March 30, 2004
Oh, those revenues
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on his proposed $1.4 billion Jets stadium, February 10: "We can rent it out for eight-odd Sundays a year for somebody that's going to pay us $600, $700, $800 million. This would be the best rental anybody has ever done in the history of the world."
Jets stadium czar Jay Cross on WFAN's "Mike and the Mad Dog" show yesterday, asked if the Jets would get the revenue from concerts and other events at a Manhattan stadium as well: "Yes, because we will incur all the costs of operating the building."
In other Bloomberg news, the mayor said he'd still like to build stadiums for the Mets and Yankees, but not if the city has to pay half the $1.6 billion combined cost, as his predecessor Rudy Giuliani had offered. Bloomberg also revealed he plans to investigate the complete exemption from city property taxes that Cablevision has been getting on Madison Square Garden since 1982, when the Knicks and Rangers agreed not to leave town; the total cost to city coffers since then has run more than $200 million, enough to completely reimburse MSG for its renovation in the late 1980s. Given that the tax break was originally supposed to sunset in 1992, but no one bothered to repeal it at the time, we're less inclined to think that Mayor Mike just got around to noticing, and more inclined to believe that this is political payback.
