Column by Juan Gonzalez

It's fourth and long for stadium

It's showdown time in the titanic battle over Mayor Bloomberg's plans for a West Side stadium for the Jets.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Herman Cahn is expected to rule today on five lawsuits from groups opposed to the stadium.

Tomorrow, Gov. Pataki will try to push through a vote by an obscure state board whose unanimous approval is legally required for the project to move forward.

Despite a furious last-minute drive by Bloomberg and the city's business elite to ram the project through, the Jets aren't over the goal line yet on either decision.

For one thing, Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno have proved to be tougher than anyone expected.

Each controls one of the three votes on the state's Public Authorities Control Board - Pataki controls the other. As of yesterday, neither Silver, a Democrat, nor Bruno, a Republican, was ready to vote yes.

Both men want to know why the cost ofthis project keeps rising faster than the price of gasoline. It's already shot upto $2.2 billion from $1.4 billion in lessthan a year.

That makes it three times more expensive than any football stadium ever built. Why, just the $600 million in taxpayer money Bloomberg and Pataki have earmarked for it surpasses the total cost of any football stadium in the country, except for Chicago's new Soldier Field.

No wonder Bruno and Silver want to see the fine print. It took until last week for Pataki's office to provide some.

"Their answers to our questions are totally inadequate," Silver told me late yesterday. "They still can't put their fingers on the total cost [of public subsidies], but it's definitely more than $600 million."

There are "25 to 30 major contracts" for the project for which there is no information, Silver said. In addition, Bloomberg and Pataki plan to create a special new state local development corporation to administer the stadium's financing - yet they have provided no details of its structure or operations.

"The notion that Bloomberg and [Deputy Mayor Daniel] Doctoroff can bully andbuy Shelly is wrong," said Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester), chairman of the Assembly committee that oversees public authorities.

"They can't get it into their heads that this isn't a negotiation over a ham sandwich," said Brodsky, a Silver ally. "They have to win on the merits of their proposal."

According to another Albany lawmaker, there was "a very bad meeting" on Tuesday among aides from the governor's office, the city, the Jets and top Assembly and Senate staff. At that meeting, city and state aides could not answer key questions about the project.

With Silver and Bruno trying to figure out how to pay for future bills to meet thefuture costs for mass transit and forcourt-mandated increases in funding for New York City public schools, it'shard to justify all that money for a private stadium.

But the state vote is not the only problem.

Cahn has been sending signals he might "bifurcate the suits," according to one lawyer involved.

That means Cahn could strike down some of the challenges while upholding others. The five suits revolve around two principal legal arguments.

Three - filed by Cablevision, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum and a coalition of civic groups - challenge the legality of a bidding process that allowed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to award the railyards to the Jets. Two other suits charge that the environmental review the city conducted for the whole Hudson Yards area - which covers the stadium site - is inadequate.

Remember, it was an environmental challenge that killed the infamous Westway project decades ago.

On Monday, the International Olympic Committee will issue preliminary ratings of the various Olympic bids. Bloomberg wants a stadium decision this week because he knows a low ranking for New York's bid next week could further doom his project.