Category: Buffalo Bills

Friday roundup: Nevada legislator says she voted for A’s stadium because she didn’t understand it, and other great moments in U.S. politics

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the week’s news roundup, a couple of programming notes. First off, my apologies for the ads that have kept appearing in the middle of posts on this site — I keep telling Google Ads not to put them there, and it keeps ignoring me. I think I may have finally succeeded in turning those off, but do let me know if they reappear for you. I may end up dropping Google as this site’s ad provider if it keeps this up — that is, if I don’t drop Google anyway for firing workers upset that it successfully created Project Nimbus from the famous science fiction novel Don’t Create Project Nimbus.

Second, I know that the Dark Mode function is pretty broken again, often displaying dark gray type on a black background. I’m in discussions with the plugin provider about bug fixes, and also once again looking for alternatives that work more consistently. In the meantime, you can sometimes get it working by refreshing your browser; if that doesn’t work, just don’t use Dark Mode for now, and hopefully everything will be back in working order before your eyeballs explode from the screen glare.

And now for the news:

  • Nevada assemblymember Danielle Gallant tried, despite a very unhappy dog in the background, to explain her vote last summer for $600 million in public money for a new stadium to bring the Oakland A’s to Las Vegas, and ended up having to apologize for not understanding how the financing worked at all. “I hope future errors you make are met with more kindness than some of the responses I received,” tweeted Gallant, presumably inviting those among you who haven’t accidentally given $600 million to a billionaire sports owner to cast the first stone.
  • Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who previously praised Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s proposed stadium development that would require $2 billion in public subsidies and said “everything is on the table here,” now says that some things are off the table: “I’ve always said that ownership has to put some skin in the game,” Johnson told reporters this week, adding that he opposes kickbacks of city ticket taxes to Reinsdorf to help fund the project.
  • If you’re a Buffalo Bills fan outraged that the team is charging as much as $50,000 for personal seat licenses before you can even buy tickets to their new stadium that is being built with over $1 billion in your tax money, good news: Now you can instead be upset about the fact that Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to make the PSLs exempt from sales tax, costing you and your fellow New Yorkers around another $25 million. Or I suppose you can be upset about both, but life is short, you have to pick your priorities.
  • Tampa Bay Times opinion editor Graham Brink, who previously defended spending $1.5 billion in public money on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium on the grounds of “collective pride,” is now back with a list of other ways it would allegedly be a good deal: extending the Rays’ lease will keep the team in town longer, their development partner is “the real deal,” they’re using stadium designers who’ve designed stadiums before, owner Stu Sternberg has an “astute front office,” and … that’s all he’s got so far, stay tuned for “Economists may say Rays stadium is a boondoggle, but aren’t puppies great?”
  • Meanwhile, if you ask St. Petersburg residents if $1.9 billion is too much to spend on a Rays stadium, they say yes, and if you ask them if a new stadium would be a good idea in the abstract without telling them how much it would cost, they also say yes! The truth must lie somewhere in the middle!
  • Where will the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs owners turn for stadium money now that voters told them where to stick their sales tax hike? “It’s not something that’s going to just kind of be thrown up into the ether out of nowhere,” says Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas of city funding, and a spokesperson for Gov. Mike Parson says there’s no state money in the works either. Clay County Presiding Commissioner Jerry Nolte says he hasn’t heard from Royals execs lately, and there’s no talk of fresh funding from Jackson County after the sales-tax plan failed, which leaves only … the team owners’ pockets? KMBC-TV for some reason doesn’t mention this option in their article, the internet must have run out of bits before they got to it. The Kansas City Star, meanwhile, reported on noted sports business expert George Brett’s thoughts on whether the teams will now move out of town, it’s truly not a great week for Kansas City journalism.
  • Now that the Arizona Coyotes are moving to Salt Lake City in the fall, everyone wants to know what the team will be called, and new owner Ryan Smith confirms that it will “start with Utah.” No word yet on what it will rhyme with or how many syllables, but presumably Smith will reveal that eventually — just maybe not this fall, don’t want to rush into things, “Utah Professional Hockey Club” sure has a nice temporary ring to it.
  • Tempe city councilmember Randy Keating has complained that the reason the Coyotes are leaving town is because team execs “ran a terribly inept campaign” for arena subsidies. Better luck next time finding ways to overcome massive public opposition, Randy, there’s got to be a way around this whole “democracy” thing.
  • A’s concessionaire Aramark threatened to fire stadium workers who openly criticize the team’s coming move out of Oakland, which turns out to be a violation of labor law, who could have known?
  • This Ringer article on fan opposition to the A’s departure is really long for anyone who already knows the basics, but its deep dive into the history of fan protest movements does quote Field of Schemes and also includes the priceless quote from Oakland activist Bryan Johansen that his goal is “to fucking haunt John Fisher for all of eternity,” so it’s worth it if you have the time.
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Buffalo sportswriter: Bills fans aren’t actually mad about $50,000-a-ticket PSL fees, says some guy

access_time personNeil deMause

As noted on Friday, Buffalo Bills season ticket holders are up in arms about having to pay as much as $50,000 per seat in personal seat license fees just to get equivalent seats at the team’s new stadium, for which they and other New York state taxpayers are putting up just over a billion dollars. Only … maybe they’re not? That’s the bold conclusion of Buffalo News NFL columnist Ryan O’Halloran after talking with, let’s see, an “industry source”:

“The truth is very different from what’s out there,” an industry source told me. “The community is super behind it.”

So let’s try to picture what happened here: O’Halloran, after reading about disgruntlement among Bills fans over PSLs, decided to look into the matter. Rather than talk to any Bills fans, though, he called someone in the seat-license industry — possibly someone with the Bills or Legends Entertainment, the part–Dallas Cowboys–owned company that the Bills owners hired to conduct the PSL rollout — who said people are signing up at a “really exciting” rate. (The source also provided a bunch of fact-adjacent stats like “the average time of visit [to a PSL showing] is one hour, 40 minutes.”) We don’t know how the source knows this, or if they’re just straight-up lying about it, because O’Halloran allows the source to characterize what’s going on without revealing who they are or their potential self-interest.

This is just a flagrant violation of journalistic ethics, which say that anonymity should never be granted to people who are trafficking in opinion or speculation, and sources should always be identified in as much detail as possible so readers can be clear on their potential conflicts of interests. Honestly, this column alone should be grounds for discipline and/or firing of both O’Halloran and whichever Buffalo News editor greenlit it, unless there’s some extenuating (looks at calendar) … ohhhh, I get it, this is an April Fools joke! I take it all back, this is an extraordinarily clever satire of terrible sportswriting that bends over backwards to serve team owner interests, well played!

(If despite all this you still would prefer to hear from actual Bills fans about what Bills fans think, head over to the Bills season ticket holder page on Facebook, where you can read such sentiments as “I tried to get information about the PSL’s in other sections, like more towards the 30 yard line or the 20 yard line they couldn’t tell me” and “I bet all these people sold time shares before being hired to pitch these PSL’s” and “Will the Bills revoke my psl if I [resell some of my tickets and] don’t get a $5,000/year ticket reseller license like the Sabres are doing?” All good things for local journalists to investigate, if the Buffalo News has any left on staff.)

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Friday roundup: KC Star urges “no” vote on Royals/Chiefs sales tax; property tax breaks could cost KC schools, libraries $600m

access_time personNeil deMause

Moving a little slow today as I head home from the Sports Economics Conference 2024, which hopefully can become a regular event. As a reward for your patience, here’s audio of yesterday’s journalism panel discussion with me, Ken Belson of the New York Times, and Pat Garofalo of the American Economic Liberties Project, plus lots of questions from the assembled luminaries of the sports economics field. (That’s our host, Dennis Coates of that meta-study fame, introducing us, and the other co-authors of that paper, J.C. Bradbury and Brad Humphreys, make cameos as well.)

And now, if the Amtrak wifi is willing and the creek don’t rise, let’s move on with this week’s news lightning round:

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Friday roundup: NYCFC unveils images of Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium, A’s reveal plans to blow a/c at fans’ feet

access_time personNeil deMause

And so we have reached the end of another programming week, one mercifully without Jerry Reinsdorf’s stadium subsidy demands going up yet again. That’s just about the only thing that didn’t happen this week, though, so let’s hit the news recap:

  • NYC F.C.‘s $780 million soccer stadium plan cleared another hurdle this week, getting the okay of the City Planning Commission, the last stop before a final city council vote. It also got some fresh renderings depicting how fans would enter the stadium through a giant cube-shaped entryway (dubbed The Cube, this team has a way with words) that would be covered in a giant video board that display the names of all five New York boroughs, in case you forget where you live. (The stadium is depicted bearing the name Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium, while the entryway in one image says “New York City FC” while in another it’s “Cube Entrance Sponsor,” pick a lane, guys.) Still up in the air: how the affordable housing component would work, where fans will park if Mets owner Steve Cohen refuses to let the soccer team use his parking lots across the street unless he gets a state casino license, and, oh yeah, how the whole thing would be paid for, someone should really look into that.
  • The Oakland A’s “spherical armadillo” stadium in Las Vegas would have “the highest number of suites, clubs and other high-end seating products” relative to size of any MLB stadium, according to Venues Now, which spoke to A’s president Dave Kaval on the subject. In addition to hardly any affordable tickets, Kaval promised that the air-conditioning would blow out from under people’s seats, something that’s used at the Sacramento Kings arena and in some Middle East soccer stadiums, and which the site reported Kaval said he’s “working with Henderson Engineers to find a way to make it work in MLB.” Also a work in progress: The A’s are playing an exhibition game in Las Vegas tonight, and plenty of good seats are still available.
  • The Virginia legislature has officially passed a budget without money for an Alexandria arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals, though Gov. Glenn Youngkin could still try for an amendment or a special session. State senate finance chair Louise Lucas, who has the power to kill budget bills by denying them hearings in her committee, doesn’t seem real amenable to that, though. One Alexandria restaurant owner tells D.C. News Now that he’s upset not because he wants arena traffic for his businesses, but because spending over $1 billion in public money on an arena would “alleviate some of the tax burden from the residents,” somebody’s been reading too many clown documents!
  • Two members of the Jackson County legislature will be holding a public hearing this Monday at 3 pm on the Kansas City Royals‘ $2 billion stadium plan and $1 billion public subsidy plan. While attendance at these things is never representative of the public as a whole — it’s almost guaranteed there will be a throng of construction workers bussed in to cheer the project on, for example — it will at least give us some hint of the public mood as we approach the April 2 deadline for voting on the 0.375% sales-tax surcharge extension that would fund the first chunk of the project. (The Kansas City Star editorial board is a no, at least until Royals owner John Sherman explains more about how the money, lease, and provisions for relocating businesses would work.)
  • The Chicago Bears owners are reportedly “close to” announcing a lakefront stadium in Chicago and are also still haggling with suburban cities over property tax breaks for a stadium there, never take seriously rumors that are spread by team execs themselves, just don’t.
  • Maricopa County and the city of Phoenix are considering a “partnership” to address the Arizona Diamondbacks owners’ stadium demands, which would … do something? Also this was just a letter that the county sent to the city council last August, and the council never replied, guess the Arizona Republic was having a real slow news day.
  • Would a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium increase the team’s attendance? Yes at first, then no after the honeymoon wears off in a few years. This report is not remotely new news, but it comes with lots of stats and charts! Guess the Tampa Bay Times opinion section was having a slow news day.
  • Sure, New York taxpayers are spending over $1 billion on a new Buffalo Bills stadium, but who can put a price on 16-foot-tall bison statues? ESPN reports that “there was some disappointment on social media among fans” that the statues aren’t bigger, since the “World’s Largest Buffalo Monument” in North Dakota is 26 feet tall, that does it, time to tear down the new stadium and build one with state-of-the-art bison.
  • New Mexico United‘s new stadium “costs the city nothing,” according to team president Ron Patel; KOAT-TV checked, and it’s actually nearly $29 million in public money, about half the total cost. Never take seriously cost estimates that are put forward by team execs, just don’t.
  • The Hawaii legislature is set to consider a bill to scrap a $350 million plan to rebuild Aloha Stadium so that the money can be used for wildfire recovery and housing instead. Rep. Gene Ward said he opposes the bill because “it’s not going to get anybody to come to the football games, regardless of how bad you are as a football player,” no, I don’t know what he meant by that either.
  • Finally, back on the A’s front, I was on this week’s Rickeyblog podcast, where we talked about all aspects of the team’s stadium situation, not least why fans in the Vegas stadium renderings are waving the flag of Gaddafi’s Libya and what that could mean for tourism. Give it a listen, you’ve got all weekend!
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Friday roundup: Bears set arbitrary stadium deadline, A’s now have three different sets of stadium renderings they won’t show you

access_time personNeil deMause

A reporter asked me this week if I thought there was one particular thing driving the current wave of stadium and arena demands, and I said not really, though there are a few factors influencing it — lots of ’90s stadiums hitting the end of 30-year leases, local governments feeling a little more flush thanks to federal infrastructure and COVID relief money, baseball teams rushing to get deals in place before expansion takes move threat targets out of play. But at the same time, man is the sports subsidy news ever a firehose right now: This site is seeing multiple posts a day right now, and still I feel like I’m leaving more news than ever for the Friday roundups.

Which is all fine and good and I’m happy to do it, it can just be a little exhausting to write. If it’s not too exhausting to read as well, and you want to throw some additional coins in the tip jar to help me shoulder this increased workload, that’s always appreciated. I’m sure things will die down some once we get to the end of various legislative sessions in the spring and early summer, but right now we should all be taking our vitamins to keep our stamina up.

And speaking of the firehose, let’s turn it on and get blasted:

  • Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren says as far as a new stadium goes, “the timeline has to be in 2024,” adding, “Time is money. It takes probably three years once you put a shovel in the ground. ’24 should be the focal point.” Oh hey, it’s our old friend the Two-Minute Warning from the standard stadium playbook! As is de rigueur, Warren did not indicate what would happen if his team didn’t get a new stadium approved in 2024, but given that right now he doesn’t have a lot of viable alternatives, I’d wager that holding his breath until he turns blue is not off the table.
  • And speaking of arbitrary deadlines, St. Petersburg is pushing back a council vote on Tampa Bay Rays stadium funding until May, so there’s enough time for committee meetings first. Rays president Brian Auld warned back in October that “any delay is going to fundamentally alter the entire agreement”; nothing yet from Auld on whether he has a problem with this delay now, but given that it looks like relatively smooth sailing right now for Rays owner Stuart Sternberg to get a potential $1.5 billion in public cash, I’m expecting he won’t complain too much about waiting a few extra weeks for the check to arrive.
  • MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle, who previously said he had seen the mythical Oakland A’s Las Vegas stadium renderings and that they were “spectacular,” now says he’s seen three different versions of where the stadium would go on the current Tropicana resort site, and it’s holding up his plans to renovate his resort across the street until he sees the final design. “I have to believe, in the next 30 to 60 days, we should find out more,” Hornbuckle said; maybe he has to believe it in order to sleep at night, but with the stadium renderings now overdue by two and a half months and counting, we are under no such obligation.
  • The meeting between A’s execs and Oakland officials about a potential short-term lease extension at the Coliseum were “really positive” according to an unnamed team official and “very open and frank” according to Alameda County supervisor David Haubert, who added, “No food fights.” I read somewhere that I can’t find now that the whole thing only lasted about 30 minutes; more meetings are expected, at which there should be plenty of time for food fights.
  • For the many of you expecting Joe Lacob to ride to the rescue and buy the A’s from Fisher and keep them in Oakland, Lacob has an update of sorts: “I’ve not checked in recently. It’s his team. If he decides he wants to sell, he knows who to call, that’s all I’ll say. We might be interested, obviously. We’ve said we were interested in the past. But I don’t think he’s doing that. I think he’s very committed to continue to own the franchise. Looks like he’s committed to Las Vegas. We’re always there. But I’m not calling anybody, it’s his team. I want to stay out of the way. We’ll cross that bridge if it or another team comes available.” Read those tea leaves as you prefer.
  • Jacksonville mayor’s office lead negotiator Mike Weinstein says Mayor Donna Deegan is considering paying the public’s share of $2 billion in Jaguars stadium upgrades by using money in the city’s pension funds, which would be repaid by (scroll, scroll) nope, he didn’t say how, so this is very much the equivalent of explaining how you’ll afford a new purchase to your spouse with “I’ll put it on our credit card.” Note to First Coast News headline writers: This is not what “paying for” means.
  • Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas says her finance and appropriations committee will “absolutely” strip funding for the proposed Alexandria arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals from a 2024 budget bill: “I’m not changing my mind.” We certainly seem headed for a scenario where the state house approves an arena bill while the state senate does not, though there’s still lots of speculation that Senate Democrats are just haggling over their price, possibly for cannabis legalization, an increased minimum wage, more affordable housing, or possibly a pony.
  • An analysis of the Virginia arena deal by the D.C. city council, which obviously isn’t impartial, estimates that it would actually cost taxpayers more than $5 billion counting maintenance and debt service. That’s not entirely fair since a bunch of that money would be paid out in the far future — it’s the old fallacy of calculating how much your house costs by adding up all your mortgage payments over 30 years — but the report does note that the arena plan includes a publicly covered $12 million a year repairs slush fund that would grow at 2% a year, so that’s maybe another $250 million in cost that hasn’t been accounted for by the first $1 billion or so in public money, add it to the list.
  • Another stadium playbook standard is the Home Field Disadvantage, claiming that the old place is just too decrepit ever to stack up with modern buildings, and the Kansas City Royals deployed that one this week, having Populous stadium designer Earl Santee say it’s “just not feasible” and “not realistic” to renovate the team’s current stadium, on account of it having what’s called “concrete cancer.” Oh, really, Earl? This didn’t come up when the Royals stadium was just renovated last decade? Do you have an engineering report to show us, or a price tag on what it would cost to subject Kauffman Stadium to concrete chemotherapy? Hello, Earl, we have followup questions! Earl!
  • Buffalo Bills execs say that their new stadium will have a steeper upper deck that will allow it to bring fans closer to the field, so that, in WGRZ-TV’s words, “fans who sit in the last row of the general concourse will be 54 feet closer to the field than they are at the current stadium.” Yes, that’s how geometry works, and yay for them for applying it — except that the old stadium holds 71,608 fans and the new one will hold only 62,000, so really a lot of the improvement is just from lopping off the farthest 10,000 seats, so not so yay after all.
  • The city of Pawtucket sold $54 million worth of bonds last week to fund a new Rhode Island F.C. stadium, and while that’s a lot for a minor-league soccer stadium and double what taxpayers were supposed to be on the hook for less than a year ago, perhaps most alarming is the news that the bonds were sold at “a yield of 8.24%, equivalent to almost 14% on taxable securities.” Nothing tops off massive public cost overruns like the worst interest rate imaginable, that’s what I always say!
  • I was on the radio in Chicago this week to talk about the new White Sox and Bears stadium proposals, and props to WBBM’s Rick Gregg for leading with my juiciest quote: “I think we went in fairly skeptical, and we came out of our research horrified.” Click the link above to give it a listen, and have a good long weekend for those who celebrate!
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Friday roundup: O’s owner still wants land atop $600m in state cash, Chuck Schumer lurves the Bills, plus fresh bonkers Titans renderings

access_time personNeil deMause

And here we arrive again at the end of another programming week. It’s a bit demoralizing that this is the slow season for stadium and arena news — no legislatures in session, lots of people on vacation — and yet the news watch is as busy as ever. I’m a little afraid of what’ll happen in September, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Meanwhile, here’s what else has been happening:

  • Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, while visiting Baltimore Ravens training camp and wearing a Ravens jersey, because that’s how elected officials roll, announced that he and Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos have resumed talks over a lease extension. The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal says the remaining sticking point is that Angelos wants, in addition to $600 million in state renovation money that was already approved, development rights to land around Camden Yards, even though there isn’t really much undeveloped land available. (Which we’ve known since February, really, but it’s nice to get confirmation from The New York Times’ proposed scab sports section.) And Angelos might not get away with it, too, if only because he keeps stepping on rakes.
  • New Tennessee Titans stadium renderings! And it’s a video! Set to a pop cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” for some reason! With children playing jumprope and computer animated people doing rock guitar moves in the concession concourses? USA Today’s Titans Wire, which is no doubt an unbiased source, calls it “just well done overall”; it certainly burns, burns, burns, so the soundtrack was well chosen in that way.
  • U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer tells the Daily News of Batavia that he has told Buffalo Bills co-owner Terry Pegula to call him whenever he needs something, and “every so often they do, about one thing or another,” and also that he has confidence the new Bills stadium will be built despite cost overruns and “it’s got to be built soon because, you know, the existing stadium is old,” and also he was “furious and frantic” when he thought the Bills might move and “did everything I could to keep the Bills in Buffalo.” The Daily News of Batavia does not appear to have asked Schumer if he thought $1 billion in public money was a fair price to pay for this, and Schumer ran unopposed in last year’s Democratic primary, so democracy is just working well all around.
  • The developers behind Pawtucket’s stalled Rhode Island F.C. soccer stadium say they have finally found money to finish the project, and will restart construction “in the near future.” The city and state still need to sign off on resuming the plan.
  • Don’t like the Philadelphia 76ers owners’ plans to build an arena on a failing mall next to the city’s Chinatown? What if they added a 20-story apartment building with 20% of the units “affordable” (no specifics provided on to which income group), or at least pictures of one?
  • Bronx cricket leagues officially hate the proposed temporary T20 World Cup stadium that would displace their public cricket fields for next year. “You know, you don’t want to come into a community and just throw things down their throat,” said Curtis Clarke, president of the New York Masters Cricket Association, who clearly doesn’t have a good handle on what sports leagues very much do want.
  • No, it won’t.
  • I have not yet had time to read Brad Humphreys and Jane Ruseski’s paper that found that flu deaths rise when a city gets a new major-league sports team, but the fact that the NHL saw the largest effect — a 24.6% increase — checks out when you consider that the league plays in indoor arenas during flu season in disproportionately cold parts of North America. Good thing we all learned from the Atalanta superspreader event and put in place protocols to reduce viral spread at sporting events by … no? Well, maybe next pandemic.
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Bills stadium facing $300m in overruns, team owners’ costs may actually exceed $0 now

access_time personNeil deMause

Don’t look now, but the Buffalo Bills‘ new $1.4 billion stadium may actually be a $1.7 billion stadium:

Three months since construction began on their new stadium, the Buffalo Bills are already facing a potential cash crunch with the latest projections having the team on the hook for as much as $300 million in cost overruns, four people with direct knowledge or who were briefed on the financial details told The Associated Press this week.

This is not at all unusual, as lowballing initial cost estimates in order to get a stadium deal done and then seeing the price tag rise is a long-established tradition. The good news here, such as it is, is that in exchange for getting over $1 billion in public money, Bills owners Kim and Terry Pegula are on the hook for all cost overruns, so they’ll have to cover the increase.

How much will this bring the total public/private split to? The Associated Press reports that the Pegulas’ share “now stands to potentially match the taxpayer contribution of $850 million, with $650 million due from the state, and the remainder from Erie County.” But that $850 million public cost leaves out about $160 million worth of future upgrades that the state has committed to pay for, while the estimates of the Pegulas’ share leave out the disparity in who’ll be getting revenues from the stadium, as we’ve covered here before:

At last count, Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula were, after cashing their checks from the NFL’s G-4 stadium funding program and from the sale of naming rights, looking at a total cost to themselves of perhaps $150 million toward a $1.4 billion stadium. If we assume even an average $4,000 PSL sale, times 60,000 seats, that’s $240 million, which would bring the Pegulas’ costs to a nifty –$90 million — in other words, the Pegulas would turn $90 million in profit before the stadium even opens, while taxpayers are out $1 billion and Bills fans are forced to ante up thousands of dollars before they can even think of buying tickets.

Add back in $300 million in cost overruns, and it looks like the Pegulas will be on the hook for around $210 million, while state and city taxpayers will be paying about $1 billion. The Pegulas have an estimated net worth of $6.7 billion, and Sportico estimates that the Bills’ value rose by about $1.2 billion in just the last year, so they can probably find a way to afford it, but if your threshold for an acceptable stadium deal is that the billionaire owners pay 20 cents on the public dollar, you’re probably safe to celebrate now.

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Erie County to let Bills owners control community benefits spending so they can get a bigger tax break

access_time personNeil deMause

The Buffalo Bills stadium deal is already one of the more one-sided in sports history, with the state and county putting up around $1 billion, while Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula, after raking in seat license sales that they won’t have to share with the public, will likely end up paying nothing. But why pay nothing when you can pay less than nothing? That was apparently the thinking of the Erie County legislature, which according to investigation by the Investigative Post, structured the Bills’ required $3 million a year in “community benefits” spending to reduce public control over the money, all so that the Pegulas could get a big tax break:

The team agreed to contribute $3 million annually — for a total of $100 million over 30 years — to various initiatives including “affordable housing, food insecurity, educational access, social justice, and mental health,” according to the CBA agreed to last month.

But those annual contributions will result in no money exchanging hands. Rather than put the $3 million into a separate fund, the Bills will retain control of the money. The Community Benefits Oversight Committee, in fact, is prohibited from operating its own financial accounts.

Poloncarz said the state and county agreed to such a structure so that the Pegulas could enjoy a tax-write off for the $3 million annual contribution.

“If the Pegulas wanted to give $3 million, they could do a 501(c)3, they could get it as a tax write-off,” Poloncarz said. “If [that money] is given to our organization, it’s not. So we wanted to ensure that they had an opportunity, if they so choose, to do the tax write-off, if they give it to a 501(c)3.”

This is a terrible idea for, well, a bunch of reasons, actually. First and foremost, Erie County just made it easier for the Pegulas to fob off part of their $3 million a year in good deeds on federal taxpayers — assuming they can write it off at the top 37% marginal tax rate, that’s more than $1 million a year that will come out of the federal treasury.

It’s also a terrible idea because if there’s one thing we know about community benefits agreements, it’s that the more you let the people funding them control the henhouse, the more likely it is that they will just become slush funds for owners’ private interests. Most famously, the New York Yankees funneled CBA money to friends of its board members in parts of the Bronx nowhere near the stadium itself, and even used some of the cash to cover its own administrative costs. “In exchange for getting a billion dollars in tax money, the Bills owners have to give $3 million a year to the Buffalo Bills Foundation and then take a tax writeoff for it” is maybe not the toughest bargaining state and county officials could have done, but then, they were always more concerned with outmaneuvering their own state legislature than with playing hardball with the Pegulas.

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Friday roundup: Coyotes suing Phoenix over arena suit, Bills agree to CBA with no oversight, and other adventures in fine print

access_time personNeil deMause

Lots going on this week, so let’s get right to it:

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Friday roundup: March is for veiled threats (by the Rays, Bears, Browns, burger lovers)

access_time personNeil deMause

Baseball season kicked off yesterday, with the introduction of such new innovations as a pitch clock that drove a sharp increase in the all-important (?) metric of hits per hour of baseball and LED stadium lights that can be made to flicker artistically, even in the middle of a play. Truly, this is the future, if the future even exists.

Inarguably, this is Friday, which means we take a spin through news of the past week, if you believe there was one:

  • Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg says it’s his “belief” and “a very reasonable anticipation” that he’ll have a new stadium deal in either St. Petersburg or Tampa by the end of the year, and that if he doesn’t, “there’s not a deal to be done, basically.” If you didn’t get the veiled threat there, he added, “At the end of the day, it’s all about ensuring that the team is here, throwing out its first pitch in 2028. And then here, throwing out its first pitch in 2053 as well.” Then he held up a stuffed Raymond the Seadog and made a slashing gesture across its throat, while dramatically tilting his head to one side with his tongue out and his eyes rolled back in his head. (Okay, not that last one, but only because Stuart Sternberg has no sense of drama.)
  • Chicago Bears owner George McCaskey said that the team still hasn’t made a decision on “whether we’re going to develop the property” it bought in Arlington Heights and “whether the development is going to include a stadium.” He added, “I don’t have a timeline” for making those decisions, and “we’d like to have” discussions with Chicago about revamping Soldier Field. The Vegas betting line on “Are the Bears just trying to get a bidding war going here?” has now fallen to –300.
  • Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam said Monday that “we’re committed to redoing the stadium” and “in all likelihood, it’s not going to have a dome.” Zero details on cost or who would pay for it, but Dee Haslam said “it’s a year-long phase” to get a more concrete plan, while her husband Jimmy said “we’re probably three, four, five years” from a stadium renovation “happening,” so clearly they’re not yet in the Rays/Bears stage of more concrete idle threats and promises.
  • The Detroit city council has awarded developers of the area around the Detroit Tigers stadium and Detroit Red Wings and Pistons arena $783 million in public subsidies, because the last batch of subsidies for the sports venues themselves only created a bunch of parking lots. Will the Ilitches and their developer partners be able to score the elusive triple-dip? Herb Simon and the city of Indianapolis know it can be done!
  • The proposed Oakland A’s stadium project at Howard Terminal cleared a legal hurdle as an appeals court tossed a challenge to the building’s environmental impact statement. Yes, that’s the same legal hurdle that a lower court cleared last September. No, still nobody knows who would pay all the costs of the thing. Yes, you may now move on to the next bullet point.
  • Qatar hasn’t actually yet dismantled and reused its World Cup stadiums that it promised to have dismantled and reused by now. If anyone is surprised by this, they really haven’t been paying attention.
  • Tempe’s duplicate Arizona Coyotes arena vote set for August has been officially canceled as unnecessary since voters will already be casting ballots in May, which is sad news for anyone who was hoping that future Arizona Coyotes seasons would be replaced by the more interesting spectacle of 82 televised arena votes a year.
  • Also just in from Tempe: “We are a community that likes to be outdoors enjoying our Arizona sunshine, having coffee on the balcony, walking the dog, grilling burgers with neighbors. We are not a community that remains inside of a sound-insulated apartment with windows closed.” No, I didn’t expect the Coyotes arena battle to turn on the inalienable right to grill burgers either, but stranger things have happened.
  • New York state is likely to use cash instead of selling bonds to finance a large chunk of the new Buffalo Bills stadium. You’ll notice I said “finance” there instead of “fund”; the amount being funded by the public hasn’t changed (still $1 billion), but how the state will raise the money may change. This is like deciding whether to pay for your new car up front or with monthly payments, and so should be completely uninteresting unless you’re an accountant for New York state, but it made headlines so I thought someone might need a reason to skip reading them, please go read about the liquid trees instead.
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