2/8/6, amNewYork: "Group: Yanks' stadium could cost taxpayers $481M"

Group: Yanks' stadium could cost taxpayers $481M
By MICHAEL CLANCY
amNewYork City Editor

February 8, 2006

Taxpayers could cough up half a billion dollars to help George Steinbrenner build a new stadium for the Yankees, a government watchdog group warned Tuesday. But Yankees' brass dismissed the group's report as "wrong" and "misleading."

Good Jobs New York estimated that the Bronx Bombers' new palace would cost $481 million in public subsidies when infrastructure improvements, demolition costs, tax breaks and other incentives are added up.

"We are not anti-development," said Bettina Damiani, the watchdog group's project director. "But the most powerful and wealthy sports franchise is asking for almost half a billion worth of subsidies in the country's poorest congressional district and nobody is asking, 'How is this going to lift a nearby family out of poverty?'"

The report adds to the controversy surrounding the new stadium. Another group, Save Our Parks, has been critical of plans because it would be built on 22 acres of Macomb's Dam and John Mullaly parks.

Yankees President Randy Levine dismissed the report as a "fiction" from an "anti-development advocacy group."

"The Yankees are privately financing a new $800 million stadium which will be the largest private investment in a private sports venue in the history of the United States and the largest private investment in the history of the Bronx," he said.

In particular, Levine objected to the group's calculation that the city would lose $103 million in rent with a new stadium. He said that's a misleading number because the Yankees do not pay rent at the current stadium.

He noted that other tax breaks used in the group's $481 million estimate are part of a state incentive package that any business that invests in the South Bronx will get.