Erie County officials released some details Friday about plans for the new Buffalo Bills stadium that will cost taxpayers $1 billion while the Bills’ owners recoup all their costs from PSL sales before the stadium even opens, and it turns out the county will also turn over 242 acres of public land for the project. And 56 of those acres are part of the Erie Community College south campus, some which is currently occupied by the college’s athletic fields.
Here’s the Bills project plan, and a satellite image of the same site today:
As you can see, the college’s track, football field, and baseball fields would all be turned over to the Bills to use for parking — as would several existing parking lots around the campus. (The old Bills stadium site would also become parking.) Where community college students would park on game days is left unspecified.
Turning over a ton of county land to the Bills — technically, to the state, so that the Bills owners don’t have to pay property tax on it, but they would be the ones getting free use of the land — is an additional public cost, obviously, though the county didn’t specify the value of the property. Large undeveloped parcels in Orchard Park go for anywhere from $6,000 to $17,000 per acre, so we’re probably only talking a few million dollars’ worth of land at the most, though Erie Community College students may feel like pricing their athletic fields as unoccupied is a bit unfair, just as Bronx residents did when New York City built a new New York Yankees stadium atop their public ballfields. (ECC’s south campus is the least-used of its three campuses, but then, one also might ask about the propriety of giving away land for free to a pair of NFL billionaires from a college that is facing layoffs to make ends meet.)
So, what do locals think about all this? Let’s turn to Spectrum News 1, with an article helpfully titled “Western New Yorkers react to Bills stadium proposal“:
“I think it’s good for the area,” said Jill Weigelt, a Bills fan and Buffalo native visiting from Baltimore, Maryland. “Eventually, I think it’s going to bring more people, especially the Mafia. You know, we all like to travel so, especially people like me who came from here maybe and now there will be more incentive to come back up, catch a game and be in the new stadium so it’s pretty exciting.”
Uhh, people born in Buffalo who now live in Baltimore are not actually so much “Western New Yorkers” as “Maryland residents who used to live in Western New York.” The piece later goes on to quote an ex-Orchard Park resident who was visiting from Florida, and what the hell, did this reporter go around interviewing people at the airport? The article itself contradicts its headline, saying it was surveying “fans,” but even then it’s unclear where these fans were found. And there definitely seems to have been no attempt to talk to people who live or go to classes near the new stadium site, making the headline deserving of at least a couple of pants on fire.
The irony being that it’s by far the best current parking lot for Bills games if you’re arriving from the south or west.
To be fair, the campus will be closed by the time the stadium is completed. Having 3 campuses and a shrinking enrollment/potential number of future students isn’t helping ECC.