Sale of Railyard Approved to Nets' Owner NEW YORK -- The New Jersey Nets dribbled closer to making a new home in Brooklyn on Wednesday when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted to sell an 8.3-acre railyard to team owner and real-estate developer Bruce Ratner. Ratner will pay $100 million for the downtown Brooklyn site where urban planner Robert Moses once turned down the Dodgers' push for a domed baseball stadium, helping prompt the team's move to California in 1957. The vote by the nation's largest public transit system keeps the Nets on schedule to be playing by November 2008 in a Frank Gehry-designed Flatbush Avenue arena at the heart of a 21-acre office and apartment complex, which would transform the low-rise Brooklyn skyline. Ratner doubled his original $50 million bid after a last-minute, $150 million bid in July from Manhattan-based Extell Development Co. prompted second thoughts from MTA board members. The agency has had the railyard appraised at $214 million. Arena opponents have called the MTA's decision-making process biased in favor of Ratner, a politically connected former city official whose plan has the support of Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who together effectively control the MTA board. Proponents point out that along with the cash, Ratner offered the MTA tens of millions of dollars in inducements such as improvements to the aging yard for Long Island Rail Road cars. Building trades unions and residents of the poorer neighborhoods and housing projects near the proposed arena site have been supportive of the plan. Ratner has promised to use union labor and minority contractors to build more than 2,000 low- and middle-income apartments, about a third of the units in the $3.5 billion project. The planned development includes 15 towers rising around the glass-sheathed, 18,000-seat Nets arena. Extell wanted to build a project less than half the size. The city and state have promised as much as $200 million in public money for the project. Ratner has said he would use all of it for his project, while Extell said it would use $150 million.
