Daniel Rubin: Mayor Nutter should cut luxury boxes

When it comes to budget cuts, Mayor Nutter likes to say "everything's on the table."

But one thing I have not heard mentioned are those sweet luxury boxes the mayor controls for sports, concerts and pop spectacles.

If libraries, firehouses and rec centers are on the table, why aren't the mayor's seats?

They were in New York. This month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg agreed to turn over his 12 seats at the new Yankee Stadium, with proceeds going straight into the Big Apple's depleted general fund.

A similar deal is being struck for the Mets' new ballpark, and the spokesman for New York's economic development corporation told me the sales could yield as much as $1 million a year.

Apparently that arrangement can't happen here. Doug Oliver, who is Mayor Nutter's spokesman, offered a number of reasons why the city shouldn't give up its 20 or so seats at Citizens Bank Park, Lincoln Financial Field and the Wachovia Center.

He touted the new way that the city hands out these seats, "rewarding kids for getting good grades in school and community groups and nonprofit organizations that would otherwise not have an opportunity to go to these events."

Former Mayor John F. Street was frequently whacked around in the press for handing out tickets to cronies and campaign fund-raisers.

So Nutter in April came up with a policy that accounts for who gets these seats, producing quarterly reports, the most recent of which was released yesterday. For the last three months of the year, 988 people sat in suites the mayor has in the three venues, the report shows.

While members of City Council and other elected officials took 87 of those seats, they were used much more often by nonprofit groups, rec centers and those truly needing something nice, such as the families of slain police officers.

But this city is facing a billion-dollar shortfall over the next five years, and the mayor is sitting on an asset of considerable value.

How valuable? I talked to a local ticket and luxury-suite broker who put an annual price tag of nearly $500,000 on the mayor's seats in the three arenas.

That's not a lot of money, given the deficit, but where else are funds going to come from?

The mayor's spokesman said the city would get some "push back" from the teams if it turned around and sold the tickets.

Let them try.

Couldn't both the city and the teams score a PR coup by working together to bail out the budget?

A couple of people I talked to said so, from Zack Stalberg, president of the Committee of Seventy, to former mayoral candidate Sam Katz, who is an expert in the financing of sports facilities.

"It's a perfectly sensible thing to bring up now," Stalberg said.

"A no-brainer," Katz said.

The way Bloomberg crafted the plan in New York earlier this month was by having the team, itself, sell his seats. The city will pay the Yankees an undisclosed amount to market these tickets, and the team will return to the city a minimum of $100,000 a year.

And the deal can end when Bloomberg is no longer mayor, so the city can get back its seats when finances improve.

New York's economic development spokesman, David Lombino, told me the boxes perform a valuable public service when the city entertains heads of corporations and foreign dignitaries or rewards employees.

But that's a luxury New York cannot afford. "In this economic climate, there are other things that are of a higher priority," he said. "Right now, it just doesn't make sense."

There's a different logic at work in Philadelphia. Just ask the 27 folks who got to watch the playoffs and World Series in seats given to the City Democratic Committee.

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