Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks at last year's groundbreaking for a new Buffalo Bills stadium in Orchard Park.
ALBANY — Imagine if a restaurant said you needed to pay for your chair before you could even sit and buy a meal.
That's essentially the scenario facing Buffalo Bills season ticket holders, who have been learning in recent days just how much they'll be charged for the mere right to keep paying for seats in the team's new stadium. On online forums, some fans say they're being required to pay as much as $50,000 for their so-called "personal seat licenses." My God.
Of course, the Bills aren't the only team to sock their fans with PSLs, which are one of the biggest schemes professional teams have going.
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But I'd argue they're particularly egregious in Buffalo, because state and local taxpayers are already kicking in more than a billion dollars to build the stadium, which will be publicly owned yet with all revenue going to the Bills' billionaire owners, Terry and Kim Pegula. It's a multi-faceted fleecing: Taxpayers fund the stadium now estimated to cost $1.7 billion, give away the profits and still get walloped if they want to see their team. (It will be fun to discover how much a beer will cost.)
Who's responsible? We have to blame Gov. Kathy Hochul, of course, who negotiated this supposed "investment" and had $600 million in state funding inserted into the budget at the last minute in 2022, preventing public debate and discussion. It was a bad deal, unethically executed. Erie County is kicking in another $250 million, and promises for future state and county upgrades raise the overall public total to beyond a billion.
A question: Given the extreme generosity of the agreement, which at the time was the largest cash subsidy for an NFL team in history, why didn't the governor protect fans from PSL madness?
"There was nothing stopping Gov. Hochul from saying, 'We'll give you a billion dollars but there has to be a cap on the amount charged for personal seat licenses," said Neil deMause, journalist and primary author of the excellent website "Field of Schemes," which documents the many outrageous ways the public funds sports venues.
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"Would that have been a fair deal?" deMause continued. "Probably not, particularly for taxpayers in Albany, Brooklyn and other parts of the state who won't use the stadium. But at least it would have been getting something back."
The Brooklyn-based writer has been tracking public stadium giveaways since the mid-1990s — the website started as a companion to the book of the same name — and considers the Bills deal an especially egregious example. In part, that's because it did an end-run around public input. But it's also because the scheme asks so much of taxpayers while demanding little of the Pegulas.
To make it all worse, the new stadium doesn't even promise much of an improvement, deMause said. It won't be, say, a dome in downtown Buffalo offering at least the possibility of added economic benefits. Instead, taxpayers are paying to build a more profitable version of Highmark, the existing stadium, in the same snow-belt Orchard Park location.
As deMause noted, towering piles of research show that stadiums don't meet economic development promises or justify taxpayer investment. That promises to be especially true of the new Bills stadium, given its location and public cost. He doesn't think the Bills were ever likely to move, by the way, rebutting one of the oft-heard justifications for the giveaway.
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Are taxpayers getting wise to the folly of the stadium game? Well, voters in the Kansas City area last week rejected a tax that would have built a new Royals baseball stadium and renovated the home of the football Chiefs. Voters in Nevada, meanwhile, are pushing for a referendum to overturn a stadium giveaway that would steal the Oakland A's for Las Vegas.
Polls also suggest New Yorkers would have rejected the Bills deal, if they'd had a chance to weigh in. They didn't, of course.
With the stadium scheduled to be ready for the 2026 season, outraged fans around Buffalo are reporting PSL costs of between $15,000 and $50,000, depending on the seat. One fan with eight seats told Buffalo TV station WRGZ that he'd have to pay $400,000 to hold on to them at the new stadium. That ... seems like a lot.
Somehow, though, the Bills have yet to fully detail how much they're asking fans to pay, which is remarkable. Legends Hospitality, the company contracted by the team to handle PSL sales, declined my request to discuss the topic, while a spokesman for Hochul noted that Erie County Stadium Corp., a branch of the state's economic development arm, finalized the agreement allowing the Bills to sell PSLs.
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Matt Janiszewski also said Hochul "negotiated a fair deal" but added that "the agreement does not give New York state any say in what the Bills charge for tickets or PSLs in the new stadium."
And that's among the reasons it's a terrible agreement.
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