1. The Pegulas briefed other NFL owners and executives on the status of Buffalo Bills stadium negotiations, meaning that 32 NFL teams now know more about the deal than 19,000,000 New Yorkers (Buffalo News). In other news, Governor Hochul expects that subsidies for a new stadium will be included in next year’s state budget.
The state has commissioned the engineering firm AECOM to study a range of stadium options, including the possibility of building in Orchard Park, renovating Highmark Stadium (an option the Bills have decided is prohibitively expensive after conducting their own studies) or constructing a new stadium downtown. Hochul said she expects to make that report publicly available “within a few days.”
2. At Boondoggle, Pat Garofalo writes about how states use public records exemptions to keep details about subsidy deals secret.
The CEO of Tennessee’s new megasite entity can deem just about anything the board does secret for five years, putting it out of the reach of the state’s residents entirely. As Deborah Fisher, the executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, put it, “That’s a whole lot of time to hide stuff you don’t want the public to know about.”
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