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Westchester County Business Journal
Cover News May 12, 2008
Alliance key to major projects
RI mayor tells Yonkers crowd of redevelopment experiences
By JOHN GOLDEN
The mayor of a Northeast city of comparable size and postindustrial
decline to Yonkers visited last week to share lessons learned from his
city’s waterfront redevelopment effort and economic renaissance.
“It’s really important to think big,” David N. Cincilline, mayor of
Providence, the Rhode Island capital, told a Yonkers Business Week
audience. “It really does require big thinking and the imagination that
this can be done.”
A partnership of the public and private sectors “is really important for
any project of this magnitude,” he said. “It requires real investment
and buy-in from the private sector.” In Providence, the partnership
forged by the city and state included business, philanthropists,
nonprofit foundations and the federal government, he said.
Executing on big thinking, “You have to do some things early in the
project that really make it believable … and give people confidence that
this vision really can be accomplished,” the mayor said.
As in Yonkers, the resurgence of downtown Providence focused on
waterfront redevelopment and “daylighting” for public use a stretch of
river that had been long buried under pavement. The reclamation project
involved moving two rivers and railroad tracks to open up the city’s
center.
Cincilline said Providence, slightly smaller than Yonkers with a
population of 180,000, has benefited from more than $3 billion in
investment sparked by water-oriented redevelopment in the city’s new
Capital Center on the Providence River. It is the second-largest and
fastest-growing city in New England
WaterFire, an art installation of 100 burning braziers on that river,
“has created this incredible experience that people come into downtown
just to walk around,” he told his Yonkers audience. “Literally millions
of people come into the center of the city with no other real purpose
than just to wander around the city.” About 70 percent of visitors to
the WaterFire spectacle are visiting Providence for the first time, “so
it’s a great vehicle for introducing people to the city.”
“It has really revived the soul and the heart of the city,” Cicilline
said. “The Providence River was 10 years ago totally inactive. Now it’s
filled with recreational activity.”
In Yonkers, the $1.6 billion redevelopment plan proposed by Struever
Fidelco Cappelli L.L.C. (SFC), the city’s master developer, includes
uncovering two stretches of the Saw Mill River at Larkin Plaza and in
the Chicken Island area, site of the development partners’ proposed
mixed-use River Park Center. Introducing Cicilline and other panelists
at the Business Week event, SFC project manager Peter G. Klein
envisioned “140,000 people” enjoying a riverside public park where “140
cars” now are parked on Larkin Plaza.
The Larkin Plaza project will be publicly funded. Klein said SFC’s cost
to uncover the river at Chicken Island and build a River Park Center
Riverwalk was estimated at $42 million. He said that work “will be an
integral part of our first phase” of construction that SFC hopes to
begin late this year.
The daylighting project last week surfaced in the city’s public arena
after a newly formed local development corporation, composed chiefly of
elected and appointed city officials, applied to the state for a $24
million grant authorized two years ago for the Saw Mill River project.
The New Main Street Development Corp. proposed to use the funds to
acquire 11 properties needed to make way for SFC’s Riverwalk. SFC holds
purchase options on several of the properties.
That led Yonkers City Councilman John Murtagh last week to question why
the city would act as “middleman” for the developer in acquiring needed
properties from private owners. Councilwoman Patricia McDow, who was
appointed to the New Main Street Development Corporation board, said she
opposed the board’s application to the state because it could allow the
city to acquire private properties through eminent domain.
A few council members said they thought the $24 million grant was to be
used for the city’s share of daylighting construction costs when
announced two years ago. They wondered how the revenue-strapped city
will come up with funding for the project. The council said it would
meet with officials of Mayor Philip Amicone’s administration to seek
answers.
Former Gov. George E. Pataki two years ago announced an additional $10
million in funding for the daylighting project. Amicone’s City Hall
spokesman David Simpson last week said that money from the Empire State
Development Corp. is planned for the Larkin Plaza project.
Simpson said the new development corporation will not retain ownership
of the properties once the daylighting project is complete, but instead
dissolve itself after transferring the properties to either the city or
another entity.
“We’ve used LDCs (local development corporations) on a number of
different projects,” he said. “They’re commonly used to protect the city
and protect the taxpayers in case something goes awry” with a project.
As for who will own Riverwalk, a public space within the private River
Park Center development, “It’s still being worked out with the
development team over who’s going to own those public spaces, how
they’re going to be maintained,” Simpson said.
The Providence mayor, who was given a Hudson River tour on the year-old
ferry line serving Yonkers, said Yonkers had one major element and
opportunity that his city lacked in its rebirth.
“You have this incredible waterway, this really serious river,”
Cicilline said of the Hudson. “To the extent that you connect with that,
you make a really powerful statement.”
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