November 17, 2004
Taxes of evil
Give New York mayor Michael Bloomberg credit for one thing: He understands how important it is to have a well-defined villain. Yesterday the battlin' billionaire went after Knicks and Rangers owner (and Jets stadium foe) Cablevision for the second time in a week over its full exemption from city property taxes, a subsidy that Mayor Ed Koch and Governor Hugh Carey granted then-Garden owners Gulf & Western way back in 1982, in exchange for a promise not to move the teams out of town - it wasn't until later that anyone noticed that no one had bothered to set an end date. "They say that they care about the city," Bloomberg declared yesterday. "Well, if they cared about the city, why don't they forgo their tax breaks?"
Oddly, two city councilmembers were holding a City Hall press conference to call for the repeal of MSG's tax exemption at the same time Bloomberg was lashing out against it across town - but, according to the New York Times, the mayor "declin[ed] to throw his support behind the proposal to repeal the tax abatement," instead charging that Cablevision should give it up voluntarily. One theory is the one I raised the other day, that Bloomberg secretly loves the tax abatement, since it allows him to paint the most deep-pocketed opponent of his own stadium-subsidy deal as a hypocrite. The other would be, I suppose, that the mayor just feels it doesn't count if you have to ask for it.
Anyway, its role in the ongoing stadium war aside, local budget watchers who've been griping about the MSG tax break for decades have to at least be amused that someone's finally paying attention. "When that tax exemption was first passed, the general understanding was that it was going to be temporary," says Doug Turetsky of the city's Independent Budget Office, which annually includes repeal of the MSG tax break in its yearly wish list of city budget reforms. "Maybe time is catching up with it." (Turetsky also observes, as an aside, that the tax-break legislation is contingent on major-league basketball and hockey being played at the Garden - something that's clearly not happening right now, and that's even before the obvious Knicks jokes.)
Finally, as promised, this week's Village Voice has my rundown of Bloomberg and Governor Pataki's attempts to evade legislative oversight of the Jets stadium plan. Representative quote, from State Senator Liz Krueger: "The state of New York's budget operates like a slush fund, because that's how it's been set out by Governor Pataki, and the legislature hasn't stopped it. When Chairman Gargano seems to imply '$300 million there, $300 million there, I can find that in the petty cash drawer,' it disturbs me immensely, but he may be right."
