--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Bills make me wanna shout! Ahead on Today Explained, it's the offseason, but that is not stopping the Buffalo Bills from setting records.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Bills are making it happen now. The football team just struck a new $1.4 billion stadium deal with New York State and local government picking up $850 million of that tab. That is the largest taxpayer contribution for an NFL facility ever. And that's $850 million of public funds, even though the team is owned by a fracking billionaire.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why New York is handing over nearly a billion dollars to the Buffalo Bills, and whether these publicly funded stadium deals ever work out in the public's favor. That's ahead on today's show.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can go to attio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year. That's attio.com slash todayexplained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sean Ramos from I grew up in Toronto, Canada, right across the Great Lake from Buffalo. So the Buffalo Bills were the closest thing I had to an NFL team growing up. That being said, I was into hockey, sort of comes with the territory. But Jerry Zaremsky was into the Bills. I am a Buffalo Bills fan, but I don't believe it affects my reporting.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Jerry's the Washington Bureau Chief for the Buffalo News. We asked him what the Bills mean to Buffalo.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: The Buffalo Bills franchise really lends kind of a big city feel to a city that's been kind of on the cusp of being a major city and a middle-sized city over the last few decades.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: It's a few decades in which the city's economy and the region's economy has been very much on a downbound train until recently. And recently there's real signs that population and the economy are picking up.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: But all through the troubled times of Buffalo's recent history over the last 50 to 60 years, The Buffalo Bills have been central to bringing the community together and giving the community something to root for.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: It's a very unique relationship between a town and team that's really only like one other in the NFL, and that's the Green Bay Packers.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Most other NFL cities are much bigger than Buffalo. The metro areas that they serve are much bigger. But the bills, for the longest time, have been just a central part of our identity in western New York.
--:-- [Breaking news theme music plays]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is breaking news from News 8. Good afternoon. Breaking news on this Monday. A hefty price tag for a new Buffalo Bills stadium. Governor Kathy Hochul confirming the state and Erie County taxpayers will be asked to contribute $850 million in public funds for the construction of a new Bills stadium.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If the state legislature approves it, the Buffalo bills will likely be set in Buffalo for the next three decades. And there's a sense of security to that that would be very important to the community.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is a city that did lose an NBA franchise, that's lost industrial power after industrial power over the years. There is, of course, another side to this story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are significant numbers of people in Buffalo and in other parts of New York State that look at this as too much public money going to a business entity, that is the Buffalo Bills, owned by a billionaire.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's a debate in Buffalo just as there is in other parts of the state. However, the current stadium will soon be 50 years old.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Orchard Park, the new stadium, the new home of the Buffalo Bills. More than 600 men and machines labor to complete the new facility in time for the 73 Buffalo Bills football season.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is in very rough shape and would need an awful lot of work. And even with a lot of work, it would not meet the modern day NFL standards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the presumption has been that if the Bills could not get a new stadium, there would be the grave danger that the Bills could end up leaving town sometime in the next few years because the lease is up only in a couple of years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So is that how this deal came about? It was just sort of proactive? Do we have any idea?
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Well, the Bills made clear that they need a new stadium. Ron Rakuya was asked if a stadium deal was not reached, would the Bills continue to play at Highmark Stadium?
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: No, we absolutely will not. The NFL made clear that the Bills need a new stadium.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: I do believe that a stadium long term is going to be needed in that marketplace.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: I love Ralph Wilson Stadium, but it's got to compete against a lot of these new stadiums that have a lot of very important features that that stadium doesn't have.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: So basically, this was bound to happen. Whomever was governor, be it Andrew Cuomo or Kathy Hochul, would be at this point in time looking to come up with some sort of a deal with Erie County and with Kim and Terry Pagula, the owner of the Bills, to build a new stadium.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Clearly, as soon as Governor Hochul took office in August, people started asking questions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I come with the Buffalo question. We know you have a study underway. What we wondering about is what is your timeline for a deal. Are you hoping to see a deal by the end of the year?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we have heard over the last few weeks that there was going to be a deal. There going to be a deal.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: My desire is, I'm a Buffalo Bills fan, let's lock this down. Let's get it done.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: So we are very intently focused on keeping the bills here. Orchard Park's their first choice, their only choice. It's Orchard Park, and we'll make it all happen.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: It was only announced a week ago, which some people clearly don't like because it was very late in the state budget process.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: The state budget was due on April 1st, which is now late. And it did take place in secret.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: The negotiations did take place in secret, but all business negotiations take place in secret.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: There is concern among some that the deal came so close to the budget deadline that it couldn't be properly vetted, that there couldn't be, say, legislature hearings on it.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: And that is a much more legitimate concern than the idea that this thing would be negotiated publicly because deals like this are never negotiated publicly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The state of New York pays the lion's share. Yes. And it's a record-breaking sum of money.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Well, it depends on how one looks at it. The public contribution, according to our analysis at the Buffalo News, is less than the 73% public contribution to stadium deals in smaller NFL markets over the past two decades.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Things are different in a place like Los Angeles or Las Vegas. We are so ready for major league sports in this town.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: But there have been very major subsidies there as well. So, for example, there was a public subsidy to the new stadium in Las Vegas for the Las Vegas Raiders.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: There, the state paid $750 million to build a $1.9 billion stadium. It's the biggest dollar amount, but it's not the biggest share ever.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: And I have a feeling that part of the reason there is some blowback is that the Pagoulas are billionaires. And not only are they billionaires, but they're fracking billionaires.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: And this is a state which were rejected fracking years ago. And that a lot of public figures have spoken out against that form of natural gas drilling.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: And here we have a fracking billionaire getting a lot of state money to build a stadium.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, the fact that the Pagoulas are getting a single dime of public funds is kind of a shocker. I thought those days were long gone, especially when you're cutting funds for, you know, regular people.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Has Hochul responded to that particular criticism yet? No.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: And she has some personal ties to the team, yeah. There are personal ties in that, number one, Kathy Hochul's a big Buffalo Bills fan.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Because I'm a Buffalo Bills fan. But more importantly than that, her husband is the general counsel for Delaware North Companies.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: I have the coolest job in the world. I have the coolest job in the world. I have the coolest job in the world.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: I have the coolest job in the world because I work for Delaware North Companies.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Delaware North Companies is one of the largest concessionaire companies in the entire nation. Currently, Delaware North handles the concessions at Highmark Stadium, the Bills Stadium today.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: And so the company that Kathy Hochul's husband works for benefits whenever a Buffalo Bills fan buys a beer at the current stadium.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a lot of questioning of that. However, that contract for the concessions doesn't carry over to a new stadium.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Okay, but there's a lot of reasons for people to think this is suspicious or at least sticky or maybe a little clumsy.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: I mean, the governor herself has a direct tie to the business operations of the stadium through her husband.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: She's financing a stadium for a team that's owned by a fracking billionaire while she's running for reelection.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: And this is a huge giveaway of public funds to the NFL, to the Buffalo Bills.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Is there a chance that while she's running for reelection, this sort of goes south on her? It is certainly possible.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: Looking at the race for governor here in June, neither of her two opponents have really caught fire yet.
--:-- Jerry Zaremsky: I think both of them are going to try to use this to catch fire. Do these publicly funded stadiums actually benefit the public? In a minute on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Stand up now, come on and shout.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm a Buffalo Bills fan. All right, we're back. Today explained the Buffalo Bills are on track to get a new stadium with nearly a billion dollars in public funds. It's a record setter, but it's far from the first.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a rich history here, and Andrew Zimbalist knows it. I'm a professor of economics at Smith College. We asked him to share.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Well, there were a couple of anomalies, such as the old Memorial Stadium in Cleveland. That was built during the 1930s.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Other than those anomalies, the time that the government really got involved in the United States in financing state and construction was in the 1950s.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And basically what happened was that Major League Baseball, which back then was the predominant spectator sport, Major League Baseball had not expanded the number of teams since 1903.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Of course, the population expanded enormously between 1903 and the early 1950s, and people's incomes expanded enormously.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And that meant that there were a lot of cities out there, particularly west of the Mississippi, that didn't have baseball teams.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And then what we had is that these cities out west are trying to lure baseball teams and they start competing against each other.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And the owners, of course, playing the capitalist game well, say to their existing cities, build me a new stadium or I'm going somewhere else.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And so that was really when the professional sports leagues got the idea that, gee, we have some market leverage here that we might as well use.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And the leverage they used was, you've got to build me a stadium if you want me to come to your town, put down public money.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Back in those days, you know, a stadium might have cost $70 or $80 million.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And basically, 100% of the stadiums were being financed publicly.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And then what happened was in the 1960s and 70s, as the United States goes through this period of automobilization and suburbanization.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: So we went through a period in the 60s and 70s of building of these cookie cutter stadiums that were also publicly financed.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And at that point in time, they cost maybe 150, 200 million dollars.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And then it continued again. We have another wave in the 1990s, which flipped the model back.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Hey, let's put the stadiums back in the center of the city. That's where the businesses are. That's where the most money is.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: So that was a new model. And again, it was overwhelmingly publicly financed.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Maybe most of the stadiums in the 90s were more like 70% to 85% publicly financed. But that varied a great deal from city to city.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: The smaller cities, of course, had much less leverage.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: In any event, that's the basic evolution of this pattern.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And one of the things that's happened in the last 10 years or so is that stadium costs have gone up from being $300, $400, $500 million up to $1 billion and more, all the way up to the stadium in Englewood, California that Stan Kroenke built for $5 billion.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: It's the first indoor-outdoor stadium of its kind. We created an open stadium, completely open on all its sides, all the concourses.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: You feel the ocean breeze right now where we're standing on the field.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: As stadiums have grown more and more expensive, it's less and less politically feasible for mayors and city councilors to say, okay, we'll pay for 80% of that because they don't have the money.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: So what they do is they make these deals with the team owner that says, since you're putting up more money nominally or putting up more money up front, what we'll do since you're putting up all that, we'll give you 50 acres of land around the stadium to develop as you see fit.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And we won't charge you property taxes for the next 20 years. Or they make some, they make some such deal.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: So the model has changed a little bit more recently, in part because of a lot of bad publicity that these deals have gotten, but in part also because it's just too expensive for cities to be taking up, at least up front, paying that kind of money.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: But of course, when they give a tax exemption for 10 or 20 or 30 years, that leads to the same thing because they're giving up revenue that they would have otherwise gotten.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And if they're giving them land for free, same thing again. They're giving them something of value. It's just not cash up front.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: So that was like the entire history right there, which is incredible.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: I wonder if I can go back and sort of pull on a string connected to one word you used somewhere in the middle of that history lesson, which was leverage.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Tell me more about the leverage these teams had against cities, because you think they need the cities more than the cities need them.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: But is that the case? Look, fact of the matter is, and the U.S. court system has validated what I'm about to say over and over and over again, is each of these major leagues in the United States, whether it's MLB or NFL or NBA or NHL or whatever it is, they're monopolies.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: MLB, Major League Baseball, is the only producer of top-level baseball in the United States.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Same thing with the NFL, NBA, et cetera. So they're monopolies.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And as monopolies, they do what all monopolies do. They restrict their output relative to demand, and that enables them to charge higher prices.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: One way they charge higher prices is by charging more for tickets and concessions.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Another way they charge higher prices is by extracting public subsidies to build them their stadiums.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: As these deals have evolved, I wonder who benefits more. Does the city benefit more or does the team benefit more?
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Well, it's case by case always because the devil's in the details.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: But if you're going to generalize about it, the generalization is that having a professional sports team in your city or having a stadium, a new stadium or a new arena in your city doesn't lend itself to promoting economic development.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: It doesn't lend itself to generating more jobs or raising per capita income in the population.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: That's what virtually every single academic scholar, independent scholarly study has found, that having a professional sports team is not a driver of economic development.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: It's promoted that way because politicians and the team owners want to find political support for it.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: No politician wants to spend $500 million or $800 million and they say, oh, by the way, I have bad news. We have a big deficit and I have to cut the school budget this year.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: But that's exactly what happens. Well, sometimes it happens.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: When all these academics and scholars and economists look at this in the aggregate and say oh this never really works out Is there is there one example everyone looks at and goes well that was the worst one we ever did
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: I don't know if there a worst example. Maybe it's cute to say, oh, this one is worse than all the others, and this one is second worst and so on.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: I think that pretty much 90% of the deals that were cut over the last 40 or 50 years have not been economically beneficial or financially beneficial to a city.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: They've created a budgetary hole that has to be filled. How do you fill it? either by raising taxes or lowering other services.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: I think that's the reality.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Now, if public treasuries are putting down an initial $850 million, as Buffalo is, then they're obligated to do another $280 million of maintenance and improvements to the stadium.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And they're hoping that they're going to be able to generate enough revenue off of the stadium in order to cover their debt service.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: But I don't see it. So I think there are cases like Buffalo and there are other cases.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: What happened in Oakland recently where the team left before the bill was paid.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And the city is having to pick up all the debt service, even though the team went to Las Vegas.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Look at what the mayor of Oakland just tweeted out yesterday, calling the NFL a billionaire boys club that ditched Oakland out of sheer greed.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: They go on to call the NFL a cartel and says some of their practices are bribes in this lawsuit that they've put forward.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: What's the city of Oakland to do? They've got this massive stadium. They don't even have a football team.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Even when they had the football team, they only used it, you know, 20 nights out of the year.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: What do you do then with this massive investment you've made?
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: I think what you have to do is, first of all, make sure that you've negotiated as hard and as effectively as you can.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: The notion that you would have debt service on hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds for 30 years, but the team isn't obligated to stay for 30 years, that makes no sense to me.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: I understand the Buffalo deal, by the way, it stipulates that they're supposed to stay for 30 years, but it gives the bills an out after 15 years.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: So they might get in the same situation that Oakland is.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Now, there's a little penalty if you leave before 30 years. There's a penalty that diminishes between year 15 and year 30.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: But that doesn't make sense to me. You shouldn't sign bills like that.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: What's a situation that went well for a city and the team? What's like the gold standard of this kind of deal?
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: I think the Atlantic Yards deal in Brooklyn that brought what was then the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn and now the Brooklyn Nets.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: The Brooklyn Arena is the first deliverable of the planned $4.9 billion project that's supposed to eventually have 17 structures in all.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: It was financed by the Ratner Corporation, which at the time owned the Nets.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: The Atlantic Yards project received upwards of $300 million in public funds and subsidies from the state and the city.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And developer Forest City Ratner and its CEO Bruce Ratner made a lot of promises.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: So you have a public investment on the one hand that is eight or nine hundred million dollars.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: You have a private investment that's close to five billion dollars.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: We are finally here to celebrate the grand opening of the Barclays Center Arena.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: OK, and you know what? Here it is. and you brought an area for life.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: So, you know, it seems to me that that's a plus plus.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Remember at the beginning of this interview when I asked you about the history and you gave it to me starting about in the 1950s, right?
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What if that moment never happened? What if cities back then said, to hell with you, you need us more than we need you, We're not giving you a nickel.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: They'd have to just front the money. They'd just have to ask their billionaires to build these stadiums, right?
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: The answer is we wouldn't have nearly as many modern stadiums. Stadiums would be a lot simpler than they currently are.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Biggest cities might have slightly more elaborate stadiums, but they would be a lot less elaborate than they are now.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And one of the consequences of that is that the teams would be less profitable and hence they would have lower franchise values than they have now.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And the players, by the way, would be playing in stadiums that had fewer people who were spending less money on the tickets.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: So they're what economists call marginal revenue product or the value of what they produce would be lower and the players' salaries would be lower.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: So, yes, that could happen, but it's a counterfactual.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And it's not something that somebody can be elected president and snap his or her fingers and get that to change.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: It's very useful to say gee if we didn't spend 800 million dollars on the stadium we could spend 800 million dollars improving our school system yeah if it were the case that building the stadium actually will produce more tax revenue than it will produce obligations financial obligations for the city then that then that actually enriches the city's ability to provide services
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: And so that's potentially a good thing. But the issue is, you're saying, by and large, the stadiums don't bring that kind of revenue to cities.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: That's right. That's right. I'm just not willing to say they never do, because I think there are exceptions.
--:-- Andrew Zimbalist: Well, I hope for the people of Buffalo that this is an exception.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Professor Andrew Zimbalist, He's with Smith College out in Northampton, Massachusetts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before him, you heard from Jerry Zaremsky. He's the Washington Bureau Chief for the Buffalo News.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find his work at buffalonews.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hadi Mawagdi produced today's show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Laura Bullard and Matthew Collette fact-checked it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The theme Shapiro and Paul Mounsey engineered.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I edited with Sean Ramos for him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Learn more at schwab.com.
