Talk Bronx New York

Bronx Awaits Community Benefits From New Yankee Stadium Construction

The Yankees still owe the Bronx about $1 million of community benefits in return for building a new Yankee Stadium, according to outraged attendants of Tuesday night’s Community Board 4 meeting, held in the Murray Cohen Auditorium of the Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center.

“This is important to the community and you allow only three questions from the community, that is not fair,” said a local resident.

But residents around the stadium say that even though the new Yankee Stadium is well under construction, the community has yet to see any benefits.

The Yankee Stadium community benefits agreement agreed for the Bronx Bombers to give each year $800,000, as well as $100,000 in sports equipment and 15,000 tickets to games – for the next 40 years.

“The community benefits agreement was carved and said that when the shovel went in the ground, when they took over the park,” said Gregory Bell, an advocate for the disabled. “That is when the $800,000 was supposed to start to flow.”

The head of the volunteer advisory panel for the benefits agreement attended Tuesday’s meeting to say the money is on the way.

“During April we will have started that process and organizations will start to see that money,” said Serafin Mariel of the benefits advisory panel.

“We know that people wonder if we exist - and if we exist what is our function,” said Michael Drezin of the benefits advisory panel. “So the first thing we want people to do is know that we exist. We hear them and we want to be responsive to them.”

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Horace Mann Yields Surge as Schools Stuck By Auctions

Horace Mann School, the $29,000-a- year preparatory school in the Bronx, and dozens more New York educational and cultural institutions just got stuck between the collapse of auction-rate bonds and an expired New York law.

Rates on $60 million of the securities sold by Horace Mann in 2002 rose to 5.4 percent last month from 3.4 percent. At nearby Riverdale Country School, where tuition is $35,250 for grades six through 12, interest jumped to 11 percent from 3 percent.

Interest costs almost doubled for borrowers in the $330 billion auction-rate bond market this year after banks stopped buying unwanted securities for the first time since they were created in the 1980s. Unlike local governments across the country, the New York institutions can’t convert the bonds into other types of debt after a state funding law expired Jan. 31.

“It’s a horrible situation,” said Andrew Alper, former chairman of the New York City Economic Development Corp. and a board member at Riverdale. “The only solution is to pay the bonds off or to pay a higher interest rate.”

Horace Mann officials declined to comment. Graduates of the 121-year-old school, located on 18 acres overlooking Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, include venture capital investor Alan Patricof, founder of private equity firm Apax Partners, and Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer, who in 2004 received the Alumni Council Award for Distinguished Achievement when he was attorney general, resigned as New York’s governor this month amid allegations that he patronized prostitutes.

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