Before the end of the year, the fate of Atlantic Yards could fall into the hands of the Public Authorities Control Board, a once a little-known Albany bureaucratic backwater that has become something of a graveyard for large projects.

Yesterday, the state’s Empire State Development Corporation released the final environmental impact statement for developer Bruce Ratner’s $4.2 billion project to build a basketball arena and 16 mostly residential towers on 22 acres near downtown Brooklyn.

The board of the development corporation is expected to sign off on the environmental statement and the general project plan as early as a November 28 meeting, according to a state official. This could set up another showdown at the Public Authorities Control Board next month, where the spotlight once again will fall on the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, as one of three voting members of the board. Mr. Silver used his vote on the control board to kill Mayor Bloomberg’s West Side stadium project and Governor Pataki’s Moynihan Station plan, enraging both leaders.

Mr. Silver, whose direction is famously hard to read, has said he backs the Brooklyn project. When Mr. Silver halted Mr. Pataki’s efforts to break ground on the Moynihan project before leaving office, some political observers suggested he was running interference for incoming governor, Eliot Spitzer. Mr. Silver said he merely favors a much larger plan to move Madison Square Garden.

With the Atlantic Yards project, Mr. Silver’s political calculus is still emerging, experts say. Unlike Moynihan Station, Atlantic Yards has vigorous support from Mr. Bloomberg and a host of elected officials, who cite jobs and increased housing.

Yesterday, a spokesman for Mr. Silver said he had not yet received the final environmental impact statement.

The director of New York Civic, Henry Stern, an outspoken critic of Mr. Silver, said the speaker would likely wave it through.

“If he were free to make a decision on the merits, I suspect he would support it,” Mr. Stern said. “If Spitzer asks him not to do it, he might not do it.”

If final approval is stalled until after January 1, project supporters fear that Mr. Spitzer may want to take a fresh new look at it and create further delays. There is less uncertainty, they say, under Mr. Pataki.

With a changing real estate landscape, some development experts have said that the residential component of Mr. Ratner’s project looks increasingly less profitable the longer it takes to build.

Some opponents of the project are focusing their stall tactics on the Public Authorities Control Board. A spokesman for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, Daniel Goldstein, said the project should not be “rammed through in the dying days of a lame duck Pataki administration.”

Mr. Goldstein said he hoped the board would at least postpone a vote until after a court decides on the eminent domain lawsuit filed last month by the group and several property owners who will be displaced by the development.

The hundreds of pages released yesterday, making up the final environmental impact statement, are a requirement for approval under state law. It outlines the predicted environmental impact of the huge project, including traffic, parking, shadows, air quality, transit, and neighborhood quality as well as measures to mitigate its effects. It lists unmitigated or unavoidable effects and alternatives to the project.

At a public hearing on the draft environmental impact statement in August, thousands of Brooklynites queued for hours outside New York City Technical College to comment on it. The state reported receiving more than 1,800 comments regarding its draft statement, and it responded to many in the document released yesterday.

The project, however, appeared to change little. Three buildings were reduced in size, the number of residential units contained in the project decreased by about 8%, as expected, and the amount of commercial space was more drastically reduced, along with assumptions about related office jobs. Despite complaints from opponents on the scale of the development, the total square footage of the project remains close to the amount that was initially planned. The state agreed to add a school to the project’s footprint.