Bills succeed in getting Buffalo residents to debate where to build stadium, not who’ll pay for it

Erie County finally held the first of three public hearings about a new Buffalo Bills stadium last night — via Zoom, because of the county’s crazy-high 10.8% Covid positivity rate — and let’s see what the local news is saying about what people said:

Erie County residents voice support, opposition for downtown Bills stadium

Erie County Legislature holds first public hearing for new Bills stadium

The majority of people who spoke during the virtual meeting supported a stadium in downtown Buffalo with a dome

Taxpayers weigh-in on where they want the future of Bills stadium to be

None of that is super-informative, and neither are the brief snippets of public comments that were included in the news reports. (The video is embedded here, but the first 10 minutes is missing and there are no fast-forward or rewind controls, so it’s pretty impossible to watch effectively.) Among the comments:

• “I don’t want to be 10 years from now kicking ourselves because we didn’t spend more and didn’t take more time.”
• “Change is the name of the game, and I think if the last two years told us anything is that we need to reinvest in the heart of our city, which is downtown Buffalo.”
• “I think Buffalo, if it was downtown would be more like Nashville Tennessee and there goes your tailgating, and people live for tailgating in Western New York.”
• “Bringing it downtown would help small businesses, it would bring opportunity for people who live in the inner city to be able to come to these games.”
• “The traffic, even for a Sabres game, it’s hard to get out of there and with the infrastructure plan. I don’t know how we’d be able to do this.”
• “Throwing people through tables and spraying mustard and ketchup on oneself does not promote strong economic ecosystems.”
• “What is in it for the city of buffalo? As I look at the whole situation, really nothing unless you build it downtown.”

(Presumably the last person meant “the city of Buffalo,” but the way WKBW-TV transcribed it is a much funnier image.)

That’s all over the map — build it downtown, don’t build it downtown, don’t build it at all — which is to be expected when you have a random assortment of people showing up on Zoom. What’s mostly interesting is that so much of the debate, such as it was, was focused on the question of where to put a new Bills stadium, not over whether one is needed or who should pay for it.

That, clearly, reflects the priorities of Buffalo elected officials, who have been hammering on their desire to move the Bills downtown for months now. This sort of makes sense from a purely self-interested perspective — if the state and county are going to spend money on a stadium, it may as well be within their city limits, concerns about traffic and mustard-spraying notwithstanding — but sidesteps the question of whether it’s a good idea for state taxpayers as a whole to pay to build a new stadium in Buffalo.

But then, that’s how Gov. Kathy Hochul and Erie County leaders have been framing the debate as well: Not whether to build a new Bills stadium, but where. It’s surely no coincidence that the only stadium study that Hochul has agreed to make public was focused on where to put a new stadium, while the ones on how much in repairs the old stadium needs and on a cost-benefit analysis of spending public money on the thing remain under wraps.

The first, most important step in winning a stadium campaign is to make the stadium seem like a fait accompli — after that, it’s just a matter of figuring out how many hundreds of millions will be kicked in by which taxpayers. If Kim and Terry Pegula can steer this thing to where Buffalo and Orchard Park officials are haggling over who will host the stadium, and which government bodies will bear how much of the price tag, they’ve won a huge battle, and if last night’s hearing is any indication, they’re well on their way to getting there.