New baseball stadiums cost over $2B

The new Yankee Stadium and the new Mets stadium, CitiField, are at a combined cost of about $2.2 billion, and the city plans to issue an additional tax-exempt bond of $341.2 million to complete the stadiums. The teams are responsible for paying off the bonds, but are paying tens of millions of dollars less in interest because payments to bondholders are exempt from city, state and federal taxes. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that the city will earn a net return of $40 million over the bonds’ life, but George Sweeting, deputy director of the city Independent Budget Office, said “The additional costs that have emerged make it quite likely that the city’s net benefit number is now negative.”