NY gov says she’ll put Bills stadium in state budget, sets up battle with legislature in election year

A couple hours later and a few blocks away, Gov. Kathy Hochul told The News during a press briefing Wednesday that she expects the stadium project to be included in the state budget, which is proposed in January, then negotiated with legislators. It must be approved by April 1.

“The conversations are going very well,” Hochul said, “and in terms of a completion, this will be a budgetary issue and therefore will show up in the New York State budget as an item once I’ve had a chance to speak to the legislators and garner support for that.”

Not that there’s a lot there — if the state has to spend money on it, we’ll have to put it in the budget — but this is the first indication of any kind of what sort of funding mechanism may be used to funnel at least $700 million in public cash at a new stadium. It also has interesting political consequences: State legislative leaders may have been trying to duck the question of who should pay how much for a Buffalo stadium, but now they and Hochul will need to pick a side, and at the start of an election year to boot. Both Democrats and Republicans in the legislature have decried “corporate welfare” in recent years, and Hochul is about to face a new challenger, state attorney general Letitia James, who literally launched her political career by opposing a sports subsidy plan. (The first time I ever heard of James was when I was giving a talk about then-New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner’s plan for a Brooklyn arena with the help of state land and cash, and she showed up, fresh off winning her city council race to replace a councilmember who was shot dead in the council chambers by a political rival who he’d walked past the metal detectors, and handed out red roses.)

Not that any of the above necessarily indicates who will come down where on a Bills stadium subsidy — even James has more recently softened her stance on the Nets arena — but the state budget is always contentious, and is likely to be doubly so in an election year. Debate is likely to kick up once there’s more indication of who will be expected to pay what, which is no doubt why everyone is remaining mum about the details, with Erie County’s top official refusing even to brief his own county legislature about stadium talks. At some point, though, something’s going to have to go down on paper, and it looks like it’ll be by January, at which point the real fun will begin.