NEW YORK – No votes were cast. No decisions were made. When the National Football League’s owners and top executives gathered this week in midtown Manhattan for the league’s annual fall meeting, there was only a brief discussion about the Buffalo Bills and their quest to build a new stadium.
But their effort is beginning to pick up momentum, both in the eyes of NFL leaders and political officials – including the New York governor’s office.
Owners and executives from the NFL’s 32 teams were briefed on the status of the Bills’ negotiations with government officials for public funding to construct a stadium in Orchard Park for a projected $1.4 billion. The details of that roughly 10-minute presentation were not shared publicly, but it illustrated a sense of “collaboration and effort” between the Bills, New York State and Erie County, said Ron Raccuia, the executive vice president of Pegula Sports and Entertainment, the company that oversees the holdings of team owners Terry and Kim Pegula.
People are also reading…
Raccuia represented the Bills in the absence of Terry Pegula, who left the meetings early after learning of a potential Covid exposure last week. Raccuia told The News that the sides are meeting “at least weekly, if not more than that.”
“Everyone’s happy with the collaboration and the effort,” Raccuia said. “We still have a ways to go on progress. But you need to have the collaboration and the effort in line to make sure that you can make the progress. Now it’s up to us, the county and the state and the league to make the progress we’re all looking for in a short period of time.”
A couple hours later and a few blocks away, Gov. Kathy Hochul told The News during a press briefing Wednesday that she expects the stadium project to be included in the state budget, which is proposed in January, then negotiated with legislators. It must be approved by April 1.
“The conversations are going very well,” Hochul said, “and in terms of a completion, this will be a budgetary issue and therefore will show up in the New York State budget as an item once I’ve had a chance to speak to the legislators and garner support for that.”
Hochul’s comments indicate she expects the stadium to be part of the final budget, although it doesn’t mean the project must be included in the initial proposal.
The combination of messaging from the owners meeting and Hochul indicate movement in the negotiations, which just a few months ago were nearly frozen.
Raccuia said that before Hochul – a Buffalo native – took office in August, the state negotiators under then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo were largely silent. “The fact that she’s actively engaged and has gotten her people to participate, unlike the prior administration, to me is unbelievable support coming from where we were,” he said. “Also, she understands our sense of urgency. And we believe that if not for that, we wouldn’t be in the position that we are today.”
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz has expressed a desire to see a deal done in the next 10 weeks or so.
“We’d like to get a deal done by the end of the year,” Poloncarz said Friday in an on-camera interview with WIVB.
The Bills have one more season left on their current lease at Highmark Stadium, which expires in July 2023.
The urgency is heightened because the 48-year-old stadium’s lifespan is limited: An engineering report commissioned by Erie County, which owns the stadium, indicates the upper deck will need to be largely replaced within five to seven years.
Another factor driving the timeline is political. In the public-private partnership that the Bills and government officials agree is needed to finance the stadium, the bulk of that money – perhaps $1 billion – is likely to come from the state. That adds a complex set of obstacles, more political than financial, in a state with an annual budget exceeding $200 billion.
Hochul is running for a four-year term in 2022. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, another key player in stadium funding and other NFL matters, is running next year as well. The political calculus is tricky for both: As moderate Democrats, they are prone to challenges from the left and criticism that providing significant funding for a stadium project is the equivalent of a billionaire handout.
“If you look at it from the political calendar, it’s hard to imagine how this goes beyond the first quarter of the year, because you’re then neck deep in the election,” said Marc Ganis, a Chicago-based sports consultant who attended the league meetings.
The state has commissioned the engineering firm AECOM to study a range of stadium options, including the possibility of building in Orchard Park, renovating Highmark Stadium (an option the Bills have decided is prohibitively expensive after conducting their own studies) or constructing a new stadium downtown. Hochul said she expects to make that report publicly available “within a few days.”
Raccuia, speaking separately, described talk of a downtown stadium as “noise.”
“We’ve spent years studying the various locations and we know unequivocally that Orchard Park is the most feasible, the most efficient, the most cost-effective location … ” Raccuia said. “Some of the noise that’s out there now from people who are uninformed is very unproductive to our discussions. Let the experts who are the national and international consultants who we’ve hired and who the state hired, let them tell everyone what the data shows. And then reasonable people can make decisions.”
NFL officials and owners are optimistic about the Bills’ stadium project.
“Listen, this is a process,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, a Jamestown native, said Tuesday night. “And there has to be a public-private partnership here that has to be managed, but I think everyone’s coming to the table with the intent to make sure that the Buffalo Bills are secure in Western New York for generations.”
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, a friend of Terry Pegula, told The News: “You’ve got great owners that are involved here. They’re probably the most vested owners that I’ve seen, on what’s good for Buffalo and what’s good for, frankly, the state of New York.”
Jones, who is a partner in the consulting firm Legends Global Partnerships, which the Bills have hired as part of their stadium development strategy, added: “It’s a great opportunity to have the Pegulas to basically continue to make their investment in that area and really give Western New York, as well as the people of Buffalo, a great national and international visibility with that new stadium.”
Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis, whose late father Al Davis was an original American Football League owner with Bills founder Ralph Wilson Jr., spoke of Buffalo’s longtime importance to the NFL.
“Buffalo has always been a great market because it goes back to the AFL,” Davis said. “Not the AFC, but the AFL.”
Raccuia said the Bills are optimistic a deal to finance a new stadium is in place within a matter of weeks.
“I know that we’re all going to do everything possible to get a deal done by the end of the year,” Raccuia said. “It takes, in this case, more than one side to get one. But the fact that everyone is publicly stating that that’s our goal is a tremendous sign. We need to get a deal done by the end of the year. We don’t have a lot of time left. ... We’re ready to do a deal. The time is now.”
