There are more bouncing numbers to follow in the Buffalo Bills stadium-demand kerfuffle, which started out at $1.5 billion last weekend (as reported by the Buffalo News’ Tom Precious, citing “multiple sources”) before team officials called that figure “pure fiction” and said the real number was, well, something else. Now Precious is back with more unnamed sources, and a not-quite-as-high-but-almost number:
In a week of competing claims about how much the Buffalo Bills want from the state for a new football stadium, one thing has become clear: The number is $1.4 billion and the team has asked for the project to be fully funded by state and county taxpayers…
This week, multiple sources with knowledge of the talks confirmed to The News the actual amount the team tossed out in its first proposal: $1.4 billion.
The bulk of Precious’s update is actually about how Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s long-awaited fall from power could impact the Bills stadium talks, which comes down to: it’ll all have to wait until we know who the governor is. In the meantime, Precious spoke with state assembly majority leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, a Buffalo Democrat and self-described “die-hard” Bills fan, who repeated the $1.5 billion number and said that was too much to ask taxpayers to cover:
“Because the amount is so large, it seems like a non-starter,’’ Peoples-Stokes said last week in an interview.
The public will have to pay some portion of a new stadium project, she believes, because the stadium would be, like the existing one, county-owned and one she believes is a taxpayer resource with a healthy return on the investment for the state and county.
“But, it certainly should not be 100%,” she said.
Precious goes on to cite other state legislators who are drawing a line at the state covering the entire bill: State Sen. Sean Ryan, also from Buffalo, said “the idea of taxpayers funding 100% of a new stadium is a non-starter” and that it “would warrant some support from the people of the State of New York, but 100% is not going to happen”; Buffalo assemblymember Pat Burke said 100% public financing is “not going to happen,” but also said he didn’t see an NFL stadium as “the same as some of those other public/private partnerships, which are often just big giveaways for very powerful, multinational corporations.”
All of which is to be expected at this stage of negotiations: Nobody in power is going to say, “Screw the Pegulas if they want public money for their massively profitable NFL franchise, don’t let the door hit them on the way out,” it’s all about seeming reasonable. Still, we don’t want to pay 100%, but maybe something less than that is a pretty worrisome place to start talks, especially when the initial ask is for the largest subsidy in sports history. The more this goes on, the more I’m convinced that whatever the Pegulas’ crazy first offer was, it was mostly about anchoring — or in the memorable words of Los Angeles Rams stadium negotiator John Shaw, “They can always say no, let’s ask for it.”
“They can always say no, let’s ask for it.” Creative minds don’t have to be put to good use. This is how the Bengals imagined the possibility of there one day being a hologram instant replay system, and putting it in their deal.
Seems like Tom is well on his way to publishing every number between $1.5bn and $400m in his stadium subsidy coverage. I have every confidence that, somewhere along the way, he will pick the actual number that it eventually costs Buffalo and NY taxpayers to subsidize a former gas company executive’s plaything.