Linking community benefits to a Bills stadium (Investigative Post)

Erie County Legislature Chair April Baskin doesn’t concern herself with whether a new Buffalo Bills stadium will be built in Buffalo or Orchard Park. 

She’s not particularly worried about its cost.

What matters most, Baskin told Investigative Post, is what the community gets in exchange for the taxpayer dollars the team’s owners want from the state and county. 

Pegula Sports and Entertainment has made it clear the team expects significant public subsidies — as much as $1 billion — to build a new facility adjacent to the current stadium in Orchard Park. 

Baskin is determined that those subsidies come attached to a legally binding community benefits agreement, or CBA, modeled on agreements won by other communities across the country. 

A CBA is a “transformational” opportunity, Baskin said, to win funding for programs meant to improve the lives and prospects of the county’s urban and rural poor. 

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Baskin is not alone pursuing a CBA. She has been working with state Senator Sean Ryan — whose district includes Orchard Park, the Pegulas’ preferred site for a new facility — to attach a CBA to any agreement.

“We have to make sure the stadium is built with unionized labor,” Ryan said in an interview with the local podcast The Square last month. “We have to make sure there’s good diversity in that workforce. And then we have to look at the stadium on game days. There are a lot of employees there.”

Those workers, too, should be local, diverse, and reasonably paid, Ryan said, whether they are unionized or not.  

Baskin’s and Ryan’s efforts have been supported by a number of community groups, including the Partnership for the Public Good, the Coalition for Economic Justice and PUSH Buffalo.

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