So, the Brooklyn Nets. Has a certain nice ring to it. It'll be weird though, no more NJ Nets. Nets owner entering negotiations with MTA. If Ratner doesn't up the offer, MTA won't be selling to him.

Link

NEW YORK (AP) -- The New Jersey Nets moved a step closer to New York on Wednesday when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted to enter exclusive negotiations with team owner Bruce Ratner, who wants to build a towering arena complex over an MTA railyard near downtown Brooklyn.

The MTA board gave Ratner 45 days to increase his $50 million cash bid for the eight-acre railyard, which the agency has had appraised at $214 million.

Ratner has offered the MTA tens of millions of dollars in added inducements such as railyard improvements to persuade the nation's largest mass transit system to sell him the property. Board members nonetheless called his bid far below what they expected.

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``The dollars involved with the Ratner proposal are unacceptable,'' board member Barry Feinstein said.

Despite its reservations, the board voted 13-1 on Wednesday to keep Ratner on a timeline that could have the Nets playing in his Frank Gehry arena on Flatbush Avenue by November 2008, making them Brooklyn's first professional team since 1957, when the Dodgers fled to California.

Ratner was ``very grateful'' to the MTA board, said Jim Stuckey, the executive vice president of the developer's Forest City Ratner Cos.

``I think there will be a positive outcome,'' he said.