Tag: Buffalo Bills

Jun 12

2022

Monday Morning Read

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Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter, an excerpt from which you’ll find below. Reinvent Albany has a good rundown of the good and bad of the session’s final flurry.  Among the bad: a $10 billion allocation, negotiated in the dark, to provide huge subsidies to the semiconductor industry. There’s good analysis here and here. New York Focus has more, on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s slush funds and lack of transparency. The state Legislature passed a two-year moratorium on cryptomining. Will Hochul sign or veto the measure? The industry has given big to her campaign and that of her running mate. So,[...]

Posted 2 years ago

May 15

2022

Monday Morning Read

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Below is the “What I’m Reading” section of Jim Heaney’s WeeklyPost, which is delivered via email each Sunday morning. The newsletter is free; if you’re not a subscriber, you can sign up here. The Buffalo News reported on the cost of personal seat licenses to purchase season tickets to Bills games at the new stadium. A figure of $1,000 a ticket was bandied during negotiations to determine how stadium constriction costs would be divvied up. With that decided, the Bills floated PSL charges through a fan survey, and they’re a lot more than $1,000. PSLs for upper end zones seats can be had for under[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Apr 26

2022

Titans’ stadium subsidy surpasses Bills deal

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Well, that didn’t take long. A month after Western New York became home to the largest public subsidy in the history of pro sports stadiums, officials in Nashville, Tennessee are preparing to spend even more taxpayer money to build a new riverfront home for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans.  Tennessee state lawmakers last week approved $500 million in bonds for a new enclosed football stadium that is expected to cost between $1.9 billion and $2.2 billion.  The total public cost for the project could hit $1.2 billion, with officials in the Metro Nashville government considering approval of another $700 million in[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Apr 17

2022

Monday Morning Read

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Below is an updated version of the “What I’m Reading” section of the WeeklyPost newsletter that is emailed to subscribers each Sunday morning. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. There’s a lot for Kathy Hochul to fix as governor, including corruption and a lack of transparency in state government. (I think she’s off to a lousy start on both fronts.) But there’s also the issue of toxic masculinity in Albany, a topic The New York Times explored in a story Sunday. An interesting read. Two Buffalo News stories caught my eye last week: The Western New York economy is not recovering from[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Apr 13

2022

The Poloncarz exchange with stadium critic

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Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz didn’t talk about a new Buffalo Bills stadium while county and state officials were still negotiating terms of an agreement with the team.  With the $1.4 billion stadium deal now approved as part of the new state budget, Poloncarz had a lot more to say this week.  Well, he didn’t actually “say” anything. Instead, he Tweeted .  On Monday, Poloncarz defended the stadium plan that will cost state and county taxpayers at least $1.13 billion over a 30-year lease term in a series of Twitter exchanges between him and Dr. Ryan Miller, a supporter of[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Apr 10

2022

Monday Morning Read

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Below is the latest “What I’m Reading” portion of our email newsletter that publishes every Sunday. You can subscribe for free here. Let’s discuss “opportunity costs” for a few minutes. An opportunity cost is when you spend money on something at the expense of spending it on something else. An example: You’ve got $100 to spend. You put it towards a nice dinner rather than, say, buying a new winter jacket. That said, the decision by state — and soon, county officials — to spend $1.13 billion to build and maintain a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills involves a huge opportunity[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Apr 3

2022

Monday Morning Read

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This week’s reposting of the “What I’m Reading” section of my weekly newsletter is topped by a couple of  fresh items that published in newspapers Sunday. You can subscribe to DailyPost here. It’s free and arrives via email at 6 a.m. every Sunday. I devoted the entire newsletter this week to coverage of the Bills stadium deal, which has generated a lot of attention – and press – across the state and beyond. For perspective, consider this story from USA Today. The Tennessee Titans are planning a new stadium and the speaker of the state House of Representatives told a[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Mar 30

2022

Conflicting cost estimates to rehab stadium

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This story was updated Friday, April 1, at 12:39 p.m. Last November, a consultant working for New York State said it would cost $862 million to renovate the current home of the Buffalo Bills, Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park.  That number was often cited by team representatives and local and state officials as they advocated for what they said was a more cost-effective alternative: a new $1.4 billion stadium. “Many people believe you can renovate the stadium,” Jim Wilkinson, a spokesperson for Pegula Sports and Entertainment, told the Buffalo News in August. “That’s just not realistic.” Erie County Executive Mark[...]

Posted 2 years ago
Investigative Post

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