EDITORIAL ROUNDUP: Opinion from around New York state | Editorial

Gov. Kathy Hochul and the owners of the Buffalo Bills are negotiating a deal for a new $1.35 billion open-air stadium to replace Highmark Stadium in suburban Orchard Park. How much money New York state will kick in is an object of intense speculation as the April 1 budget deadline approaches.

Last week, the New York Post reported taxpayers could be on the hook for as much as $1 billion. If true, that would be the richest public stadium subsidy in history, eclipsing the $750 million taxpayer subsidy for the NFL Raiders’ $1.9 billion stadium in Las Vegas.

A spokesperson for the governor said reports of any details are premature and stadium negotiations are ongoing.

That gives us an opening to urge Hochul to drive a hard bargain with the billionaire owner of the Bills, Terry Pegula, on behalf of the state’s overburdened taxpayers.

Pegula has threatened to move the team out of Buffalo if he doesn’t get enough public funding for the new stadium. New York should call his bluff. Taxpayers should not be bullied into bailing out the team’s uber-rich owner and the uber-uber-uber-rich National Football League.

A new stadium would make them even richer. Yet study after study shows the public reaps extraordinarily little benefit from stadium construction. This is especially true for a football stadium, which is only used for eight to 10 home games and the occasional concert. A study commissioned by Empire State Development, the state’s economic development agency, said the Bills generate just $27 million in annual revenue for the city, state and Erie County. Forbes magazine values the team at $2.27 billion.

Beyond money, intangibles are at stake. The Bills are a core part of Buffalo’s identity. The city’s pro football history goes back to the first incarnation of the NFL in 1920 and formation of the rival American Football League in 1959. Plus, with the Jets and Giants playing their home games in New Jersey, the Bills are the only NFL team to actually compete within the boundaries of New York state.

It is in the state’s interest to keep the team in Buffalo — but not at any cost.

New York has helped to fund many stadium projects. In 1980, the state put up $15 million of the nearly $27 million cost to build the no-frills Carrier Dome in Syracuse. (In 2022, dollars, that would be $52 million out of $92 million.)

Nowadays, sports venues brim with technology, luxury and spectacle and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. But state grants to recent downstate stadium projects — often for public infrastructure — are smaller than you might remember. An analysis by the independent Buffalo news organization Investigative Post showed the state’s share of new stadium costs for the Yankees, Mets, Islanders and the Brooklyn Nets ranged from zero to 12%. The Rangers and Knicks got no state aid for the $1 billion renovation of Madison Square Garden. The new Yankee Stadium received the highest dollar amount — $115 million in state aid — but the state share was only 5% of the $2.3 billion total cost. New York subsidized 12% of the cost of Citi Field, or $96 million of its $830 million total cost.

The new Bills stadium, to be built next to the old one, would cost $1.35 billion, according to ESD’s consultant. If Pegula were to get $1 billion in state aid, that would represent a 75% taxpayer subsidy.

Pegula, owner of the Bills and the NHL Buffalo Sabres, has a net worth $5.8 billion, according to Forbes.

In a year when New York state is flush with money — thanks to federal COVID aid and higher-than-expected tax revenues — all we hear from Albany politicians is how they plan to spend it. And it’s not on improving the state’s dismal tax burden relative to the other 49 states.

Hochul and state legislators will have some explaining to do to voters if they give away the store to the billionaire owner of an NFL team.

Advance Media New York, March 20

As negotiations on the Buffalo Bills’ new stadium near the finish line, a chorus of complaints is swelling about the use of public money to pay for it. But the expected contribution is line with similar projects and, what is more, it’s worth it.

This has been a drawn-out saga and it’s attracting new scrutiny as the April 1 deadline nears for Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Legislature to reach agreement on the state budget, which is expected to include funding for a stadium.

The cost of building the new stadium in Orchard Park has been estimated at $1.4 billion, with sources saying $1 billion in public funding was expected, though Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz on Wednesday called the public funding figure inaccurate.

Whatever the exact figure, the investment of state dollars will be substantial. This is the cost of doing business in the National Football League. Highmark Stadium is showing its age and requires expensive upkeep. Its lease with Erie County expires after one more football season and the team’s owners, Terry and Kim Pegula, have said they would not renew the lease without agreement on a new stadium. Pegula Sports & Entertainment never threatened publicly to relocate the team, but that possibility has been a specter hanging over the negotiations. At least nine NFL teams have relocated since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970. There are other cities that would be happy to have the Bills, including Austin, Forth Worth and St. Louis, which was abandoned by both the Cardinals and Rams franchises. Toronto, London and Mexico City are other possibilities.

Skeptics of public funding for sports facilities point to studies showing that such deals do not return equal value to the community in economic benefit. While there is no dollar-for-dollar return on investment, keeping the Bills in Western New York is worth paying for.

Bills football is part of our common language in Western New York. Being a fan is belonging to a club that anyone can join, no matter their age, income level or whether they buy tickets to the games. It means something to have Jim Nantz, Joe Buck or Al Michaels broadcast a Bills game in front of a national TV audience.

Having a pro football team also produces a halo effect. Corporate recruiters say that the Bills help companies attract talent here from elsewhere. Plenty of cities have craft breweries and bike trails, but Buffalo has one of just 32 NFL teams.

The expected public share of the cost for the new stadium is within the range of deals made in other smaller NFL markets. A Buffalo News analysis in September found that for the nine new stadiums in the regions with the smallest populations, public funding paid for 73% of the cost. Using the round figures of $1 billion in public dollars for a $1.4 billion Bills stadium, that would be 71%.

Most stadium deals involve public money. Even in cases in which team ownership claims no public funds are involved, hidden costs are passed on to taxpayers, through complex tax breaks, below-market land deals and other sleights of hand. When the New York Yankees claimed that their new stadium was totally team-financed in the 2000s, a state Assembly report on the hidden costs to taxpayers called the deal “The House That You Built.” The real subsidy, it said, was as much as $1 billion.

Bills fans will also pick up a big part of the tab for the Pegulas’ contribution to the project, including the team’s requirement that season-ticket holders buy personal seat licenses for the new stadium. Those would raise at least $50 million.

The Pegulas can also apply for a loan from the league to help cover construction costs. Up to $150 million of that can be repaid by the league’s other 31 franchises, through the visiting team’s share of Bills ticket revenue — paid for by the fans.

Owning an NFL team is a nice business to be in. League revenue-sharing and the player salary cap allows Buffalo to compete with mega-market teams like the Dallas Cowboys or Los Angeles Rams.

The Pegulas don’t need to play hardball with the state or Erie County. Their leverage is understood. As Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economist and stadium financing expert, told The News last year, “the Pegulas could always take the team to a much bigger market if they want.”

It’s hard to imagine that Hochul, Polocarz or anyone else in state or local government can want their legacy to include losing the Bills — not even downstate legislators who mistakenly root for those “New York” teams that play in the swamps of New Jersey.

Thanks to the imminent stadium deal, we can expect Buffalo will remain a major league city for many years to come.

With just over a week to go before the new budget year begins April 1, one big question is how much damage Gov. Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders will do to the state’s fiscal future.

Awash in cash from D.C. and last year’s massive state tax hike, Hochul proposed shelling out a whopping $216 billion for the new year. Yet lawmakers make her look like a piker: The Assembly calls for spending $226.4 billion, up a stunning $53 billion, or 31%, from just three years ago.

Assembly Dems want billions (on top of Hochul’s outlays) for child care, universal pre-K, tuition assistance and other goodies. The Senate, too, would hemorrhage cash: $250 million for pre-K, millions more for higher ed, $278 million to expand home-care eligibility … .

Both chambers aim to boost minimum wages for home-care workers to $22.50 from $13.20, at a cost of as much as $2.5 billion a year. Lawmakers even set aside millions for longer inmate phone calls and to extend the state Earned Income Tax Credit to people who lack Social Security numbers (illegal immigrants, that is). The parties were reportedly still at least $9 billion apart over the weekend.

Meanwhile, despite their newfound cash, they did virtually zilch to ease New Yorkers’ tax burden, the nation’s heaviest. Likewise, despite the struggle of restaurant and bar owners to recover from lockdowns, the Legislature omits provisions to let them sell booze to go (much to the liquor-store lobby’s delight, no doubt).

Nor did any of them initially seek fixes in the state’s disastrous criminal-justice laws, though Hochul is now pushing for at least some tweaks.

The huge spending hikes “will create more risk that we will run into problems down the road,” warns the Empire Center’s Peter Warren. New outlays are “not federally funded and, if established, will quickly become a major drain on the operating budget,” echoes New York City Partnership boss Kathy Wylde.

And Hochul may make matters even worse, by calling for another $1 billion for a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills, a private business.

Outrageously, lawmakers also fail to renew mayoral control of city schools — a nod to teachers unions, which fear that Mayor Eric Adams might put kids ahead of teachers.

No, the gov isn’t going to lower her recklessly high opening bid for budget talks, but she shouldn’t approve one dime more demanded by lawmakers. Nor should she agree to any deal that doesn’t fully fix the state’s disastrous criminal-justice laws or renew mayoral control. And if she and lawmakers can’t reach a responsible deal by April 1, let them keep talking: Better no deal than one that destroys the state.

New York leaders are well-intentioned in their desire to ensure that the people and communities that have suffered from the racially unbalanced enforcement of marijuana laws are the first to reap the benefits of legalization.

Unfortunately, the proposed licensing policy needs work if the state is to realize that goal.

No fair person would deny that people of color have been disproportionately searched, arrested and prosecuted over the years in the war on drugs in general and marijuana in particular. An analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union of data from 2010 to 2018 found Black people were, on average, 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for possession than white people, despite similar usage rates, and more than 2.6 times more likely in New York. Most of the arrests were for relatively minor possession, not for big-time drug dealing.

As the ACLU and many others — including lawmakers — have argued, the question isn’t merely whether to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use, but also how to undo the harm of this pattern of racially lopsided enforcement — harms that include incarceration, lifelong criminal records, and difficulty getting jobs, housing, financial aid and so on.

In its effort to right those wrongs, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration has proposed to give first priority for dispensary licenses to people with a record of marijuana offenses, or who have a close family member with such a record, and who also have experience successfully running a small business.

Again, we get the intent here. Who has been more affected by the war on marijuana — a war that, remember, is all but over now that adult recreational use, cultivation and sales have been legalized in New York — than people who have been arrested over the years? And since the state obviously can’t hand out retail licenses to every person who has ever been arrested for a low-level marijuana offense, some kind of proven business experience seems logical.

We’ll put aside the knee-jerk reaction of politicians who portray this as some wild soft-on-crime idea, a simplistic view that fails to see the need to somehow compensate people who were on the receiving end of racially disproportionate enforcement.

But the plan needs work. It requires a close look at the original offenses to ensure that people weren’t involved in violent or other serious crimes. And it should not reward people who weren’t harmed long-term, nor penalizing those who were.

What would that look like? For starters, the first dispensary licenses shouldn’t go to someone who was busted when they were a white middle class college student and, with the help of a lawyer paid by Mom and Dad, got right out on bail, pleaded to a minimal charge, had the case sealed and went on to run the family business. The more likely beneficiary ought to be a Black man from a poor neighborhood who was not-so-randomly stopped by police, tricked into emptying his pockets on the street, then charged with a misdemeanor for public possession, and left with a criminal record that made it hard for him to even get a job, much less a business loan.

How to better write that into regulations is the challenge not just the Cannabis Control Board but a fair and just society faces. As the board prepares to take public comment on the proposal, this is the time for New Yorkers to help New York get it right.

It isn’t about singling out people who broke marijuana laws for special treatment. It’s about trying to find a way to meaningfully make amends to people and communities that were unfairly singled out for selective enforcement of those laws that no longer even exist.