There's a new player in town...or rather, a new corporate buddy of Bruce Ratner's.

Ratner...the feller that comes off like Brooklyn's gift from the heavens.

...the guy from Cleveland
...who lives on Manhattan's Upper East Side
...whose Atlantic Terminal mall has not a single Brooklyn-based corporation in it
...who sold arena naming rights to a former slave-trade/apartheid supporting banking consortium from England
...and hired an architecht based in Los Angeles
...and a landscape architecht from Philadelphia
...and a construction management firm from Washington, DC

Yes, that Ratner.

He's done it again.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle has reported Ratner's new deal to sell soda pop in the still un-begun Nets basketball arena. (Don't expect us to give free advertising to the aforementioned banking consortium with the dubious past.)

The company is Jones Soda Company.



Look...we like the idea of a company like Jones being the soda company at a big mega basketball arena. Beats heck out of having the gigantor Coke or Pepsi.

It's hard to believe, of course, that this deal is for the entire arena, and for the entire schedule of events. Maybe it's a boutique signing, the way the Mets brought in Rheingold a few years back -- not to replace or even compete with beer giant Budweiser, but just as a nod to the old days.

If it's an across-the-board deal, then it's not 100% awful. If Ratner were true to his words about encouraging small, local businesses, he'd have done more of this before now.

Ratner's national-chain box-store actions, of course, are far different.

At any rate, we contacted Jones Soda Company and its CEO, Peter Van Stolk with the following.

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Here in Brooklyn, New York, we received this news today (from the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper):

"Nets Name May Change, But Will Definitely Be Brooklyn’
By Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

"PROSPECT HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — Seattle-based Jones Soda Company officially joined U.K.-based Barclays Bank and the New Jersey Nets as the third out-of-town company expected to make a grand entry into the Brooklyn marketplace once the planned Atlantic Yards arena is built.

"The Nets, owned by Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner Companies, announced yesterday that Jones will be the exclusive carbonated soft drink and bottled water provider once the team moves into the Barclays Center, named after the British bank for a reported $400 million."

Peter Van Stolk...you've chosen the worst way to enter the Brooklyn market.

Jones Soda Company looks like a wonderful enterprise. We love companies that aren't the big multi-nationals, so it's good that Jones is getting some traction all the way here in Brooklyn, New York.

It would have been nice if you'd done your homework before inking this deal with Bruce Ratner to sell your soda products in his controversial, divisive new basketball arena. The arena is part of a sixteen-skyscraper development that for four years has caused pain for many neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

You would've discovered that a cool, alternative company like Jones can find better business parters than Bruce Ratner.

That is, unless you like the way Bruce Ratner runs his operation.

Ratner's $ 4.5 billion Atlantic Yards project, the one you're now part of, has:

* displaced over 1,000 people from their homes, jobs and properties;
* been approved through a process that avoided community input and city governance;
* promised jobs and affordable housing, neither of which would ultimately occur in meaningful numbers (according to the developer's own figures)
* been granted a public subsidy package that would cost taxpayers $2 billion;
* no legally-enforceable provisions for local small-business development;
* engaged in eminent-domain abuse;
* exploited poor peoples' desperate fears about jobs and affordable housing in order to co-opt support;
* forced residents to prepare for traffic nightmares, environmental damage, increases in children's asthma, and an overwhelming of the city's infrastructure without plans or money to fix it;
* presented wildly out-of-scale skyscrapers and community-unfriendly plans;
* caused racial divisions in Brooklyn's dry-tinder political climate;
* resulted in planned skyscrapers that would cast adjoining low-income neighborhoods in near permanent shadows, causing higher heating bills and stress that normally accompanies loss of daylight;
* forced owners to choose between selling their properties or apartments to Ratner or risk losing them through an eminent domain process that in New York State doesn't come close to market-value compensation;
* coerced these sellers into signing gag orders about their deals, sometimes requiring them to report to Ratner on their neighbors who have not yet sold;
* diverted funds from our increasing broke subway system via a deal that allowed Ratner to purchase local railyards at a radically undervalued price;
* wildly accelerated gentrification in the surrounding neighborhoods, with one city agency predicting that Ratner would displace more affordable housing than he would create;
* involved only community groups that already support Bruce Ratner. Those in any way cautious, never mind critical, have been excluded from the planning process for Brooklyn's biggest-ever single building project.
* begun destroying a multi-racial/multi-class mixed use community in order to build a superblock city of mostly luxury condo units and a basketball arena;
* encouraged Ratner's political friends to ignore other plans for the area, including a community-driven plan three years in the making.

Incredibly, theses are just the tip-of-the-iceberg reasons the project should not be built. The iceberg itself is even more ghastly.

Currently, there are lawsuits in state and federal court that have a good chance of stopping or forcing major changes on the Atlantic Yards skyscrapers. These legal battles will take a year or two to play out. Besides the lawsuits, the local economy is not being kind to Bruce Ratner. From mounting expenses to a downturn in the luxury housing market, Atlantic Yards is becoming a bigger and bigger white elephant.

We hope that Jones Soda will reconsider this deal. We welcome you to Brooklyn, but not as part of Bruce Ratner's disastrous megablock skyscraper project.

Ratner's p.r. has for four years painted Atlantic Yards as a boon to the local economy. We do wonder why he would make a deal with your company in Seattle...after granting naming rights to a banking consortium from England.

One one level, that's fine -- Brooklyn is where so many people have come to find a new life. Welcome, mazel tov, slainte. But it does, you know, put lie to Ratner's stated goals of local empowerment initiatives.

We invite Mr. Van Stolk to visit Brooklyn, to tour the neighborhoods Bruce Ratner is decimating, and to meet with the some of the groups fighting for better development in our borough.

Fans For Fair Play is one of fifty community groups, political organizations, churches and grass-roots initiatives in a city-wide coalition against both the Ratner project and the current onslaught of overdevelopment in New York.

Change is great. Change that does more damage than good isn't.

We hope Jones Soda Company can find a better way to be part of Brooklyn. There really couldn't be a worse way.

Jones Soda has all these great flavors, great colors, great varieties. So does Brooklyn. But if Bruce Ratner gets his way, Brooklyn's flavors will coagulate into a bitter, flat concoction -- a bad taste Brooklynites will be stuck with forever.

with regards,

Scott Turner
Fans For Fair Play
Brooklyn, New York