This is an archived version of a Field of Schemes article. Comments on this page are closed. To find the current version of the article with updated comments, click here.
July 29, 2008
More questions over Yanks' land value claims
New York state assemblymember Richard Brodsky has joined U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich in questioning whether the Yankees inflated the value of their new stadium site in order to be eligible for tax-exempt bonds. As my Metro NY colleague Pat Arden reported yesterday, the city reported the value of the land under the stadium as $200 million to the IRS - which needed a high number to justify the team's pretend-our-bond-payments-are-property-taxes deal - but just $21 million to the state, which needed to determine that the replacement parkland being proposed was worth at least as much.
"The PILOTs that repay the stadium bonds are actually a tax payment which normally would go into the city's coffers to pay for schools, police and health care," Brodsky wrote to team president Randy Levine. (Well, sort of. Either that, or they're really private bonds payments, and a way to cheat the federal government out of $200 million in taxes.) "No citizen of our state can call the local assessor and have his or her property tax payments sent to pay off the mortgage on their new house on the ground that otherwise they will leave the state."
Brodsky is also questioning whether there will be affordable tickets at the new stadium, and whether the city officials that approved the project will get their own luxury suite, as is indicated in the team's lease. Mayor Michael Bloomberg first insisted yesterday that the city wasn't getting a suite, only to have his spokesperson later backtrack and admit it was, but that the mayor hadn't decided what to do with it.
UPDATE: Bloomberg's verbatim remarks, according to Arden: "In the new stadiums, the city will not have any boxes, 'cause they're not going to be city-owned stadiums. They'll be built with private money - that was the whole deal. But I don't know whether anybody has any boxes. You talk to them." In fact, the stadiums will be owned by the city - by the city-run Industrial Development Authority, to be specific, and leased to the teams, much as the existing stadiums are owned by the city Parks Department and leased to the teams.
