The Sabres may be moving out of Buffalo!
The Sabres aren’t moving out of Buffalo!
The Buffalo Sabres have no intention of leaving Buffalo.
“I don’t even think that’s a reasonable expectation,” Sabres COO Pete Guelli said.
The Sabres aren’t moving out of Buffalo, but that doesn’t mean they won’t demand public money to get them to sign a new lease to keep them from moving out of Buffalo!
“Our goal is to kind of sit down with the county to stay in the city and work out a solution that’s best for everybody.”
But as you may remember, New York state and Erie County gave the Bills and Pegula Sports a combined $800 million for the new stadium, and multiple sources have told 2 On Your Side that renovations at KeyBank Center could range between 75 and 200 million dollars.
Will the organization be able to make those types of renovations, especially if it’s in that ballpark? Will the organization need assistance from New York State to do that?
“I don’t have that answer yet either. I think the partnership that we set up here at the stadium has been beneficial to everybody involved, so I wouldn’t rule it out.”
WTF is actually going on here: Earlier this week, Erie County executive Mark Poloncarz, one of the architects of the Bills stadium deal that gave the Pegulas (who own the Sabres as well) $250 million in county money along with $750 million in state money, declared that he wants to end the county’s lease on the Sabres arena, which is owned by the city of Buffalo but leased to the county and then subleased to the Pegulas. (I think. The Spectrum News article linked above says, “Erie County owns KeyBank Center, leasing it from the City of Buffalo,” which is nonsensical; Wikipedia and this article both say Erie County owns the arena; I’m still working on getting hold of a copy of the actual lease.)
The Sabres’ lease, which automatically renews this fall for another five years unless the Pegulas opt out, requires the team owners to pay for all interior upgrades, while the county pays for all exterior improvements. And the arena needs up to $200 million in renovations, look, it says right here in this graphic:
Interior renovations? Exterior renovations? Renovations that are needed to keep the place from falling down, renovations that are needed so the Pegulas can charge more money for luxury suites? Who knows! WGRZ had to make that “ripped piece of paper” graphic, no time to waste on more research!
As for Sabres COO Guelli, I watched the WGRZ interview with him so you don’t have to, and he said:
“That’s not our intention to go anywhere.”
And also:
“That’s where things are not quite as simple. Because basically we would have to walk away from the lease, the way it’s currently structured…
“We’re not looking for [the city and county] to contribute beyond their means.”…
Will the organization need assistance from New York State to do that?
“I don’t have that answer yet either. I think the partnership that we set up here at the stadium has been beneficial to everybody involved, so I wouldn’t rule it out.”
So basically: The Sabres’ lease is expiring, and a key bargaining point will be who will pay for what future renovations. The team COO says the Pegulas aren’t threatening to move, but are threatening to “walk away” from their lease and … go skate on frozen-over Lake Erie? Refuse to leave or sign a lease and become squatters? The exact details are left to your imagination, which is how non-threat threats always work: If you spell out exactly what you’re threatening to do, people start asking whether it’s feasible or ethical or a violation of basic human rights. But if you just allude to how you wouldn’t want anything to happen to the team, then nobody raises any pesky questions. At least, not if they know what’s good for them, isn’t that right, Dino?
according to a different local news article, the ownership is incredibly complicated with multiple subleases involved, but the property itself seems to belong to the city.
>“The city owns the land, the county owns the building and is leasing it from the city, which is then subleased to an organization that subleases it to the Sabres,” Poloncarz said. “My goal is to eventually get the county out of that.”
https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/who-will-own-keybank-center-after-erie-countys-lease-expires
Right, we’re back at “the county owns the building and is leasing it from the city,” which is not how either ownership or leasing works.
the land itself is definitely owned by the buffalo urban renewal agency.
paytax.erie.gov->parcel search->tax map id 1402001220500002001110
cannot confirm the rest, but apparently there is some convoluted agreement where a city agency owns the land, the county owns the building itself, and then various leases and subleases exist to allow the anchor tenant use of the property.
If the county owns the building, though, “getting out of the arena business” is not that simple.
I’ll report back here if I can find anything else out.
I think the legal framework is a preserved fossil of local political trends from the mid-1990s, which was for Erie County to absorb the City government’s financial albatrosses with perceived (rightly or wrongly) regional benefit. County took outright ownership of the convention center; I think the framework of the City owning the arena land and the County owning the building was to facilitate County footing the bill for construction, but allowing the City to control the future of the land for when the day comes that the arena no longer exists.
On the other hand, this has been a non-issue for almost 30 years. The County Exec picking this moment to noisily declare “not it” tells me that team ownership is asking County to foot the bill for renovations.
I generally don’t think the legal framework is all that important nor will encumber any future deal. The overall trend is for taxpayers to get fleeced; the exact LLC through which it happens is a rounding error. If County wants the state to kick in most of the funds, and Kathy Hochul agrees, it will get done that way without regard to a 1990s legal framework (or common sense, or legitimate uses for taxpayer money). It did lead to this canary-in-the-coal-mine moment; I don’t think we would have been hearing about this now / this year if the County Exec didn’t feel the need to make a noisy exit.
Sabres want free money to upgrade their arena, but they know threatening to move is bad for marketing, but not threatening to move takes away their leverage. So they did both. A bold strategy.
Worthy of Schrödinger!
Is Schrödinger that kid who plays the piano in Charley Brown’s Christmas?
You’re both right and wrong, at the same time.
Schrödinger Is the guy with the cat who never know where the cat is
He absolutely knows where the cat is. That’s like the only thing he knows for sure about the cat.
He does not know the location of the cat’s immortal soul.
The Pegulas didn’t have to threaten anything to get a new football stadium. Whatever they did will probably work again. Here, have a new hockey arena because… Gov. Hochul is from western New York!
A link to an NPR article critical of the Trump administration. So appropriate for this site. Why don’t your add some MSNBC or CNN pieces as well and round out your connections to the slanted legacy media. I really enjoy your site Neil, when you stay in your lane (which you are damn good at) and don’t go off topic and out-of-way to remind us of your Left leanings.
Thanks for the concern trolling, but if you think that political misdeeds are off-topic, you have entirely missed the point of this site.
D’s and R’s are both guilty of wasting the public dollar. Just seems like you go out of your way to take swipes at this administration, like it’s a requirement to maintain membership in the Legacy Media Monthly Cub. How many times did you get shots in on ol’ Joe over the last 4 illustrious years? I expect slanted coverage from Fox and CNN, they’re biased to a fault. Too bad that is also prevalent on a stadium economic blog such as yours.
Unfortunately the Bills owner isn’t donald trump. If the NFL had allowed trump to buy the Bills, trump might have been satisfied as an NFL owner and never run for President. A couple billion from New York State for a retractable dome for the trump Bills would have been a great deal if it kept the very stable genius far away from the Oval Office.
Given that the Sabres haven’t even made the playoffs since Obama’s first term, holding the “we might need to eventually explore relocation” card over the city is a hell of a gambit.
Given the inherent monopolistic structure of major league sports in North America, leverage is granted to owners despite how putrid their product may be on the court, field, pitch, or ice. And if fans or corporations choose not to financially “support” a losing campaign, even one that has spanned more than a dozen years, they are still held to a standard for the “privilege” of having a major league team as if that denotes some facet of the quality of life in the city or region.
Sad as it is the gambit is merely one of the plays allowed by this structure that has enabled billionaires to dictate public policy and spending. While Buffalo has passionate fans that go back to 1970, it is still the second smallest US metro area in the NHL and the margin of error for such franchises is very small lest Toronto pick up their coveted second team.
Not just the second smallest metro area in the league, but one that has been gradually shrinking for basically 50 years. This isn’t Jacksonville, which started off from an even smaller footprint than Buffalo when it got its first “major league” franchise way back when, but has since far surpassed Buffalo (and two other NFL markets) in terms of population and corporate presence.
This is a possibility that other small markets don’t like to acknowledge (and with good reason), but given the struggles of other two-team markets like New Orleans — and even one-horse sports towns like Winnipeg and Memphis — but all these places may not have the local and regional resources to “support” all these teams over the long-term. And not just in terms of the number of tickets sold, either; it’s maybe even more so about their abilities to keep conjuring up nine-figure subsidies to make their presence in town possible.
“lest Toronto pick up their coveted second team”??? The Maple Leafs will fight like hell to keep that from ever happening. It’s not a credible threat.
As for the US, Pegula would have a lot of work to do to convince anyone but the most gullible people that there is a US market to which the team can be easily moved and would make a profit. The only obvious answer there is Houston, where the problem is that the Rockets owner controls the arena and, so far, neither wants to buy an NHL team nor let a team owned by someone else share the arena.
Pegulas own Buffalo, tightening the screws after hundreds of millions of $$$. Good Luck Buffalo!
hahahaha
Well always Hamilton down the road with the Oak View group and Tie Liewieke:
https://www.oakviewgroup.com/canada/hamiltonarena/