This sports joust involves the Bronx and Queens, but the game is soccer, not baseball.
The two New York City outer boroughs, home to baseball’s Yankees and Mets, respectively, are kicking a different ball around as each explores building a soccer-only stadium for a Major League Soccer expansion team.
Regardless of what transpires, municipal officials hope to avoid financing fiascoes such as parking garage bond defaults at the new Yankee Stadium and the pricey Major League Soccer stadium in Harrison, N.J., which pushed the small city’s bonds to junk ratings.
In May, the New York City Football Club announced plans to play in MLS beginning in 2015. The club is a joint venture with Manchester City of England’s Premier League and the Yankees as part owners.
MLS officials also hoped to build a privately financed 25,000-seat stadium of up to 13 acres in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, a plan Mayor Michael Bloomberg had favored, but local advocates opposed to the loss of recreational parkland in that borough keep booting the ball away.
That opened the door for Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., who wrote MLS commissioner Don Garber last month touting his borough. Diaz cited the recent recreational and sports developments in that borough, including a proposed hockey and ice-skating center at the site of the former Kingsbridge Armory.
“As reports have made clear, your league’s plans to build a new soccer stadium in Flushing Meadows have stalled . … There’s a much different story in the Bronx,” Diaz wrote.
The borough also got a momentum boost last week when New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli praised the Bronx in an eight-page economic-snapshot report. “The Bronx has come a long way since the 1970s,” DiNapoli wrote. “In fact, the Bronx weathered the great Recession better than the nation and New York City’s four other boroughs.”
The Bronx-Queens tussle – both have hosted international exhibition matches, or “friendlies,” at their respective baseball parks, Yankee Stadium and Citi Field – has become tabloid fodder in New York. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office recanted a statement he made on a local radio show last weekend declaring that the new team would play at Yankee Stadium and politicians in the two boroughs are wagering over which borough gets a soccer stadium first, silliness normally reserved for World Series and Super Bowl outcomes.
Robert Boland, a sports management professor at New York University, sees a hurry-up offense in place.
“I haven’t seen any of the funding mechanisms yet, but I think there’s a sense of urgency among stadium-development people to get done before Bloomberg is out of office. That’s a real big issue,” said Boland. “Even if the shovels aren’t in the ground before Bloomberg leaves on Jan. 1, they want to at least have the funding in place and the project greenlighted.
“The projects, the teams and their needs don’t all sync. It’s still very much in the drawing-board phase. There’s a different economic sweet spot for each of the new stadiums.”
The pro-development Bloomberg is in the last if his 12 years in office.
Sports stadium financing often involves financial risk, and two vivid examples are the Yankee Stadium parking garage bonds and Red Bull Arena stadium in Harrison.
Bronx Parking Development LLC, a nonprofit that runs a system of parking garages built near the new Yankee Stadium, defaulted on a $6.9 million bond interest payment on April 1, three weeks after revealing in a disclosure filing that it hired bankruptcy counsel.
The tax-exempt status of its $237 million of civic facility revenue bonds is in jeopardy after the Internal Revenue Service said it is examining the bonds to “determine compliance with the federal tax requirements.” The bonds’ conduit issuer, New York City Industrial Development Agency, revealed the IRS notice Wednesday in a filing on the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s EMMA website.
Bronx Parking is negotiating a haircut with majority holders of the bonds the agency issued in 2007 to finance parking garages to serve to the Yankees’ new stadium, which opened two years later just north of the old one.
The Yankees demanded a parking system for about 9,000 cars, but use of the garages even on game days has run far below expectations. High prices – as much as $48 on game days for valet parking – combined with the opening of a long-awaited Metro-North Railroad station nearby and free parking available at a new mall a few blocks away have enticed fans to shun the garages.
Feelers for a hotel complex at the site of one of the garages have produced nothing, but last month Bronx Parking issued requests for proposals to sublease and develop two lots near the stadium. Even when combined, they appear too small for soccer use.
Meanwhile, Harrison, N.J., just across the Passaic River from Newark, is still recovering from cost overruns to Red Bull Arena, home to the New York Red Bulls of MLS. Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the town eight notches to Ba3 from A1 with a negative outlook.
Moody’s has since upgraded Harrison twice, though the bonds are still below investment grade. The town is now Ba1 with a positive outlook although the Red Bulls are appealing a court order to pay taxes on the field. The team maintains that the tax-exempt Harrison Redevelopment Agency owns the land.
Pending final court resolution, the tab for Red Bulls owner Dietrich Mateschitz, the team’s owner and chief executive of the namesake energy-drink company, is about $3.6 million.
The stadium, which seats 25,000, cost about $200 million. Although within walking distance to a Port Authority Trans-Hudson commuter train station, the structure sits isolated, prompting one columnist to liken the surrounding area to a nuclear fallout zone.
“The Harrison stadium was really built at the worst time economically,” said NYU’s Boland. Officials planned it after the first wave of soccer-only facilities opened in Columbus, Ohio, and Carson City, Calif.
“But construction costs have risen so dramatically,” Boland said. “It’s no one’s fault. Harrison got caught in a cycle.”
In Queens, borough leaders are divided over a soccer stadium. State Assemblyman Francisco Moya sees economic opportunity, while Councilman Leroy Comrie doesn’t want one where neighbors would object.
“The Flushing and Corona communities have been very clear on their feelings about the proposed soccer stadium. Flushing-Meadows Corona Park is used by residents from all across Queens, and this usage by Major League Soccer would negatively impact park life,” said Comrie, the chairman of the council’s powerful land use committee. “While there are many soccer fans here in Queens, there are more appropriate places to build this stadium.”
A message was left with Moya and with New York City Football Club officials seeking comment.
According to Boland, the intracity push-pull poses even more difficulties than across municipal lines.
“You see more cooperation between city and suburb on projects like these,” he said. “Certainly Mayor Bloomberg has done really well not to let political boundaries impede his goals. Examples are the Super Bowl and Wrestlemania in the Meadowlands [in East Rutherford, N.J.],” he said.
While acknowledging appeals and drawbacks to the Queens and Bronx concepts, Boland said the city has more futuristic needs. “New York could use another arena, another covered and convertible and using new technology, combining the Javits Center with the elements of a stadium,” he said.
