Queens pol’s bill counters gov's offer to Buffalo Bills
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Highmark Stadium, where the Buffalo Bills currently play. Governor Kathy Hochul announced the state would pay $850 million in public funds to help construct a new $1.4 billion stadium for the team. AP file photo by Frank Franklin II
By Jacob Kaye
If a new piece of legislation from a Queens lawmaker passes, every New Yorker could one day own a small chunk of the Buffalo Bills should the team decide to leave the state for greener pastures.
A new bill from Queens Assemblymember Ron Kim and Brooklyn State Senator Jabari Brisport says that if a major sports franchise takes public dollars to build a new stadium and later decides to leave New York, the state government will have the option to purchase 50 percent of the club.
The legislation comes days after Governor Kathy Hochul offered the Buffalo football team $850 million in public funds to help the Bills construct a new $1.4 billion stadium. New York state taxpayers would punt over $600 million to the Bills, and Erie County taxpayers will spend another $250 million.
The deal comes with the stipulation that the Bills can’t leave New York for at least 30 years. Hochul, who is attempting to negotiate the deal into the state’s budget due April 1, offered the funds as the Bills threatened to leave the state to play elsewhere.
But Kim, who represents parts of Whitestone, Flushing, College Point and Murray Hill, said that his legislation acts as a counter to Hochul’s commitment to fund 60 percent of the Bill’s new playing field.
“We're counter-proposing to illustrate like this could be done a different way, by holding professional sports teams that took public subsidies accountable,” Kim told the Eagle.
The legislation would apply to teams that take public money upfront or that take tax credits or breaks, Kim said. While some details of the legislation, including how long a team is required to stay in the state before the stipulation no longer applies, still need to be negotiated, others are firm, Kim says.
Should a team decide to leave New York after using public funds or tax breaks to build a stadium, the state will have a six month window to decide whether or not it wants to purchase 50 percent of the team. Additionally, if the upfront funds the team takes covers over 51 percent of the project, as is the case with the Bills, the state will have the opportunity to buy equity in the team at the time of the deal under the legislation.
“If [the Hochul administration] is serious about their goal, which is to keep the team in Buffalo, they'll look at other ways to achieve that,” Kim said. “If you're trying to bribe a team or corporations to come to your city and stay there, it's never a successful outcome. It's always proven to be a recipe for failure.”
In a statement to the Eagle, a spokesperson for the governor said: "The Bills franchise is a proven economic driver, and the economic and tax impacts generated from the team will support more than 100 percent of the public share of the new stadium.”
“This agreement secures the Bills’ long term future for decades to come while putting to work thousands of union workers in what will be the largest construction project in Western New York history,” the spokesperson added.
Kim said the Bills deal shows echoes of another deal that saw state and local governments offering funds to a large company – Kim was one of a number of lawmakers who fought to keep Amazon from building its second headquarters in Long Island City. The deal, which would have seen the second-largest company in the country receive around $3 billion in subsidies, fell through in 2019 amid pressure from the lawmakers.
In her announcement of the deal, Hochul said that the revenue generated by the team will eventually offset the cost of building the stadium. According to Hochul, the franchise generates around $27 million annually in direct income, sales and use taxes for the state. Over the 30-year lease period, those funds could come out to around $1.6 billion, the governor said.
The local economy also sees around $385 million annually from taxes generated from fans who visit Buffalo to catch a game.
"I went into these negotiations trying to answer three questions - how long can we keep the Bills in Buffalo, how can we make sure this project benefits the hard-working men and women of Western New York and how can we get the best deal for taxpayers?" Hochul said in a statement.
"I'm pleased that after months of negotiations, we've come out with the best answers possible - the Bills will stay in Buffalo for another 30 years, the project will create 10,000 union jobs and New Yorkers can rest assured that their investment will be recouped by the economic activity the team generates," she added.
The impact New York sports teams have on the local economy was also touted by Mayor Eric Adams last week, who used the revenue generated during games as a rationale for lifting the vaccine mandate on New York City’s hometown players.
But how much economic impact a sports franchise has on the city it plays in is up for debate.
“This is one of those topics where you have almost universal agreement among economists: that stadiums really do not bring a significant financial benefit to the cities that house them,” Michael Leeds, an economics professor at Temple University, told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “What they do bring is very limited geographically and very limited financially.”
The Bills are owned by billionaires Terry and Kim Pegula, who are among the top 10 wealthiest owners in football.
Kim said that the money going toward the construction of the new stadium could be spent in other ways.
“I would argue that if we spent $1.2 billion investing in small businesses in Buffalo and building more affordable housing, you’d get a much higher return on investment and we’d know that we're building wealth for the people of Buffalo,” the lawmaker said.
Kim isn’t the only person mounting an opposition against the deal, which will have to be approved by lawmakers should it pass with the state budget.
A bulk of the public funds will come from a recent payment made by the Seneca Nation to the state of New York as part of a settlement reached over the weekend regarding a casino gaming compact. The payment came after the state froze a number of bank accounts owned by the Native American tribe. Seneca Nation President Matthew Pagels condemned the deal in a message to social media this week.
“In one breath, New York's hostile and shameless greed was laid for the world to see,” Pagels said. “Hundreds of millions of dollars from Western New York, in her own words, given to billionaires after intentionally and unnecessarily holding the Senecas and thousands of Western New Yorkers and families hostage for several days by strangling various bank accounts held by the nation and our businesses.”
But the deal is not without its supporters.
In a statement issued Monday, Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes called the deal a “once in a generation opportunity for advancement,” while also promising to review the terms of the agreement and ensure community benefits are baked into the deal.
Using public funds to pay for private sports franchises’ construction projects isn’t new to Queens residents. In 2009, the city funded a majority of the New York Mets’ construction of Citi Field. Of the $830.6 million spent on the stadium, $614.3 million was paid for in public money and tax breaks.
