NY residents, growing number of state legislators say Hochul’s $1B Bills stadium subsidy plan blows

The $1 billion Buffalo Bills stadium subsidy isn’t a done deal just yet, and there are small signs of growing opposition to the plan:

• Fifteen state assemblymembers and five state senators have written an open letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul opposing her proposed Bills subsidy, calling it “inadequate to the real economic need in Buffalo and across our state” and arguing that Bills owner “Terry Pegula does not need support for his ownership of an NFL team.” (Notably missing from the signatories: state Sen. Liz Krueger, who has been vocal in her criticism of the Bills deal. She explains via email that as chair of the senate finance committee she makes it a policy to avoid signing on to letters for or against budget requests, but does note that “the more we learn of this deal the worse it is.”)
• State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins told the New York Post that she didn’t learn about the details of Hochul’s plan until it was announced, adding, “we all know that the Buffalo Bills are important, not only to Buffalo, but to the state, so we’re looking at it, but I don’t have the language yet.”
• A robopoll of 830 state residents found New Yorkers overwhelmingly oppose the stadium plan, 55-22%. The numbers were largely reversed in the Buffalo area, 58-31% in favor, according to WIVB-TV, though those figures don’t actually appear in the posted poll results.
• Seneca Nation leaders continue to decry Hochul’s attempt to justify the Bills spending as okay because of a windfall of back revenues from the nation’s casino, Seneca Nation President Matthew Pagels declaring in a Facebook video, “In one breath, New York’s hostile and shameless greed was laid for the world to see.”
• A New York Daily News editorial called the proposed Bills plan “even worse than we thought,” noting that the state would get no share of revenues from any events at the stadium, football or otherwise, despite being the building’s owner.

The Bills money isn’t the only thing holding up the state budget — there’s also a huge staredown underway over Hochul’s plans to roll back bail reform — but it isn’t helping, and the longer things drag on, the more time there is for legislators to start questioning the deal, which is exactly what Hochul was trying to avoid by releasing it at the last minute. There still appears to be a downstate/upstate split, with legislators from the Buffalo area backing the plan, which makes some sense since it would be mostly state money paying for the deal and 86% of the state’s population lives outside of Western New York; but for the same reason, most of the state legislators hails from the more populous downstate, providing more opportunities for opposition.

It still seems likely that the Bills subsidy will pass — neither Stewart-Cousins nor assembly speaker Carl Heastie has weighed in pro or con, notably — but it does feel a bit less of a fait accompli than it did when Hochul first announced it a week ago. Past history shows that usually state leaders can twist enough arms to get these sort of things passed, but usually is not always, so we’ll just have to see where the tea leaves lead on this one. Meanwhile, here’s a Hochul handout of the governor wearing Bills gear and holding a freshly baked pie, for some reason: