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Article IndexBY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
Last Sunday should be the happiest day of the year for New York Red Bulls fans. The soccer season began with a game at the 3-year-old Harrison stadium that comes equipped with all of the state of the art right gadgets that owners think fans crave -- luxury boxes, expensive seats, and big priced food.
But for those living in Harrison, last Sunday’s soccer match only served as a reminder of a development project that went totally wrong and has put the city in bad fiscal straits. But if there is any good news for Harrison taxpayers, they are not alone in owing big money for a stadium that was supposed to have provided a shot in the arm for the local economy.
Harrison, Newark (the baseball stadium), Ramapo, New York, Cincinnati, Ohio and Indianapolis, Indiana have suffered the same fate. Invest a ton of money into a sports arena and see the investment turn into a sour deal.
Even though Harrison did not directly invest into the stadium, the Red Bulls ownership did, the city purchased the land that houses the stadium and paid for preparing the land for construction.
It cost Harrison taxpayers $39 million and the municipality is hemorrhaging money on the project, so much so that last December Harrison had to borrow $3 million to pay down the debt on the $39 million it borrowed in 2006 to clear the land.
Harrison wants some of the money back from the soccer team, and it wants it now.
The biggest question that needs to be answered in the 2012 Major League Soccer season will not come from a result on the field but rather a judge in some courtroom.
It will be finances and will Harrison salvage something by getting a check for property taxes at the stadium site.
The New York Red Bulls franchise, which operates in a Harrison, New Jersey stadium, doesn't want to pay property taxes to the municipality. Red Bulls owner Dietrich Mateschitz refused to pay his 2010 and 2011 tax bill, which comes out to about $3.6 million because the team's lawyers feel that the land underneath the stadium is owned by the tax-exempt Harrison Redevelopment Agency.
Why should Mateschitz pay for something he doesn't really own? The land below his soccer stadium.
In a Newark courtroom in January, Judge Christine Nugent told Mateschitz's lawyers that she disagreed with the Red Bulls franchise claim and ordered the team to pay the property taxes. The Mateschitz’s franchise lawyers appealed Judge Nugent's ruling.
The judge also said no to another notion that the franchise put forth. Red Bulls attorneys said because the team-owned stadium serves a public purpose, it should be tax-exempt.
who cares why should energy drink pay have you seen what new jersey looks like who in their right mind would want to pay for any thing in that 3rd world dump that is the garden state.....
I'd like to personally offer Weiner a ticket to the home opener, TWO Sundays from now, March 25th.
I hope the sequel to this article will be about how all of the Harrison officials should resign from their respective posts for ever giving their stamp of approval on this apparently ill-advised project.
I'm not a tax lawyer, but maybe the city should have made the team buy the land too.
I wasn't thrilled when they announced years ago the stadium would be in Harrison, but when the beautiful thing was built, I thought it just might transform a community I saw as a place to avoid. But the lack of appreciation makes me think the league's plans to find another location for another team might not be such a bad idea after all if the hostility and resentment from locals for the project continues.
Right off the bat, the opening trope – soccer fans enjoying opening day at the stadium last Sunday while Harrison taxpayers continued to suffer – is embarrassingly inaccurate. Sunday's game was played in Dallas and the Red Bulls fans won't get to enjoy their home opener for more than a week. Why does this matter? Because it speaks to Weiner's attention to detail specifically relating to the arena in Harrison.
There are two very different issues at play here, and yet you'd never know it from Weiner's heavily flawed, manipulative op-ed. First, there's the money that Harrison laid out to clear the land. This $40 million investment was made four years before the stadium even opened and it wasn't done entirely for the Red Bulls. The stadium is only one part of a much larger development that has only just begun to see further progress. Everyone (including Weiner) acknowledges that this lack of progress is the real problem behind Harrison's fiscal troubles and that it's a direct result of the global economic meltdown, not the fact that Red Bull built a soccer stadium. In fact, the success of the stadium in drawing healthy gameday crowds is the only thing ensuring that the planned development is now continuing. The overall redevelopment plan is still in its infancy, so declaring it a failure or success is wildly premature to the point of being laughable.
And as for the tax fight between the city and the team's ownership, it's hard for anyone who wasn't in their meetings to know what kind of promises were made. Clearly, if it was easy to figure out, the courts would've decided the matter months ago. That a major multinational company and a fairly large city can't get their stories straight here does not speak well for either side. I can say that it seemed fairly clear to me from contemporary reporting that the city ownership of the land and the company ownership of the facility was agreed to from the get-go – a sweetener from the city to have a stadium anchor their redevelopment plan. Again, I actually think this is a terrible arrangement for the city, but if I owned a team and was approached with the same offer, I'd have taken it. (And when they came to collect, I'd also have fought it.) But the fact of the matter is that the property taxes from Red Bull don't come close to the amount the city invested in the overall project.
Then there are entire sentences like this one: "It will be finances and will Harrison salvage something by getting a check for property taxes at the stadium site." Excuse me? This is the work of an award winning writer? Again, I don't point this out frivolously – it's hard to take a piece like this seriously when it's so hard to follow.
The jury is still out on whether or not the Riverbend District will be a success with Red Bull Arena as its most high-profile tenant. This op-ed doesn't do anything to make the case otherwise.