Here’s some potentially good news for Lower Manhattan: Avi Schick is on his way out.
Sort of, anyway.
The embattled state economic-development czar – who’s overseen Downtown’s bureaucracy-induced paralysis since the early days of the Spitzer administration – told The New York Times that he was stepping down as president of the Empire State Development Corp., effective this September.
It’s about time. As ESDC president and, concurrently, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., Schick is officially responsible for the inexcusable lack of progress at Ground Zero and surrounding sites – not to mention the collapse of such big state projects as the Javits Convention Center expansion.
The LMDC, for example, oversees “deconstruction” work at the 9/11-scarred Deutsche Bank building, which remains standing more than nine months after a blaze there killed two firefighters.
All the more reason to worry about Schick’s plan to stay on, with Gov. Paterson’s blessing, at that agency.
To be sure, no one charged with corralling the myriad city, state, regional and federal bureaucracies that for years have jockeyed for position (and run from responsibility) in Lower Manhattan has an easy job.
But Schick, sad to say, simply wasn’t – and isn’t – up to it.
His tenure at the ESDC was particularly unfortunate – marred, according to numerous sources, by an inability to get along with either of the agency’s two regional chairmen. Paterson, indeed, is in the midst of overhauling the agency’s governance structure.
Schick, a lawyer by trade (before taking over the ESDC, he was Eliot Spitzer‘s right-hand man at the Attorney General’s Office), says he’s interested in returning to the private sector – and we obviously wish him the best wherever his career takes him.
Preferably, though, it will take him far from Downtown development oversight.