Dan Biederman worked as a consultant to Sustainable Playland Inc., the nonprofit group chosen to run county-owned Playland park. SPI walked away from its agreement with the county in June, after its improvement plan for the park withered under legislative scrutiny and community opposition, but Biederman is still part of the Playland planning process.
He is working on an analysis of the park”™s operations and is set to issue recommendations in a report on the future of the county-owned park by Nov. 30. Biederman said this time his role will be different because he is working directly for Westchester and his views won”™t be filtered by a board of directors. Delays and a lengthy review process were to be expected, he said.
“Nobody should be, from my perspective, annoyed, ashamed about how long things take,” said Biederman, of Manhattan-based Biederman Redevelopment Ventures Corp., which counts Bryant Park among its park redevelopment projects. For Bryant, there was six years of debate before implementation of a redevelopment strategy and private-management plan. “I see a lot of commonality with what we”™ve done and what we”™d be doing here.”
The county Board of Legislators”™ labor, parks, planning and housing committee met Monday with Biederman, with some lawmakers asking questions about the somewhat vaguely-defined scope of the consultant”™s work and expressing concern about whether his recommendations would differ greatly from the SPI plan. SPI planned to transform what is now a summer-seasonal amusement park into a year-round destination that would have included an 82,500-square-foot athletic field house that became a rallying point for opposition groups, which said it would create an eyesore, increase traffic and encroach upon the existing parking lot.
Biederman told the committee he still favored finding year-round uses for the park but had come back to the process with a stronger understanding of the concerns of the park”™s neighbors regarding issues such as traffic and noise. Another lesson he said he took from the aborted SPI plan was the realization it would be difficult to raise private money for capital improvements to the park. SPI, which formed specifically to seek to manage Playland, faced questions about its access to capital.
Democratic Majority Leader Catherine Borgia, of Ossining, told Biederman she expected in his report very specific projections as opposed to the mathematics-light SPI proposal.
“One of the things that I think we had a little unease about is we never were able to see the calculations ”“ very, very basic calculations ”“ that said in order to reach our revenue goals we”™ll have to have X number of people, X number of heads in the park X number of days spending X amount of money,” Borgia said.
County Executive Rob Astorino, a Republican who came into office in 2010, made the so-called reimagining of Playland a marquee goal of his administration. The park runs in the red annually and has seen attendance decline as its art deco infrastructure on the Long Island Sound deteriorates, according to the administration, although attendance figures remain disputed because the county has changed how it counts the number of those who enter the park over the years.
In his first year in office, Astorino solicited proposals for the park and in 2012 chose SPI out of 12 entries. William M. Mooney III, Astorino”™s economic development director, said several of the other bidders focused on one aspect or another of the 272-acre park, with two amusement park operators focusing on the amusement park zone while a skating-rink operator focused only on the park”™s ice skating rink.
“In a sense, the only one that was comprehensive was SPI, which frankly was part of the reason the administration chose to move forward with them,” Mooney told the parks committee.
Central Amusements International and Standard Amusements Inc., the two runners-up to SPI, are set to meet with the committee Sept. 4 about their interest in possibly entering into an agreement now that SPI is out of the running. A fourth bidder, Elmsford-based American Skating Entertainment Centers L.L.C., is in line to get a 10-year deal to run the Playland Ice Casino. Shane Coppola of American spoke to the committee and said the company intended to invest in improvements at the rink, including an upgraded lobby area.
“By (already) having a facility in Westchester, we happen to have a lot of local knowledge,” he said. “We clearly plan to grow it, we”™re not going to be happy sort of just caretaking.” SPI had planned to subcontract management of the rink to American and to subcontract amusement park operation to Central Amusements.
American is set to pay $300,000 in its first year, $250,000 the second year and see 2 percent increases each year following. It will spend $640,000 in capital improvements, which is in addition to the $4.5 million Westchester spent to reopen the rink after it was closed due to Hurricane Sandy-related damage.
The contract with American and the agreement with Biederman do not require approval of the full Board of Legislators but rather the three-person Board of Acquisition and Contract, which is made up of Astorino, Board of Legislators Chairman Michael Kaplowitz and Jay Pisco, the commissioner of county public works. The 10-year deal with American does not constitute a lease, the administration said, because it is an asset management agreement.
The consultant was also invited to attend the committee’s Sept. 4 meeting with Central and Standard, with legislators saying they hope to have a new management concept in place for the 2015 season.
