Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks at last year's groundbreaking for a new Buffalo Bills stadium in Orchard Park.
ALBANY — In 2013, a $130 million state deal to renovate the Buffalo Bills stadium came with an unusual feature: A luxury box for the state.
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo justified the arrangement by saying the "I Love New York" hospitality suite would be used for economic development and to woo companies to western New York. Bills games, in other words, would be a great way to show off Buffalo's spirit.
"We are proud of the Bills and western New York, and we want business leaders from around the country to know what a great place it is to invest and grow jobs," Kenneth Adams, then the chief executive of Empire State Development, which manages the suite, said at the time.
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Critics, though, warned that the suite could easily be abused and that, New York being New York, it would become a perk for elected officials. The warning was prescient.
Consider: A December game against the Dallas Cowboys, while officially made available to the Amherst Chamber of Commerce, was attended by Gov. Hochul and her husband, William; Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie; Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes; and several high-profile lobbyists, including Patrick Jenkins and Rebecca Lamorte.
What economic development purpose was served by having Hochul, politicians and lobbyists gathered together in the suite?
I suppose it's possible that Heastie, who is from the Bronx, wants to open a business in Buffalo. Seems unlikely, though. But he is a lifelong fan of the Dallas Cowboys, which is fairly damning on its own.
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In any event, the box was used in January by former U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez, now a senior advisor to President Joe Biden, who attended the playoff game against the Kansas City Chiefs. The economic development angle to his use of the box is likewise unclear.
According to ESD documents, Hochul first used the suite early in 2023 for a Bills playoff game against the Cincinnati Bengals and shared it with, among other guests, her husband and Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh. A lobbyist for Idaho-based Micron Technologies, which is building a semiconductor facility in central New York, also attended.
Before that game, which the Bills lost, the suite was almost exclusively used by figures from the business world, meaning it was more or less used as first advertised. A spokesman for Cuomo said the former governor never used the suite, paid for tickets when he did attend games and sat elsewhere.
After the Bengals game, the Hochuls returned to the suite for the opening home game of the 2023-24 Bills season, sharing it with a member of the governor's staff and executives from the Allegany County Industrial Development Authority and Moog, a local manufacturer, among others. Together, they watched the Bills stomp the Las Vegas Raiders.
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Hochul and her husband used the suite three more times last season, including for a playoff game in January against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Avi Small, a spokesman for the governor, said her every use of the suite had an economic development purpose. For an October game, for example, the governor and her husband were joined by executives from the Tom Jones Co., a clothing manufacturer in Rochester. For the January playoff game, the Hochuls attended with two executives from IBM.
"Governor Hochul will use every tool at her disposal, including showcasing the fun and excitement of a Buffalo Bills game, to show business leaders that New York State is the place to be," Small said.
A problem with that argument is that nearly every business executive who attended games with the Hochuls was already living or doing business in New York, meaning they already knew what the state was all about. The governor may have been charming or rewarding them, but she wasn't selling the execs on New York.
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Empire State Development notes, without offering specific details, that Hochul, Heastie and other state officials who used the luxury box "made charitable donations for the value of the ticket."
Hochul's office told me that the governor and her husband used an estimated ticket value of around $190 per game to make donations of about $380 to groups that included FeedMore Western New York Foundation, the Buffalo City Mission and the Israel Crisis Fund.
It's good that charities are benefiting, certainly, but the estimated ticket value seems remarkably low, particularly for playoff games. One online broker estimates the per-game cost of Highmark Stadium suites at $9,000 to $30,000, depending on the opponent and demand, and the cheapest tickets available on Ticketmaster for the Steelers playoff game were priced north of $250.
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But that's for average Joes and Janes, who rarely sit in luxury suites and pay through the nose to see the Bills — even though the team benefits from extraordinary taxpayer support that includes $850 million in public funding from the state and county to build a stadium adjacent to the existing one in suburban Orchard Park.
The new stadium is not expected to have a suite set aside for the state, which will be one of its improvements.
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