Author Archives: Neil deMause

Tom Tunney now fighting himself over proposed Wrigley changes

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The Chicago city council took up the latest iterations of Cubs owner Tom Ricketts’ Wrigley Field renovation plan this week, and they didn’t actually entirely rubber-stamp everything! Yet, anyway:

The revised Wrigley plan now heads to the full council for a vote, where everything will no doubt get worked out between Tunney and himself. Whether anything ever actually gets built, since Ricketts is still insisting on a no-lawsuits pledge before breaking ground, is another story.

 

Markham council kills arena plan (mostly) dead

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The Markham city council concluded its third straight night of hearing residents savage the idea of putting public money into a new NHL-ready arena last night, then topped it off by voting unanimously to withdraw from their agreement with developer Graeme Roustan. The council of the Toronto suburb also voted 11-2 that any future arena project would have to be paid for entirely with private money.

The writing has been on the wall that this could happen for a while now, since the council almost killed the plan back in August before giving Roustan one last chance to come up with a deal that made sense. Still, given that it was less than a year ago that the Markham council approved the Roustan plan despite plenty of public opposition, it’s a pretty remarkable turnaround. Apparently learning that a new arena wouldn’t actually guarantee an NHL team and that the proposed arena manager doesn’t think arenas can survive without pro sports dimmed their ardor.

And their ardor, at this point, is decidedly dimmed:

“What we’ve heard over and over again is residents do want an arena,” said councillor Carolina Moretti. “But they don’t want to pay for it.”…

“What is the rush?” [councillor Jim] Jones said. “We’re not going to get an NHL franchise any time soon, so let’s take our time and get it right.”…

“Publicly funded arenas have an abysmal financial record,” Councillor Valerie Burke said. “Nothing in this proposal or the amendment convinces me otherwise.”

There’s still a glimmer of hope for Roustan: The council approved sending his arena financial plans to city staff for further study, and voted to give the developer six months to come up with a new plan that involves no public money. But, seriously, for a deal that was awfully speculative to begin with, this puts it back at square one, if not square zero — Roustan hadn’t even managed public commitments for his half of the original arena deal, so it’s just about inconceivable that someone will throw the full $325 million at him now.

It’s bound to be a disappointment for Greater Toronto residents who were looking forward to … having an alternative place to see Avril Lavigne concerts, maybe? Anyway, the swift crash and burn of the Markham arena should be a lesson to everyone everywhere that a sports venue plan has been declared a “done deal”: Until the money has all been committed, it’s never too late to call things off. You got that, Cobb County?

Markham arena developer threatens libel suit against anyone who says mean things about him

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So many people have lined up to testify at the Markham city council’s hearings on developer Graeme Roustan’s proposed $325 million hockey arena — after Monday night’s packed hearing, 123 more speakers signed up to testify last night, and dozens were still waiting as the meeting dragged into the wee hours — that the council has delayed a vote until after a third straight night of testimony tonight. And in case you’re wondering, the populace does not sound too happy about the project:

“This process is a sham,” said Markham resident Norman Manara. “Put this project out of its misery.”

Mr. Manara’s comments were met with a standing ovation.

Roustan, meanwhile, has responded in the way that only a developer scorned can: by threatening to sue citizens for libel if they keep saying mean things about his project:

A lawyer for Graeme Roustan, president of GTA Sports and Entertainment … said “personal attacks” to his reputation on the coalition’s website or in a public meeting “are not appropriate.”…

“Please be aware that public statements by the [Markham Citizens Coalition for Responsible Government] or its directors that do harm to Mr. Roustan’s reputation, whether or not they are a repetition of newspaper reports or other sources, may constitute libel or slander and give rise to serious legal consequences,” the firm said in the notice.

“We would ask that on your website and in any public comments by your directors, the MCCRG adhere to standard practice and not pose open-ended questions or make statements based on misinformation that are harmful to Mr. Roustan’s reputation.”

This, needless to say, is just all kinds of awesome sauce, and was immediately seized on by MCCRG members to paint Roustan as a big meanie. (“Threatening residents where you want to do business is not a smart thing to do,” said group director and Markham Village City Ratepayers Association president Karen Rea.) Figure on him not getting a standing ovation at tonight’s meeting.

Meanwhile, at risk of being dragged before some bewigged Canadian libel court judge (do judges still wear wigs in Canada? aw, crap), Roustan’s financial plan got even shakier yesterday, as investment bank Canaccord Genuity, which a Roustan spokesperson had previously said was “supporting” the developer’s private share of the project, declared that it’s only an advisor, not an investor. So we have Roustan not revealing where he’d be getting his half of the money, and Markham still not clear on where it’ll get its share, and — wait, is that the libel police I hear? Forget everything I was just saying: This Markham arena is totally awesome sauce!

Oilers’ “big announcement” is just selling naming rights to nonexistent arena for undisclosed sum

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The Edmonton Oilers‘ “big announcement” on their planned new arena has been announced, and it is:

Rogers Communications has now acquired the naming rights for Edmonton’s future downtown arena.

Calling it a “moment of pleasure and joy for everyone involved,” Edmonton Oilers president Patrick LaForge told a Tuesday news conference the naming rights agreement moves the $480-million arena in downtown Edmonton “closer to reality.”

Hey, I guessed it!

How much the Canadian TV giant will pay to name the as-yet-nonexistent hockey venue “Rogers Place” — not to be confused with Rogers Centre and Rogers Arena — is unknown: Even Edmonton Mayor Don Iverson said he doesn’t know the dollar figure. In fact, it may be unknowable without fancy accounting tricks, as the naming-rights deal is just an expansion of Rogers’ sponsorship deal for the Oilers’ TV broadcasts, website, and mobile app.

Not that any of this matters much, since according to the Oilers’ deal with Edmonton, all naming-rights money goes into the pocket of team owner Daryl Katz, who’s already said he’s spending as much as he’s gonna towards the $676 million arena project. That means the $50-130 million funding hole is still empty. So the arena is only “closer to reality” in the sense that there’s now a corporate name to put on the renderings — which is kind of a shame, as I was looking forward to pictures of the Your Brand Here Centre.

Edmonton Oilers to announce some damn thing about long-stalled arena plans today

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The Edmonton Oilers are set to make a “big announcement” regarding their downtown arena plans today, according to their house TV broadcaster Tom Gazzola. Which could mean … jeez, pretty much anything, given what passes for major announcements these days.

But it’s a slow news day, so sure, let’s take a guess. When we last checked in, the $676 million Oilers arena project was still $50 million short of full funding, even after getting more than $300 million in commitments from various levels of government. Plus it’s likely the arena construction will cost $80 million more than has been projected, and I’m pretty sure there’s still no deal in place to cover cost overruns.

So … hmm. It’s pretty unlikely Oilers owner Daryl Katz would voluntarily announce that he’s chipping in more money to cover any of these gaps, given his past behavior, even if he could pay for it out of just the increased value of his franchise thanks to the promise of the new arena and the NHL’s new TV deal that made pretty much every NHL team jump 50% in value this year. If it’s not about construction money, then, and the design of the place has long been set, I’m going to guess it’ll be the announcement of a naming-rights partner, or some other “prime sponsorship” kind of deal. Tune in later today to see if my exciting wild-ass guess was correct!

Markham rolls out same arena plan yet again, this time with more promises

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There’s yet another Markham arena plan afoot, with Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti signing two new memorandums of understanding on Saturday that developer Graeme Rouston says will make funding the project come “100 percent from the private sector.” And how does that differ from the last plan that was supposed to do the same?

The breakdown of payments now looks like as follows:

  • $162.5 million from arena developer GTA Sports & Entertainment, same as in the original plan approved in April 2012.
  • Another $32.5 million in future lease payments from GTASE, based on a future lease that will be written in the future.
  • $80 million promised by developers as part of a special fee on new development near the arena, though it’s unclear how the city can go about collecting this if the new development doesn’t actually happen.
  • $50 million from … we’ll get back to you on that.

In other words, it’s all pretty much the same plan that it’s been for almost two years, except that now GTASE and other developers are promising that they really will pay all this money, instead of … actually, they always were promising it, but I guess now they’re promising it on paper. Not necessarily enforceable paper, but paper nonetheless.

The Markham council is set to vote on this plan today or tomorrow, and though the Toronto Sun says it expects it to be “rubber-stamped,” National Post columnist Bruce Arthur says it shouldn’t be:

Between now and then, someone should tell them that they are risking an enormous amount of money for a project that is somewhere between risky and outright insane.

“We have never been encouraging of this project,” said NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, reached by phone on Saturday. “And we have repeatedly said that if this building is built, it should be built with the expectation that they will not get a team.”

On the bright side, the Toronto metro area is a huge market, and there’s some recent evidence that even second arenas in big markets can be a success. On the less bright side, building arenas on spec for teams that never arrive has worked out significantly less well, and hanging financial plans on speculative future housing development around an arena is — “between risky and outright insane” sounds about right. There is much for the Markham council to consider before they get out their rubber stamps.

D.C. United stadium land swap spins wheels as January 1 deadline approaches

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We haven’t heard much about the proposed new $290 million D.C. United stadium — public cost: $150 million — since back in September, when the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute was complaining that the District only had until January 1 to finalize the city-subsidized land swap to clear space for the stadium. Turns out that’s because almost certainly nothing is going to get finalized by January 1 after all:

Under an agreement the city signed with one of the main landowners, Lew was given a Nov. 15 deadline to share with the council the terms for how the city would obtain the stadium property, enough time, Gray had said, for the council to approve the plan before the end of the year…

Lew now hopes to submit a package of proposed deals to the council before Dec. 25, spokesman Tony Robinson said.

Still, Mendelson said he is loath to pressure the council to rush approval. “Intentionally or not, I fear the council is going to be jammed, and this is too expensive a project for us not be careful about it.”

As the Washington Post notes, it doesn’t help that four city councilmembers — Tommy Wells, Muriel Bowser, Jack Evans, and Vincent Orange (yes, that Vincent Orange) — are all vying to replace Gray as mayor, and so are not likely eager to rubber-stamp Gray’s plan over the holidays. Even Evans, who has never heard a stadium proposal that he didn’t like, griped to the Post: “I have no idea where it stands. Absolutely nothing, zero, I don’t know. I hope to get it done. I support the whole idea, but to do it all so privately and secretively, that’s when you announce it and suddenly have all kinds of critics because you haven’t done the legwork to build support.”

If the land swap isn’t approved by January 1, D.C. United can back out of the deal, or just start soliciting offers from other cities — not that any other cities are really bidding to throw $150 million at the MLS team, but a threat’s a threat. It is puzzling that Gray would set up a short deadline and then fail to actually submit a stadium bill, but maybe either his staff underestimated the difficulty of negotiating for the land, or he saw how well giving elected officials no time to considered a deal worked in Georgia, and is hoping lightning can strike twice.

Cardinals leave Flagstaff training camp, local economy surges

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The Arizona Cardinals moved their summer training camp back to the team’s regular-season home in Glendale this summer after 25 years in Flagstaff, which no doubt was gripping news to all of you Arizona Cardinals training camp fans. But since the whole move was over money — money the Cardinals didn’t want to pay in rent to Northern Arizona University, money NAU didn’t want to spend on further renovations to its facilities, and money that football advocates claimed Flagstaff would lose without the annual influx of Cardinals fans — it’s interesting to see how the city fared with summer football gone.

And the answer is pretty darn well indeed:

Sales tax revenues from restaurants and bars for July and August were up by 5.3 percent over the same two months in 2012, according to city data.

For August alone, when much of the camp was held, restaurant and bar spending was up 11.6 percent even without the Cardinals.

Spending in hotels and motels also was up, although many Cardinals fans from the Valley are day-trippers. Lodging tax collections increased 7.7 percent in July and August, and 7.3 percent in August alone.

Taken together, August revenues from the 2 percent BBB tax were up 9.9 percent compared with August last year.

“This tells me that the Cardinals training camp has some entertainment value for Flagstaff but is not as significant an economic driver as we perhaps thought it was,” said Mayor Jerry Nabours.

Now, it’s hard to tell from these numbers alone whether the Cardinals leaving truly had no impact — local sales tax revenues have been up almost every summer since 2007, as the city has been marketing itself as a cooler summer destination for Arizona residents, so it’s possible the numbers would have been even better with the Cardinals. Still, it’s a pretty significant sign that losing visiting sports fans needn’t mean disaster for a local economy: If Cardinals tourists are being replaced by Grand Canyon tourists who don’t have to worry about fighting with football fans for hotel rooms and restaurant reservations, all the better — especially since the Grand Canyon doesn’t demand new locker rooms.

Post-Thanksgivukkah stadium news roundup: Cubs beer sales, World Cup crane collapse, Vikings steel imbroglio

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So it’s Thanksgivukkah+1, meaning that most of you are either sleeping off turkey latke comas or looking for Black Friday deals on smartphone-enabled Furbies. But there might be somebody sitting in an otherwise-empty office today scouring the web for things to read, so what to do? I know — bullet points, to cover some items that slipping through the cracks while we were focused on more urgent (or at least more bizarre) matters:

  • Chicago alderman Tom Tunney, the sometimes-nemesis of Cubs owner Tom Ricketts’ Wrigley Field renovation plans, has proposed a new “sports venue plaza liquor license” that would allow any sports stadium with a capacity of 30,000 or more — in other words, the Cubs, White Sox, or Bears — to sell alcohol in adjacent pedestrian plazas. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing or anything — given Wrigley’s small footprint, it wouldn’t hurt to get some of the beer-buying activity out of the baseball-watching part of the building — but it is a concession to the team, just as the Boston Red Sox‘ ability to use Yawkey Way for food sales is — and at the very least something you’d think the city could trade off with Ricketts in exchange for, say, not putting up illuminated ad archways over city streets. It also probably won’t make local bars too happy that Cubs fans will have more places to drink inside the park, but them’s the breaks.
  • Brazil’s much-beleaguered World Cup preparations got even more beleaguered on Wednesday when a crane collapsed at a stadium under construction in São Paolo, killing two workers and likely delaying the stadium’s opening until at least February. The World Cup doesn’t start until June, but still, the crane accident is only likely to exacerbate the cost overruns that have many Brazilians wondering why the hell anybody would want to host a World Cup anyway?
  • Construction is about to begin on the new $1 billion Minnesota Vikings stadium, and former state representative who Tom Rukavina is upset that the structural steel will be imported from Europe instead of brought in from Minnesota’s Iron Range, as required “to the extent practicable” by a provision that Rukavina inserted in the stadium bill. Only problem: The Iron Range doesn’t actually directly produce structural steel. Anyway, the Gov. Mark Dayton has promised that Minnesota firms will be on the job fabricating parts from the steel, so everyone can rest easy about the project. Except for, you know, all the money it’s costing Minnesota taxpayers to create a few steel-fabricating jobs.

And that’s enough for now — if you really want to read Marcos Breton’s latest puff piece talking about how awesome the Sacramento Kings arena will be for downtown, do it on your own time. See you Monday.

Detroit council delays Red Wings arena vote until they can read the actual lease

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The Detroit city council was set to vote yesterday on the only thing it gets to vote on regarding the proposed $650 million Red Wings arena-and-other-development project (public cost: around $261 million), the expansion of the TIF district that will kick back property taxes to help pay for it, but instead postponed the vote until December 17. The reason: Councilmembers still haven’t seen details of the new arena’s concessions agreement, including whether local businesses will be hired and who’ll pay for increased police costs, a complaint that the council first raised back in September. The agreement will supposedly be ready in a couple of weeks, but at least some local elected officials aren’t down with buying a pig in a poke.

Meanwhile, the Detroit Free Press reveals that council staff say the arena deal will cost the city an estimated $45 million, which goes against the team’s (and governor’s) claim that this is all tax money that the state doesn’t let the city see anyway, so quit yer yapping. There are no other details of this in the news media, and doesn’t appear to be anything on the council’s website, either; if I can find out anything else, I’ll post an update here.