It’s been a minute since the Buffalo News had one of its big Sunday stories speculating about a new Bills stadium, but this week brings one of the speculatingest. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who only inherited the job in August when Andrew Cuomo was caught almost certainly sexually harassing every woman in sight, is already facing a reelection campaign next year, and has been traveling the state promising things for various communities, from federal infrastructure funds for subway expansion in Manhattan to $1 billion for repairing potholes statewide to a new affordable housing complex in the Bronx that, uh, was actually built by Cuomo’s administration. But anyway, she’s throwing around promises like they’re bags of peanuts, and the News notes that this could be part of a plan to win not just votes in the September primary but also downstate legislative votes for funneling more than $700 million toward a new stadium for the Bills:
“Put another way, everyone else is getting something, why not Buffalo?” asked John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, a government watchdog group that regularly raises questions about large public subsidy deals for private businesses.
“I think it makes all the sense in the world, because she gets to say that in Western New York they care about this, and in your backyard you care about this and I’m helping you in your backyard,’’ Sen. Patrick Gallivan, an Elma Republican, said of the linkage that could be at least indirectly made by Hochul…
“There’s no doubt in my mind that the governor demonstrating in every single area of the state that she is delivering important major financial victories, delivering resources to those communities, will bode well for us making a case for a new stadium in Western New York, as a priority for the fabric of the community but also for the economy of the region and the entire state,” [Tim Kennedy, a Buffalo Democrat and major backer of efforts to keep the Bills in Buffalo,] said.
That’s a whole bunch of people saying, “Yup, quid pro quos are a thing,” certainly. Kaehny also noted that two of Hochul’s main challengers, state attorney general Letitia James and New York City public advocate Jumaane Williams, are progressives from Brooklyn who could stake out positions opposing a stadium giveaway, which would put a dent in the governor’s strategy. And state senate finance committee chair Liz Krueger, also a longtime critic of corporate subsidies (some of them, anyway), is already raising the questions one would hope about putting the Bills bill on the state’s tab:
“The questions people should ask is ‘Is that a reasonable use of the money? Is it the highest priority need given the demands all over the state, and what kind of funding structure will be used to pay back the costs?’ ’’ Krueger said of any potential stadium deal.
“I have already voiced those concerns to the governor’s office about the economics of stadiums around the country that have not actually proven to be wins from an economic development perspective. You don’t get your money back. You don’t create jobs,’’ the senator said.
None of this quite seems to justify the News’ headline of “Gov. Kathy Hochul’s spending spree could grease the skids for a Bills stadium deal,” but I guess that “could” is doing a lot of work. What we’ll really need to see is whether any downstate electeds start jumping on board the Buffalo-stadium-funding train after seeing Hochul stand outside a Bronx housing project and take credit for it; it 100% could happen, but a lot of things could happen over the next few months of both a budget campaign and an electoral campaign.
In the meantime, another New York paper had a huge article yesterday about the problems state governments are likely to face finding enough construction projects to ramp up quickly to use up the federal money committed by Joe Biden’s new infrastructure spending package, with cost overruns already widespread and both steel prices and labor shortages soaring thanks to the pandemic. In other words, that “more than” in “more than $700 million” above could be doing a lot of work as well. This is going to be a very interesting 2022 in Albany.
Hmmmn. I’d like to see some actual evidence that “the people of Western New York” care about ‘this’.
I’m sure Kim & Terry care about it. I know Roger Goodell cares very much about it. And thousands of Bills fans care about it.
I have not a single shred of evidence that there is broad public support for this kind of spending from the balance of western NY state voters and taxpayers.
As for the “in your backyard” notion, well, you’d need plebiscites across the entire state to know if, for example, an affordable housing project in the Bronx or an NFL stadium in or around Buffalo is worth the cost to state voters in Syracuse, Rochester or Elmira… who might only be getting a statue of a disgraced former governor as their economic development project.
It’s really just another version of the ‘tourist tax’ argument. “You” get your project, but the rest of the state (rather than ill defined ‘tourist’ groups) also pays for it. Sounds great. Except for when the rest of the state gets their own vanity projects, you pay for it too.
TINSTAAFL