The New York Times April 10, 2005 Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently provided a new reason for building a 75,000-seat stadium on the Far West Side of Manhattan...(Ah, C'mon, Charles)

I picked this off the on-line issue of The Times, so I do not know if this appeared in print as analysis or straight news. It certainly should fall under the former.

Charles V. Bagli is a talented newspaperman. That is why he is writing for The Times. Personally, he can be quite charming, or he can be a tough news hound, which is what you'd expect out of a good newspaperman.

Having said all that, I'm deeply troubled by the following article.

It starts off with some hyperbole from our Mayor. It seems that Mayor Mike said that this project would create 7,500 jobs, when the Jets have only claimed the number of jobs created by the West Side Stadium as 6,971, which is the highest estimate out there.

First, we're given a quote from the Mayor from March 31, in which he says, "Jobs, jobs, jobs." Political hyperbole at its most simplistic. You roll your eyes, and you move on. Then, the Mayor followed this by saying at some point, I take it to be on that day, something about 7,500 jobs. I do wish I knew the exact context of the remark- was it a press release, an off-the-cuff remark, something he said in the course of an interview, or is it the official position of the administration?

Because what I glean from this article is, we've got a politician on our hands who is guilty of the heinous crime of hyperbole.

If we locked up all the politicians who committed the said act of hyperbolic speech, we'd have zero politicians left amongst us, and while some might argue this to be a positive, we really do need these rascals to run things.

Then Charles writes the following: "The community and civic groups who opposed the stadium may have missed an opportunity to win union support when they failed to discuss job opportunities associated with their alternative to the stadium - building housing..." Am I the only one who reads that sentence and concludes that the writer has a rooting interest here?

That is an ethereal, open-ended question. Yes, they "may" have missed, could be, possibly...

It fishes for a response from the reader. It sure smacks of editorializing to me.

But. What really troubles me is the following sentence: Still, the hot dog sellers, ushers and security guards, and the Teamsters who put up and take down exhibit booths, are not full-time workers. That is, at best, a horrid distortion of the truth. Many of the women and men who "sell hot dogs" as Mr. Bagli so flippantly puts it (and it is mostly women, by the way, and mostly members of minority groups) are union workers whose lives depend upon these low paying jobs. I realize that as a writer at The Times, making, let's face it, a nice wage, that notion may seem bizarre, but I would suggest a phone call to Marisol Thomer of UNITE HERE Local 100, the union that represents these women and men at Madison Square Garden. Their union has not taken a position on the stadium, so, they are, in fact, unbiased. She knows a heck of a lot about the topic of poor working women, and is eager to share her knowledge. I should point out that one does need patience when reaching out to Ms. Thomer, as she has her hands full at the moment. You see, UNITE HERE Local 100 is fighting for its life in a struggle with Cablevision, the owners of Mendacity Square Garden, who are doing their best to break the union.

Finally, Charles throws out numbers without examination, which may be quibbling, on my part, but, what the hell. For example, in a worst case scenario, according to this article, the creation of each of these jobs would cost $190,000. But what Mr. Bagli neglects to mention is that these are permanent jobs, created, in effect, from bond money, so that even the lowest paying job, if it brings in, let's say, $20,000 a year, multiplied over the next 50 years, returns $1,000,000 in 2005 dollars, all created, as far as the city and state are concerned, from $600 million in borrowed money, paid back over time. You are not laying out $190,000 up front. That is the worst-case scenario applied to the lowest paying job.

$20,000 a year may not seem like much to an "ink-stained wretch" (a most noble occupation, to be sure), but, to these vulnerable women, it is a matter of life and death.

April 10, 2005

Bloomberg's Guess at Stadium Jobs Is the Highest Yet

By CHARLES V. BAGLI

ayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently provided a new reason for building a 75,000-seat stadium on the Far West Side of Manhattan - and it's not the Olympics, conventions, or professional football.

"Keep in mind that what this is about is jobs, jobs, jobs - and people need those jobs now," Mr. Bloomberg said the day the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted to sell development rights to the Jets so that they can build a $2.2 billion home on the Hudson.

But the mayor, in his eagerness to become a champion of the working class and draw union support for the project, appears to be exaggerating the number of blue-collar jobs that would be created by the project, according to everyone from the Empire State Development Corporation to the Independent Budget Office and stadium critics.

In a burst of enthusiasm, the mayor said the stadium and exhibition hall would generate 7,500 permanent jobs. The Jets claim only 6,971, but that is still more than the combined payrolls at Giants Stadium - the team's current home in the Meadowlands in New Jersey - the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and Madison Square Garden, the busiest arena in the country.

The state's general project plan for the proposed stadium estimates that a more modest 3,110 new jobs - 45 percent of what the Jets claim - will flow from the operation of the stadium and spending by visitors who attend Super Bowls, basketball games, concerts and trade shows there.

The Independent Budget Office put the projected number of jobs at 3,791, a bit higher than the estimate by the state, which supports the project.

Most National Football League stadiums schedule only 10 games each season, including two exhibitions. But the Jets contend that their stadium will be full much of the year with other sporting events, conventions, special events, ice skating shows and circuses. Still, the hot dog sellers, ushers and security guards, and the Teamsters who put up and take down exhibit booths, are not full-time workers.

"Typically, a stadium generates seasonal part-time low-wage jobs, although these will be union," said Robert A. Baade, a leading sports economist, who teaches at Lake Forest College. "This is not a very efficient public works program. Someone has to ask, 'Is this good public policy, or not?' "

Under the terms of the Jets deal with the city and the state, taxpayers would contribute at least $600 million toward the cost of what the Jets are calling the New York Sports and Convention Center. That would translate into a subsidy of $86,070 per job if the Jets projections are correct, or more than $190,000 per job if the state is right.

Job projections are as much art as science, and the different results in this case arise from the fact that the Jets used an economic simulation model that was different from the one the Empire State Development Corporation and the Independent Budget Office used.

The Jets acknowledge that the job numbers are wildly at odds. But, they say, the state and the budget office, along with the Jets, all say that the stadium will have an enormous economic impact.

"Although the methodologies are different," Thad Sheely, the Jets vice president of development said, "the conclusions are the same in the sense that this project will generate tens of millions of dollars in economic impact and thousands of jobs."

The state's analysis is certainly in line with the Jets, who say that the project will generate $72.5 million a year in state and city taxes, roughly $30 million more than it will cost the city and the state to subsidize it. But both the city and the state largely used the economic impact numbers produced by the team's consultant, Ernst & Young, according to state and city officials involved in the analysis.

The I.B.O., however, was much more cautious, conducting its own analysis and concluding that the stadium would produce a $210 million fiscal surplus over 31 years, or only about one-fifth of what the Jets claim.

None of the studies compared the impact of the stadium to alternative proposals in which government invested $600 million in public money in affordable housing, transportation projects, or job development on the piers in Red Hook. Some community groups and critics of the stadium say that kind of analysis would have put the stadium into some kind of perspective as to what is the city's best investment.

In any event, the mayor and the Jets have won vociferous support from construction unions in the city. The reasoning is simple. The number of construction jobs in the city fell to 111,100 last year from a high of 122,000 in 2001, although the industry now appears to be on the rebound.

"We want jobs," Edward J. Malloy, president of the 100,000 member Building and Construction Trades Council, told a March 30 rally of several thousand construction workers. "The only real way of creating long-term, sustainable jobs on the West Side of Manhattan is to move forward with the New York Sports and Convention Center."

But once again there are widely varying estimates of just how many construction jobs there will be. The mayor and the Jets contend that the project will generate 18,000 jobs. It actually means, the Jets acknowledge, that there will be an average of 4,500 jobs during the four years of construction.

The budget office's estimate, however, was far lower than the Jets' - an average of 2,880 construction jobs per year, and it did not bother multiplying that figure by four, because construction jobs by their nature are temporary.

The state, in turn, came up with a higher number, 3,188, but still 1,300 shy of the Jets.

The community and civic groups who opposed the stadium may have missed an opportunity to win union support when they failed to discuss job opportunities associated with their alternative to the stadium-building housing.

Instead, the Jets capitalized on the issue, pledging not only to employ union workers, but also to ensure that a quarter of the workforce is black, Hispanic or women. That may not be as hard to achieve today as it was 10 or 20 years ago, given that minorities now make up 51 percent of the construction workers in New York City, according to the census.

"More than half our new members coming into apprenticeship programs are minorities who live in the city," said Paul Fernandes, chief of staff at the Building and Construction Trades Council. "It's really one of the higher-paying blue-collar jobs you can get in the city, because there's no more manufacturing."

But Jim Haughton, who heads an organization that has fought discrimination in the construction industry for 40 years, said that far too many black union members are out of work today.

"There's nothing wrong with building the stadium," he said, "but first things first. You could create thousands and thousands of jobs if you fixed up the infrastructure."