Mugging on Carlton! $350,000,000 stolen!! ESDC on the loose!

Village Voice wrote: City on Yanks Bond Details: Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later

As promised, state assemblymember Richard Brodsky held a hearing this morning into the Yankees' latest request for $350 million (or so - see below) in city-backed tax-exempt bonds to help pay for extra doodads for their new stadium. The surprise: On the hot seat for the entire three-hour hearing was a single witness, Economic Development Corporation president Seth Pinsky, who at times struggled to come up with detailed responses to the questions posed by an increasingly impatient Brodsky.

Pinsky did explain one mystery right away: The reason no one can agree whether the additional Yankees bonds would total $350 million or $400 million or what is that the team hasn't submitted a formal request to the city, and won't until the Internal Revenue gives its blessing to the deal. "The Yankees have submitted a partially completed draft application to the [Industrial Development Agency] to put their project into the IDA queue," said Pinsky, and city lawyers have begun drawing up the paperwork, but nothing will go forward unless the IRS rescinds proposed rules that would have the effect of making the bonds more expensive. (Pinsky insisted no bond buyers would touch them at any price, effectively making them unusable for sports projects.) Likewise, a new set of bonds for the Mets (estimated by Pinsky at "tens of millions" of dollars) and promised financing for the Nets' Atlantic Yards project are on hold until the IRS comes to a decision.

Even the rough guesstimates in the Yanks' preliminary application, though, were not revealed at today's hearing - Pinsky's office had redacted them in the documents supplied to Brodsky. (At this point, visible steam all but shot out of the assemblymember's ears.) Pinsky insisted that letting on what the Yanks plan to spend their newfound money on could hurt their bargaining position with suppliers - leading Brodsky to snort that if the team wanted to keep the details a secret, CEO Lonn Trost shouldn't have gone bragging about them to reporters.

Other hard figures notably absent include the number of full-time jobs the Yankees have promised to create (numbers thrown around this morning ranged from 16 to 1,000), and what ticket prices will look like at the new stadium - Pinsky confirmed that aside from checking to see that average prices would be high enough to generate significant sales taxes (yet low enough that the Yanks couldn't afford to pay for the stadium on their own), the city didn't concern itself with how much it will cost to get through the turnstiles of the new city-financed venue....