Even though Buffalo Bills fans are still recovering from last week’s heartbreaking loss in the divisional round, the future for the team looks bright. State and local politicians are doing everything they can to keep the team in Western New York after the current lease at Highmark Stadium expires next year.  

Team owners Terry and Kim Pegula have said the team will not sign a new lease unless it’s in a new stadium. The search for a new home for the Bills intensified 10 years ago. Since then, the question over where to put it still hasn’t been settled. There’s also the continuing debate over whether or not to build a dome stadium.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo native, recently said the preference is an open air facility next to the Bills' current suburban home in Orchard Park, not downtown.

It’s a bit of a reversal from a decade ago. Then Lt. Gov. Bob Duffy told Spectrum News 1 that the NFL wanted a waterfront or downtown location. When the current 10-year lease was signed to play in Orchard Park, Duffy said it was clear downtown had the edge. 

A written report from Empire State Development seemed to back that up. The option to build a new stadium in Orchard Park comes in at $1.5 billion. That’s about $450 million less than the $1.9 billion price tag at a site downtown. Despite that, a 2019 study scored downtown as the better option.

Duffy says he has confidence in all who are the parties currently involved in choosing the site for a new stadium, but admits he’s surprised Orchard Park has appeared to leapfrog downtown.

"Because when I was in office it was leaning more toward downtown and Orchard Park was not out of the picture, but in the end we thought downtown probably at the edge," Duffy said. "It now looks like that pendulum swung back the other way and perhaps they just couldn’t get enough space to make that happen in a waterfront or downtown Buffalo location. I don’t know. It might take a lot of imminent domain decisions to make that happen. With Orchard Park the tough thing, and it's why I haven't got to a game in a few years, it’s the traffic. You leave your house at 8 o’clock in the morning and you get home at 10 or 11 o’clock at night."