Erie County exec rules out renovated Bills stadium because $500m is not “astronomically more” and also terrorism

I was asked by a reporter yesterday what I thought of the AECOM study of building a new or renovated Buffalo Bills stadium, and one of the things I said was that studies like this serve more as justification for whatever elected officials already wanted to do. And that was before Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz opened his mouth yesterday and declared that renovating the Bills’ current stadium — which the study estimated would cost far less than previous reports, even with much of the price tag devoted to things like “decoration work” and contractor profits — was now completely off the table, because, well:

“Renovation is very expensive and it probably does not make sense to do renovations when you are talking about a new stadium, that could last more than double the life of the renovations,” Poloncarz said. “But the cost, while expensive in both regards, is not that astronomically more than a renovation.”

“Not astronomically more,” in this case, is $492 million, which is well more than the average public cost of building any existing NFL stadium from scratch. And given that current talks are for the public to put in around $700 million toward a new stadium, lopping off $492 million could cut the taxpayer cost by 70%, which is not chicken feed.

Poloncarz, though, wasn’t finished, saying that the report’s renovation estimates are too low because, well:

Poloncarz said the report isn’t complete, because some details about structural points at risk in the current stadium that could be used by a terrorist attack have been removed from the released version.

Okay, so the state of New York hired an engineering firm to do a comparison between what it would cost to renovate vs. to build new, but then asked the firm not to take into account the cost of terrorist-proofing? (I can only assume this would involve a bigger version of these.) Or it took into account terrorist-proofing in its cost figures, but didn’t specify what that money was for, lumping it under something like “envelope augmentation” or “general diversions” so as to ensure the bad guys don’t notice what they can fly an exploding blimp over?

All this makes it all the more important to see Erie County’s 2019 breakdown of what it would cost to renovate the existing stadium — and whether “renovate” here means “make it last another 30 years” or “trick it out with everything the Bills’ billionaire owners could possibly want in their wildest dreams” — but which the county so far has refused to offer without blacking out all of the important bits. I was promised again yesterday that in response to an appeal of my Freedom of Information Law request I would be provided a less-redacted version “in the near future,” so we’ll have to wait and see whether that means in geological time.