We are living through an economic catastrophe sparked by reckless corporate indebtedness, rubber-stamped by toothless government oversight verging on complicity. Now more than ever, the public deserves thorough scrutiny of how public dollars and revenue are used and safeguarded.
This is why the Bloomberg administration is wrong to push a vote to grant additional tax-exempt bonds to highly-profitable private corporations like Yankees and the Mets.
The city’s Industrial Development Board (IDA) is scheduled to vote on a request by the Yankees for $259 million in tax-exempt bonds as well as one by the Mets for $83 million.
The Yankees already landed close to one billion in tax-exempt bonds for its new stadium. These bonds are sold by the IDA and backed by the Yankees through payments over the course of decades, minus the taxes that would have been paid to the city.
But the dispute has been whether these bonds were issued through a legal and honest process. Assemblyman Richard Brodsky has charged that the city’s Department of Finance violated laws by using inconsistent and inflated property assessments at the prodding of the Yankees.
At a hearing yesterday, both Yankees President Randy Levine and IDA head Seth Pinsky called the charges political theater. Yet an email by a former City Hall point person bears looking at: “I don’t want to get into this much further on email but we have to take into consideration that the AV [assessed value] is only so high because we’re choosing a methodology to support the tax-exempt financing,” Michael Kalt wrote in 2005.
Aside from disputing Brodsky’s claims of cooked numbers, Pinksy and Levine touted the benefits of the new stadium, among them jobs, an $800,000 annual community grant and transferring stadium maintenance costs to the Yankees.
Indeed, thousands of construction jobs are created. But those jobs are temporary. And while the Yankees project that they will eventually introduce more than 1,000 new seasonal jobs, there are only a handful—57—of permanent positions.
The city’s Independent Budget Office says that the job numbers seem to pale against the investments the city is making and breaks the Yankees are getting. Its analysis of the savings Yankees are receiving: a whopping $787 million. For the Mets, it’s $513 million.
In light of all the serious and troubling questions that have surfaced, it would be absolutely unfair for the IDA to proceed with any approvals until an independent investigation delivers clear answers.
We are living through an economic catastrophe sparked by reckless corporate indebtedness, rubber-stamped by toothless government oversight verging on complicity. Now more than ever, the public deserves thorough scrutiny of how public dollars and revenue are used and safeguarded.
This is why the Bloomberg administration is wrong to push a vote to grant additional tax-exempt bonds to highly-profitable private corporations like Yankees and the Mets.
The city’s Industrial Development Board (IDA) is scheduled to vote on a request by the Yankees for $259 million in tax-exempt bonds as well as one by the Mets for $83 million.
The Yankees already landed close to one billion in tax-exempt bonds for its new stadium. These bonds are sold by the IDA and backed by the Yankees through payments over the course of decades, minus the taxes that would have been paid to the city.
But the dispute has been whether these bonds were issued through a legal and honest process. Assemblyman Richard Brodsky has charged that the city’s Department of Finance violated laws by using inconsistent and inflated property assessments at the prodding of the Yankees.
At a hearing yesterday, both Yankees President Randy Levine and IDA head Seth Pinsky called the charges political theater. Yet an email by a former City Hall point person bears looking at: “I don’t want to get into this much further on email but we have to take into consideration that the AV [assessed value] is only so high because we’re choosing a methodology to support the tax-exempt financing,” Michael Kalt wrote in 2005.
Aside from disputing Brodsky’s claims of cooked numbers, Pinksy and Levine touted the benefits of the new stadium, among them jobs, an $800,000 annual community grant and transferring stadium maintenance costs to the Yankees.
