LMDC Behind Closed Doors
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
One of the issues liberals like to claim as their own is the topic of so-called “open government.” They are for disclosing political contributions. They’re in a lather over Vice President Cheney’s energy taskforce. They’re for forcing the solicitor general to disgorge internal memoranda written by Miguel Estrada, even documents protected by attorney-client privilege. So it strikes us as passing strange that hardly a whimper of protest has arisen about town regarding the conduct of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
As our Julia Levy reported at Page 1 of yesterday’s New York Sun, the LMDC may well have operated, and may continue to operate, in violation of New York State’s Open Meetings Law. The law requires public bodies to conduct their proceedings in such a way that the general population can determine how their decisions are made. The executive director of the state’s Committee on Open Government, Robert Freeman, told the Sun that if more than half of the LMDC’s board — or half of a committee or subcommittee — gets together to talk business, the meeting should be open. Some of the most important meetings relating to rebuilding at Ground Zero — including a meeting of a steering committee that included representatives of the LMDC, the Port Authority, the state, and the city — were held in closed quarters.
A quirk in the state’s open meeting law makes it legal for such inter-agency sessions to be held in secret, but it wouldn’t be allowed in other states with stronger laws. A City Council member and former member of the open government committee, Alan Gerson, told the Sun that the LMDC’s meetings should have been open and that even if the letter of the law hadn’t been violated, the spirit of it had. The LMDC should “err on the side of democracy” he told us.
While the open government movement has its excesses, this case isn’t one of them. Ideally, the World Trade Center site redevelopment would be primarily a private initiative, led by the man with a 99-year lease on the site, Larry Silverstein. That would be a private-sector initiative, with private decision-making. As it is, we have a public-sector redevelopment, and one might think New Yorkers could expect public decision-making. Instead, New Yorkers are getting the worst of both worlds: public-sector decisions, made in private.
