The Pope has Spoken

OK...I am no finance major BUT Mike telling some caller just a few minutes ago that taxpayers didn't help finance the NEW Yankee Stadium is just grossly wrong. This is merely from Wikipedia and it took me < 10 seconds to find. Enjoy...

Financing

Rather than the $800 million value affixed to the stadium (which is for the stadium and not for the parking garages, highway improvements and other items associated with the construction), independent analysts have set the tab for the complete project closer to $1.3 billion. The city's share includes allowing the Yankees to occupy 22 acres (89,000 m²) of Macombs Dam Park and John Mullaly Park (which is already used for stadium parking on game days), and to build parking garages on those parks. City-funded artificial surface will be placed on top of those parking garages to make up for the lost parkland. The city would retain ownership of the land, but would not charge the Yankees rent or property taxes. In addition, the city would foot the bill for acquiring scattered parcels of land near the waterfront, about a half-mile away, and building smaller parks as replacements there. The cost of renovating the existing parkland would be about $25 million; building new parkland will cost $150 million. That cost includes demolition costs for the historic Yankee Stadium, which would be completely torn down. The building's destruction would be paid for entirely by the city and replaced with parkland. The city will also issue tax-exempt bonds for the Yankees' new stadium. The Yankees would repay those bonds with payments in lieu of taxes; the Yankees have not paid taxes.

View from right field upper-deck during the first contest held at Yankee Stadium, April 3, 2009

The Yankees have arranged for the lease on Yankee Stadium to be classified as an "operating lease", even though many accountants think that the Yankees' early involvement in the building of the stadium should have precluded operating lease accounting. This is extremely important to the financing because it means that the Yankees will be able to keep significantly more revenue from the stadium and will not have to share it with the rest of Major League Baseball.

New York state taxpayers will pay $70 million to help the Yankees build parking garages (as authorized by the State Legislature). The parking garage project would cost $320 million. City and State taxpayers will forgo up to $7.5 million annually in lost taxes resulting from the sale of $225 million in tax-exempt bonds authorized on October 9, 2007, by the New York City Industrial Development Agency (administered by the New York City Economic Development Corporation) to finance construction and renovation of the parking garages.^[13][14] However, if the parking revenues are not enough to pay a reported $3.2 million land lease to the City of New York, the entity that will operate the parking garages and collect revenue will be able to defer that payment.^[15] State taxpayers, through money that has accumulated from the MTA's budget since the 1980s, will also pay all of the costs of a train station on the Metro-North commuter railroad.

In addition to the public subsidies and billions of dollars of increased revenue, the Yankees will benefit from a change to Major League Baseball's 2002 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that deducts new-stadium building costs from a team's net local revenue, which in turn reduces a team's revenue-sharing payments. For the Yankees,the largest contributor to the revenue sharing pool with roughly $300 million in overall revenues, this rule means 40 percent of their share of the price tag may be borne by the remaining 29 baseball teams. All told, the Yankees and the taxpayers can each expect to pay about $450 million, and the Yankees will cover the remaining costs from diverting revenue sharing payments that would have been paid to the other baseball teams.

Lonn Trost, the Chief Operating Officer of the Yankees, confirmed in February 2008 that the new stadium would retain its original name, Yankee Stadium.