October 21, 2004
Piling on the Jets
New York City comptroller William Thompson, echoing earlier findings by the city Independent Budget Office, has decried Mayor Mike Bloomberg's multi-billion-dollar Hudson Yards stadium-and-development complex as an "extremely risky" plan that could leave taxpayers on the hook for $1 billion if projected revenues fall short. Using the city's Transitional Finance Authority to float short-term bonds for the project, Thompson wrote to the mayor, "is a back door financing scheme which is not only fiscally imprudent, it also flouts the principles of responsible government."
Thompson's letter grabbed the headlines, but possibly more important was an item hidden in the body of the news stories: The city has dropped plans to use Battery Park City PILOT payments to fund the city's $350 million share of an expanded Javits Convention Center, realizing it would never fly with state assembly speaker Sheldon Silver. A mayoral press flunky told Newsday that Bloomberg would decide on an alternate revenue source "in a couple of months"; of course, we've already been waiting close to two years for the mayor to say where $600 million in public funds for the accompanying Jets football stadium would come from, to no avail...
Meanwhile, the public transit advocacy group the Straphangers Campaign has called for the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority to put the proposed stadium site up for public bid, saying that it could generate as much as $2 billion to help the cash-strapped agency hold off bus and subway fare hikes. The MTA insists it will charge the Jets "fair-market value" for the site - after decking over existing rail yards at no charge - but plans to rely on appraisers, not an open bidding process, to determine what that value might be.
