There’s nothing like cash: anonymous, a little grimy, but everyone takes it, and doesn’t ask questions. Except for Mr. Clean Hands, Mike Bloomberg, who is still turning up his nose at the cold, hard green that Cablevision plunked down.
Those Cablevision folks are playing this one like Karl Rove. I foolishy predicted that they would be braying all over town if they topped the Jets. Turns out, they didn’t and they did, offering the truly staggering sum of $760 million, cash, to tell the Jets to get stuffed. Their offer is noncontingent, meaning that if they never get around to building anything, the MTA keeps the scratch.
The cash is still a gross number, and includes the cost of building the platform over the rail yards, so it’s likely that Cablevision would deliver about $450 million upfront, which, by someone’s calculation, is the value of their near-monopoly of sports and large-arena events in the city.
Given how much they have dragged their heels on renovating the Garden, this is likely one of those Enron moments, where a craven decision to dump cash now (that may be less than the costs of renovations and lost opportunity dollars for displaced events during the renovation period) in most expeditious way to protect the monopoly and its likely extraordinary margins. Plus there’s that $12 million a year in tax breaks.
If Bloomberg wasn’t blinded by Dan Doctoroff’s obsession with making New York into Tysons Corner, he might leverage this offer into a win-win for the city: wrestle down the development proposal into a binding situation that provides housing and public facilites and get the Dolans to do the renovation at MSG (sure, we can all get to hand-wringing on the monopoly status later; does anyone think a Madonna concert will get cheaper once there are two large-event spaces in the city?). None of this will compromise the potential to expand Javits, since the preferred expansion is to the north (not without its own problems) or, creatively, east or upwards. Only the Post would miss the Super Bowl, and if we need to promise a stadium today for 2012, well, fuck ’em. What’s the IOC done for anyone lately, besides take bribes?
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How much is that tax subsidy in the window?
There’s nothing like cash: anonymous, a little grimy, but everyone takes it, and doesn’t ask questions. Except for Mr. Clean Hands, Mike Bloomberg, who is still turning up his nose at the cold, hard green that Cablevision plunked down.
Those Cablevision folks are playing this one like Karl Rove. I foolishy predicted that they would be braying all over town if they topped the Jets. Turns out, they didn’t and they did, offering the truly staggering sum of $760 million, cash, to tell the Jets to get stuffed. Their offer is noncontingent, meaning that if they never get around to building anything, the MTA keeps the scratch. The cash is still a gross number, and includes the cost of building the platform over the rail yards, so it’s likely that Cablevision would deliver about $450 million upfront, which, by someone’s calculation, is the value of their near-monopoly of sports and large-arena events in the city. Given how much they have dragged their heels on renovating the Garden, this is likely one of those Enron moments, where a craven decision to dump cash now (that may be less than the costs of renovations and lost opportunity dollars for displaced events during the renovation period) in most expeditious way to protect the monopoly and its likely extraordinary margins. Plus there’s that $12 million a year in tax breaks. If Bloomberg wasn’t blinded by Dan Doctoroff’s obsession with making New York into Tysons Corner, he might leverage this offer into a win-win for the city: wrestle down the development proposal into a binding situation that provides housing and public facilites and get the Dolans to do the renovation at MSG (sure, we can all get to hand-wringing on the monopoly status later; does anyone think a Madonna concert will get cheaper once there are two large-event spaces in the city?). None of this will compromise the potential to expand Javits, since the preferred expansion is to the north (not without its own problems) or, creatively, east or upwards. Only the Post would miss the Super Bowl, and if we need to promise a stadium today for 2012, well, fuck ’em. What’s the IOC done for anyone lately, besides take bribes?