Overcoming a late diversionary thrust by Vice Mayor Gary Silbiger, the City Council, at a sleepy, yawny hour — just before 1 this morning — narrowly but firmly approved builder Greg Reitz’s much talked-about proposed unique office building in the industrial shoulder of the Hayden Tract.
The emergence of broader popular support than expected was persuasive in Mr. Reitz’s exhausting, gasping-for-air victory.
But at the tail-wagging end of yet another 5 1/2-hour wrangle between the Council and a chorus of voluble neighbors, one more dramatic scene remained to be played out.
Even though Councilman Andy Weissman, author of the winning motion, Mayor Scott Malsin and member Mehaul O’Leary were resolute in their determination to endorse Mr. Reitz’s enterprise and entrepreneurship, Mr. Silbiger sensed a vulnerable breach.
Outnumbered but not beaten, he concluded to himself.
Without overtly acknowledging his opponents were about to prevail his message to his colleagues was: Yes, you may have a consensus, but, in the name of communal unity, let’s go for a wider consensus.
Which Way to Lean?
Being an environmentalist, Mr. Silbiger said, it was tantalizingly tempting to support the project on those grounds alone. The building is being billed as the greenest around. But, echoing the sentiments of some dissatisfied neighbors, the Vice Mayor said the spectre of “significantly” increased traffic and the need to seek an exception to the city’s height limit outweighed his green gene.
The Vice Mayor said he wanted to make everyone happy.
Citing a failed, supposedly similar neighborhood project last week that was delayed more than a month so protestors and builder could further compromise, Mr. Silbiger said the present example could be solved the same way, by putting it off and letting the two parties duke it out with a professional mediator.
The trouble was, a majority of his colleagues regarded that scenario as fiction. They already had to votes to declare the situation resolved.
In quest of literal unanimity, Mr. Silbiger kept going. “We can have a win-win situation in the Hayden Tract,” he said. “We took one step forward with (4043) Irving Pl. by trying to say that ‘We, the community and the developer can work together with the Council.’”
They Quietly Changed Roles
Perhaps Mr. Silbiger had lost sight of the fact that the people he was siding — formerly regarded as the majority — had morphed into the minority. They were, in fact, outnumbered when the public spoke out earlier in the evening. He persisted, nevertheless. He made a motion to have a mediator brought in to facilitate a solution.
“I think we owe the community a chance to participate in a meaningful way in this decision,” Mr. Silbiger said. “Not that they have veto power, but that their vote means something.”
Councilman Weissman looked perplexed. This was a non-problem, he suggested. He wondered why a second solution to a thorny problem was being pursued when a solution was about to be made official by the Council vote.
If we bring in a mediator, Mr. Weissman asked, open-facedly, who is the second negotiating party? The people who support Mr. Reitz? Or the people who oppose him?
The trajectory of the evening was not absolutely clear until the final hour and a half of the marathon. Mr. Silbiger, in his fashion when he is passionate, spoke twice as long as anyone else, 30 minutes.
An Almost Win
In real time, Mr. Silbiger came close to scoring a postponement of a final decision just before the Council rejected an appeal of the Planning Commission’s endorsement of the project two months earlier.
Always reluctant to retreat, the Vice Mayor was not nearly ready to surrender even though it was obvious during the run-up to the pivotal vote that his view would lose.
Once it was clear that objections he and his generally faithful ally Chris Armenta raised were going to be overridden, the Vice Mayor said he wanted to speak one final time.
Mr. Silbiger was mindful of similar events last week when the decision on the disputed property proposal at 4043 Irving Pl., was delayed for six weeks to mediate a resolution.
Worked the First Time
He ripped his strategy straight out of that playbook. However, the Vice Mayor’s evident rudimentary miscalculation was that there were fewer parallels between 4043 Irving and 8665 Hayden Pl., than Hayden Tract partisans were willing to admit.
Numbers tell part of the story. When the Irving Place neighbors squared off last month against the City Council, there were 119 community votes against the project, none in favor.
Despite an insistent, very public, year-long campaign by a knot of Hayden Tract neighbors to either shrink or vanquish the Reitz plan, they were outflanked at the moment of showdown.
On a cold, rainy night, the crowd was smaller than expected. Opponents of the project must have been either prescient or fatigued. After the partisans had made their pleas to the Council, most left the building by 9:15, strikingly early since the verdict was not rendered until 10 minutes before 1 this morning.
A Surprising Winner
The surprising tally showed that of the 26 speakers, 14 supported Mr. Reitz, 11 were unalterably opposed, and a stumped young lady said well, she really, really, really liked the fact the building would be green-sensitive, but she really, really, really disapproved of the new traffic it would bring in, and she really, really, really did not know how she would really vote.
Then came the most challenging, controversial hour of the meeting when the audience almost disappeared and all five Council members, some nodding off, indicated they would rather be anyplace by listening to the dry recitation of the repetitive cards.
Clerk Alice Prasad announced that 52 speaker cards had been submitted. Under a recently refreshed Council policy, all were ordered to be read. Ms. Prasad was not allowed to summarize and move directly to the final score.
Amazingly, the first 28 favored Mr. Reitz’s plan. Overwhelmingly, the count favored the office condo plan by two to one, 34 to 17.
So much for vehement opposition, it seemed.
The Breaking Point
All evening, the Vice Mayor had sided with those residents who complained that the project would spawn a fresh influx of unwanted traffic and that the 4/5-story office condo complex, containing 10 units by Mr. Reitz’s count, was too tall. The building that originally was 43 feet high, exactly conforming to the zoning height limit. Latter it was edited into an ascending trajectory, starting at 31 feet on the side closest to residents and rising to 61 feet at the most distant point. This height required a dispensation, to which Mr. Silbiger strongly objected.
The main problem for the Vice Mayor’s side was that Mr. Reitz had done his homework, Phi Beta Kappa-style.
The tall, young environment-centric businessman has closely watched week after week of theatrics in Council Chambers when a builder would try to build only to be stonewalled by loud, often unruly, neighbors. Residents repeatedly protested that, almost regardless of the dimensions, the project was outsized for their neighborhood.
Mr. Reitz took notes. And he acted upon them.
Two were crucial, both public relations-oriented:
• Meet early and often with neighbors. You may be rivals, but you are not enemies. Hear their concerns. Make numerous adaptations, structurally and cosmetically, maintaining an accommodating stance, keeping at least one eye on always bending in the neighborhood’s direction.
• Work constantly on enlisting support, in and out of the neighborhood. Find all likeminded neighbors and peers. Make certain all of them file their testimony with the City Council.
Perhaps a new playbook has been written.
