Sal Maiorana

@salmaiorana

The Bills have playing in Orchard Park for 43 years, and will through at least 2022.

There are several options for new stadium sites, but the Pegulas have not concluded their research.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell hinted that the Bills need a new stadium.





BUFFALO – There are several open spaces on the downtown Buffalo landscape perfectly suitable on which to build a new stadium for the city’s National Football League team.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the 31 owners who don’t have the surname Pegula would gladly sign off on any of them, just so long as something gets done in the next few years because, simply put, a new stadium in Buffalo means more money for that group of multi-millionaires/billionaires.

To the chagrin of everyone at Pegula Sports and Entertainment, the conundrum that is the stadium issue was back in the news a couple weeks ago when Goodell — in town for Jim Kelly’s celebrity golf tournament — dropped some not-so-subtle hints about the Bills’ need for a new venue.

“Stadiums are important, just to make sure the team here can continue to compete, not only in the NFL, but also to compete in this environment,” Goodell said. “You’ve got great facilities (around the league), and the Bills have to stay up with that.”

However, Goodell and the owners can talk about it all they want, but Buffalo, Erie County, New York state, and team owners Terry and Kim Pegula are not ready to put an executable plan in place.

“We’re in the fact-finding mode,” Kim Pegula said last week during a sit-down with the Democrat and Chronicle at the PSE office in downtown Buffalo. “We want to make sure we have all the information that is relative to our community, to our fan base. We’re not Atlanta, so it’s hard for us to say we’re going to build a stadium like Atlanta. We can’t. It’s not just a yes or no, it’s a lot more involved than that. We don’t talk about it now because we don’t have all the answers and we don’t want to get misconstrued because things change.”

Russ Brandon, chief operating officer of PSE, has been involved with the new stadium dilemma dating back to the late 1990s when he first came to work for former Bills owner Ralph Wilson. When Brandon arrived in 1997, the Bills’ 25-year lease with Erie County for what was then called Rich Stadium was coming to an end, and the team had to sell $11 million in premium seats in order to free up $63.25 million in state funds earmarked for a much-needed renovation.

But even then, with the threat of the team moving out of town if those seats weren’t sold, there were whispers that a new stadium might have been a smarter play than gussying up what soon became known as Ralph Wilson Stadium. And through the years, those whispers grew louder and louder to the point where, when the next major renovation plan was put into motion, there was clear opposition. Some of it was local, but most of it emanated from other NFL owners who thought it was foolhardy to spend more money on a stadium entering its fifth decade of existence.

“When you look back at the (2013-14) renovation, we took a very holistic approach to that,” said Brandon. “We looked at the new stadium model, the complete retrofit model, and the renovation model, and we came to the renovation number ($130 million) because we didn’t feel it made sense at the time (to build a new stadium), with everything that was on the horizon. We’re going to take the exact same approach with this and see what makes sense.”

That’s because Buffalo is a unique market for the NFL. Only Green Bay is smaller, and Buffalo is one of only two markets (Baltimore is the other) that does not have a Fortune 500 company in its midst. What works elsewhere doesn’t work here.

“We are the 53rd DMA (designated market area) in the country (Green Bay is No. 70),” said Bruce Popko, the executive vice-president of business and development for PSE. “Our realities are different than a lot of other markets. There are realities and real ceilings that everyone has to understand.”

Here’s what Popko means: Bills fans, though many may not realize it, are spoiled. Not by the success of the team, but by what it costs to spend a day at the Ralph. They pay the lowest average ticket prices in the NFL, and nowhere is the cost of suites, premium seats, concessions, and parking lower than Buffalo.

“Just because we think the community should pay a quarter of a million dollars for a suite doesn’t mean the community is going to pay a quarter of a million dollars for a suite,” said Popko. “Having it in discussion is very different than the reality of a conversation when you’re sitting across from someone negotiating these types of deals.”

Building a new stadium in Buffalo will be an enormously tricky venture because of what it would cost the taxpayers of western New York, initially in the actual construction, and then in the sustainability when fans are asked to shell out so much more money to attend games.

“When you look under the Christmas tree everyone wants brand-new toys, that’s easily said,” Brandon said. “But when you go through the process and look to see exactly what makes sense for our community, that’s what we have to be very thoughtful of. With a new stadium comes a lot of things — public-private partnership, there’s PSLs (personal seat licenses), there’s cost increases across the board. We’ve been successful in Buffalo with a volume model; lot of seats in the building, lot of suites in the building, and we’ve been able to keep costs down because we’ve been able to manage a 43-year-old building and we’ve been able to do that very well. That equation, economically, changes with a new building.”

MAIORANA@Gannett.com