Field of Schemes
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March 09, 2005

Clash of the Titans

Your latest heaping helping of New York Jets stadium news:

  • City council speaker Gifford Miller is set to introduce today a bill to require city council approval before the mayor can spend developer PILOT payments on the Jets stadium project. The Daily News reports that Miller looks to have the votes to override a mayoral veto, so this thing looks to be headed to the courts to decide just whether the Bloomberg slush fund is legal or not.
  • Speaking of that slush fund, it just got slushier: Yesterday the city Industrial Development Agency approved the transfer of more than $20 million a year in Bank of America PILOT payments from the state Empire State Development Authority to the IDA. These, the "new" PILOTs that figured into the city budget director's insistence that no "current" city money would be diverted for the stadium, stem from a BofA headquarters in the works for 42nd Street that's already getting $42 million in city tax breaks and $650 million in tax-exempt Liberty Bonds.
  • Stadium foe Cablevision, owner of Madison Square Garden, is now refusing to run pro-stadium ads on its cable systems, which cover about half of New York City. The Jets have charged that this violates cable contractors' requirement to provide "a diversity of video programming"; an FCC spokesperson and other First Amendment experts told the New York Times, however, that this generally refers to diversity of programs, not commercials, and that Cablevision is free to reject whatever ads it likes. (Whether this is a good power to be giving to a TV service provider is another question; but then, so is whether public policy decisions should be decided primarily by dueling ad campaigns.)
  • On the politicians who don't actually have any say over the stadium front, Congressman Charles Rangel came out in favor of the plan, while state attorney general (and likely 2006 gubernatorial candidate) Eliot Spitzer is opposed.
  • The New York Giants were reported yesterday to be close to an agreement for a privately funded stadium on public land in the New Jersey Meadowlands; now, however, there's an unconfirmed rumor that the Giants may threaten to join the Jets in Manhattan if they don't get lease concessions from New Jersey. More on this if and when things become any clearer.

Meanwhile, New York has yet another sports entity sniffing around for a new facility: NASCAR, which wants to build a 660-acre raceway and mall on Staten Island. Among those that NASCAR lobbyist (and former Staten Island borough president) assembled for the initial discussion of the project, according to the Village Voice's Tom Robbins: Mayor Michael Bloomberg, deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, and Doctoroff's former business partner Steve Ross, who is one of the real estate barons hoping to help develop the NASCAR project.

COMMENTS

Christ. The last thing NYC needs is a Nascab track....

Posted by Bertell Ollman on March 10, 2005 12:16 AM

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