After the failure of his effort to build a stadium for the Jets on a giant platform on the site of the West Side railyards, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that he supported a plan by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the site, to use surplus funds to build a platform anyway and sell development rights for office and residential towers.
Officials of the agency have said that the sale of space on the platform, which would represent one of the authority's most ambitious forays into real estate development, could generate more than $1 billion.
Of course, the M.T.A.'s first priority should be to assure reliable and secure transportation, the mayor said in his weekly radio appearance on WABC-AM. "Then they've got to make the investments in the infrastructure," he said. "And this one for the West Side is a very good deal for the M.T.A. and a good deal for the city."
The project would bring new development to the West Side, Mr. Bloomberg said, and if the authority moved its headquarters to the railyard site - as its officials have suggested - that could also bring funds to the agency from the sale of its old headquarters building.
Money to build the platform would come from the authority's anticipated $833 million surplus, which stemmed from a surge in tax revenue. The executive director of the authority has said that $12 million of the surplus will be used immediately for service and security improvements.
The authority conceded earlier in the week that its original plan to sell the West Side railyard rights to the Jets to build a stadium was, for practical purposes, dead.
Gene Russianoff, a lawyer at the New York Public Interest Research Group and a longtime transit advocate, said it was creative of the authority to consider using its surplus to venture into real estate development. "One of the huge problems for the M.T.A. is it has no money for capital repairs," he said. "It can get money for its operating budget from politicians, but it's hard to get money for capital repairs."
Meanwhile, breaking with the national Republican line, the mayor also said in his radio address that he opposed legislation debated yesterday in the Senate that would shield firearms manufacturers and dealers from liability in lawsuits stemming from violent crimes committed with their weapons.
The bill, sponsored by the Republican majority leader, Bill Frist, is supported by the White House and backed by the National Rifle Association. It would bar third parties from bringing civil liability actions against gunmakers, dealers, distributors and importers.
"This is one of the great disgraces of Congress," Mr. Bloomberg said. "They ought to go home and hang their heads in shame. I don't care how powerful the N.R.A. lobby is."
"There are too many guns out there," the mayor said, adding that the right to bear arms must be weighed against the dangers of automatic weapons and bullets that pierce bulletproof vests.
The Police Department recently released statistics showing that in the week that ended last Sunday, there were 56 shootings in New York, injuring 75 people, while during the same period in 2004 there were 33 shootings. Between Jan. 1 and July 24, 2005, there were 841 shootings, up from 769 for the same period last year.