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Downtown uproar over building talks
By amy zimmer
Published: April 10, 2007 LOWER MANHATTAN. Recent reports of negotiations by JPMorgan Chase, state and city officials to build an office tower near Ground Zero at the Port Authority-owned Deutsche Bank building site has already sparked ire from union leaders and residents even before a deal is inked.
Members of the neighborhood’s Community Board 1 were outraged when they read a Wall Street Journal article saying the skyscraper would have cantilevered floors extending over the newly opened Cedar Street and above Liberty Park, creating a shadow over that public space.
“We really care about the park and the little open space we have,” said Catherine McVay Hughes, chair of CB1’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee, at its meeting last night. “We supported the [WTC] master plan, but we feel that’s being chipped away.”
Many are wary also of a Goldman Sachs-like incentive deal. In 2005, that company — which paid $16.5 billion in bonuses to its employees last year — received $1.6 billion of the state’s $8 billion in tax-free Liberty Bonds to build its $2 billion headquarters on West Street.
Though Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Eliot Spitzer have said companies won’t be get those kinds of subsidies anymore, groups such as 32BJ — the Service Employees International Union that represents 60,000 city property service workers, including security guards and window cleaners — want to have a say in this deal.
“Before JPMorgan runs off with millions of dollars in a taxpayer-funded incentive scheme to relocate,” said Matt Nerzig, 32BJ spokesman, “their record on community and employee relations should be reviewed, if not scrutinized.”
Summit Security — the firm JPMorgan uses — pays workers “unlivable wages” and “inadequate benefits,” claimed Johnnie Patterson, the union’s security division coordinator.
“In one hour, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase earns more than a Summit security officer makes in a whole year,” Patterson said. The company gave its CEO a bonus of nearly $40 million while Summit employees make as little as $8.50 an hour.
Port Authority officials at last night’s meeting were tight-lipped.
“There are negotiations between the Port Authority and Chase,” Quentin Brathwaite, the PA’s assistant director of priority capital programs, said. “But they are being discussed by the law department and are inappropriate for us to discuss.”
Track record?
A forthcoming report from 32BJ looked at JPMorgan’s lending practices in 11 cities, including New York.
It said high-cost loans are more prevalent in minority neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods.
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