Board votes down Sloan-Kettering expansion

Real Estate Weekly, July 25, 2001 by Parke Chapman

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's expansion plans hit a bump last week when the Community Board voted against their rezoning proposal by a slim margin.

The vote does not doom the project since Community Board #8's role is strictly advisory. Still, the blessing of the Community Board always helps.

The city's Planning Commission will examine the rezoning proposal next.

"At the beginning of the meeting, we really thought that we would lose the vote. But at the end of it, the Sloan-Kettering people stormed out of the room," said Joel Ross, a critic of the proposal who lives in the area.

The hospital is seeking to rezone a three-block area next to their existing campus on the Upper East Side. The rezoning is a sore point, for outraged neighbors who fear that -- if granted -- the change would allow other hospitals to build similar facilities in their area, where a high concentration of hospitals already exist.

Of them, Memorial Sloan-Kettering is one of the most respected for their cancer treatment and research. Central to the Sloan-Kettering's rationale that the new facility be located nearby is the nature of the research that is being conducted, which relies on "translational research," or the ability to bring materials from various projects and facilities together.

There is a semantic rift between the hospital and those who are opposed to it, as the hospital denies that the facility will be a "biotech incubator," which is the label the community is using to thwart it.

So is it a research facility or a biotech center? Sloan-Kettering maintains that the real issue is their currently limited space.

"This rezoning would allow us to plan for the future. We are running out of space," said Avice Meehan, vice president of public affairs for Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

Meehan said that the hospital is not discouraged by last week's turn of events. The next step in the public review process will take place before City Planning, she said, some time in the next few weeks.

"The application process will continue," she said.

As for the possibility of building the facility in Queens West, Meehan said that it was not viable.

The board's vote ended up with 22 in favor of the resolution to deny Sloan-Kettering the R9 application. In order to build the facility they envision, the hospital has asked that the current R8 designation be changed to R9, which would allow for a bulkier building. Nineteen board members voted to grant the rezoning, indicating that the board was split on the issue.

"This is not a vote against cancer treatment. The closeness of the vote reflects how strong an issue this is," said Board #8 manager Ken Moltner.

Ross has been a proponent of Queens West as the ideal location for this new facility, but he claims that Memorial Sloan-Kettering has bristled at the very notion of building across the East River. This even though the hospital itself praised Queens West as a viable niche for biotech in Sen. Charles Schumer's Group of 35 Report on the future of New York City development.

"I believe that Memorial Sloan-Kettering can be the anchor tenant in Queens West. If they build here, it will attract other hospitals to the area," said Ross.