When it comes to sports stadiums, nearing lease expiration is a natural time for team shareholders to reevaluate their investment. If the league is healthy, a new stadium will be built. Where that stadium is built depends on the health of the city, as well as the often conflicting interests of ownership and local legislature. Sports teams offer huge profit potential, so the most attractive markets are populous and wealthy. When the city of Buffalo signed its last stadium contract, it was a great sports market. Not anymore. Buffalo is a city with two major sports franchises, but by basic liberal economic principles, it probably shouldn’t be. There’s just one problem — Americans really like football, and politicians are willing to cede a lot of ground to private enterprises to avoid public ire — even if that means sacrificing money that could be spent on public welfare.
In early April, New York state finalized its budget for the 2023 fiscal year. Slipped among expected pandemic investments, such as bonuses for frontline health care workers, was an eyebrow-raising $850 million subsidy to construct a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills, $250 million of which will come directly from Erie County. To Terry and Kim Pegula, owners of the Buffalo Bills, this is awesome, but from a public policy standpoint, it’s a pretty regressive move. We had come to believe that the days of sports owners extorting millions from taxpayers just to hold on to a beloved franchise were over. Evidently, they’re not. It’s been a long time since the public had to fork over this much for a stadium deal. Back in 2020, the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers unveiled the most expensive National Football League (NFL) stadium in history, totaling almost $5 billion. If you ignore the tax breaks they received, the project didn’t cost a public dime, so what exactly happened to all that progress when it came to Buffalo?
We can start to contextualize the stadium deal by analyzing the city of Buffalo and its unique kinship with other upstate cities, including ours at Binghamton University. In summary, Buffalo greatly expanded its economy a century ago due to wheat and steel, and it peaking in the 1950s as one of the most populous cities in the country. The Bills rolled into town a decade later. The greatest factor in Buffalo’s success was what physically connects it to our school — the Erie Canal, to which the Chenango Canal connects. Cities like Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo and Binghamton once benefited immensely from the canal’s commercial opportunity, but as trucks rendered the canal obsolete, the promise of these once great cities dried up. Buffalo was sidelined, and the city’s middle class fled to the suburbs. So too did the Bills, who in 1972 moved from downtown to the small wealthy suburb of Orchard Park, where they will stay under the new stadium deal.
But even from Orchard Park, the Bills are iconic. The Buffalo fan base is one of the most loyal and notorious in the NFL, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that they’re a central part of Western New York’s identity. A Buffalo native myself, I hold a Bills’ debit card and I’m not even a big fan. I just like being identifiable to other Western New Yorkers in public. It’s an ideal, small market — one which compensates for its size with passionate, unwavering support — a fact which only makes more tragic the extortion Bills fans face from the Pegula family over a beloved fixture of their community. Western New Yorkers are dissatisfied with the largest stadium tax subsidy in U.S. history, and for good reason. They believed they held greater leverage than was actually the case, but the reality of small sports markets is that there is a constant threat of relocation, and there will always be immensely profitable markets to be exploited. Not only is there no viable economic defense of the deal we struck, there never was one. All New York politicians need to hear is the threat of the team leaving their city to front the money and fall into obedience.
That’s how Erie County and the city of Buffalo ended up footing a $250 million “Buffalo Bill” of their own. Buffalo was the third-poorest city in the nation as of 2019, with a mere quarter-million inhabitants but two major sports franchises, the Buffalo Sabres being the other. In a more natural order, Buffalo would cede its sports teams and redefine itself from the ground up, developing human capital through education and finding a new economic niche. But who could sign off on such a thing if it meant losing the beloved Bills? Fixing this problem would serve as an acknowledgment that Buffalo will never return to its prosperous past, but politicians still hold a responsibility to act in the best interests of their constituents. My city is clinging to an all-consuming intangible — its “relevance.” Rationalizing $850 million public dollars for a football stadium can only get you so far, and at some point it becomes indicative of goals that align directly against the needs of your poorest inhabitants. There’s a genuine fear that losing the Bills will forsake the city, but if Erie County truly can’t find a better way to use $250 million to help the people, have we not already been forsaken by our politicians?
When leaders favor prestige over utility, ordinary people suffer. This is, of course, not isolated to Buffalo. Even in our own University, we so often find a veneer of relevance or prestige standing as a roadblock to actual progress. A great example is the baseball complex we recently constructed. While some might see a $60 million anonymous donation toward a baseball complex as a great act of altruism, I think it’s all pretty silly. It illustrates the disconnect between the priorities of those empowered and the rest of us. In truth, collegiate athletic investments are almost never an efficient way to spend money if your priority is serving your student and faculty body. Whenever I step into our Events Center, I’m always taken aback by how much money we throw at a program that has not, in 21 years of Division I competition, produced one single National Basketball Association player appearance.
To be clear, BU’s problem is relatively small when compared to some other schools across the country, but we’re still wasting a significant amount of money. From the perspective of a fan, it would hurt to see the grandiosity of student athletics diminished, but when I consider the life-changing sums that could be reinvested, I could stay content with even the departure of the Buffalo Bills.
When asked about the new baseball complex in 2020, former SUNY Chancellor Kristina Johnson said, “As a former Division I athlete, I know that the lessons sports teach — teamwork, discipline and collaboration toward a common goal — are invaluable life lessons that will be supported by this gift.” In fairness, it can be hard to place a monetary value on the merits she outlined, but I can confidently say that, in terms of virtues taught, BU’s mysterious benefactor is probably not getting the most bang for their buck.
Jacob Wisnock is a freshman majoring in political science.