Field of Schemes

June 30, 2005

They will fight eternally

Andy Zimbalist's reply to my reply to his defense of New York's tripartite stadium plans is in! As is my reply to his reply to my reply! This could go on forever!

In related news, apparently the state and city of New York - or rather their quasi-public development arms, the Empire State Development Corporation and the NYC Economic Development Corporation - have signed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with the Mets and Yankees spelling out details of the proposed deals; they just aren't sharing them with anyone else yet, like, say, the public. I'll report back here as soon as any copies of the agreements are successfully unearthed.

D.C. fans disguised as empty seats

The Washington Nationals are 13th out of 30 MLB teams in ticket sales, but in terms of actually getting fans to show up for the games, they're not doing quite so well. The Washington Post reports that the Nats sold an average of 32,019 for their first 33 home games, but average turnstile count was just 24,679 - meaning almost one-quarter of all tickets went unused. (One Nats fan club president theorized that the blame should go to "typical K Street lobbyists who buy all the tickets and don't show for the game.")

The Nats still get the ticket money, of course - the team is expecting to turn a $20 million pretax profit, according to the Post. But those no-show fans aren't buying hot dogs and scorecards and souvenirs, which costs the city money in lost sales taxes. (Assuming, of course, that they're not spending their money elsewhere in the city instead - the substitution effect cuts both ways.) D.C. projected tax revenues of $10.5 million for the year on turnstile counts of about 33,000 per game, so the drop of 25% would amount to... well, it's hard to say exactly since the city collects sales taxes on tickets as well, but certainly a loss to the city coffers in the $1-2 million range.

Bloomberg on public oversight: Oh, fine

Remember that slush fund of developer fees that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to use for a New York Jets stadium, back when there was still a New York Jets stadium in the works? The one that the mayor's top lawyer said any attempts by the city council to restrict would be an "impermissible curtailment of the mayorís powers under the City Charter"? Turns out he didn't really mean all that after all - yesterday, Bloomberg did an about-face and signed into law a bill requiring council oversight of city-collected PILOTs (payments in lieu of property taxes), calling it a "reasonable compromise" that will "increase public input into the PILOT process."

Given that the mayor had previously asserted that he had the right to spend this money without consulting anyone, who knew that "public input" was even a concern of his - but hey, maybe he's been doing his reading.

Pot to kettle: Drop dead

With liberal billionaire George Soros having joined one of the bids to buy the Washington Nationals, Republican Rep. Tom Davis - who you'll remember as Congress' would-be baseball kingmaker - is fuming, leveling threats at baseball's antitrust exemption if MLB lets Soros into the club. "I think Major League Baseball understands the stakes," Davis told Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper. "I don't think they want to get involved in the political fights. ... I don't think it's the Nats that get hurt. I think it's Major League Baseball that gets hurt. They enjoy all sorts of exemptions from antitrust laws."

Roll Call further reported:

Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), vice chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that covers the District of Columbia budget, said if Soros buys the team and seeks public funding for the new stadium or anything else, the GOP attitude would be, "Let him pay for it."

Yeah - because who could ever imagine giving government stadium funds to a wealthy politician?

June 29, 2005

NYC stadium subsidies hit $1.2 billion and rising

Smith College sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written his latest defense of New York's proposed stadium deals in a column for the Sports Business Journal, writing that "compared with the typical deal in the sports industry and previous proposals in New York, the new facility plans for the Yanks, Mets and Nets are good news indeed." That Zimbalist is backing the deals is unsurprising - he serves as a paid consultant to Nets owner Bruce Ratner, after all, and has been a proponent of a Brooklyn Nets arena even before being hired to work on the project. However, Zimbalist's article is also rife with factual errors about the projects' public cost; those interested can read my response to Zimbalist here.

Zimbalist does, however, provide one useful piece of information for determining the stadiums' true cost to the public. Discussing the plan to have the teams use "payments in lieu of taxes" to pay off their own stadium debt, Zimbalist writes:

Some may object that if the teams cover the debt service instead of paying taxes, then, in effect, the public treasury is paying for the bonds and the facility through forfeited tax collections.

This objection was valid in the case of the vetoed West Side stadium for the Jets. However, it applies only to a small degree for the Yankees, Mets and Nets.

The difference for the latter three is that the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn are all in tax-abatement zones. (Manhattan is not.)

Under a commercial incentive program, all commercial developers in these boroughs do not have to pay real estate taxes on new projects for 15 years. After that, the tax is phased in at 10 percent a year for 10 years, and only in years 26-30 are full taxes assessed.

I estimate the present value of the taxes that are being replaced by the PILOTS for the Yankees, Mets and Nets at $44 million, $39 million and $21 million, respectively. Thus, for instance, it could be argued that the Yankees are paying $756 million out of the $800 million for stadium construction and the Mets are paying $661 million out of the roughly $700 million for their new ballpark.

George Sweeting of the city Independent Budget Office, while neither confirming nor disputing Zimbalist's figures - there's no way to know exactly what the PILOTs would be worth until the property value is assessed - did confirm to FoS that Zimbalist's reasoning here is correct. However, Sweeting also points out that Zimbalist left out two additional public costs: the "opportunity cost" that comes from not using the land for a purpose that would generate higher property taxes; and the teams' savings from using triple-tax-exempt state bonds to finance the projects, which he says "could exceed $100 million for the Yankees and Mets and are estimated at $75 million for the Nets."

Adding the new figures from Zimbalist and Sweeting to previously published figures, then, we can now make new estimates of the total public subsidies required for New York's new stadium projects:

YANKEES: $469 million ($160m in city funds, $75m in state funds, $90m in Metropolitan Transportation Authority capital expenses, $100m in tax-exempt bond savings, $44m in property-tax savings)
METS: $419 million ($105m in city funds, $75m in state funds, $100m in forgone city parking revenues, $100m in tax-exempt bond savings, $39m in property-tax savings)
NETS: $296 million ($100m in city funds, $100m in state funds, $75m in tax-exempt bond savings, $21m in property-tax savings)

TOTAL: $1.184 billion

And that's before any calculation of opportunity cost, and not counting the Nets pay-your-tax-and-deduct-it-from-land-costs plan or any of several other possible hidden subsidies. Add those in, and the three new sports facilities could end up costing taxpayers more than $1.5 billion, or $500 million apiece - more than any stadium or arena in U.S. history (though the planned Indianapolis Colts stadium would shatter that record). Funny, "Bloomberg" doesn't sound Greek.

LATE NOTE: Some of my math was off in the initial calculations, so I've revised this from $1.3 billion to $1.2 billion.

June 28, 2005

Missing the boat

During last night's New York Yankees-Baltimore Orioles game, Yankee broadcaster Michael Kay related this tale about Baltimore's Camden Yards:

"I don't know if the story is apocryphal, but when they were getting the design for the new Comiskey Park, HOK, which designed this and is also designing the new Yankee Stadium, went to the owners of the White Sox and gave them the design for this and they said no, no, no, no, we want a modern stadium. So they missed the boat."

(Thanks to FoS reader Andrew Ross for the TiVoed transcript.)

If by "apocryphal" Kay means "pure fiction," then yes, it's apocryphal. Philip Bess, who was a Chicago-based stadium consultant at the time, tells FoS that "the White Sox always wanted a Chicago version of Royals Stadium," and hired HOK because they'd worked on that 1970s modernist stadium. Moreover, as Peter Richmond made clear in his book Ballpark, about the building of Camden Yards, the Baltimore park's since-imitated "retro" design wasn't even HOK's idea. As then-O's (and now Red Sox) president Larry Lucchino told Richmond of HOK's work on Camden Yards, "[New] Comiskey would have been the stadium they'd have built, given free rein."

You can see Bill Frist's house from there

Headline in this week's Washington Business Journal: "Big question for ballpark: What view will fans have?" Could it be? Someone is actually concerned about the fact that new stadiums leave fans farther from the field than old ones?

Get real. What the article actually said:

After deciding to put the stadium at a South Capitol Street location, officials are now wondering: What backdrop should fans see when they look out over the field?

City and team officials, and architects are considering two options: a northeast orientation that puts the Capitol in view and a southeast orientation that provides a view of the Anacostia waterfront.

Somewhere, there's a world where people actually go to baseball games to watch, you know, baseball. But maybe stadium designers think that would just distract fans from more important things, like buying garlic fries.

The $687 million Indianapolis Colts stadium project hit its first speed bump in a while yesterday, as Morgan County became the first Indy-area county to vote down a 1% food-and-beverage tax to help subsidize the Colts' new home. (All seven other area counties have approved the tax.) While stadium boosters had previously said all counties would need to participate in the tax in order for the stadium to go through, they changed their tune in the wake of the Morgan County defeat: Stadium authority chair David Frick said this "is not going to be the death blow. ... It's going to make the financing clearly tighter, and we'll just have to figure out how much tighter."

And as an example of the kind of good press you just can't buy: WCBS-TV reported (and I heard a similar report on WCBS-AM news radio) that Ratner will be "giving the Atlantic Yards community where he wants to build the new Nets Basketball stadium $3.5 billion in community improvements." $3.5 billion, of course, is the full price tag for Ratner's planned housing/office/basketball complex, not any associated "community improvements" - meaning this could mark the first time in history that a developer was credited with generosity for his own cost overruns.

In what must be a speed record, the New York state legislature has passed authorizing legislation for new Yankees and Mets stadiums, less than two weeks after they were first proposed. While there's some confusion over the exact provisions of the bill, the Associated Press reports that it included $75 million in state bonds for each team, plus another $75 million for unrelated projects upstate - presumably to placate state senate majority leader Joe Bruno, who has been insisting on getting equal subsidies for his upstate constituents in any stadium deal. The New York Post also reports that the bill "authorizes the transfer of Macombs Dam Park, across from the current stadium, to the team for building a new stadium. The city is also permitted to take other land for new parks."

While state approval doesn't make the stadiums a done deal - they still must receive hundreds of millions of dollars more from the New York city council, as well as likely going through a land-use approval process that could take a year or more - it is one major hurdle down. That the legislature managed to accomplish this on such short notice is a tribute to the teams' political machinations - though the fact that it was done with no public hearings and almost no public notice is less of a tribute to New York's alleged democratic process.

LATE NOTE: Further review reveals that the same legislative session that approved $150 million in state stadium funding also passed $150 million in tax breaks for state assembly speaker Sheldon Silver's lower Manhattan district. This just can't be a coincidence.

Last Thursday, I e-mailed New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's press spokesperson Jennifer Falk with a list of unresolved questions about the mayor's proposed Yankees and Mets stadium deals. These were:

While some clues have leaked out on these topics since then, not a word has come from the mayor's office. And so today fieldofschemes.com inaugurates a new feature, the Mayor Bloomberg Stonewall Counter, that will appear in this site's right-hand column. In coming weeks and months, you the readers can thrill to the dead silence emanating from City Hall - and if you like, you can even ask the mayor yourself and see how you fare at getting an answer. Just like the Bloomberg administration itself, it's more fun than watching paint dry!

The New York Jets are doing better at the courthouse than the statehouse: Yesterday a New York state appeals court ruled that the state has the right to sell rail yards land to the Jets for a stadium, even though the team was not the high bidder.

Of course, with state financing for the stadium having been deep-sixed earlier this month, the Jets don't have much use for the land without anything to build there. The leading rumor continues to be that the team will join the Giants in building a new stadium in the Meadowlands; New Jersey state officials are now attempting to "make nice" (the Newark Star-Ledger's words, not mine) with the Jets by offering them a one-third rent break at Giants Stadium. The Star-Ledger's Matt Futterman also reports that there could be still another wild card in play:

Where on earth they'd put a Queens Jets stadium, given that a proposed Mets stadium and accompanying Olympic media center would take up all available land in the Willets Point area, Futterman doesn't say. More likely, the Queens option is being floated by these "people close to the team" in order to extract a better deal from New Jersey - just as Yankees owner George Steinbrenner has spent the better part of the last two decades making eyes at Jersey in order to elicit stadium subsidies from New York.

The U.S. Supreme Court has made its ruling in the Kelo v. City of New London case: In a 5-4 ruling, the court declared that (in the words of the Associated Press) "local governments may seize people's homes and businesses against their will for private development." The ruling clears the way for local governments to continue using eminent domain proceedings to clear land for private projects - including sports stadiums - on the grounds that creating economic development is a "public use."

Among the stadium plans that will benefit from the ruling is the planned $581 million Washington Nationals stadium, which would displace a bunch of local business owners who aren't too thrilled with the idea.

In other D.C. news, meanwhile, local businesses have begun objecting to the new stadium tax that the city started imposing this month, noting that it's skewed to take a bigger tax bite from smaller businesses and those with high cash flow. City council president Linda Cropp now says she might revisit the gross-receipts tax idea - at this rate, the stadium could be open for business before the D.C. council figures out how it's going to pay for it.

The San Diego Chargers owners say they'll be putting an initiative on the November 2006 ballot for voters to decide on their new stadium plan, which would be partly funded by a gift of 60 acres of free land from the city. Yay, right? Direct democracy in action!

Well, sort of. It turns out that the reason the team is using the initiative process, which requires gathering signatures to get on the ballot, is this way it can avoid doing an environmental impact study before the vote, as would be required if it asked the city council to place the issue on the ballot. Instead, any environmental review would take place after it's too late for voters to take its finding into account. The Chargers say the vote would be binding; the city council says it will have to check the law and get back to them on that.

It's true what they say: Canada really is another country. The Montreal Alouettes Canadian football team are complaining that their 20,000-seat, 90-year-old Molson Stadium is too small, and are asking for - no, not a new one. The Als are asking for renovations to add luxury boxes and 5,000 new seats, at a total cost to the public of $24 million. (In U.S. dollars, that's $7.42. Okay, not really.)

While in the U.S. $24 million is the sort of money that cities throw at teams for merely thinking about a stadium, in Canada they treat it as real money. Montreal executive committee vice-president said that while he supports the Molson expansion project in principle, he's not so sure about the money: "As to the principle of Montreal's participation, we're open. But the amount is far from fixed. I'm happy the Als are going forward, but there's still some work to do. That's normal. In this project, money becomes an important subject."

For those of you wondering what your visit to a new New York Yankees stadium would look like - assuming, that is, that the stadium is built out of cardboard and you're Godzilla - I now have a page of photos of the Yanks' new stadium model for public perusal.

Also, with the help of stadium architecture consultant and critic Philip Bess, I've put together a cross-section comparison of the existing and proposed stadiums. The Yankees didn't provide a measurement scale with their architectural renderings, but by matching tread widths (the depth of each row of seats) and using other clues, I've come up with the following guesstimate (Yankee Stadium is in red, proposed new stadium in full color):

As you can see, the main changes from the existing stadium would be: Eliminating the middle loge deck entirely to make room for luxury suites, and replacing some of these seats with new rows at the back of the two-level lower deck; and shifting the entire upper deck about 30 feet further back from the field, while lopping off the top few rows. While the resulting stadium would be shorter than the current stadium, it would also have about 12% fewer seats, meaning the 50,000th ticket sold would still be at about the same height. And with the upper deck pushed back from the field, the worst seat in the new smaller-capacity building would be just as far from the action as the worst seat in the current 57,000-seat stadium.

To the throngs of economists who say that sports stadiums don't do anything for local economies, add an unlikely ally: Minnesota Twins president Jerry Bell, who says the economic-benefit argument his team has been using for years is bunk. Of stadium-naysaying economists, Bell told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "At some global level, they're obviously correct," adding: "I don't think the economic argument turns it one way or another, so why go there? If there are side benefits, great. If not, so what? You get into an economic argument, and the bottom line is, 'Do you want to build it or not?'" Did somebody put truth serum in the Minnesota water supply this month, or what?

With the Minnesota Twins stadium bill stalled once again - the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Jay Weiner writes that "if there's no movement on the larger issues at the Capitol this week [during the special session of the legislature], the Twins' prospects could run out of time" - the local newspapers have the unusual luxury of stepping back and looking at the big picture instead of just rushing from press release to press release:

Another piece of the funding puzzle has been revealed in the New York Yankees stadium plan, with T.J. Quinn and Michael O'Keeffe of the Daily News reporting that the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority "will pay about $90 million for a new Metro-North rail station and subway renovations at the stadium." (Earlier reports have indicated that the subway renovations would serve mostly to move station entrances closer to the new stadium.) For those playing at home, this would bring the public cost of the stadium project to $310 million - and that's before accounting for rent and property-tax subsidies.

St. Louis Blues owners Bill and Nancy Laurie are engaged in a tax dispute with the city of St. Louis, saying they want the same waiver of a 5% ticket tax that the Cardinals will be getting in their new stadium. The Lauries' response when the city turned them down? Announce they're selling the team, possibly to an owner who would move it out of town. Now Mayor Francis Slay says he'll "pull out all the stops to take a look at how we can keep this team here," while Board of Aldermen president James Shrewsbury indicates he'd be okay with a hockey subsidy, saying, "I'm realistic that we need to be competitive."

Of course, the Lauries didn't come out and say that ticket-tax extortion was the reason they're putting the team on the market. No, they said in a prepared statement that they "can no longer justify remaining active in a business which has lost more than $60 million in the past two years and is certain to continue to lose millions annually in the years ahead." Now that's sure to get buyers to come running. Or, heck, maybe it will.

And we've had a David Samson sighting! The ever-quotable Florida Marlins president provided an update, such as it was, on his team's stadium plans, saying of team owner Jeffrey Loria: "He's going to review all options and then have a comment. And I'm still doing that with him. I hope to have news soon." Added Samson: "There's continuing dialogue at all times. Baseball's very interested in what's happening here because we're one of 30 franchises and they keep track of that." Samson failed to set a deadline for a stadium deal, possibly out of fear that people would laugh and point.

A huge pile of press clips on the new Yankees stadium plans today, most of them drinking the Kool-Aid. My favorite line from bizarro reporting land: Newsday's Steve Zipay describing how the stadium would have "a gentler slope, allowing better sight lines," which in the realm of non-Euclidian stadium geometry is right up there with the former Red Sox ownership's promise of "seats that are closer to the field, not to the fan next to you."

The most interesting bits in all the coverage: Newsday provides a gallery of artist's renderings of the proposed stadium. (I should have scale-model photos to share tomorrow.) And the New York Times' Richard Sandomir confirms that a new Metro-North commuter rail station to be constructed near the stadium "would come out of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's capital budget." No word from anyone in public office yet on how much this would cost the public, on top of the $220 million in city and state funds already proposed for the project.

As promised, the New York Yankees held their press conference today at 4 pm - actually more like 4:20, the better to get TV stations to air footage during the 6 o'clock news without time to seek comments from critics - to announce their long-rumored plans for a new stadium. It was clearly a thrown-together affair, with a paper model of the new stadium and only a single two-page press statement, and amid all the glad-handing pols taking the stage, not much new info was provided. But there were some glimmerings:

After escaping from the packed Stadium Club, I called David Gratt of the newly formed Friends of Yankee Stadium for a comment on the proceedings. "A facility that processes four million fans a year is anything but nonfunctional," said Gratt. "If by 'antiquated' the Yankees mean Yankee Stadium is a historic site that has seen many of the most important events in baseball, no one will argue with that. If they mean that it's unusable, they don't know what they're talking about."

New York's stadium turmoil has taken center stage in recent days, but there have been some developments beyond the five boroughs as well:

The other shoe drops today, as the New York Yankees have scheduled a 4 p.m. press conference to announce their plans for a $1 billion stadium in what's currently Macombs Dam Park across the street from the House That Ruth Built. According to the New York Times, the team would pay the $800 million construction cost - about 40% of which he'd recoup from other MLB teams via reduced revenue-sharing payments - while the state and city would spend $220 million to build new parking garages and compensate for the destruction of Macombs Dam Park by building a new waterfront park along the Harlem River and new athletic fields atop the garages.

Meanwhile, new details have continued to emerge about the city's twin stadium plans for the Mets and Yanks, some of which I discuss in my article in today's Village Voice:

Add it all up, and you get a combined public cost of somewhere from $400 million (the official reported cost) to well over $1 billion (if all of the above hidden costs are counted, including the loss of property-tax revenue). Now you're starting to talk real money.

One more tidbit that's leaked out about the Mets plans: Apparently deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff let slip at Sunday's news conference that the city's "infrastructure" costs would include sinking girders in the swampy Queens soil to serve as a foundation for the new stadium. Sound familiar?

In a twist that would have been unimaginable just one week ago, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has thrown his support behind a Olympic stadium in Queens - to serve as the home not of the Jets, but of the Mets, who would foot the bill for construction costs, while the city and state paid for land and infrastructure. And if New York were awarded the 2012 Olympics, the Mets would play that season in a new Yankees stadium - plans for which are now expected to be released later this week.

As the news conference for this new plan took place late last night - less than 24 hours before the city needed to submit a revised bid to the International Olympic Committee - much is still unknown about the financing and other details. Here's what we know so far:

Other details are sketchy at this early hour. Would the Mets be using their own property taxes to pay off stadium bonds, as the Jets had planned? Would the Yanks and Mets pay rent on their new digs (the Times' Richard Sandomir says no), and how much would this cost the city in lost revenues? Who would pay for inevitable cost overruns, especially those incurred by a rush to be ready for the Olympics? Who will pay operations and maintenance costs? And what other hidden costs could be lurking in the fine print, particularly for the media broadcast center that the city wants to build atop an existing light-industrial neighborhood in adjacent Willets Point?

Given how long it took to suss out the true costs of the Jets plan, it could be a while before we know answers to all of these questions. For now, the Mets and Yankees stadiums suddenly take center stage, without the political baggage that weighed down the Jets project. (Bloomberg indicated that both state assembly speaker Sheldon Silver and state senate leader Joe Bruno have agreed to sign off on the Queens deal.) The stadiums would still likely need to go through a months-long land-use process before being approved, including community hearings, environmental impact statements, and ultimately votes of the city council and state legislature.

And while there's no Queens version of Cablevision to throw its weight behind opposition to the deal, community support is far from assured. Local Queens officials say they want to hear more before signing off on the deal. "Hopefully, some lessons have been learned with the West Side fiasco," Queens city councilmember John Liu told Newsday. "The consensus can be built this time by ensuring Queens residents that there is no devil lurking in the details."

LATE NOTE: The mayor's office says that the Mets have agreed to pay both construction cost overruns and operations and maintenance costs.

Pro-stadium forces in New York are scrambling in the wake of Monday's negative Public Authorities Control Board vote, and as anticipated, they're scrambling in every direction at once:

New York's 2012 Olympic bid is not quite dead yet, as the International Olympic Committee says it would allow NYC2012 to submit an alternative stadium proposal if it wants. Of course, it's not like there are a ton of good fallback options - Queens? New Jersey? - but the bid committee will no doubt try to cobble together something before the IOC meets in July.

Meanwhile, state assembly speaker Sheldon "The Stadium Killa" Silver may now be setting his sights on another part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's West Side redevelopment plan: The $2 billion subway line extension that the mayor has proposed funding with developer payments in lieu of property taxes (PILOTs), in a deal that some charge could cost the city billions more in tax breaks. The Daily News reports that Silver could veto the subway line as well, this time through his seat on a different obscure state agency, the MTA Capital Program Review Board, noting: "Charles Carrier, a Silver aide, told the Daily News that the speaker is 'reviewing' the No. 7 proposal - using the same term Silver took until the very moment he killed the stadium."

Finally, New York Times columnist Richard Sandomir continues the paper's series lauding developers who know how to grease the wheels of government, this time praising New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner for proposing a new stadium "without public money for construction [sic] or discourtesy to egos and agendas in the State Legislature." The only real news item revealed by Sandomir: A statement by Yankees stadium guru (and former city deputy mayor) Randy Levine that "we expect to announce in a few weeks." Isn't this where we came in?

Now here's a twist: The Minnesota Twins say they don't want a retractable roof on any new stadium, as it would be too expensive, and trying to design a building that could be retrofitted for a roof later would be too impractical. Minnesota House Rep. Loren Solberg says it's too damn cold in Minnesota to watch baseball outdoors, so he's going to introduce a bill to build a roof anyway.

What's going on here, of course, is that the Twins stripped the roof off of their plan in order to cut the costs down and avoid having to ask for state money. (It would still, mind you, require $353 million of county money, but state legislators are less concerned about that.) After two decades of watching baseball indoors, however, enough Minnesotans are concerned that Solberg is proposing to spend $115 million in state funds on a flippable lid, to be raised by - you guessed it - tax increment financing, the perpetual-motion machine of urban development.

Now, the Twins couldn't have planned it that way, removing from their plan the one thing that they knew fans would clamor for, counting on the state legislature to put it back in? Could they, Twins president Jerry Bell? "If they want to put the roof on, and if it gets the votes, we're certainly not opposed to it." Hmm.

Three days after the proposed New York Jets/Olympic stadium met its apparent demise, the New York media are all a-flurry with rumors of what happens now:

New York wasn't the only city turning thumbs-down on an NFL stadium this week. Yesterday, the Pasadena city council voted 5-1 to seek "non-NFL alternatives" for redevelopment of the Rose Bowl, taking themselves out of the running to be home to a new or relocated NFL franchise. (The NFL is still considering proposals to rebuild the L.A. Coliseum or build a new stadium in Anaheim, though those plans face their own opposition.) Declared Pasadena preservationist Sue Mossman, one of those who'd fought the NFL proposal: "We haven't driven a wooden stake through the heart of this, but the message is clear."

Some highlights and lowlights from today's media postmortem of the New York Jets stadium vote:

At about 5 pm today, just as the state Public Authorities Control Board prepared to meet in Albany to vote on the New York Jets stadium proposal, a massive thunderstorm swept into New York City, and the heavens opened up, cooling off what had been a sweltering day in the big city.

It was cheap symbolism, but New York would take it. After five years of controversy, threats, and political machinations over the plan to plunk down the world's most expensive stadium on top of some of the world's most expensive real estate, it was hard not to see the deluge as a sign that the weather had finally changed. While it's certainly too soon to declare the Jets stadium dead - everybody knows that by now - all signs are pointing toward it entering its final reel.

So about that meeting: When last we left off, both state assembly speaker Sheldon Silver and state senate leader Joe Bruno were saying they wouldn't vote to approve the stadium plan. (Technically the vote was on allowing the state's Empire State Development Corporation to sell stadium bonds.) When the meeting started, two and half hours late thanks to a band of angry pro-stadium demonstrators, both men lived up to their word, abstaining from the vote on Gov. George Pataki's proposal to fund the stadium, thereby defeating it. (All PACB votes must be unanimous to pass.) Bruno promptly introduced a second resolution that the West Side stadium would be built if New York were to be awarded the 2012 Olympics; this time, Silver and Pataki both rejected the proposal.

While there's nothing stopping the board from voting again on the plan at a later date, Silver in particular didn't seem eager to leave the door open for further negotiations on a West Side stadium, which he declared was being "used as a shield" to "shift the financial and business capital of the world" from his downtown Manhattan district to midtown. "Am I supposed to turn my back on Lower Manhattan as it struggles for recovery?" he asked at a pre-vote press conference. "For what? The stadium? For the hope of bringing the Olympics to New York City?"

There are plenty of theories as to why Silver chose to draw a line in the sand on the stadium - running from craven self-interest (there was nothing in it for his district) to moral indignation (he's recently taken to decrying the $1-billion-plus in subsidies it would cost the public, though that didn't stop him from asking for development subsidies for downtown instead). And there's been plenty of griping, even from stadium opponents, that the three-men-in-a-room style of government that typifies New York politics is a far cry from democracy.

All this is true. And yet Silver's Last Stand was, in many ways, the culmination of five years of some of the most devoted organizing against a stadium project that has been seen anywhere in the nation. The stadium skeptics included elected officials and local think tanks, billionaire corporations and individuals who are anything but, not all of whom agreed on what should happen on the West Side, but all of whom thought that the public had better things to do with its money than spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a football stadium. (Excuse me, a sports and convention center.) They, and the majority of New Yorkers who consistently opposed the stadium, created the political cover for Silver, the consummate politician, to feel that he could oppose the stadium without risking dire repercussions. Even the late move by Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to accuse Silver of costing the city the Olympics fell largely flat, given that many New Yorkers don't even want the Olympics, and a majority think New York won't get them anyway.

What happens next is anyone's guess. Neither the Jets nor the Olympic boosters will go away tomorrow - Jets president Jay Cross, who was hired by the team specifically to lead its stadium bid after running a successful campaign for a new Miami Heat arena, declared today that "four years of hard work and planning will not be washed away in a single day" - and there's still the question of what happens the accompanying convention center expansion and Hudson Yards housing-and-office development, which were sold by Bloomberg and his henchman Dan Doctoroff as being unworkable without the stadium. Similarly, Bruce Ratner's Brooklyn Nets arena and George Steinbrenner's dreams of a new Yankees stadium were waiting in the wings for the end of the Jets drama; whether they will now move ahead, or be set aside as Mayor Bloomberg tries to focus on getting re-elected without getting weighed down by more sports-stadium controversies, remains to be seen.

At almost 11 pm, it's still raining in New York. This change in the weather is going to be interesting indeed.

It's D-Day, but possibly not for the New York Jets stadium. After a long day of negotiations yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had still been unable to sway state assembly leader Sheldon Silver into backing his West Side NFL-and-Olympic stadium plan. As he left City Hall at about 4:30 pm, Silver told reporters: "I don't know if there's been any progress except for the fact that we're talking."

Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee issued is evaluation reports for the five cities bidding for the 2012 games, and the results were less unfavorable to New York than had been expected. According to the Olympic-watch site gamesbids.com:

When I last spoke to gamesbids.com's Rob Livingstone, he was anticipating that New York's half-billion-dollar contingency budget wouldn't be enough to satisfy the IOC (which demands that cities promise to cover unlimited budget shortfalls for the Games), so in this case New York's bid looks to have dodged a bullet.

Other bullets, though, hit their mark. While NYC2012 issued a statement that "the single negative point in the IOC evaluation is the lack of approval for the Stadium" (yes, they capitalize it like that), newyorkgames.org points out that the Olympic Village and media center are up in the air as well:

Silver and Bloomberg were scheduled for more stadium talks this morning. Stay tuned for further updates.

LATE NOTE: The cable news network NY1 is now reporting that today's Public Authorities Control Board vote is still on, and "without a major change in negotiations" Silver will vote no, with senate majority leader Joe Bruno abstaining.

Here we go again: Today's Public Authorities Control Board vote on the New York Jets stadium has been called off, at least until Monday, so that the Three Men in a Room can commence with the haggling. Asked if "horse trading" could be expected this weekend, Mayor Michael Bloomberg replied:

LATE NOTE: It's now being reported that state assembly speaker Sheldon Silver had scheduled a 1 pm press conference at Ground Zero before calling it off - with scuttlebutt being that it was to announce that if the governor insisted on a vote today, Silver was going to vote no. Now that would've been something to see.

LATER NOTE: The New York Post reports that state senate leader Joe Bruno "said he would instruct his representative at today's scheduled meeting of the Public Authorities Control Board not to second Gov. Pataki's proposal for a West Side stadium and instead offer an amended plan linking the approval to the Olympics." Sounds like Pataki was looking at being majorly shown up at today's meeting - no wonder he chose to call it off by leaking it on the mayor's radio show.

New York state assembly speaker Sheldon Silver told reporters yesterday that he might ask for another postponement of today's Jets stadium vote, and if there is a vote, he would send a representative in his place. (It's unclear if this would serve to block a vote, as it apparently would if Silver just went AWOL.) Silver also hinted at his price for granting support for the stadium, noting that if Gov. George Pataki agreed to scrap the entire 24-million-square-foot sea of office towers scheduled to go up around the stadium, "that obviously would go a long way to the way I view the entire project." But then what would be in it for Dan Doctoroff's pals?

State senate leader Joe Bruno, meanwhile, has sent a letter to IOC chair Jacques Rogge reiterating his vow to approve a West Side stadium if New York gets the 2012 Olympics. Bruno also said he still has "serious doubts" about the need for a Public Authorities Control Board vote today. The board meeting is set for 2 pm - stay tuned.

Call it "revenue-increment financing": Minnesota Twins stadium critics Sen. John Marty and Rep. Phil Krinkie (you'll remember him as chair of the house taxes committee that's the next stop for the Twins stadium bill if it ever gets moving again) have introduced an amendment to give the county a share of new stadium revenues in proportion to its share of stadium costs. With the Twins anticipating about a $40 million a year increase over proceeds at their current home, the Metrodome, and Hennepin County putting up about three-quarters of the $478 million estimated construction cost, that would leave county taxpayers getting about $30 million a year, Twins owner Carl Pohlad the rest.

Hennepin County commissioner Mike Opat, the architect of the Twins plan, immediately declared that the Marty-Krinkie bill would leave the stadium "more dead than dead," and then added a pretty remarkable addendum:

There you have it, sports fans: The purpose of spending $353 million on a new Twins stadium isn't revitalizing downtown Minneapolis, or giving fans a chance to watch baseball outdoors, or any of the other rationales that are put forth - it's giving Carl Pohlad more money. I guess the honesty is refreshing, at least.

Guess Juan Gonzalez' sources weren't right after all: Judge Herman Cahn has just ruled against the plaintiffs in the legal challenges to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's sale of rail yards land to the New York Jets. The plaintiffs, which include Cablevision, city public advocate Betsy Gotbaum, and local community groups, have until Tuesday to file an appeal. No word as yet on how this will affect tomorrow's Public Authorities Control Board vote on the project.

LATE NOTE: John Fisher of hellskitchen.net points out that Tuesday is the deadline for getting a judicial stay against the land sale, not for filing an appeal. In any event, two of the plaintiffs have already declared their intent to appeal, so this court battle is far from over. (Not to mention that several other lawsuits are still pending that were not addressed by today's ruling.)

Once again, Yogi Berra had it right: The all-but-finalized Indianapolis Colts stadium project has hit an unexpected new bump in the road. While more than $1 billion has now been allocated for the stadium and accompanying convention center expansion, it's still facing a $48 million shortfall, to repay the Colts' fee for breaking their current lease. Neither the city nor the state wants to be the one to pay this fee; a Colts attorney would only say: "I know we're going to get the $48 million. Who's going to be signing the check is something the city and state are going to have to work out."

New York Gov. George Pataki has finally officially called for a Jets stadium vote for this Friday, but it's unclear it one will happen, as state legislative leaders Sheldon Silver and Joe Bruno are reportedly considering forcing a delay by not showing up for the vote, which must be unanimous. The Daily News' Juan Gonzalez reports that an unnamed state legislator told him there was "a very bad meeting" on Tuesday among represenatives of the governor, mayor, Jets and legislative leaders; Silver told Gonzalez following the meeting that there are still "25 to 30 major contracts" for which the governor has provided insufficient financial information.

Today is D-day for the lawsuits against the sale of state land to the Jets, and Gonzalez has potentially bad news for the team there, too: State judge Herman Cahn has given indications he might "bifurcate the suits," ruling against the state on some issues but not others. Even a partial victory for the plaintiffs could force the Jets land sale back to the drawing board, and give Silver and Bruno additional reasons to put off a vote.

Bruno, meanwhile, came out of left field this week with a suggestion that "there are private-sector investors who believe that the entire project can be funded with private-investor money. If it's a good business deal, it's a good business deal for the private sector." An unnamed Jets official immediately pooh-poohed this idea, declaring: "There's no room for additional debt." Sounds like somebody's been taking p.r. lessons from Joe Maloof.

Don't forget, I'm doing a live chat at Baseball Prospectus today at 1 pm Eastern. If you can't make it then, you can pre-post questions and check in later to read my witty ripostes.

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