wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

So few Yankee fans are parking at 11 garages and lots around the new stadium in the Bronx that the company managing them may soon default on $237 million in tax-exempt bonds used to build them.

The new Yankee Stadium is smaller than the old one. But in 2006 when the team said it needed 2,000 extra parking spots for a total of 9,000 all together, the New York City Industrial Development Agency issued $237 million in tax-exempt bonds for an expanded parking system — paving over the neighborhood's only regulation baseball diamonds to do it.

"Unfortunately, the Yankees built their parking lot on the field that we used to practice on," said All Hallows High School varsity baseball coach Edgardo Guttierez during the team's 45-minute bus trip to play against Mount Saint Michael in the north Bronx near the Yonkers border.

The team used to play four blocks from the school.

"We feel like a bunch of gypsies just traveling all over the place," said right fielder Stephan Alamies.

Bloomberg said private bondholders, not taxpayers, will be on the hook if the Bronx Parking Development Company defaults on the bonds. On his weekly radio show, he recently shrugged off the Bronx Parking Development Company's possible collapse.

"The city has no downside," he said. "If they were to go bankrupt, it doesn't hurt us. It wouldn't be good for the project."

But taxpayers have been hurt. According to public documents and two separate analyses, the Bronx Parking Development company owes the city $17 million in back rent and other payments. The city is paying $195 million to replace the parkland it gave to the Yankees.

And New York State spent $70 million to build Parking Garage B. That's where Derek Jeter and his fellow players park, along with VIP ticket holders. The garage is not open to the public, and allows those who use it to enter directly into the stadium.

"It doesn't seem to make sense to publicly subsidize the stadium and also publicly subsidize the parking garages," said Bettina Damiani, project director at Good Jobs New York, a government watchdog group. "This is about the impact it's had on an entire generation of kids who have not had access to open public park space the way they did have."

At a City Council hearing in 2006, Yankees president Randy Levine predicted additional parking garages would bring less traffic to the neighborhood: "By building the new parking spots, the cars will get out of the community, won't circle around the community and disrupt it and will go into parking lots," he said. 

As a sweetener, the Bloomberg administration, pushing the plan, added a last-minute concession: it would build a new Metro-North stop next to the field. 

The Yankees got their new stadium — and the 9,000 parking spots. The stadium plan passed the city council, 44 to 3.

In 2006, Speaker Christine Quinn defended the garages.

"I think it would be great if people could go to sporting events exclusively on mass transit but that's not going to happen," she said. "So one has to, when they're developing projects like this, have a reality sense of what the needs are as it relates to parking."

The MTA told WNYC that more than 50 percent of a typical sell-out crowd arrives by train, bus or ferry. Many fans who do drive skip the $35 charge for a spot at a Yankee garage and either park on the street or at cheaper lots in the neighborhood.

Little has changed outside the stadium on game days. Traffic cops stand on corners directing the circling cars. By first pitch, every one of the area's 3,200 curbside spots is filled.

Angel Castillo, a car-owner who lives four blocks from the stadium, said street parking is so scarce during Yankee homestands that he leaves his car in a spot for four days and pay $15 each way for a car service to his job as a barbershop manager in the North Bronx.