Reisman: A pedestrian walkway to nowhere

This is the story of a $17.4 million sweetheart deal that stinks worse than the Byram River at low tide on a hot day.

It's a boondoggle that offers a textbook example of how powerful developers and their pliable allies in government can declare a "win-win" victory and yet screw the taxpayers with impunity.

Let's start at the beginning.

In the late 1990s, the village of Port Chester's downtown underwent a major facelift that included the creation of a Costco store, a multiplex movie theater and a number of other concerns.

To achieve this retail utopia, the village forged a Faustian partnership with the developer, G&S of Bethpage, Long Island. The urban renewal plan hinged on a ruthless application of the state's eminent-domain law.

Private property was taken. Rent-paying merchants were closed down. Buildings that housed the poor were demolished.

Greed is a powerful motivator. Some slick, politically connected interests knew how to play the money game.

When the $100 million revitalization plan was drafted, a narrow strip of land along the Byram River was reserved as a pedestrian walkway with a "nautical theme."

A three-way deal was engineered. Port Chester, which owns the bulkhead along the river, leased it to G&S for $1 a year. Westchester County subleased the promenade under a tax-incentive arrangement that pays G&S $70,000 a month for 20 years, ending in 2020.

That's $840,000 a year, or $17.4 million for the length of the contract.

After much discussion and arm-twisting, the Westchester County Board of Legislators voted in favor of it.

Mayor Christine Korff and Westchester County Executive Andy Spano, both of whom have long since vacated their respective offices, celebrated the deal at the time. Everybody involved in the revitalization project was a winner, they said. They failed to mention that among those winners were several law firms with strong ties to the Democratic Party — most prominent being DelBello, Weingarten, Tartaglia & Wiederkehr, a White Plains firm that regularly and generously makes donations at election time.

The expensively acquired promenade supposedly fulfilled an obligation to provide public access to the waterfront. In fact, it was nothing more than a meager bone thrown to the hoi poloi. Poorly constructed, it runs behind and below Costco's vast parking lot and is virtually invisible to passersby.

Then, in 2011, a large piece of the bulkhead collapsed into the muddy channel. It's been closed to the public ever since. Since then, the village and G&S have been haggling over the cost of repairing it.

According to a recent story by Journal News staff writer Mark Lungariello, it could cost as much as $7 million. How much money G&S will actually contribute to that amount is not known. But to defray the cost the village is considering converting one of its few free parking lots into a paid valet lot. In other words, the citizenry gets screwed again.

Meanwhile, the county continues to fork over $70,000 a month for the worthless, inaccessible walkway.

Ned McCormack, spokesman for County Executive Rob Astorino, stressed to me that the deal predated his boss's time in office. He also acknowledged that the walkway deal has its critics.

However, McCormack argued that the county actually came out ahead on the deal. The lease agreement, he said, was contingent on G&S achieving a set of financial benchmarks and those targets were met. For instance, the county's share of tax sales generated by the project has more than doubled the $840,000 payments made to G&S, McCormack said.

Those payments, he suggested, were a guaranteed revenue stream for the developer — collateral, in effect, for taking on the project.

That may be so. But I suspect the developer would've folded on this point if the county's leaders had taken a tough negotiating stance. Only, they didn't want to be tough.

They wanted to make a sweetheart deal. In the process, they created a boondoggle — a walkway to nowhere.

Email: preisman@lohud.com Twitter: @philreisman