Author Archives: Neil deMause

San Diego economist reports that all the other teams’ moms are buying them new stadiums

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The president of the National University System Institute for Policy Research — hey, it’s never heard of you either, okay? — has come out with a report on plans for publicly funding a new San Diego Chargers stadium, and determined that all the other kids are doing it:

San Diego County would have to cover up to 65 percent of the cost of a new stadium, based on what other NFL markets have contributed. … The center’s president, Erik Bruvold, said he is still preparing his findings, but a much lower public contribution matched by a much higher private share would make a stadium deal in San Diego an “extreme outlier” in the NFL stadium world.

Well, yes, cities do tend to put in most of the money for stadiums these days — I believe I’ve read a book or two about that. This is somewhere between “painfully obvious” and “answering the wrong question,” since the point should be whether it makes sense for San Diego to pay 65% of the cost of a stadium, not whether other teams have gotten away with it. (It’s worth noting, which Bruvold did not in his U-T San Diego interview, that the Chargers’ best alternative option at the moment is a stadium in Carson that would be covered 0% by the public, at least so far as we know now.)

Bruvold did acknowledge, kind of, that 65% is a lot of money, but mostly because those pesky voters might not be happy about spending it:

“It’s unclear to me that the region has got an appetite for a 60 to 65 percent contribution on an $800 million stadium,” he said.

Fabiani has said a new stadium could cost as much as $1.5 billion or more — meaning that the public contribution according to Bruvold’s calculation could reach $975 million.

“People may not like that and I’m not expecting people to like that,” Bruvold said. “That makes some sense of Fabiani’s negative message in his letter to the task force, which is there may not be a deal.”

So to sum up: Other NFL teams have gotten an average of 65% of their stadium costs covered by taxpayers, so the Chargers are going to want that, even though no one else is offering it to them, but San Diego residents aren’t going to like it, so … let’s throw up our hands and say that people can either like the Chargers’ demands or lump them? I’m not really sure what to make of this, except that I’m now thinking I’d get more press coverage if I changed the name of this site to the National Institute for Analysis and Research of Field Schemes.

New Winnipeg stadium leaky, city sues builder to pay for fixes

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It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the new $208 million football stadium that Manitoba is building for the municipally owned Winnipeg Blue Bombers football team. How’s that going, guys?

Triple B Stadium Inc., the consortium that owns IGF and funded the construction of the 33,500-seat facility at the University of Manitoba, has filed a lawsuit against construction company Stuart Olson and architect Ray Wan.

The lawsuit argues the home of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers is riddled with problems that will take millions of dollars to fix.

Oh, dear.

The minister said part of the reason the province chose not to put money into the old Canad Inns Stadium near Polo Park was because putting the required $50 million into it would have been “pouring that money down the toilet.”…

“Do I think that this is still a great stadium? Yeh, I do. But we want it here for 50 or 60 or 70 years. And the problems that have been identified and what Triple B is looking at is that the construction, we may not get that 50 years out of it and it’ll just start to crumble a lot earlier and so these problems need to be taken care of.”

Oh, dear oh dear.

Basically, the new stadium will be safe, but the charges are that the builders mucked up the waterproofing, which will cause the building to sustain more damage over time. One hopes that the suit will be settled in a way that will allow for repairs to be made that will keep this building around for 50 years or more — wow, people talking about a stadium lasting 50 years, that takes me back — but in the meantime, I guess at least Manitobans can be glad that they can play football in it at all.

Emanuel rejects Cubs’ request to work nights on Wrigley bleachers, which will now be ready pretty much never

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The Wrigley Field bleachers are not going to be ready by May, either:

On Monday, the Cubs said the cold weather meant bleacher construction remains behind schedule, as work could not be done when temperatures dropped below 10 degrees. The left field bleachers are expected to be open by May 11, with the right field bleachers to be open in June, [Crane] Kenney said.

“We were hopeful for a warm winter. We did not get that,” Kenney said. “I think over the last nine days, we lost five days on the bleachers. We’d love to pick that time up by extending our work hours.”

By “extending our work hours,” Chicago Cubs president Kenney meant working outside the legal times of 8 am through 8 pm, which would require special permission from Mayor Rahm Emanuel. That being Mayor Rahm Emanuel who’s suddenly in the middle of an unexpectedly tight runoff election, and doesn’t want to piss off any voters unnecessarily by keeping them awake with late-night construction, so he said hell nah.

The Wrigley Field bleachers are not going to be ready for a while yet. But then, neither are the Cubs.

AEG issues another report on how Inglewood stadium would be a menace to planes

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Apparently AEG’s plan to block Stan Kroenke’s Inglewood stadium plan is to pay anyone in sight to issue reports about how it’s too near the airport. Following on last week’s report claiming that it would be a terrorist missile pad, AEG has now commissioned a former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board to show that planes could crash into it, or fly real low over it and scare people, or something:

According to the [Mark] Rosenker report, approaching aircraft could be as little as 300 feet above the Inglewood stadium, potentially dangerously close for the safety of the plane as well as fans in the stadium.

“The (safety) margins are not there,” Rosenker told the Post-Dispatch on Tuesday. “You lose an engine. Something bad has happened for whatever reason, and you have got to come down quickly. This is not a place that you want to be having to dodge around to guarantee that you get in there safely and not collide with anything before you touch that touchdown zone.

“It’s a bad idea, just in general. … Why put something that could be a catastrophic result in a place, where if you put it anyplace else, you take all of those problems off the table?”

Now, I am not a former NTSB chair, but I am a Mets fan, which means that I’ve been overflown by hundreds if not thousands of planes while at games, both at Shea Stadium and at Citi Field, which was allowed to be built six years ago in the flight path of LaGuardia Airport without anyone raising any alarms. Also, FAA regulations do try to account for this, saying no buildings in a flight path within three miles of an airport can be more than 200 feet tall — the stadium would be about 150 feet tall, so what’s the problem, exactly?

(I could also point out that the only stadium ever to be hit by a plane wasn’t anywhere near a flight path.)

I guess Rosenker’s point, such as he has one beyond “Can I have my check now?”, is that if you’re going to have a football stadium, you might as well do it somewhere that’s not near an airport, just to be better safe than sorry. In which case, you know what’s nowhere near LAX? The Edward Jones Dome. I bet the Rams could keep playing there for years and nobody would crash into it.

St. Louis stadium plan for Rams nears $1B, would only require tearing down most of everything in sight

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The state of Missouri has released some new renderings of its proposed St. Louis Rams stadium, featuring lights that won’t shine in the eyes of passing boat captains and some local buildings not being demolished. It still looks like it would wipe out the newly renovated, nationally historic Hammond Apartments, though, in addition to most of the remaining old warehouses by the river:

That’s a lot of riverfront land dedicated to parking lots, as well as a reminder that the Jones Dome would still be there, serving as a very-occasional plenary hall for conventions, I guess? There would also be crazy geometric shaped video boards, and room for additional seating for Super Bowls, and a $985 million price tag that nobody has much of a clue how to pay for. But it’ll bring more tourists and huge profits around each event, so what’s to complain about?

TV station lands interview with Indy Eleven exec, forgets what “interview” is supposed to mean

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Is this WRTV6 report on the proposed Indy Eleven stadium perfectly inept? Let’s count the ways:

  • Parrots the team owner’s claims about how much money will come from stadium ticket taxes, even though the team’s own projections contradict that? Check!
  • Talks to only one source, a team exec wearing a team scarf? Check!
  • Video of a stadium rendering flyover, plus video of exciting soccer footage? Check!
  • Softball questions about “Should we trust you?” followed by the interviewer himself opining that any claims that the team isn’t trustworthy “are just not true”? Check!
  • Interview subject claims that unlike other projects, this one has assurances in place that it “will not fall on the public’s shoulders,” and the interviewer then ends the segment without even asking what those assurances are? Check!

That, my friends, is some bad alleged journalism. Indy Eleven president Peter Wilt must have gotten lots of high fives on returning to the office, for putting across the team’s media message perfectly without having been challenged at all. Not that any of it will likely sway the state senate, but free televised PR time is never something to turn up your nose at.

AEG says Kroenke’s Inglewood stadium no good because terrorists could shoot down airplanes from it

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In what the Los Angeles Times calls “a bold move to undercut an NFL stadium at Hollywood Park” — “bold” being an adjective usually reserved by journalists for the sort of things done by, say, Vladimir Putin — AEG has attempted to throw a roadblock in the path of St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s proposed Inglewood stadium by getting former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge to write a report that it would be too tempting a terrorist target and should not be built:

In a 14-page report, Ridge suggests that because the Inglewood stadium proposed by St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke would lie within three to four miles of Los Angeles International Airport and beneath the flight path of airliners, terrorists might try to shoot down a plane or crash one into the stadium, scenarios Ridge described as “a terrorist event ‘twofer.’ “

Because when terrorists want to shoot down an airplane, the first thing they do is look for an NFL stadium to launch surface-to-air missiles from. It’s easy to bring those in, so long as you put them in a clear plastic bag.

The Times reports that “it is not known how widely AEG distributed the report,” which the paper got from Ridge’s PR firm. NFL vice-president Eric Grubman effectively dismissed its findings, saying, “We feel that the best approach is to look at these things with an independent eye.”

In addition to giving everyone a good laugh, the AEG report should show what we have to look forward to as three different developers and three different NFL owners all circle around the L.A. market, which is full corporate titan smackdown action. Recall that when the owners of Madison Square Garden faced off with the New York Jets owners over a proposed Manhattan stadium, it culminated in a giant ad war, so one can only hope that this will have as entertaining a denouement.

Back nearer to planet Earth, meanwhile, the Oakland Raiders are reportedly looking for a smaller, 55,000-seat stadium in Oakland, which would be more in line with the NFL’s new marketing reality, not to mention with what Raiders owner Mark Davis said two years ago, than an 80,000-seat behemoth in Carson. Not that anybody, including Davis, is proposing how to build such a thing, but it’s a way to get another Raiders stadium story into the paper, so hey, do what you gotta do.

And speaking of getting stadium stories into the paper, consummate NFL insider Peter King has an article at SI.com theorizing that since Kroenke seems to be “the most determined owner to want to move to Los Angeles” (though he hasn’t actually said anything about moving, and has only partnered with a development company in Inglewood on a stadium with unspecified funding) and St. Louis has the most advanced stadium plan (though it has its own problems with mystery funding), maybe the Rams will move to L.A. and then the San Diego Chargers will move in with them and the Raiders will move to a new stadium in St. Louis?

Even King calls this “a virtual sports-talk-show bit of guesswork by me,” but that doesn’t stop him from putting it in print. (And in a pull quote.) Nor does it stop him from writing his entire column with only two people quoted: Grubman and St. Louis stadium plan chief David Peacock, neither of whom say anything other than what you’d expect them to say. (Grubman talks about L.A. having “real momentum,” Peacock says “if we do our job, I can’t imagine 24 votes to approve the Rams moving.”) And now I just wrote almost two paragraphs about this piece of wild speculation, so maybe I’m no better than the rest of them — though at least I reserved the headline for the far more entertaining piece of wild speculation. That’s the defense I’m going with, anyway.

A’s owner wants control of Coliseum site for development, just without so much development

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With the Oakland Raiders sorta kinda maybe thinking about moving to Los Angeles, it would seem that A’s owner Lew Wolff is sitting pretty to finally seize control of the Oakland Coliseum property so that he can build a lucrative mixed-use development to help pay for the costs of a new stadium. So, naturally, Wolff thoroughly confused everyone by announcing that what he really wants to see built around an A’s stadium is a giant parking lot:

Wolff said there is not enough land readily available at the Coliseum complex to build a stadium and satisfy the city’s desire for additional development, such as homes, shops, offices and a hotel.
The only way it could work, Wolff said, would be to build multilevel parking garages, but that would leave fans waiting in long lines to exit the garages and begin their drives home.
“Parking is a key issue for us,” Wolff said. “We want surface parking surrounding the ballpark wherever we build it unless we’re in the heart of a downtown.”

Now, no argument from me that A’s fans are going to want to park somewhere, and that multilevel parking structures are kind of a mess. (I still have nightmares about the New Haven Coliseum parking ramp.) But given that, as an astute Twitterer noted, back in 2010 Wolff went on and on about how an Oakland stadium would only work if it were surrounded by “residential entitlements” (i.e., the right for Wolff to build condos), it’s a bit odd to see the guy suddenly saying screw condos, parking lots are where it’s at!

The most likely interpretations, it seems, are that Wolff’s latest gambit is an attempt to tell Oakland 1) there’s not enough room for two stadiums plus other development, so get the Raiders offa our lawn, 2) you’re not giving us enough land, go back to the plan where 800 acres would be in play, 3) we don’t like those Coliseum City guys, let us plan our own development or it’s no deal, or 4) some combination of the above. Still, it makes for a bit of a muddled public message from Wolff — but then, muddled messages are kind of his specialty.

Crunching the Inglewood numbers: Rams stadium would bring new revenues, but getting to $1.86B is tough

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The Los Angeles Times’ Tim Logan, who has been doing excellent work on St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s Inglewood stadium plan (and I don’t just say that because he usually seems to interview me), had a long story yesterday headlined “Stadium economics: How building a venue in Inglewood makes financial sense.” So how does it make sense, exactly?

  • Sports economist Rod Fort says it’s a good deal for Kroenke if he can make enough money on the associated non-stadium development: “It’s more like a real estate development than a stadium.”
  • Sports economist John Vrooman says the Rams could bring in an extra $100 million a year in “sponsorships, marketing and premium seating” in L.A. as compared to St. Louis, calling a move “an economic no-brainer.”
  • Sports economist Victor Matheson says Kroenke could rent out and Inglewood stadium for concerts and the like, but “there’s just not that many 60,000-plus person events.”
  • I call spending $1.86 billion just to get uncertain revenues “a huge, huge risk.”

Fort’s and Vrooman’s points are the most viable arguments for a privately funded Inglewood stadium making sense for Kroenke, so let’s take them one at a time. First off, the real estate development at Hollywood Park might well bring in enough revenue to make a stadium-plus-development deal turn a profit — but then, why saddle it with a potentially money-losing stadium when the rest of the development was already approved and ready to go? Kroenke had to pay his development partners (no one knows how much) to buy into the bigger plan, and it doesn’t make sense that they’d voluntarily give him a lot more in revenues than he’s paying them to buy in, since a stadium doesn’t especially help them any.

As for the extra $100 million a year from being in Los Angeles, that is the big question: Precisely how much value does the L.A. market have to an NFL owner? We’ve heard that number before, on the San Francisco 49ers‘ move to Santa Clara, but we’ll have to wait till the new Forbes numbers come out this summer to see if they agree. We can use the Forbes numbers another way, though, to see how reasonable this is: What are the Rams revenues right now, and what would adding $100 million a year mean?

According to Forbes, the Rams were dead last in the NFL in revenue in 2013, at $250 million. (Being dead last in the NFL in revenue is still a pretty lucrative gig.) Adding $100 million would mean they’d have to jump to 5th in the league in revenue, behind only the Dallas Cowboys, New England Patriots, Washington Unmentionables, and New York Giants. That’s conceivable, I suppose, but I’d still call it a huge risk, even if maybe the Forbes figures might make me willing to lop off one “huge.”

And then, would even $100 million a year be enough to make a $1.86 billion stadium a good investment? Kroenke could presumably knock off some of that price tag with PSL sales (figure $300-400 million), naming rights (about $200 million in present value), and possibly NFL G-4 money ($200 million max). That leaves only a little over a billion dollars to pay off, which $100 million a year would cover, but without much left over for a return on investment. At best, then, Kroenke would be putting up more than a billion dollars out of pocket, plus whatever he’s spending on stadium land and a share of the associated development, for a return that he could get by putting his money in a decent stock index fund. (Okay, and increasing the value of his asset, which admittedly could come to a bunch — the Giants are worth about a billion dollars more than the Rams right now, according to Forbes, though the Giants also aren’t saddled with $1.86 billion in stadium debt.) And if there’s any significant relocation fee required by the NFL, then forget it.

Add it all up, and I would just suggest that the Times’ headline writers should have made one tense change: “How building a stadium in Inglewood could make economic sense.” We’re talking hypotheticals here, and everything would have to go Kroenke’s way for a $1.86 billion stadium to pay off for him. Or to put it another way: It’s a huge, huge risk.

San Diego officials propose bold new Chargers funding plan: Borrow money, pay it back somehow

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San Diego county supervisors testified before Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s Chargers stadium task force yesterday on ideas for funding a stadium, and man, are they terrible. (The ideas, I mean. Not the supervisors, necessarily.)

  • Supervisor Ron Roberts suggested that the county provide a “bridge loan” that could later be paid back by property and sales taxes on new development around a stadium — tax money that would normally go to the general fund to pay for schools and other public costs associated with new development, but would be instead diverted to repaying stadium loans … somehow. Also, Roberts didn’t indicate how the loan would be repaid if the development didn’t pan out as expected.
  • Another idea, from supervisors chair Bill Horn, was for the county to sell a revenue bond that would be repaid by revenues on … something. (In the inimitable words of U-T San Diego, “no payback source was suggested — though he said there would need to be one.”)

No offense, guys, but it’s not much of a challenge to come up with ways of paying for a stadium that just amount to “Borrow the money, then pay it back somehow.” The not-so-fancy footwork is apparently being inspired by a California law that requires a two-thirds public vote before adding new taxes, a voter threshold that is never going to be cleared for a San Diego stadium, no way, no how. So instead we have local officials trying desperately to think of ways to fund a stadium with existing taxes, which would then need to be made up somehow, and backstopped if they don’t come in sufficiently, and oh it all just makes your head hurt, doesn’t it? I’m starting to understand why Sacramento used an arena financing plan that involved using city parking revenues and then filling in the resulting gap with more city parking revenues and then filling in that resulting gap by shrugging a lot and changing the subject.