January 16, 2005
Times: NYC sports tab to be $1.1B
The New York Times' Charles Bagli, citing "interviews with public and team officials," has come up with total public price tags for the three sports facilities under discussion in Gotham: $600 million for the Jets stadium slated for Manhattan's West Side, $300 million toward a new Yankees stadium that would replace the House That Ruth Built, and $200 million in subsidies to a Nets arena in Brooklyn - this last "whittled down," according to Bagli, from an initial $450 million demand by Nets owner/developer Bruce Ratner. The grand total: $1.1 billion in taxpayer money, for a city that's already facing a $3 billion budget gap.
And it could easily be worse than this, as Bagli leaves out some additional public costs that could send the bill still higher:
- Despite promises to the contrary, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority still hasn't figured out how much it wants to be paid for the land under the Jets and Nets projects. If the MTA agrees to a cut-rate sale price, that could easily add hundreds of millions of dollars more to the effective public subsidy; if it charges full value, though, it could end up torpedoing the teams' ability to build the buildings at all.
- Bagli apparently based his calculations on team and City Hall sources - in other words, the parties backing the deals. As everyone should know by now, you never trust a stadium dealer when he tells you the list price: Cost overruns are a near-certainty when it comes to sports facilities. New York City public advocate Betsy Gotbaum, based on prior stadium deals, has estimated an additional $430 million in overruns and inflation costs for the Jets stadium alone.
- To get these three deals done would likely require other subsidies for other projects. For starters, the Mets have already said they'll demand the same $300 million subsidy as the Yankees are getting; state senate majority leader Joe Bruno, meanwhile, says he'll want another $300 million in public subsidies for upstate projects before he'll approve the state's share of the Jets stadium cost.
Add it up, and we're already over $2 billion - and that's without factoring in such items as that $1.7 billion subway line. That's quite a sum for a mayor who said upon taking office in 2002 that "given the deficit in the operating budget, it is just not practical this year to go and build stadiums." The total projected public cost of the Mets and Yankees stadiums that Bloomberg rejected that year: a mere $800 million.
