Somewhere over the Railyards

If you’re not a New York Jets fan, or a New Yorker, the significance of the West Side Stadium Scam (the “WSSS”) might not be as important to you as it is to others. However, we should review the WSSS for the lessons we can learn from it.

Why do I call it a “scam?” Well, because it is. It’s a shameful example of a big business (the Jets) trying to coerce tax payers into footing the bill for a new stadium when that cost should be borne by the franchise itself. It’s an equally shameful example of some politicians urinating on their constiuents’ legs and telling them its raining. To understand all of this, we need a little back story.

The Backstory

The Jets, an NFL football franchise, have been playing football in Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey for about twenty years. The Jets used to play football at Shea Stadium, in Flushing, New York but, for reasons that are not important to the present discussion, moved their games to Giants Stadium in the mid-1980s. To hear some Jets fans tell it, the poor, poor Jets have been without a “home” for twenty years because they don’t have their “own” stadium. They have to play in the blue-and-red colored environs of Giants Stadium, rather than in a green-and-white facility that would reflect the Jets colors (and, presumably, the team’s spirit.)

The Jets offered to buy a large chunk of land on the West Side of Manhattan Island, on which is situated an area known as “the railyards.” This is where a number of train tracks that traverse Manhattan converge. The Jets proposed building a stadium/convention center in this location, over the railyards, which would also include offices and space for other commercial ventures. The stadium was to be a state-of-the-art facility, with a retractable roof and numerous configurations that would enable New York to host larger events than it is presently able to host in the Javitts Center, which is New York’s current convention center. (For some perspective, the Javitts Center is now the 16th largest convention center in the United States. For many New Yorkers, having the 16th largest anything is cause for grave concern and immediate action to ensure that New York has the Number One largest whatever.)

In conjunction with the Jets’ stadium proposal, the powers that be also submitted a bid for the Summer Olympics in 2012. Inextricably tied into this bid was the Jets proposed stadium. New York (or at least Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki) wanted the Olympics, and promised a facility worthy of hosting them if Olympic Site Selection committee chose New York as the venue for the 2012 Olympics.

The Fallacy of the Olympic Bid

Before addressing the meat of this issue, let me go on record as saying that holding the Olympics in New York would be a logistical nightmare and more than just a minor inconvenience to the citizens of the City and the surrounding areas. Getting into and out of the city now, on a good day, can be a nightmare. With the Olympics in town, the City would simply shut down and the people who work in and around the city would have to plan to take a month off. But that’s a topic for another day.

The powers that be all claimed that the West Side Stadium was necessary to ensure that New York was awarded the 2012 Olympics. This claim is simply not accurate. No member of any Olympic site selection committe, or any other Olympic-related entity, ever indicated that if New York built the West Side Stadium, New York would receive the 2012 Olympics.

To be sure, without the stadium, New York’s chances of being awarded the Olympics would be reduced, but nothing was ever guaranteed even if the stadium were built. Indeed, it was entirely possible (and probably more likely) that New York could build the West Side Stadium and yet never be awarded the Olympics. With cities like London, Paris and Moscow in the running, all of which are more centrally located with respect to the rest of the world than is New York (and, save for Paris, none of which come with some of the arrogant sense of entitlement that America tends to project to the rest of the world), it came as no surprise that Paris and London were running one- and two- with the selection committee.

Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki both made the case for the stadium on the back of the potential for an Olympic bid that they made seem more real than it was. The reality is that the politicians were asking the people to foot a significant portion of the bill for the stadium on the empty promise of the possibility of an award of the Olympics to New York. (By the way, no one has yet gotten a hold of a firm handle on the actual price of the stadium. Cost estimates have run in the range of $800 million to $2.4 billion, with taxpayers responsible for a large portion.)

Ultimately, the PACB (the control board responsible for giving approval to the funding of the stadium) declined to vote on the measure at its most recent meeting. As a result, the building process if stalled and, most likely, dead in the water. Now, the Governor and the Mayor are decrying the lost opportunity to get the 2012 Olympics, as if the PACB had thrown it away. It did not. Although the other two voters on the PACB (Pataki is the third) were motivated by their own political self-interest in declining to vote for funding the stadium, the reality is that they were correct in stating that there remain too many questions that are unresolved and that should be resolved prior to the casting of any fuding vote, including the actual financial impact on taxpayers, and the actual impact of the additional commercial space in mid-town Manhattan on the continuing efforts to revitalize lower Manhattan and the area where the World Trade Center once stood. With those questions, and many more like them, still unanswered, it made no sense to vote on the Jets’ proposed stadium simply to perpetuate the fallacy that New York was going to get the Olympics as long as the West Side Stadium was built.

The “Jets Need A Home” Fallacy

Many sports-radio talk-show hosts are all over the argument that the poor, poor Jets need a home. Some even attribute the Jets failure to make it to the Super Bowl since 1969 to the fact that they are without a home. (Never mind that the Jets called Shea Stadium home from 1970 through 1985 and didn’t make a Super Bowl in those years. And let’s not forget that the Cleveland Browns have never made it to a Super Bowl despite having their own home for both periods of their existence (for the football fans among us, those are the pre-Ravens and post-Ravens Browns)).

It seems to be the most nonsensical justification for a stadium imaginable. These poor, poor football players, who make hundreds of thousands of dollars more in a year than I’m likely to see in my lifetime, can’t get “up” for a game because they’re not playing in their own “home.” Only a stadium festooned in green-and-white will be sufficiently inspiring for the Jets to compete in the NFL. What rubbish.

It is obvious that NFL players don’t need colorful pennants, cheerleaders, and the entire student body behind them to motivate them. It’s the NFL, for goodness sake. Practically every home game is a sellout and is attended by rabid fans who are willing to go shirtless in January and paint various body parts in team colors in order to motivate the team. From Raider Nation in California to The Dawg Pound in Cleveland, to the Lambeau Leap in Green Bay, neither the players nor the fans need a “home of their own” to get motivated for games. Would a green-and-white stadium make the Jets fans care any more than they already do? On the flip side, a green-and-white stadium is not going to make one bit of difference in whether I attend a game, or paint my chest green. The game’s the thing, not the building in which it is played.

By the way, this proposed new building on the West Side eliminated one very significant tradition from the Jets fans’ pre-game rituals. No tailgating. There was not going to be the room that exists at Giants Stadium at the proposed West Side Stadium, so no tailgating. No games of touch football in the parking lot. No barbecues going all afternoon long. No contests on who’s got the best pre-game spread. No road trips, with a caravan of cars, to the stadium on game day. Did anyone bother to actually ask the fans whether they wanted to sacrifice this significant aspect of Game Day for a proposed new "home"?

Nevertheless, the tax payers were being asked to foot the bill for a new stadium so that the Jets could finally have a new home. However, whether it’s one dollar, or one billion dollars, I don’t believe for one second that any stadium should be built with taxpayer money -- especially in this day and age. With ticket prices running at $50 a pop for the cheap seats, let’s be real. In a 70,000 seat stadium, even if every ticket was priced at $50 a piece (like that would happen), the team would take in 3.5 million dollars for each game. For eight home games (not counting playoffs), the team would take in $28 million from ticket sales alone. That doesn’t count TV revenues (which are substantial), revenues generated by parking (last game I went to, it cost $20 to park -- and I know they’re not building any more parking lots), concessions, the sale of team paraphenalia (who do you think gets part of the excess from that $5 hat that you can buy at the stadium for $25?) and the revenues from advertising. Believe me, neither the Jets, nor any other sports team, needs taxpayer help to build a new facility.

It’s shameful to even ask Joe Lunchbucket to contribute dime one to a new facility, whether the request is in the guise of building a team “home,” or cloaked in the “spirit of competition” embodied by the “Olympic Dream.” Mr. Johnson, the owner of the Jets, is not a poor man. He’s got a couple nickels to rub together. I’m sure that he can finance a stadium anywhere he wants. He can pick anywhere in New Jersey, or go back to New York and pick from Manhattan, Flushing, Queens, or out on Long Island, where the Jets “fan base” supposedly is. (By the way, going back to New York would disregard the fact that Giants Stadium sells out for the Jets for each and every home game). If Mr. Johnson is having difficulties putting together financing, I’m sure someone can refer him to the Giants, who are financing their own new “home,” or the Yankees, who are also financing their own new “home.” It can be done. Just because Mr. Johnson doesn’t want to pay the freight all by himself doesn’t justify the demand that the taxpayers help him do it.

At the very least, the idea of taxpayer contribution should be put to the taxpayers themselves. In fact, let’s pick a number -- $300 million dollars. Let’s ask the taxpayers for that much money (with 8 million New Yorkers, it would amount to about $37.50 from each New Yorker -- less than the price of one ticket to one game). Then, let’s ask them whether they’d like to spend the $300 million on a new stadium for the Jets -- or salary increases for teachers -- or 10,000 new police officers, at starting salaries of $30,000 per year -- or 10 new state-of-the-art firehouses. I mean, if you want taxpayer money, let’s ask them whether they want to give it and, if so, where they want it spent.

Fortunately, taxpayers and fans alike avoided the ramifications of this scam, although not because anyone was actually trying to protect these people, who are the ones who would be most affected by it. I can only hope that the lessons that can be learned from this whole disaster will not be forgotten the next time the proposal for a new stadium (or some other boondoggle), funded by taxpayers with the promise of accomplishing some ethereal goal, comes around.