BULLETIN - NASCAR RACE TRACK DEAL IS DEAD ON STATEN ISLAND

The NY TIMES reports on 12-5 that the deal to put a race track on  NYC's Staten Island is dead as a door knob. This brings up the possibility of (none other than) Donald Trump (and his custom-fabricated race shop toupee) bringing back his concept for a track in Riverhead, Long Island (and if they think traffic is bad on Staten Island, wait'll everyone hears THIS idea ...) ... There are also ideas for race tracks on some of the Native American land scattered throughout the northeast, especially where casinos have been built in Connecticut and Massachusetts. All this means that the only major NASCAR track in the northeast remains the New Hampshire International Speedway. Here's the word from the online edition of the NY TIMES:

Faced with unyielding opposition from residents who complained that Staten Island’s roads were already too congested, a Florida company dropped plans for a 82,000-seat NASCAR speedway on the island, officials said yesterday.

After two years, plans for the speedway — a three-quarter-mile track to have been built on an abandoned oil tank farm near the Goethals Bridge — were scuttled on Thursday by the board of directors of the International Speedway Corporation, said Wes Harris, a company spokesman.

“The reality of it is the board came to the conclusion that the politics was going to be such that we could not be successful,” Mr. Harris said.

In May 2004, officials of the company, a Nascar affiliate based in Daytona Beach, Fla., announced plans to transform 450 acres of unused industrial land on the northwest tip of Staten Island into the New York base for the country’s most popular sport.

In order to relieve the inevitable traffic, they had proposed a complex network of ferries, charter buses and park-and-ride lots that would have allowed fans to reach the site during the three race weekends that were expected to be scheduled each year.

They had also promised more than $350 million in construction wages during the two years it would have taken to build the track and said the track would have contributed $200 million to the economy annually, including ticket sales, food and beverage sales and hotel bookings. To help them navigate the shoals of city politics, they hired Guy Molinari, a former borough president, as a lobbyist.

But Mr. Harris acknowledged yesterday that the board finally realized that even Mr. Molinari, who did not return a telephone call seeking comment last night, could not help them overcome Staten Island’s three-man City Council team, which came out in vociferous and early opposition to the track.

One of the councilmen, James S. Oddo, the Council’s minority leader, called the company’s move “a monumental victory for the people of Staten Island” in a statement released yesterday. Another, Michael E. McMahon, called the development “a huge victory” and “delightful,” saying he had considered the project a “sow’s ear” from the start.

“I am glad that the Nascar people finally understand what I have said all along,” Mr. McMahon said in his statement, “that to put a 100,000-seat Nascar track on the west shore of Staten Island is what my mother would call a schnapps idea.”

Almost from the start, the plan was met with condemnation from a diverse crowd of skeptics, including  Manhattan-based environmentalists and Staten Island homemakers.

In April, the Sierra Club issued a report saying the project would pollute the air, require filling in nearly 15 acres of fragile saltwater wetlands and harm several wildlife species.

A few days later, a public hearing on the track devolved into fisticuffs when more than 1,000 people converged on a meeting hall in Staten Island, including a union carpenter who tussled with Staten Island’s third councilman, Andrew J. Lanza.

At the time, Mr. Lanza said he was simply trying to express his views when “a guy put a bear hug on me, threatening me while guys standing in front of him were urging him, ‘Punch him in the face.’ ” After the confrontation, the police shut down the hearing, saying the auditorium’s capacity had been exceeded. There was no other hearing on the matter.

“We honestly don’t know what happened at that hearing ourselves,” said Michael P. Printup, an International Speedway official. There was support for the track early on, according to Mr. Printup, but after the hearing, “something turned.”

Mr. Harris said the company, which bought the land for $100 million, would now study other ways to use it, though he refused to say last night what those might be.

He also refused to give up on the idea of bringing Nascar racing to the nation’s largest media market, though he admitted that New York could be a tough town for business.

In Chicago, he said, it took several tries for International Speedway to settle on a site for a track, but eventually the company was successful.

“The challenge with New York is everything’s magnified 10 times over,” he said.

Comments

[Bill Barnett]

Dead wrong Einstein. NASCAR survived the recession and hasn't missed a step. Guess you'll just have to put up with real racing as a comparison to that wimpy, three-good-passes-in-an-entire-race open wheel crap that you like so much. Blue collar racing beats blue blood racing anyday.