October 03, 2007
Yankees billed city for souvenirs, bar tabs
Fans of last year's revelation that the New York Yankees billed taxpayers for their own stadium lobbyists (calling them "stadium planning costs") will be excited to read my article in this week's Village Voice, which reveals that the team subsequently submitted receipts for everything from crystal-baseball souvenirs to luxury suite bar tabs in an apparent attempt to max out their rent credits.
If this shows that George Steinbrenner has remarkable, um, chutzpah, city officials deserve equal blame for enabling this behavior. As I write in the Voice:
Mayor Mike Bloomberg has long insisted that his hands were tied by the Giuliani lease. But the latest documents show that Bloomberg's largesse to the Steinbrenner clan has gone far beyond even what was allowed by his predecessor. The original lease provisions allowed the teams to deduct "all [stadium planning] costs and expenses incurred by or on behalf of Tenant during the Credit Period" - defined as from January 1, 2001, through December 31, 2005 - up to a limit of $5 million per calendar year. By the end of 2005, however, the Yankees had only spent down $16 million of their allotted $25 million.
According to the parks department, the team was nonetheless allowed to deduct an additional $9,035,636 from its rent the following year, after the stadium-planning clause had expired. (The Yankees got an additional no-questions-asked $5 million rent break in 2006, as well as similar reductions in 2007 and 2008, courtesy of a clause added by Bloomberg as part of the final stadium deal.) Mayoral spokesman Jason Post says the lease was amended by Bloomberg in 2005 to allow late deductions "because the project was delayed."
Read the full story here.
Posted by Neil deMause
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