Taxpayers will finance more than $1 billion in subsidies if the Jets stadium is built, according to 106 economists who have signed an open letter to Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg, and the City Council. The letter, to be released today by the National Taxpayers Union, says the $1.925 billion stadium would be three times as costly as any other National Football League stadium and would translate into $1.3 billion in subsidy costs to taxpayers.

Signatories include a Nobel laureate, Vernon Smith; university economists from Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia universities, and several senior fellows at conservative think tanks.

The letter comes as the state’s Public Authorities Control Board prepares for a special session Wednesday that Mr. Pataki hopes will feature a vote for the proposed stadium. The required unanimous approval by the three voting members of the board – the speaker of the state Assembly, Sheldon Silver, and officials designated by Mr. Pataki and the majority leader of the state Senate, Joseph Bruno – is, along with a favorable decision next week on several lawsuits seeking to block the Jets project, a final hurdle before construction can begin on the New York Sports and Convention Center, as the stadium is officially known.

Mayor Bloomberg has made the stadium a central issue in his candidacy for re-election and has said New York City will forfeit the opportunity to be host of the 2012 Olympic Games if the stadium, which would serve as the Olympic stadium, is not approved before the International Olympic Committee votes for a host city July 6.

“Lower Manhattan is the most important issue, and the stadium comes second,” Mr. Silver told The New York Sun yesterday. As for the stadium, he said: “We need to put the facts on the table. What is the real amount of public subsidy – and I know it is a lot more than the $600 million that has been advertised.” The economists’ estimate of $1.3 billion in city and state subsidies for the Jets stadium “sounds a lot more realistic,” Mr. Silver said.

According to the letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Sun, the $1.3 billion in subsidies represents $300 million each in direct payments from the city and the state, which the Bloomberg and Pataki administrations have pledged to the Jets, and $450 million in tax-exempt bonds serviced by “payments in lieu of property taxes” and sales taxes on construction material. The city and state administrations have also agreed to finance infrastructure improvements, including $30 million for a pedestrian tunnel connecting the stadium to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, and $66 million for the stadium lobby, game porch, and other structures.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s sale of its West Side rail yards, at which the stadium will be built, is another $150 million subsidy, the economists wrote. The MTA sold the development rights to the Jets for $250 million instead of to another bidder, Madison Square Garden, which offered $400 million.

“The report is full of inaccuracies,” a spokesman for the Jets, Matt Higgins, said. “Even the conservative Independent Budget Office said that the New York Sports and Convention Center will not only pay for itself but generate millions in surplus over the next 30 years.” That office, an independent city agency, released a report last summer that estimated the stadium would create $28.4 million a year in new city tax revenue.

In addition, Mr. Higgins said, the economists’ letter was incorrect because the Jets have agreed to pay for some of the public expenditures attached to the project, including $70 million for a “north porch” and half the cost of a pedestrian bridge over West 30th Street.

“All of the independent research ever done on sports stadiums financed with taxpayer subsidies have found they do not pay back their investments,” a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a signatory of the letter, Steven Malanga, said yesterday.

The president of the National Taxpayers Union, John Berthoud, said: “Here are a large number of well-respected economists sending a message that taxpayer subsidies for stadiums are a bad deal.”

The reason stadiums are not moneymaking ventures stems from “the substitution effect,” Mr. Berthoud said.

“Politicians talk about people eating hot dogs or buying tickets at the stadium, but in reality, people would be eating whether they went to the stadium or not,” he said. The entertainment dollars spent at the stadium would be spent at the movies or a restaurant, for example.

“If you look across the economic studies that examine whether stadiums make money – and there have been a lot of these studies conducted – the resounding answer is no,” Mr. Berthoud said.

Other economists who signed the letter include Princeton’s Elizabeth Bogan and Gregory Chow, Columbia’s Donald Davis, and Harvard’s Jeffrey Miron. A noted sports economist who is a professor at Smith College, Andrew Zimbalist, also signed. Think-tank fellows who signed the letter include the Heritage Foundation’s Dan Mitchell, the Hoover Institution’s David Henderson, and the Laissez Faire Institute’s John Semmens.

The National Taxpayers Union, a nonpartisan group that boasts 350,000 members, has issued critical analyses of proposals for government-subsidized stadiums in other cities, such as Washington.