Neil deMause: The Website

I’ve been digging into claims of economic windfalls from sporting events for quite a while, so why quit now? Today, I investigate New York City’s claims that the All-Star Game will generate $148 million for the local economy, this time with the help of an eminent tourism expert:

Don’t be so sure, says John Crompton, author of a 2006 paper detailing what he calls “mischievous procedures” in economic impact studies that reflect their genesis as more PR documents than scientific treatises. “The All-Star Game, there’s no question people will come to town for that,” he says. Nonetheless, he questions how many of the “new” visitors will merely displace existing tourists who’ll avoid New York because the hotels are full during All-Star week: “If there was no All-Star Game, would those hotels still be at 80% [capacity]? If the answer is yes, then you haven’t added to the economic impact, you have merely displaced some other folks who would have come if there was no game.”

…and still more, including new figures for the amount of public subsidy the Yanks would be getting. (And if you’re worried about the technical details being too dry, note that I’m now officially “someone who can write about [stadium finance] without making any eyes bleed.”)

The taxpayer cost of the Yankees’ latest request for city bonds went up on Friday, as the city Independent Budget Office released a more detailed analysis of just how much tax revenue will be lost if the Family Steinbrenner is allowed to use tax-exempt bonds to finance an additional $350 million in construction costs. The total public price tag, according to IBO deputy director George Sweeting: $82.9 million, with $3.6 million coming from city coffers, $6.7 million from Albany, and the remaining $72.6 million from the feds. As for the Yanks, according to Sweeting, they’d pocket $61.9 million in savings. (Apparently the tax-exempt bond racket requires cutting bondholders in on a sizable piece of the action.)… [read more]

More on the New York Yankees’ latest demands for city-backed bonds…

When the rich want to get richer off the public till, one trick is to make the theft so boring that only a trained accountant could understand it without dozing off. If Ken Lay had tried to pump up Enron’s stock by, say, floating rubber checks, he would have been tabloid fodder from Day 1; instead, nobody noticed until it was too late, largely because manipulating “stranded costs” and other nuances of the electricity markets made even regulators’ eyes glaze over… [read more]

With the cost of the New York Yankees’s new stadium project running close to $2 billion, the team has asked the city for another $350 million in city-backed tax-exempt bonds to help raise money for the project. I break down the numbers for the Village Voice, and also examine whether the whole thing might be illegal:

Next time you’re tempted to conclude that New York’s state legislature is entirely useless, remember this: State Assemblymember Richard Brodsky broke the news on Tuesday that the Yankees are looking to get an additional $350 million in city tax-exempt bonds for their new stadium, currently under construction in the Bronx.

“The explosion of public debt issued by obscure semi-public and private institutions is reaching unmanageable proportions,” declared Brodsky, chair of the committee overseeing public authorities. “The Yankee Stadium financing may or may not be a good thing, but it certainly should be done in the light of day.”

In the interest of daylight, then: The $350 million the Yanks are seeking would be on top of the $940 million in city bonds the team already got in 2006… [read more]

The new stadiums for the Mets and Yankees are a year away from completion, and they’re costing less and creating fewer headaches for local residents than expected. Just kidding!

When Mets and Yankees fans arrive for the start of the new season, the teams’ past and future will be on display side by side—and not just Pedro Martinez and Johan Santana or Andy Pettitte and Joba Chamberlain. At a record-shattering price tag of more than $2.5 billion, twin homes for New York’s ball clubs are being readied for their 2009 openings—and in the Bronx in particular, the repercussions are affecting not just the city treasury but the local neighborhood… [read more]

Don’t believe anything you read on the front page of the New York Post, no matter how amusing the headline is:

Today’s front-page Post “exclusive” reports that the Yankees and Mets are in “secret talks” to buy the remnants of Yankee and Shea Stadiums so the teams can sell off the scrap to souvenir-hunting fans. In the story inside, memorabilia expert Mike Heffner raves about the value of New York baseball relics, speculating that in the case of Yankee Stadium, “Each brick could sell for $100 to $300. I doubt we’d have any trouble selling every seat in the house for as much as $1,000.”

Even given the low bar for tabloid exclusives, not much of this is news… [read more]

Just got word that Field of Schemes: The Next Generation (ed. note: not the actual title) is now shipping from Bison Books’ website, notwithstanding the official release date being a month away. This edition has all the stadium-swindley goodness of the original FoS, plus four new chapters and annotations to the original chapters that make the whole thing clock in at a hefty 400-plus pages.

For more on this, visit fieldofschemes.com. And if you’re a potential book reviewer, radio producer, or bookstore that might want to host a speaking/signing, drop me an e-mail. (Bookstores, you might want to get one of your staffers to send the e-mail; I know how hard it is for brick and mortar to type.)

It’s been a while since I’ve had an excuse to do a new tally of the public costs of the Yankees and Mets deals, so I was pleased to see New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg put his foot in his mouth about the stadiums last week:

On his weekly radio show Friday, Mayor Bloomberg was asked why the city was subsidizing stadiums for the Mets and Yankees. His response: “The city and the state, to my recollection, each put in $75 million” for each new stadium — a mere fraction of the total cost. “It was a really good deal,” he added.

For a data-crazed mayor, Bloomberg can be awfully loose with his numbers… [read more]

I’ve also put up a new spreadsheet of the public/private cost calculations underlying this article, for those interested.

The New York city council debate over whether to continue Madison Square Garden’s $11-million-a-year exemption from property taxes - which was supposed to end in 1992, but somebody forgot to write that into the legislation - has not exactly covered either side in glory:

t was a strange scene even by City Council standards: representatives of Madison Square Garden testifying last week that they should get to keep their perpetual tax exemption because the city is throwing so much money at its other sports teams — more than $1.3 billion, by their count — that the Knicks and Rangers might as well share in the boodle.

Arguing that “all the other kids are getting one” isn’t exactly new for sports teams in search of public subsidies; Rudy Giuliani, after all, once asserted the Yankees needed a new, city-built stadium to let them compete with the (no guffawing) Baltimore Orioles… [read more]

My latest Metro New York op-ed (at 400 words apiece, they’re really more op-aphorisms) takes a shot at digging beneath the surface of baseball’s steroid scandal, or at least coming up with some new topics of conversation aside from whether the Yankees’ World Series titles are “tainted” now that Chuck Knoblauch may have been air-mailing throws into the seats with a juiced right arm:

A few items that were largely missed amid the acres of newsprint devoted to baseball’s latest steroid mess:

Did anyone really expect that the big names in baseball’s drug report would be a couple of aging pitchers? The steroid-abuser stereotype has always been that of an over-muscled batter, but the Mitchell report’s drift net snagged a lot of Ryan Franklins and Kent Merckers along with the Bondses and Cansecos… [read more]