NEW YORK — The board of the Fashion Center Business Improvement District has approved a 9 percent increase in the levy imposed on district landlords to pay for the FCBID’s services.
At the group’s annual meeting Wednesday night, held at the Stitch bar on West 37th Street, finance committee chairman Martin Meyer described the proposed hike as “necessary to keep pace with rising costs.”
Meyer, who is senior executive managing director of Williams Real Estate Co., a district landlord, noted the increase would bring the FCBID’s annual budget to $4.7 million. The FCBID’s budget is paid through a property tax stipend on landlords, who hold much of the power on the group’s board, which also includes industry and organized labor representatives.
The increase, which is subject to the approval of city authorities, would be the second in the FCBID’s 12-year history. During the eight-year administration of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, all budget increase requests by BIDs were rejected by the city.
In 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg approved a 33 percent hike in the FCBID’s annual budget, along with increases for most other city BIDs. The Fashion Center BID used the hike to take its security and sanitation services to a seven-day-a-week schedule, up from five days.
The next increase would take effect in the fiscal year beginning July 1.
Attendees at the meeting also turned to the city’s plans to redevelop the far West Side of Manhattan, a wide-ranging program including a new stadium for the Jets to be built over the Hudson Rail Yards, which border the FCBID to the west.
The FCBID roughly runs from Sixth and Ninth Avenues and from West 35th to West 41st Streets.
George S. Kaufman, the group’s chairman and a principal of the Kaufman Management Organization, another district landlord, said “there is an opportunity for us to be more appealing neighbors to the new Hudson Yards.”
Since 2003, the FCBID has been lobbying the city to change the special zoning provision that sets aside half the space in side-street buildings in the district for manufacturing uses.
Barbara Randall, the group’s executive director, noted that manufacturers have been leaving the district for decades, but asserted that is more the result of overall macroeconomic forces than local real estate pressures.
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“The zoning now is covering more space than is actually used” by manufacturers, she said.
Designer Stan Herman agreed that stopping the exodus of manufacturing jobs is a challenge beyond the FCBID’s — or the city’s — power to solve, given the flow of labor-intensive work out of the U.S. and into the developing world. But he fretted that as new industries move into the neighborhood, Seventh Avenue will lose its character as a center of design.
“I’m concerned that this district itself is being chopped up,” he said.
As of March, apparel manufacturing employment in the five boroughs stood at 26,900, a 19.7 percent drop from 33,500 a year ago.
Robert Walsh, commissioner of the city Department of Small Business Services, said in making any changes to the zoning rules, the City Planning Commission would have to be “conscious” of its effect on the remaining manufacturing jobs in the district.
“What you don’t want to do is keep chasing out companies,” he said.