Toilet Paper? Ask the Jets

A Call To Action
The New York Times
January 28, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST

By BOB HERBERT

In a lot of ways New York is a wonderful city. For my money, it's the greatest. But like most American cities, it's weathering fiscal hard times. Despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg's upbeat tone at yesterday's budget presentation, it's a city that can't afford its share of the basic upkeep for its schools, its libraries, its day care centers and so forth.

It's a city of some eight million people that dangerously shortchanges its Fire Department because money is hard to come by. It's a city that has been unable, due to budget constraints, to reach contract agreements with crucial city employees, including firefighters, police officers and teachers.

In short, it's tapped out. Over the past couple of years the city has relied more and more on corporations, wealthy individuals and foundations to pay for municipal services and functions that the city can no longer afford to provide.

The mayor proposed more than a half-billion dollars in budget cuts yesterday as part of an array of proposals (some of them fanciful) to close a budget gap of about $1.5 billion. This is an election-year budget. You can bet heavily that next year's budget will be worse.

New York State is in worse fiscal shape than the city. Much worse, actually. For one thing, Mayor Bloomberg has been far more responsible when it comes to fiscal matters than Gov. George Pataki, who seems to have studied at the George W. Bush School of Economics.

The state, for example, has the primary responsibility for financing local school systems. But the governor and other state officials, already faced with daunting deficits, are clueless about how to comply with a court order to come up with billions of dollars in additional state aid for New York City's chronically underfinanced schools.

Gambling has been one of the governor's favorite strategies for raising school funds. For the longest time he has promoted the idea of bolstering school aid through the use of video lottery terminals - a wretchedly destructive little system known to its detractors as video crack.

The point here is that neither the city nor the state has a dime to spare. Subway lines are falling apart because 19th-century signal systems have been neither upgraded nor protected. Plans for critically needed school construction are being deferred. After-school programs, which are literally lifelines for many youngsters, have to be shut down because they are not "affordable."

And yet. Ah, yes. If there's one thing in this unhappy fiscal environment that Mayor Bloomberg will absolutely go to the mat for (carrying along the governor and any other powerful figures he can muster), it's that football stadium for his fellow billionaire, Robert Wood Johnson IV, owner of the New York Jets.

At $1.4 billion, this playground for the richest among us would be the most expensive sports stadium in the history of the world. The city and the state, which can't afford toilet paper for the public schools, would put up a minimum of $600 million and undoubtedly much more. The smart money says the public will take at least a billion-dollar hit on this project so Woody Johnson can hold court amid a sea of luxury boxes hard by the Hudson on the Far West Side of Manhattan.

How foolish is this project? They're planning to build a 75,000-seat stadium without any parking facilities to go along with it. Can you imagine what the West Side will look like on a game day? (The mayor's people got into a snit last October when officials in New Jersey wouldn't let Hizzoner land his helicopter at the Jets' current home in the New Jersey Meadowlands. He wanted to arrive too close to game time, the officials said. They suggested he come by bus.)

If you're not rich and you don't already have season tickets to Jets games, you will have very little chance of ever seeing the team in its new digs. The waiting list for tickets is 10 years.

But if there's any justice at all, this stadium will never see the light of day. To take the public's money, which should be used for schoolkids, for subway riders, for hospital patients - for any number of projects that might truly serve the public's interest - and hand it over to a billionaire who will use it as seed money to further his already fabulous interests is obscene.

I presume there will be naming rights for Woody's wonderful new playground. I can see the sign now: Bloomberg's Boondoggle.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

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