Columbia's Harlem Lobbying Effort Gets Expensive
Columbia University is ramping up lobbying efforts for its planned 17-acre campus extension in Harlem, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into an attempt to gain city approval for the contentious project.
Between January and April, the university paid more than $440,000 to lobbying firms, according to data released to the New York Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, a marked increase compared with the approximately $190,000 the institution spent in the first four months of 2006. Since 2004, Columbia is listed as paying more than $1.5 million to lobbyists for land-use or expansion-related subjects, mostly targeting city and local elected officials.
For developers seeking city approval for giant projects, it has become an almost obligatory step to throw fistfuls of money into lobbying in an effort to win needed support of officials. Columbia's plan to expand its campus north has drawn strong resistance from many in the community, and opponents are vowing a fight as the proposal enters the city's public review process in coming months.
Perhaps seeing the storm clouds on the horizon, the university last year hired as a lobbyist the longtime political insider Bill Lynch, who has received about $200,000 so far this year.
A spokeswoman for Columbia, La-Verna Fountain, said the dollar figures in state records also include services other than lobbying, such as community outreach and land-use legal services.
Opponents of the plan have hired a lobbyist as well, though the university's spending easily dwarfs the $28,000 paid to Richard Lipsky, who frequently does lobbying for small businesses.
The owner of rental storage properties in the project's footprint, Nicholas Sprayregen, who hired Mr. Lipsky, said he, like Columbia, is just trying to get officials to hear his position.
"These eminent domain fights are David vs. Goliath and in the case like this, the thing one guy like me can do is try to get his message out," Mr. Sprayregen said.
Particularly for large development projects that require city or state approval, policy analysts say lobbying has grown tremendously in the past decade.
"It just seems that one of the greatest growth industries in the city and state is our lobbying industry," the executive director of the advocacy group Citizens Union, Richard Dadey, said. Regarding the money Columbia is putting into their campaign, Mr. Dadey said: "It is a fair amount of money to spend on a lobbying campaign to influence these decisions, but it is what institutions are increasingly willing to pay to win on their issue."
Columbia's spending on lobbying this year tops that of any major developer in the city, though the developer of Brooklyn's $4 billion Atlantic Yards Project, Forest City Ratner, is listed as spending more than $300,000. In 2006, the Brooklyn-based development company ranked third in the state for lobbying expenses, spending more than $2.1 million leading up to the approval in December of the giant mixed-use project that seeks to build a basketball arena and residential towers near downtown Brooklyn.
Columbia is awaiting the completion of a state-administered blight study for the area, a required step for the use of eminent domain. A spokesman for the state's development agency said the state is hoping to complete the study in June.
