, they’ve got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear…. They spend billions of dollars lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.” – George Carlin
October 1, 2022
Kingston, NY – City officials allied with the Kingstonian developers violated state law when they withheld the contents of a draft resolution to finalize the development’s site approval, according to a state official. The Daily Freeman reported that the City refused to release the resolution, discussed at the Planning Board’s Sept. 19 meeting, because it was in draft form. But the official, from the State Committee on Open Government, said under law proposed resolutions should available even if it’s a draft. Then, another City official said the draft was kept private “in light of all the litigation surrounding this project.”
If City officials won’t release the resolution, that’s okay, because the Vindicator will do it for them.
The Planning Board, which delayed its vote on the resolution, has reasons to keep it private: what we’ve suspected all along about the parking flim-flam is true, and the developer/local government cabal wants to make sure lawsuits from opponents of the massive tax break don’t hold up passage of the resolution. The developers ask for a parking waiver from the Planning Board rather than a variance from the Zoning Board of Appeals because the ZBA would have to hold a public hearing. The last thing Team Kingstonian wants is hundreds of irate Kingston residents, you know, the real Kingstonians, showing up to complain that government has handed Brad Jordan tens of millions so he can blacktop 603 spaces in his mall.
In the resolution, the developers acknowledge that if code was followed, the Kingstonian garage would contain only 96 parking spots for the public. Right now, the N. Front St. lot contains 140 spaces, of which two are unusable, leaving 138 spaces, for a loss of 42 spots. The premise for this huge gift to the developer was that there would be more “desperately needed” parking. In short, the developers used the nonexistent need for more parking as a fig leaf to scam tens of millions from the public kitty so they could accommodate their new tenants, hotel guests and patrons.
Since the resolution acknowledges that there would be a loss of 42 spaces, how is a developer to get around this inconvenient bit of math? Team Kingstonian relied on a piece of code allowing parking requirements to be waived if there’s parking available on an adjacent property. And it so happens that developer Brad Jordan owns the adjacent property, which is the mall, and 603 extra spaces are available there.
Team Kingstonian predicts that the hotel and store customers will use 84 spaces, but they’ll be transient, which according to the developer will free up more spaces for public use.
This means the developers are encroaching on the spaces allocated to the so-called “public” if they allow hotel and store customers to park there and shows that even with the parking waiver, there still won’t be 270, or 277, or 290 spaces for the public, whatever the number du jour. In the June 3, 2019 Planning Board hearing, Planning Board chair Wayne Platte asked, “Can you just reiterate how many parking spots will be allocated just for Uptown parking, not anything associated with the building itself?” And Dennis Larios replied, “290 of those will be dedicated to the City, to anyone that wants to use them. 130 spaces will be designated to the project specifically and there will be an allocation of some spaces within the Kingston Plaza for employees and or residents that want a second car to keep it there.” Larios said nothing about hotel guests or shop patrons, but those car owners would certainly fall under Platte’s definition of “associated” with the Kingstonian. Platte failed to press the issue. See more on the parking bait-and-switch from this site and Mayor Steve Noble’s latest response.
The draft resolution recapitulates much of the Kingstonian’s five-year process. Therefore, it might be time to recapitulate some of the attendant corruption. The operative word is “some,” because no doubt the public will never know about all the wheeling and dealing that went on behind closed doors and in dark money quid pro quos. Over the next few days I’ll annotate the resolution to fill in the meetings and reports they don’t want you to know about, complete with video references, transcripts and other documents they tried to suppress.