Look out Buffalo: Stadium hucksters may want your property

You may already be a winner: A Manhattan law firm has been circulating a letter to homeowners in the First Ward, offering its services in what the letter called “likely” eminent domain proceedings should the Buffalo Bills decide to build a new stadium in the triangle of land defined by South Park Avenue and Louisiana and Ohio Streets.

The letter from the law firm of Goldstein, Rikon, Rikon & Houghton, reads in part:

Our firm recently learned of the potential acquisition of your property in the enclosed public notice. If the City ultimately takes title to the property, then it will be required to pay “just compensation” to the former owners and will make an offer based upon the City’s highest approved appraisal. If you are not satisfied with the offer, the City will pay you the amount of the offer and you still have the right to claim for additional compensation over and above what has already been paid.

Unsurprisingly, the firm “limits its practice to eminent domain law” and is available to represent the interests of neighborhood property owners—no doubt requiring a retainer.

The public notice referenced is a sketchy map of the neighborhood with the basic outlines of a stadium superimposed over the triangle, with a circle defining a quarter-mile radius around the stadium—presumably the area in which the City of Buffalo, on behalf of the NFL and the Buffalo Bills, would exercise eminent domain.

As recently as July, the Bills’ owners, Terry and Kim Pegula, told The Buffalo News, “[T]here’s been a lot of money put into Ralph Wilson Stadium. We’re in no hurry. We realize that if that work was just done, how foolish would you look if you start looking around for a new stadium when we’ve just renovated the one we have? We have time. We have an existing lease on the current stadium.”

This article originally ran in The Public, a Buffalo-based partner publication of City & State. To read the attorney letter in full, click here.