Politics
The stadium issue was also a political issue, as 2005 was an election year. Some individuals, most notably mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner suggested another location in Queens, which has large open spaces and is home to other sports facilities such as Shea Stadium (the former home of the Jets), as a possible alternative site for a stadium, but the Jets said that any site other than the West Side would be no better than remaining in New Jersey.
Two components of the stadium plan ($300 million in state funding and the MTA's transfer of the land) were subject to the approval of the state's Public Authorities Control Board. The Board's approval could be given only on a unanimous vote of its three members, who were representatives of New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, New York State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, and Pataki. On June 6, 2005, although Pataki's representative voted in favor, Silver and Bruno directed their representatives to abstain on the vote, thus denying the needed approval and scuttling the proposal.
Read more about this topic: West Side Stadium
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“A baby changes your dinner party conversation from politics to poops.”
—Maurice Johnstone (20th century)
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)