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At 3:46 pm on Friday, I received my long-awaited response to my appeal of Erie County’s Buffalo Bills stadium renovation study that the county released only after blacking out all the informative bits. Here’s what I had written to the county’s Freedom of Information Law appeals officer back on October 12, after the redacted study failed to shed any light whatsoever on whether the study really showed, as a Bills rep had claimed, that the entire upper deck would “have to be replaced” at a cost of $500 million, and renovation overall would cost $1 billion:

The records that were redacted include the projected cost of maintenance and repairs to Highmark Stadium and any information regarding how that figure was calculated. I am now seeking the additional release of only those sections of the report, which should not violate either safety or contracting concerns.

And here’s the first page of what I received:

Deep, exasperated sigh.

That’s from page 7 of the full report; what I really wanted was to see the blacked-out sections of the executive summary on pages 5 and 6, where two whole paragraphs were redacted right before the phrase “In addition to the structural deficiencies” — which strongly implies those missing paragraphs were about the structural deficiencies in the current stadium, and maybe how much they would cost to repair. But this time around I didn’t get pages 1-6 at all, with no explanation.

[UPDATE: Just got (11:14 am on 11/8) a reply that the executive summary redactions were all retained because “the information that remains redacted has been defined as something that would publicly reveal structural elements currently unknown to the public and releasing it would create an opportunity for a threat to public safety.”]

There are a few new unredacted parts of the study that provide hints, at least, to how much repair work might cost. For example:

The 300 level is the Bills stadium’s top deck, the one that that Bills spokesperson had said was so badly deteriorated that it made renovation “not realistic.” With all the details of what would be getting repaired having been redacted, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on here — for starters, are those $91,000 in “single occurrence repairs” on top of the $140,000 in “annual” repairs, or part of them? Still, one thing is evident: The repairs itemized in the Erie County report amount to something in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, which implies it would take until at least the year 3021 for a full renovation to cost anything like the $1 billion the team has claimed.

(We do still have that separate state study that placed an $862 million price tag on renovation, but that’s mostly a wishlist of things the Bills owners might want, not a list of things that actually have to be done to keep the stadium safe and operational.)

And then there are the rare pages in the report with no redactions at all, like this one:

Those railings look fine to me, but I’m not a structural engineer, so really someone should ask some engineers to evaluate the conditions and indicate how much they would cost to fix, and then issue some sort of report that … oh, that’s what this report was meant to do, but the answers are a state secret? Even from the taxpayers being asked to foot the bill? Then I’m going with “those railings look fine to me” — it may be an uneducated assessment, but it’s still more informed than what you’ll get from a page of black bars.

New York state released its stadium study for the Buffalo Bills yesterday — no, not the one claiming that it would cost $1 billion to renovate the team’s old stadium, and not its cost-benefit analysis from 2019, both of which Gov. Kathy Hochul is refusing to make public. Rather, this is a study by AECOM, an engineering firm, of whether to build new or renovate and whether to build in the suburbs or downtown, and it concludes:

• “The cost to renovate the existing stadium is estimated at approximately $862 million, compared to $1.354 billion for a new stadium at Orchard Park (a difference of approximately $492 million).”
• “The cost to build the same stadium in a downtown location is estimated to add an additional $350 million to the project cost, not including the potential cost to relocate residents and businesses and the potential time required to move through the SEQRA process (potentially up to $100 million additional costs) as well as the cost to add a roof to the stadium if required to address orientation issues of downtown site (an additional $300 million). With these additional costs, a new downtown stadium could cost up to $2.1 billion or more.”

Those certainly sound like good arguments for building a new stadium at the current Orchard Park site rather than in Buffalo, and maybe to build new rather than renovate, though $492 million in savings is nothing to sneeze at. But where did AECOM get those estimates, anyway? Is an $862 million renovation really necessary?

That’s it? Not even a footnote, or a sourcing credit? I’m not sure how much AECOM is being paid for compiling this study, but it seems like somebody skimped on this section. (Just kidding, if government officials won’t release the stadium renovation study without blacking it out, I’m sure nobody in government was going to complain if AECOM omitted cost specifics.)

We can get a few hints on what the proposed renovations would entail, though, from the “renovation considerations” appendix, which includes the following bullet points:

• Because the Bills stadium’s main concessions concourse is below street level, “resulting in a fan experience inconsistent with other venues in the league,” a renovation would need to raise up the concourse, which would then require reconfiguring the lower deck seating.
• There’s only one tunnel where vehicles can enter the field from outside the stadium, which “presents logistical issues” for both football and concerts. To remedy this, one entire endzone seating section would need to be rebuilt.
• The current upper deck has “extensive deterioration” and would require replacement, at least “pending confirmation of applicable engineering assessment.” (Did Erie County refuse to let AECOM see the renovation report, too?)
• The existing stadium lacks “contemporary food service/catering facilities” and club facilities fail to provide “game-day atmosphere desired by patrons and ownership.”

That is a real mixed bag of needs and wants, so how much of the renovation cost would be for which items? Scroll way down to Appendix 3.1, and we get some answers: Redoing the lower seating bowl would cost $38 million, adding a second vehicle tunnel would cost $28 million, replacing the upper deck would cost $96 million, upgrading food service would cost $32 million, snazzier clubs would cost $16 million, and a bunch of random items (including both ADA upgrades and “decoration work” would cost $233 million. That comes to only $443 million, but after adding $220 million in “contractor mark-ups” — really, contractors would get to turn a 50% profit on this thing? — and $199 million in “developer soft costs,” which are basically overhead and things like design fees, we get to that $862 million figure.

Not that contractor fees aren’t real things you have to pay, but this is quite a leap from “there are a bunch of things the Bills owners would like that would cost a few tens of millions each” to “screw it, may as well spend $1.35 billion on a new stadium, then.” And in particular, the much-repeated $500 million figure for keeping the upper deck from falling down appears to be much less in reality, only $96 million (plus contractor mark-ups). We’ll see if any journalists or elected officials bother to read far enough into the report to notice this; in the meantime, it’s more urgent than ever now that Erie County release that renovation study without all the words blacked out — time for me to go bug the FOIL appeals officer again, I guess.

One of the underlying assertions behind the Buffalo Bills owners’ demand for a new stadium is that the old one is falling down. Literally: We’ve seen team VP Ron Raccuia declare that the upper deck “will fail in plus-or-minus 5 years,” whatever that means (could it fail by 2016?), as well as claims that an “independent engineering study” shows the upper deck would “have to be replaced” at a cost of $500 million, with a full renovation costing $1 billion. At a price tag like that, spending $1.4 billion on a new stadium starts to sound, if not reasonable, at least less crazy.

Of course, plenty of team owners have claimed their old buildings were falling down to try to get new ones, so I filed a Freedom of Information Law request last week for the report, which was conducted by the engineering firm DiDonato for the Erie County Department of Public Works. And to my surprise, given that FOIL requests often take months to process, I got a response back yesterday morning, just eight days later, with this bombshell information:

Okay, that’s maybe not so much “information” as the lack thereof. What gives, Erie County FOIL Officer? The cover letter on the FOIL response stated:

1. As a critical piece of infrastructure, under the category of Commercial Facilities Sector, releasing details about the structure could endanger the life or safety of any person who enters the stadium.

2. Erie County is currently in ongoing negotiations with New York State and the Buffalo Bills regarding the future of the football team in Erie County.  Therefore, releasing the entire study would most certainly impair an imminent contract award.

3. Finally, as you can see, the study is a Draft and subject to change.  Therefore, it is a communication between Erie County and a consultant and therefore subject to the inter/intra-agency exception.

Okay, so revealing how much it would cost to maintain and repair the Bills’ current stadium, and how that cost was calculated, would “endanger the life or safety” of football fans, because … yeah, I got nothing. Nor can I begin to guess how making public the cost estimates would “impair an imminent contract award” for a new stadium, except inasmuch as if the costs don’t turn out to be as high as Bills execs are claiming, it could cause a public outcry about handing over hundreds of millions of dollars to the team owners for a new one — but that’s the kind of “impairment” that open access to public records is supposed to result in. “We can’t tell you, because we don’t want fans to know whether concrete might fall on them or whether building a $1.4 billion new stadium is really necessary” is maybe not the pinnacle of transparent government.

The full redacted study — which only includes 12 pages out of a 182-page report, and much of those are blacked out — can be found here, for anyone curious about what information Erie County decided to allow out into the world. We do learn that $250 million has been spent over the years on upgrades to the stadium (most significantly $130 million in 2013 on “new video displays, additional concessions stands and restrooms and various elements to improve circulation and provide ADA access in and around the facility”), and that “the Stadium currently remains in overall fair to good condition with some elements in fair condition” — followed immediately by a redaction, so there’s no way to tell which elements are in only “fair” shape, or what “fair” means in this case. Erie County could tell you, but they don’t want to endanger your life and safety — do you have any idea how many people trip and fall each year on stray commas? You’ll thank them for it later.