Nonretractable Doom

We understand if you're sick of reading about the West Side stadium. To be honest, we're sick of writing about it. The whole thing started to tire on us a couple of months ago, around the time it descended into a three-way game of corporate dozens between the Dolans, the mayor and Woody Johnson. But until the Cablevision bid, submitted Monday, is accepted and shovels are getting dirty, we feel compelled to go tit for tat with the stadium's boosters, starting with the mayor.

Bloomberg's latest salvo came last Tuesday. "Unless we build the Sports and Convention Center," warned Bloomberg, "New York won't get the Super Bowl and will lose out on hundreds of jobs, more than $200 million in economic activity and nearly $30 million in tax revenue. Bringing the Super Bowl to New York is another reason why the Sports and Convention Center means economic growth and a bright future for our City."

At least he didn't claim the tooth fairy would also start leaving an extra nickel under our pillows. Leaving aside the question of whether New Yorkers want a Super Bowl circus on the island (we don't remember voting on that), it is rank dishonesty to describe the Super Bowl as an economic growth machine. Just on the face of it, the idea that a single football game-largely a television event-is going to spur meaningful economic activity is such a joke that everyone in the mayor's overpaid press office must have been keeled over in laughter as they drafted the release.

But don't take our word for it. Economists at Holy Cross and Lake Forest colleges recently completed a study of every Super Bowl from 1970 to 2001. They found that the game puts, at most, $90 million into the local economy, not the hundreds of millions claimed by the NFL and parroted by naive host-city officials. The study also confirmed another bit of the obvious: The big winners are the NFL, the stadium owners and big businesses; the losers are taxpayers and, often, local businesses.

"The biggest financial gains during the game are big chain businesses-the hotel chains, the operators of rental cars [and] restaurants," one of the study's economists told the Detroit News. (Rental cars?)

The Holy Cross study supports the findings of economist Patrick Anderson, who claims that the numbers bounced around by the NFL are 10 times too high.

"It's economic charlatanry," Anderson told the Detroit News, in an article examining that city's upcoming Super Bowl. "That $300 million figure is essentially a myth that keeps going unquestioned? I've spent two years tracking the origins of that number and I don't believe it's based on a solid study."

As for the Super Bowl tax windfall Bloomie wants us to lunge for, the Houston comptroller's office estimates the city's sales tax revenue from last January's Super Bowl at around $1 million. Compare that to the $600 million the mayor wants taxpayers to shell out in corporate welfare to help Woody Johnson build the stadium in the first place. The $1 million figure is also about a fifth of what Bloomberg has already spent on his gilded reelection bid. If the mayor really cares so much about the city raking in the kind of chump change offered by the Super Bowl, why doesn't he spare us the stadium and put the money directly into the coffers out of his own personal fortune?

Come to think of it, why doesn't he do that with a whole raft of shortfalls in the budget? What's the point of having a billionaire mayor if he only spends it on himself? Instead of cutting almost $700,000 from the city's soup-kitchen and food-pantry programs (see his 2006 budget), why not just pay the difference himself? Hell, if the stadium is really going to repay the public subsidy, as the mayor claims, why not just pay for that, too, and call it the Bloomberg News Stadium and Convention Center? The only logical answer is that the mayor knows he's lying when he boasts of the economic potential of the stadium and the NFL. And for that alone, he should be sent back to his natural habitat in the private sector as soon as possible, where he can do less harm.