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July 30, 2008
Field of Schemes: Congress Probes How New Sports Stadiums Turn Public Money into Private Profit
A congressional committee is investigating whether New York City and the New York Yankees wildly inflated the value of the site for the team’s new stadium to float nearly $1 billion in tax-free bonds.
Democracy Now
Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Good Jobs New York's Bettina Damani and Field of Schemes author Neil deMause join host Juan Gonzalez to discuss subsidies, funny stadium math — and Atlantic Yards.
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: I think that it’s very important to understand that we’re looking at a public policy matter here that relates not only to New York and not only to the Nets and the Atlantic Yard project, but it also relates to the whole country, as your other guests have said, because it’s quite possible that there are billions of dollars in tax benefits that should be going to municipalities for the purposes of repairing their infrastructure and for schools and other things and that are instead being diverted for these private sports complexes.
And the question is one of public policy, one of the IRS, and in the case of the New York Yankees, questions of securities law, because of the various amounts of the appraisal, $45 a square foot versus $275 a square foot, which have a bearing on the overall cost of the project. And if the cost of the project is inflated, that’s going to be of interest to the SEC, as well as the IRS.
...JUAN GONZALEZ: Right. And then, of course, the final irony with—because most of these stadiums have luxury boxes that are for corporations that go from $500,000 to $800,000, in the case of the Yankees, per year to rent these boxes, and of course, my newspaper, the Daily News, reported yesterday that in this deal, the City of New York arranged to have its own luxury box at Yankee Stadium available, presumably to city officials, as part of the deal for the financing. Bettina, your response to that?
BETTINA DAMIANI: It’s aptly coined the landlord suite. And it’s just another example of how local elected officials almost seem to be void of feeling that they have responsibility to the public, because they’re going to get nice seats, in the long run.
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NoLandGrab: "The landlord suite." Nice. If we taxpayers are funding the lion's share of the costs, doesn't that make us the landlords? That being the case, NLG's got dibs on the first Mets-Yankees inter-league game next season.
Posted by eric at July 30, 2008 7:12 PM