The New York state budget is due to be approved by April 1, and Gov. Kathy Hochul continues to insist that it will including funding for a new Buffalo Bills stadium, though she’s kept it very close to the vest how much funding or where the money would come from. On Friday, Hochul answered Bills stadium questions by saying that while discussions are “ongoing,” there are “issues to work through, but I feel very confident that they’ll be resolved in time to have conversations during the budget process.”
Elsewhere, though, numbers are starting to leak out, and they could amount to the biggest stadium subsidy in NFL history. Buffalo News sports reporter Jason Wolf tweeted last Tuesday: “Public likely to pay >$1B of $1.4B cost.” On Thursday, Sports Business Journal reported (citing “sources”) that $850 million of that would go toward construction costs, with the rest going toward future maintenance and capital expenses.
Subsidies for future stadium expenses are still subsidies, obviously, so this remains a $1 billion spending proposal for the benefit of Bills owners Kim and Terry Pegula. But still, even at just the $850 million in up-front costs, the Bills stadium would saddle New York taxpayers with more expenses than the previous NFL record holder, the $750 million that Nevada’s Clark County put up in 2017 toward a new stadium for the Las Vegas Raiders.
Plus, of course, since Hochul has yet to reveal where the public money will come from (other than “the budget”) or how long the revenue stream will last, we have no idea whether this could end up being an extended slush fund as some other teams have arranged for. Nor do we know whether the Pegulas would get the benefits of additional tax breaks, like not having to pay property taxes on their stadium, for example.
While Hochul has been peppered with questions on the proposed Bills stadium deal, she’s managed to keep the spotlight off of the members of the state legislature who would actually vote on the prospective $1 billion(–plus) subsidy, hopefully after reading it first. No news outlet seems to have even asked state legislators what they think of having to cut the largest stadium check in NFL history — they almost certainly would say, “I have to read the bill first,” but still it’s worth asking. Wolf and his News colleague Tim O’Shea, though, did take the time to read how the NFL’s G-4 stadium fund works, and spin that out into an article on how the Bills owners and the league could kick in $350 million toward a $1.4 billion stadium, leaving taxpayers to cover the rest. Somehow the headline on this wasn’t the $1 billion or more that taxpayers would be saddled with, but rather the much smaller amount that the Bills and NFL would kick in — but then, I guess “sports team to actually pay a small fraction toward its own stadium” qualifies as news in our dumb times.
The Bills’ stadium is not falling apart, is it?
Sounds like a solution waiting for a problem
We don’t know, because Hochul won’t release the engineering study:
https://www.investigativepost.org/2022/03/04/ipost-sues-over-suppressed-stadium-records/
A fine example of end stage capitalism here. “We must build a stadium that the team owners haven’t really said they want and it must be the best and most expensive stadium or near to it and it will not generate any property tax revenue and….” because we need the jobs and the manufacturing even though the facility will only be used ten times a year or so.
At least when the Soviets paid people to dig holes and then paid other people to fill them, they were just simple holes and did not require construction bonds and 15,000 tons of imported marble or 6,000 4kuhd tvs.
The same amount of money put into affordable housing or actual manufacturing subsides to bring decent jobs back home would have a much more positive effect on the local economy. But then, this isn’t about Buffalo’s economy or helping the needy… it’s about welfare for billionaires.