Is The City In Effect Giving The Yankees Money To Lobby Itself?

If true*, then this seems at least mildly disturbing:

City documents newly uncovered by the Voice reveal that the New York Yankees billed city tax-payers hundreds of thousands of dollars for the salaries of team execs and high-powered consultants to lobby the city and state, thanks to the team’s sweetheart lease deal engineered by the Giuliani administration.
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The Yankees are apparently taking advantage of a clause in their lease with the city that allows “planning costs” of their new $1.3 billion stadium — groundbreaking for which could take place as soon as next week — to be deducted from the team’s rent. The planning deductions date back to a lease renegotiation arranged by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in his final days in office. Under the December 28, 2001, lease deal, both the Yankees and the Mets were allowed to deduct up to $5 million apiece from their annual rent payments to the city, to be used for planning the new stadiums that Giuliani proposed to build, with city aid, across the street from the teams’ existing homes.

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Until recently, the city had insisted that it had no details of how the “planning” money was spent. But a review of documents submitted by the Yankees to the parks department — pried from the city only after a Freedom of Information Law filing (a separate request has been made for Mets city documents) — shows that the beneficiaries of the city money include not just those working to design the stadium, but also those trying to extract public approvals for it as well.

For starters, Yankees president Randy Levine (a former deputy mayor under Giuliani) and the team’s chief operating officer, Lonn Trost — the two top Yankee officials working for passage of the stadium deal — received a combined $312,500 in city money in 2004. The Yankees’ justification, according to the documents: The amount totaled 30 percent of Levine’s annual salary and 20 percent of Trost’s, representing the time each spent working on the stadium project.

Even more audaciously, the Yankees in 2004 charged the city $203,055.87 for the services of Powers and Company . . . According to filings with the New York Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, Powers was hired by the Yankees to lobby the state senate and assembly and the governor’s office for permission to use 25 acres of Bronx parkland and $70 million in state money for the stadium — permission that, as the Voice has reported (“Playing Hardball,” March 15–21, 2006), was granted in June 2005 after no discussion or debate in the legislature.

The city even apparently paid the Yankees to lobby the city itself. Another recipient of city money, via the Yankees, was the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, which, according to the New York City clerk’s lobbyist database, has served as a registered lobbyist for both Tishman Speyer, the Yankees’ project managers for the stadium, and the Yankees themselves. (Tishman’s $1.9 million in 2004 was the number one billable item in the stadium planning account.)

*As if the Yankees need more money!