During the years-long tease about a new Buffalo Bills stadium, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz has been a relative voice of reason, saying a new stadium would likely be too expensive compared to a renovated one, warning that the price tag could be over a billion dollars, and cautioning that talk of a deal was way, way premature. So now that team owners have reportedly (still according to unnamed sources, mind you) levied a demand for more than a billion dollars in state and county money for a new stadium, what does Poloncarz have to say?
Erie County executive Mark Poloncarz dismissed speculation of the Buffalo Bills relocating if a deal can’t be negotiated for public funds to pay for the construction of a new stadium.
Poloncarz, however, did issue a warning on Wednesday by saying the state and county won’t be writing what he called “a blank check” to pay for what is projected to cost at least $1 billion.
“We will get a deal done,” he said in speaking the most extensively on the stadium issue since negotiations began two months ago. “It’s just got to be a fair deal for all.” …
“I want the public to understand there’s been no gun put to the head of Erie County and New York state stating, ‘If you do not do this, we are moving,'” he said. “I want people to understand negotiations are a long process. … A negotiation takes time. It takes compromise on both sides.”
There’s a lot of reasonableness in Poloncarz’ statements, certainly: We won’t just pay the Bills owners whatever they want, any deal has to be a fair deal, nobody has threatened to move the team to Austin no matter some guy on Twitter says. But there’s also a fair bit of goalpost-moving: Going from “the facility can last another 30 years” to “We will get a deal done” with “compromise on both sides” is handing over a major victory to the Pegulas (or the NFL, or the Buffalo News editorial board, or whoever really wants a new stadium): The need for a new stadium is now taken for granted, and Poloncarz is just haggling over the price.
This gets us back to some of the reason for that initial $1.5 billion ask (assuming the unnamed sources are correct) and why it could be less a shameful demand in the middle of a pandemic economy and more a well-thought-out negotiating ploy. As I’ve mentioned before here, one of the central principles of the new field of behavioral economics is “anchoring“: the idea that hearing an initial price gets people comparing the eventual price to that number, rather than to what they’d rationally be willing to pay. (This is why, for example, it works for retailers to jack up the “regular” price and then set what they actually want to be paid as the “sale” price.) Most famously, researcher Dan Ariely and two colleagues asked MIT students to write down the last two digits of their Social Security numbers, then asked them whether they would pay that much money for various items like a bottle of wine or a box of chocolates, then the maximum amount they would pay for the items; students who wrote down numbers between 80 and 99, it turned out, were willing to pay three times as much as those who wrote down numbers between 00 and 19, all thanks to anchoring on what was essentially a random number.
Are the Pegulas really expecting to get $1.5 billion in public money? Almost certainly not. Are they figuring that floating a $1.5 billion price tag is a great way to get some large but not quite that large sum of public money for a stadium that just got $94.5 million in renovations at public expense, plus $132 million in state operating subsidies, less than a decade ago? As I wrote way back in March 2019:
Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz, meanwhile, said that “scaled-down” still probably means “you’ve got to expect at least a billion dollars,” but that “that’s a conversation that we, in the county, as well as the state and the Pegulas will have when the time has come,” which isn’t yet. This is what behavioral economists call anchoring, and if the Pegulas and Erie County eventually propose, say, a $990 million stadium for which New York state taxpayers will only pay $700 million, don’t say you weren’t warned.
That still seems like a reasonable guesstimate as to where “compromise on both sides” could end up, but we’ll see. It can’t help the Pegulas that their main advocate in Albany is about to get impeached for sexually harassing subordinates and then claiming in his defense that he gropes everybody, even Bill Clinton; you think there’s a chance that the $1.5 billion number was leaked on Sunday because somebody wanted to drop an anchor before the Cuomo report dropped on Tuesday? That’s probably too Machiavellian even for Roger Goodell, but I would never rule it out.
Doesn’t compromise, by its very definition, require both sides? Else it’s something else entirely.
In fairness to the Pegulas, haven’t they said they “haven’t demanded” $1.5Bn, and also on occasion said they hadn’t actually demanded anything?
Not to sound like a candidate for America’s next Incompetent Clown President (a reality tv series coming soon to a network near you), but this has very much been media driven thus far.
Goodell has done his faithless duty and sabre rattled (no pun intended) about “whatever the present state of affairs is, it’s not good enough and I won’t stand for it”, but really, the vast majority of the information out there on “Buffalo’s need” for a new stadium has been written and/or reported by the media.
I’m sure Goodell will lean on the Pegulas as much as he dares, in exactly the same way that super agents lean on their clients to accept maximum dollars even though they have to go play in a crap city they don’t want to be in (“If not for yourself, do it for the next young draftee/billionaire team owner that comes along…”)
Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, but as near as I can tell we haven’t seen the Pegulas play the heavy at any point in this.
Right, all we know is that *somebody* told the Buffalo News Albany bureau chief that the Pegulas were asking for $1.5 billion. That could be somebody aligned with the Pegulas, with Cuomo, with people who want to stop the project, etc.
I would say it’s unlikely that that someone came up with $1.5 billion out of whole cloth, which suggests that somebody is trying to set a high anchor, anyway. But most of this is still at the tea-leaf-reading stage.
I hope the Bills owner is looking at the A’s situation. I wouldn’t threaten to a specific city unless you have a complete financing deal flushed out and executable. When the Oakland city council saw less than enthusiastic comments from Clark County officials, they said “Nope we are holding our ground”
I know this is off topic but since the announcement of Texas and Oklahoma moving to the SEC and both having massive stadiums and both being public universities, what’s your opinion on what’s going to happen in the stadium world regarding future construction? I imagine the Texas Techs, Baylors, and Oklahoma States of this world might feel that among other things in order to stay competitive and attract a new conference they might want to remodel and even build new stadiums, and if that happens, how much of that will involve the taxpayer. And I get that Baylor is a private university, but then again pro sport teams are also private businesses and that doesn’t stop them from appropriating public funds, so there’s that.
That’s an excellent question, and one that I haven’t looked into much. Can I get back to you in a future post?
No problem Mr DeMausse
Just thinking out loud here, but when Texas Tech and Baylor are playing Cincinnati, Memphis and Houston instead of Texas and Oklahoma, those places aren’t going to sell out. I think they might deteriorate. It’s going to be the Mississippi States and Vandys that get the building bug.