Bills study says old stadium only needs $443m in renovations, much of it for things like snazzier clubs and “decoration work”

New York state released its stadium study for the Buffalo Bills yesterday — no, not the one claiming that it would cost $1 billion to renovate the team’s old stadium, and not its cost-benefit analysis from 2019, both of which Gov. Kathy Hochul is refusing to make public. Rather, this is a study by AECOM, an engineering firm, of whether to build new or renovate and whether to build in the suburbs or downtown, and it concludes:

• “The cost to renovate the existing stadium is estimated at approximately $862 million, compared to $1.354 billion for a new stadium at Orchard Park (a difference of approximately $492 million).”
• “The cost to build the same stadium in a downtown location is estimated to add an additional $350 million to the project cost, not including the potential cost to relocate residents and businesses and the potential time required to move through the SEQRA process (potentially up to $100 million additional costs) as well as the cost to add a roof to the stadium if required to address orientation issues of downtown site (an additional $300 million). With these additional costs, a new downtown stadium could cost up to $2.1 billion or more.”

Those certainly sound like good arguments for building a new stadium at the current Orchard Park site rather than in Buffalo, and maybe to build new rather than renovate, though $492 million in savings is nothing to sneeze at. But where did AECOM get those estimates, anyway? Is an $862 million renovation really necessary?

That’s it? Not even a footnote, or a sourcing credit? I’m not sure how much AECOM is being paid for compiling this study, but it seems like somebody skimped on this section. (Just kidding, if government officials won’t release the stadium renovation study without blacking it out, I’m sure nobody in government was going to complain if AECOM omitted cost specifics.)

We can get a few hints on what the proposed renovations would entail, though, from the “renovation considerations” appendix, which includes the following bullet points:

• Because the Bills stadium’s main concessions concourse is below street level, “resulting in a fan experience inconsistent with other venues in the league,” a renovation would need to raise up the concourse, which would then require reconfiguring the lower deck seating.
• There’s only one tunnel where vehicles can enter the field from outside the stadium, which “presents logistical issues” for both football and concerts. To remedy this, one entire endzone seating section would need to be rebuilt.
• The current upper deck has “extensive deterioration” and would require replacement, at least “pending confirmation of applicable engineering assessment.” (Did Erie County refuse to let AECOM see the renovation report, too?)
• The existing stadium lacks “contemporary food service/catering facilities” and club facilities fail to provide “game-day atmosphere desired by patrons and ownership.”

That is a real mixed bag of needs and wants, so how much of the renovation cost would be for which items? Scroll way down to Appendix 3.1, and we get some answers: Redoing the lower seating bowl would cost $38 million, adding a second vehicle tunnel would cost $28 million, replacing the upper deck would cost $96 million, upgrading food service would cost $32 million, snazzier clubs would cost $16 million, and a bunch of random items (including both ADA upgrades and “decoration work” would cost $233 million. That comes to only $443 million, but after adding $220 million in “contractor mark-ups” — really, contractors would get to turn a 50% profit on this thing? — and $199 million in “developer soft costs,” which are basically overhead and things like design fees, we get to that $862 million figure.

Not that contractor fees aren’t real things you have to pay, but this is quite a leap from “there are a bunch of things the Bills owners would like that would cost a few tens of millions each” to “screw it, may as well spend $1.35 billion on a new stadium, then.” And in particular, the much-repeated $500 million figure for keeping the upper deck from falling down appears to be much less in reality, only $96 million (plus contractor mark-ups). We’ll see if any journalists or elected officials bother to read far enough into the report to notice this; in the meantime, it’s more urgent than ever now that Erie County release that renovation study without all the words blacked out — time for me to go bug the FOIL appeals officer again, I guess.