What’s it worth…to tear down Giants Stadium?
It’s 10 am on a brisk December Sunday. You and your buddies jump off the Turnpike, park at the Secaucus Transfer Station, and buy a $10-per-carload ticket for the Lawrence Taylor Park-and-Ride Shuttle. In minutes, you’re among other fans who connected from New York’s Penn Station or NJ Transit stations, passing through the Frank Gifford Terminal. At the Tiki Barber Lounge, you eat and drink without having to light a grill or lambaste the friend who brought buns when he was supposed to bring burgers.
To the left, the media and the NFL’s traveling entourage scurry from the Mara Towers Hotel, while 30,000 other fans hang out in the Tail Gate Zone, a quasi–theme park for the beer-bellied set. After lunch, you sidle over to the Xanadu Entertainment Complex to check out the pre-game show on Fox Sports. You check your coats and enjoy the game in the $750-million climate-controlled IBM Big Blue Stadium, where the undefeated 2009 Giants hope to wrap up their first season without a loss. If they prevail, you might even stick around for dinner at Harry Carson’s House of Beef.
Okay, so the team’s undefeated record tipped you off to the hypothetical nature of this scenario, but with very little embellishment, it’s the grand vision behind the Meadowlands stadium deal fashioned by acting governor Richard J. Codey and the Giants. The April announcement of the agreement was devoid of computer-generated aerial renderings, carefully crafted stadium models, or jovial photo ops for team owners, the governor, and members of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority. Some say the statement was just another arrogant proclamation from an arrogant franchise, while the governor and Giants chief operating officer, John K. Mara, have clung to the facts: The tentative agreement would require the Giants to cover the $750-million cost to build the new stadium, costs associated with demolishing the current stadium, $3 million in annual maintenance, and a fixed $6.3 million in rent to the state each year of the 40-year lease. In return, the state would grant the team ownership of 75 acres, or roughly three times the space that the current stadium occupies. The state also would pay $30 million for improvements—primarily, relocating water, electricity, and other utilities to the new stadium—and give up an estimated $20 million in yearly concessions, parking, and other fees that the team would collect.
“We comfortably feel that of the last twenty stadium deals done, this is clearly one of the best,” Carl Goldberg, chairman of the Sports and Exposition Authority, said last spring. The rhetoric seemed appropriate; taxpayers in Baltimore and Cincinnati, among other cities, assumed nearly all construction costs for their sports complexes. Having a team willing to foot the bill sounded like a refreshing throwback to simpler times. “It sounds like a pretty good situation for New Jersey citizens to me,” says Brian Goff, a sports economist at Western Kentucky University.
But this is New Jersey. In brokering the deal, the Giants and the state faced disputes with nearby towns, environmentalists, and the builders of the adjacent $1.3-billion Xanadu entertainment complex, which broke ground last spring. The Giants quickly brushed aside the issues—again showing their arrogance, opponents of the plan say. Yet the Giants offense failed to pick up a last-minute blitz by the stadium’s other tenant, the New York Jets.
Back in April, the Jets appeared ready to hop across the Hudson by the end of the decade, to a $2.2-billion stadium they would build on Manhattan’s West Side. Frustrated by having to play since 1984 in a stadium bearing the colors and name of their regional rival, Jets management truly wanted to return to New York. But the plan crumbled following bitter infighting between New York City officials and Cablevision, owner of Madison Square Garden. The Jets’ Manhattan failure, though, became their Garden State success; a ten-year option to extend their lease at Giants Stadium guarantees them a place to play until 2018, even if they don’t pay a penny for the new stadium. Exercising that option, Jets officials believe, gives them a powerful hold over the Giants’ new stadium deal.
Paul T. Fader, the governor’s chief counsel, concedes that the Jets are in a good position. “This is all subject to sign-off by the Jets,” he says. The Giants declined to discuss the issue, but state officials say the teams met three times in June and tried to hammer out a plan.
Since then, the Jets have been playing some hardball of their own. In early September, after Codey extended a mid-month deadline ten more days for the teams to reach an agreement, the Jets issued a statement criticizing the Giants’ plan as insufficient, adding that it was “unreasonable to expect such a complex agreement could be concluded in just ten days.” And in case Codey and Mara had missed the point, they added, “We continue to seriously explore all of our options for a permanent home for the New York Jets, including a joint stadium in the Meadowlands or building a new football and soccer stadium in Queens.” Team owner Woody Johnson and his management team continued their threat into late September, muddying the picture of whether the team will partner with the Giants in any stadium project here.
Sticking points reportedly ranged from the color scheme of the stadium to the Jets’ desire for a larger share of the revenue generated by selling the stadium’s naming rights to a corporate sponsor, a trend that occurs virtually everywhere a new stadium is built since it gives the team a new revenue stream. Currently, the rights in this Giants deal accrue solely to the team, up to $12 million a year, at which point the state gets the overflow. Codey, a sports fanatic, has tried to sweeten the pot, floating the idea of a Giants-Jets-state three-way deal to pay for a $200-million retractable roof that would enable New Jersey—not Manhattan—to host the lucrative Super Bowl or NCAA Final Four.
On top of the Jets–Giants scrum, a swarm of municipalities, environmental groups, and other opponents could cause the deal to collapse. But the Giants managed to settle their traffic and environmental issues with the Xanadu developers, and Mara says that he would like to see the Giants open the new stadium in 2009. “That’s still our hope, but that’s very ambitious at this point,” he says.
Still, Mara’s optimism prevailed: on September 29, the Giants and the Jets worked out a last-minute plan to partner for the new stadium complex. In addition, the Jets will eventually move their practice facilities and offices to New Jersey, which could mean roughly $12 million in revenue to the state.
Even before the Jets came charging back onto the field, critics argued that Giants Stadium, built in 1976, cost much more than the supposed $75 million in taxpayer money. Lost in the game-day headlines: New Jersey Must Pay Off $124 Million in Outstanding Debt. That was one reason that George Zoffinger, the sports authority’s executive director, opposed the new deal. While Zoffinger publicly has pledged to see it through and “build the best stadium in America,” officials say that in negotiations he has advised the state to hold out for better terms, a position that got him into deep trouble with the governor and, for a time, kept him out of the negotiating sessions. “George was saying, ‘Why are we rushing? The Giants lease runs to 2026,’ ” says a source close to the negotiations. “Now we’ve made a deal, and the Jets are suddenly in the mix again, and we’ve got this mish-mosh. What has been a state asset is being turned over to a private concern, leaving the state with a $124 million debt.”
“The Giants’ annual rental payments will easily take care of the remaining debt service,” Goldberg counters. The plan, he says, is to use this year’s rental payments from the Xanadu development—some $64 million—to pay off the old stadium debt.
But wasn’t that Xanadu money earmarked for something else? “Like any other state agency, we have a list of priorities,” Goldberg says. “ I always saw retirement of debt as a top-tier priority, since we have an obligation to limit our state’s exposure to debt as much as possible. But we probably would have used the money to make capital improvements to Continental Arena in order to attract tenants there.” (The arena is being abandoned by its two major tenants, the New Jersey Nets, who are moving to Brooklyn, and the New Jersey Devils, who have an arena in the works in Newark.)
Throughout their history in New Jersey, the Giants have had more success in the boardroom than on the ballfield. In 1976, the television networks began listing NJ Giants on their halftime scoreboards. The team prodded the NFL to make the networks use NY, as mandated by the deal that had brought the Giants from Yankee Stadium. The team outmaneuvered the state again in 1996, when, as part of lease-extension negotiations, they talked Governor Christine Todd Whitman’s administration into agreeing to language that ensured the stadium would be maintained as a “state-of-the-art” facility. A few years later, when the Giants demanded $300 million in upgrades, the state faced a decision: Pony up for improvements or consider a new paid-by-the-Giants stadium plan.
In the end, would people be more supportive of the deal if it could just get the teams—or at least one of them—to embrace their home stadium? We’ll never know. “I certainly have my own personal desire to be able to call them the New Jersey Giants,” Goldberg says. “That said, their physical presence in the state is infinitely more important.” Fader says that regarding the name, the state ran straight into a Giants specialty: a solid defense. “They basically said, “We’re the New York Football Giants. That’s our name, and it has been for a long time.’ ”
Mike Moran wrote about Senator Jon Corzine in the October issue.
Article from November, 2005 Issue.