Dan Steinberg

CitiMets: A Corporate Name for a Corporate Game

As a lifelong New Yorker and avid baseball fan, I've dreaded the day that a local ballpark would be named after a bank. But today I'm feeling more ripped off than sentimental since the Mets are poised to make over $300 million by selling the name of a stadium that actually belongs to the city. Like many other hidden subsidies, this one can be found in the lease agreement.

Good Jobs New York has repeatedly criticized the Bloomberg Administration for offering the Yankees and Mets stadium-related subsidies worth hundreds of millions of dollars and failing to structure some sort of guaranteed revenue stream to flow from the ballparks to the city. The teams will no longer pay rent, and the money paid "in-lieu-of" property taxes will be used to pay off debt issued to finance the stadiums.

Now the Mets have sold the name of the stadium they won't even own thanks to a clause in the team's lease agreement in which the city handed over all stadium revenues. This seems exceedingly generous, especially considering that the Mets are benefiting from $530 million in tax-exempt bonds to build the stadium, various city and state tax breaks, an agreement allowing the team to retain more parking revenues, and an infrastructure contribution of $90 million from the city (and $75 million more from the state).

If the name of an institution with great symbolic importance has to be sold, the city should have at least split the profits as was done in San Jose. New Yorkers should expect more in return for helping to pay for a stadium with fewer seats and higher ticket prices--a stadium that will direct enormous income to a relatively small number of players and owners who are likely to spend much of this money outside the local economy.

Last week voters in Seattle and Sacramento rejected plans to waste public subsidies on stadiums. One can only imagine how New Yorkers would have voted if a similar initiative was on the ballot here.

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Posted at 12:32 PM, Nov 14, 2006 in Fiscal Responsibility | New York
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