On Monday night, most fans of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills will be focused on the team’s game against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
But a few are marking their calendars for a different reason: To buy municipal bonds from Erie County, New York, which will help finance the Bills’ new stadium, scheduled to open in 2026.
The bonds are one piece of an $850 million public funding package which — when it was announced in 2022 — was the largest public subsidy for an NFL stadium to date.
The county has been marketing the so-called “Bills Bonds” as a way for fans to invest in the team’s future, and the bond sale is tapping into a complicated mix of emotions and economics in the NFL’s second smallest market.
Considering all the heartbreak the franchise has experienced — four consecutive Super Bowl losses in the early 1990s — this is a pretty good time to be a Bills fan. They’ve made the playoffs five years running, their quarterback Josh Allen is a star, and their running back James Cook is somersaulting into the endzone.
But even through the team’s many down years, Bills fans have remained dedicated. Rooting for the team is deeply embedded in Buffalo’s culture.
“In any given Sunday when the Bills are playing, you could shoot a cannon down any thoroughfare in Buffalo because everybody is watching the Bills,” said Nellie Drew, a professor of practice in sports law at the University at Buffalo.
But despite having a rabid fan base, the Bills play in one of the NFL’s oldest stadiums, which opened in 1973. “The cracks literally are quite visible,” Drew said. “It’s time to move on to a new facility.”
And because they play in a metro area of just 1.1 million people, fans have long feared the team might pack up for a larger city.
“The entire time I’ve been here, you always worry about the Bills moving because we are a small market,” said Erie County Comptroller Kevin Hardwick, who moved to the area in 1989.
The 2022 stadium deal between the county, state and team put those worries to rest, but at a cost. For the county, that cost is $250 million, half of which it hopes to raise through a bond sale next week.
For a day before institutional investors can get in, Hardwick’s office is giving fans the chance to own some of that debt. The minimum investment? $5,000.
“This is a once-in-a-generational opportunity for Bills fans to get involved,” he said.
And some fans are jumping at it, like Corey Wiktor, who heads an economic development agency in nearby Cattaraugus County and lives a few miles from the stadium.
“In my mind, it’s a great way to help finance it, where you’re not necessarily putting this on the backs of Erie County taxpayers to that degree,” Wiktor said.
Selling bonds cuts down on the amount of cash the county has to pull from its coffers right now to pay for the stadium. And selling those bonds to a larger pool of individual investors is in Erie County’s financial interest, said Abigail Urtz, a senior vice president at FHN Financial.
“Inviting that local support and retail investor support is a tactic used by issuers to basically invite more orders, not just from retail investors, but from institutional investors,” Urtz said.
The more investors, of all kinds, who buy in, the lower the county’s cost of borrowing, she said. Still, taxpayers will have to cover that borrowing cost — which Hardwick estimates will likely be several million dollars a year.
Erie County is far from alone in using public dollars to pay for pro sports facilities.
Public contributions to stadium projects have generally fallen since the Great Recession, but they’re still significant, according to Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
“This is not unusual,” he said. “It’s not good public policy, but it’s not unusual.”
It’s not good policy because there’s not much evidence that having a pro sports team in town actually makes a positive economic impact, Matheson said.
“Every dollar that a Buffalo resident spends on the Bills is a dollar not available to spend on other things in the economy,” he said.
In Buffalo, fan Drew Ludwig is a hospice chaplain and said he watches every Bills game. He’s choosing not to pay for a stadium bond or for anything Bills-related right now, because he’s already paying his taxes, which ultimately pay for the stadium.
“They’re taking enough of my money against my will, right? So I don’t want to give them voluntary money on top of that,” he said.
Ludwig admits he might be in the minority among Bills fans, but he sees a lot of other things in the Buffalo area that could use public money.
“Education, parks, benefits for people in poverty,” he said. “I mean, there’s hunger in Erie County.”
But the deal is done. The stadium is under construction. Still, Ludwig feels like the region got burned in the negotiations.
“The people of Buffalo love the Bills, right? And you can’t really make business decisions when it’s love.”
It’s a power imbalance, he said. And as a fan, that’s frustrating.
