Taxpayers weigh-in on where they want the future of Bills stadium to be

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – With Bills lease and stadium negotiations underway, the Erie County Legislature is giving taxpayers the opportunity to have their voice heard with a series of public meetings. The meetings are being held over Zoom due to spiking Covid-19 cases in Western New York.

“Bringing it downtown would help small businesses, it would bring opportunity for people who live in the inner city to be able to come to these games,” said Andrew Robinson who says he’s in favor of the stadium being in Buffalo.

“I work at Shea’s performing arts center and I see the positive impact live events have on the city, and businesses that are downtown near Shea’s every weekend,” said Margaret Niederpruem. “I think a bills stadium would benefit everybody if it was built downtown.”

“Downtown, I can’t see it handling 75,000 or 80,000 people,” said Wayne Teneff, who want the new stadium built in Orchard Park. “The traffic, even for a Sabres game, it’s hard to get out of there and with the infrastructure plan. I don’t know how we’d be able to do this.”

Bills fan Lynda Schneekloth says she doesn’t want to see a new stadium at all.

“Why are we even talking about spending multi-billion dollars when we already have a functioning stadium that needs renovation?”

Hearings will also be held this week on Tuesday and Wednesday at 6 p.m. Monday’s meeting can be seen in the video player above (some technical issues affected the first ten minutes or so, which were cut from the video).

The Erie County Legislature isn’t directly involved in the negotiations, but does need to approve contracts entered into by Erie County. The county is represented in the negotiations by county executive Mark Poloncarz and his team.