ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — As the new Buffalo Bills stadium continues to rise, the Community Benefits Oversight Committee met once again on Tuesday, where it also got an update on the construction in Orchard Park,
The panel was formed to monitor the team's promise to invest in the community in exchange for the hundreds of millions of tax dollars being used to finance the stadium.
According to the Bills’ Vice President of New Stadium Operations Penny Semaia, 61% of the structural steel has been put in place and the thousands of workers involved in the stadium's construction have now put in a collective total of more than one million hours on the project. The construction is due to be completed in a little under two years.
Semaia also reported that goals set by the state, which is paying for the stadium, in terms of the number of women, minority, and veteran owned businesses doing work on the site have, for the most part, been met .
However, they've had to look far and wide to find them.
Semaia produced a chart which indicated that while 60 percent of them came from within a 100 mile radius of orchard park, the remaining 40 percent were found, in some cases, in other states.
Board member Sean Mulligan proposed a resolution which was tabled that would "right size" some of the contracts for the work.
"It calls upon the general contractor to break up some of those contracts," he explained in noting many of the construction firms in Western New York are small to medium in size. Mulligan said right sizing the contracts would allow more local companies, and their workers, to benefit from this once in a generation project.
"There may not be in this area the capacity for one company to do, for example, the entire roof. But perhaps there are ten companies and if you break it down into contracts worth half a million or $200,000 it could spread the wealth around a little bit," Mulligan said.
However, the community benefits agreement doesn't just involve construction of the new stadium. There will also be hiring quotas once it's operational and for the work involved in the subsequent demolition of the existing Highmark Stadium.
Beyond that, the Bills are required to invest $3 million every year for the next three decades into the community.
Committee member Franchelle Parker suggested there needs to be more clarity on how interested groups can apply for those funds and expressed the opinion that this needs to be done before the committee hosts a public hearing in early December.
"We have this process that's kind of moving forward, but we don't have an application process in place. We don't have a clear deadline on when you can submit a proposal, and I believe we owe it to our people to make sure that when we do have the public hearing, we have all of these pieces in place," Parker said.