Green Light for Renovations Is Start of U.N. Fiscal War

UNITED NATIONS — The General Assembly yesterday approved the budget for the latest version of the plan to renovate the landmark First Avenue U.N. building, giving the official green light for launching the project, which is expected to begin early next year.

But the long-awaited approval of the so-called Capital Master Plan's nearly $2 billion budget was only the beginning of a much larger fiscal war, in which a new two-year U.N. budget proposal was heavily criticized yesterday by all sides, including America, which pays the largest share of the organization's funding.

American officials said that at an estimated $5.2 billion — more than $1 billion of which will be financed by American taxpayers — the United Nations's "regular" budget represents the largest funding growth in the organization's history.

This figure, they stressed, does not even account for many independent U.N. funds, and it excludes not only such special projects as the building's renovation plan, but also one of the United Nations's most prominent, and most expensive, activities: peacekeeping.

The approval of a two-year $992,771,819 budget for the Capital Master Plan was a victory for its latest director, Michael Adlerstein. His new blueprint represents the plan's fourth version in nearly a decade since the organization has decided to modernize its flagship building and bring it into compliance with safety and other codes enforced by New York City, where the United Nations has a unique legal status that exempts it from local laws.

According to Mr. Adlerstein's plan, the renovation would be done in one phase, to be completed by 2013, instead of an incremental approach — which would not be finished until 2016 — that was envisioned in a previous plan approved last year. The new approach would allow the plan to stay within its overall budget of $1.88 billion. In yesterday's vote, the assembly authorized Mr. Adlerstein and his staff to seek rental space for 1,500 staffers who would need to be relocated to Midtown Manhattan offices in the vicinity of the U.N. building.

"We are optimistic," a CMP spokesman, Warner Schmidt, told The New York Sun, saying he hoped leases for office space would be signed in the needed time frame and that the right Midtown location would be found within the price range ascribed by the budget.

Once the project is completed, "the U.N. headquarters will not only be a safer, healthier, greener, and more secure place, but our renovated workshop for peace will also stand out as a symbol for building a revitalized U.N. for a better world," Secretary-General Ban said in a statement yesterday, thanking members for the approval of the plan.

But Mr. Ban faced near rebellion as the General Assembly's budgetary organ, known as the Fifth Committee, started negotiating approval of his proposed two-year budget. "The 2008/2009 projected budget of $4.8 billion represents a 15% increase over the 2006/2007 budget," an American U.N. ambassador, Mark Wallace, told the committee yesterday.

Mr. Wallace protested a "piecemeal" approach to presenting the budget, estimating that "add-ons" would balloon the actual two-year budget up to a figure "in excess" of $5.2 billion. This would represent not only "the largest regular budget in the history of the U.N.," Mr. Wallace said, but also the largest budget increase on dollar basis. America is concerned, he said, that the budget includes "no substantial cuts or offsets" to compensate for such expenditure growth. America pays 22% of the U.N.'s regular budget.