Yanks bond request includes $11m tax break

This seems to have slipped past everyone, or at least me, at the time: Last Tuesday’s paperwork on the New York Yankees and Mets tax-free bond requests includes word that the city will also be voting this week on exempting the teams’ new stadium costs from mortgage recording and construction sales taxes, as their initial costs were. Estimated cost of the Yanks’ new tax breaks to city taxpayers, according to information provided to me by the city Industrial Development Agency: $6 million for the mortgage tax break, $5.1 million for the sales-tax break. (I haven’t gotten Mets figures yet from IDA, but they’d presumably be proportionately smaller.) The IDA also estimates $5.2 million in lost city income taxes as a result of the tax-free bonds, which is actually higher than the estimate the Independent Budget Office gave me.

The IDA still says the city would make money on the deal, thanks to what it says would be $7.1 million in tax benefits from new Yankees construction, plus an $11.5 million “capital contribution” that the Yanks have agreed to make to the city parks department. (Which sounds suspiciously like a kickback of the $60 million or so the team would be getting in federal bond subsidies, but that’s another story.) I’m still waiting to hear back from the IDA, though, on how much of these benefits wouldn’t materialize if the bonds aren’t approved, especially considering that construction work on the new stadium is almost complete.

More on this in my column in today’s Metro. I’m also going to work on getting an updated stadium cost spreadsheet up in the next day or two.

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