Field of Schemes
sports stadium news and analysis

  

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March 06, 2005

Greetings from Bizarro World

This weekend's adventures in New York Jets stadium land:

  • Jets president Jay Cross acknowledged for the first time that the team would consider staying in New Jersey if its $1.7 billion Manhattan stadium plan falls through. The New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority estimates a shared stadium for the Jets and Giants could be built for around $900 million; Jets officials say as Plan B's go, this would be preferable to building in Queens, which would be more expensive.
  • Newsday's Steve Zipay did a rundown yesterday of the $5 billion worth of new stadiums and arenas that have been proposed for the New York metro area, and while I don't usually complain about articles that quote me this much, I do have one gripe: Zipay quotes uncritically a Lehman Brothers stadium consultant who calls New York's current venues "economically obsolete," saying, "They all have to be replaced. Teams with new stadiums are moving ahead of them in revenues, and they need the extra revenues to field competitive teams." This, as anyone who's read Chapter 4 of Field of Schemes will call, is one of the oldest canards in the stadium-grubbing book - "economically obsolete" is in fact sports-owner code for "we're not making as big a profit as we'd like." And it's an especially ridiculous argument in New York, where thanks to huge cable contracts most teams rank among the highest-revenue franchises in their leagues.
  • At least Zipay largely got his facts straight, though, which is more than can be said for yesterday's Daily News editorial that asserted the public's $600 million in Jets stadium subsidies "will be repaid, plus profit, out of tax revenue generated by the facility." As my Village Voice colleague Paul Moses pointed out in his column last week, this is horsecrap: It overlooks the $400 million in property-tax breaks that the Jets would get from the city on top of the $600 million in cash. Writes Moses: "Once that cost is included, you can scrap the studies (including an often cited one by the respected Independent Budget Office) that say the city will get its investment back on a stadium and expanded convention center by collecting more money in sales taxes on the goods that the extra conventiongoers buy."
  • The New York Times didn't have anything new on the Jets stadium battle yesterday - but not to be left out, it managed to work a Jets reference into the headline for an unrelated story about Boss Tweed.
  • Finally, one unnamed supporter of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to justify the mayor's stadium dreams to Newsday today, saying: "You can't take innovative steps without blockbuster ideas. It's the enormity of the project that makes it complicated." Why, yes. Yes, it is.

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