Friday roundup: NYCFC unveils images of Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium, A’s reveal plans to blow a/c at fans’ feet

And so we have reached the end of another programming week, one mercifully without Jerry Reinsdorf’s stadium subsidy demands going up yet again. That’s just about the only thing that didn’t happen this week, though, so let’s hit the news recap:

  • NYC F.C.‘s $780 million soccer stadium plan cleared another hurdle this week, getting the okay of the City Planning Commission, the last stop before a final city council vote. It also got some fresh renderings depicting how fans would enter the stadium through a giant cube-shaped entryway (dubbed The Cube, this team has a way with words) that would be covered in a giant video board that display the names of all five New York boroughs, in case you forget where you live. (The stadium is depicted bearing the name Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium, while the entryway in one image says “New York City FC” while in another it’s “Cube Entrance Sponsor,” pick a lane, guys.) Still up in the air: how the affordable housing component would work, where fans will park if Mets owner Steve Cohen refuses to let the soccer team use his parking lots across the street unless he gets a state casino license, and, oh yeah, how the whole thing would be paid for, someone should really look into that.
  • The Oakland A’s “spherical armadillo” stadium in Las Vegas would have “the highest number of suites, clubs and other high-end seating products” relative to size of any MLB stadium, according to Venues Now, which spoke to A’s president Dave Kaval on the subject. In addition to hardly any affordable tickets, Kaval promised that the air-conditioning would blow out from under people’s seats, something that’s used at the Sacramento Kings arena and in some Middle East soccer stadiums, and which the site reported Kaval said he’s “working with Henderson Engineers to find a way to make it work in MLB.” Also a work in progress: The A’s are playing an exhibition game in Las Vegas tonight, and plenty of good seats are still available.
  • The Virginia legislature has officially passed a budget without money for an Alexandria arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals, though Gov. Glenn Youngkin could still try for an amendment or a special session. State senate finance chair Louise Lucas, who has the power to kill budget bills by denying them hearings in her committee, doesn’t seem real amenable to that, though. One Alexandria restaurant owner tells D.C. News Now that he’s upset not because he wants arena traffic for his businesses, but because spending over $1 billion in public money on an arena would “alleviate some of the tax burden from the residents,” somebody’s been reading too many clown documents!
  • Two members of the Jackson County legislature will be holding a public hearing this Monday at 3 pm on the Kansas City Royals‘ $2 billion stadium plan and $1 billion public subsidy plan. While attendance at these things is never representative of the public as a whole — it’s almost guaranteed there will be a throng of construction workers bussed in to cheer the project on, for example — it will at least give us some hint of the public mood as we approach the April 2 deadline for voting on the 0.375% sales-tax surcharge extension that would fund the first chunk of the project. (The Kansas City Star editorial board is a no, at least until Royals owner John Sherman explains more about how the money, lease, and provisions for relocating businesses would work.)
  • The Chicago Bears owners are reportedly “close to” announcing a lakefront stadium in Chicago and are also still haggling with suburban cities over property tax breaks for a stadium there, never take seriously rumors that are spread by team execs themselves, just don’t.
  • Maricopa County and the city of Phoenix are considering a “partnership” to address the Arizona Diamondbacks owners’ stadium demands, which would … do something? Also this was just a letter that the county sent to the city council last August, and the council never replied, guess the Arizona Republic was having a real slow news day.
  • Would a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium increase the team’s attendance? Yes at first, then no after the honeymoon wears off in a few years. This report is not remotely new news, but it comes with lots of stats and charts! Guess the Tampa Bay Times opinion section was having a slow news day.
  • Sure, New York taxpayers are spending over $1 billion on a new Buffalo Bills stadium, but who can put a price on 16-foot-tall bison statues? ESPN reports that “there was some disappointment on social media among fans” that the statues aren’t bigger, since the “World’s Largest Buffalo Monument” in North Dakota is 26 feet tall, that does it, time to tear down the new stadium and build one with state-of-the-art bison.
  • New Mexico United‘s new stadium “costs the city nothing,” according to team president Ron Patel; KOAT-TV checked, and it’s actually nearly $29 million in public money, about half the total cost. Never take seriously cost estimates that are put forward by team execs, just don’t.
  • The Hawaii legislature is set to consider a bill to scrap a $350 million plan to rebuild Aloha Stadium so that the money can be used for wildfire recovery and housing instead. Rep. Gene Ward said he opposes the bill because “it’s not going to get anybody to come to the football games, regardless of how bad you are as a football player,” no, I don’t know what he meant by that either.
  • Finally, back on the A’s front, I was on this week’s Rickeyblog podcast, where we talked about all aspects of the team’s stadium situation, not least why fans in the Vegas stadium renderings are waving the flag of Gaddafi’s Libya and what that could mean for tourism. Give it a listen, you’ve got all weekend!
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Behold the spherical armadillo: A’s Vegas dream stadium has ginormous windows, scoreboard, funding gap

Three months after they were originally supposed to be releasedOakland A’s Las Vegas stadium renderings finally dropped yesterday. [UPDATE: This was apparently a day earlier than planned, because A’s execs initially forgot to tell reporters the images were supposed to be embargoed.] Are they as batshit as last week’s “verbal renderings” made them sound? Do they raise even more questions about the financial wherewithal and/or sanity of A’s owner John Fisher? Are they ever, and do they ever!

Initial thoughts:

  • The “five overlapping layers” “inspired by traditional baseball pennants” turn out to look more like someone picked up the Sydney opera house and dropped it on a baseball stadium. It’s definitely visually striking — how it would work in terms of engineering, how much it would cost to construct, and how it would fit on a teeny nine-acre site are all excellent questions.
  • The “largest video board in MLB” will be attached to the curve of the (fabric?) roof somehow, and will be impossible to read for anyone sitting down the first-base line. Also despite the stadium not opening until 2028, a 40-year-old Mike Moustakas will still be playing third base for the Los Angeles Angels, and the A’s lineup will likewise involve all players who are currently on the team, which would be remarkable but maybe not more remarkable than Shea Langeliers batting .285.
  • “The tiered design will split upper and lower seating bowls to bring fans closer to the action than traditional ballparks and provide clear sight lines from every seat,” according to MLB.com’s writeup, and yes, every baseball stadium for at least the last century has featured a “tiered design” and no, there’s no way that “brings fans closer to the action” unless the upper decks are cantilevered over the lower ones, and that doesn’t appear to be the case here.
  • As Noah Pransky notes, there’s no a/c ductwork to be seen, which would make the stadium a little on the toasty side.
  • The whole mess looks like “a spherical armadillo” according to stadium critic … oh, whoops, that’s what designer Bjarke Ingels said himself, apparently meaning it in a good way. Twitter took it differently.
  • Fisher gave an interview to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser that will be remembered for his quote that “the armadillo is an underrated animal,” but is mostly notable for his admission that even after putting in $500 million of his own money and borrowing another $200 million, he’s still missing $500 million that he expects to come from unidentified “equity investors” in … the team? The stadium? The roof? Slusser apparently didn’t ask, nor did she ask if a $1.5 billion price tag for this madness is really realistic.

All of this is very on brand for Ingels, whose firm’s style is more architectural shock and awe than fireworks and people flinging their hands in the air for no reason. (Though it is worth noting that future A’s fans seem to have taken to bringing blank green flags to the ballpark, possibly because they’re all diehard supporters of Gaddafi’s Libya.) It does make me wish for some renderings that break new ground in terms of not only physics-defying engineering but reality-defining clip art — couldn’t we at least have one completely nonsensical scene, like, I dunno, horses running wild in the parking lot?

Ahh, now that’s what I’m talking about! That small child will always remember the day her parents first took her gambling, not least because of the hoof-shaped indentation her head will feature the rest of her life. Every great image tells a story, and I’ll take that one any day over “John Fisher captured a space armadillo and forced it to serve as his stadium roof until Jean-Luc Picard figured it out and forced him to release it.”

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Friday roundup: Utah still unclear on where it’d get $1.4B in MLB/NHL subsidies, White Sox have lots of friends in high places

It’s been another nutty week in stadiumland, but let’s give thanks for the small things — in this case, for the WP Dark Mode plugin, which has been updated so that it again gives FoS readers the option to avoid eyestrain while still navigating the site as you’re meant to. If you haven’t clicked the little crescent moon in the corner of the screen, give it a try, it’s fun!

Or you can read about the news of the week, which is less guaranteed to be fun, but is still … interesting? Informative? One of those:

  • Fox 13 in Salt Lake City claims that both the proposed MLB stadium and NHL arena would create entertainment districts where sales taxes would be kicked back to pay for the projects. We knew this for the baseball stadium, but for the arena the legislation says “authorizes a qualifying local government to levy a sales and use tax within the local government’s boundaries and for use within the project area” and caps the amount at 0.5%, so it looks like this would actually be a citywide sales tax hike? Either way, it’s a lot of money, and still more money would be required to pay the full $1.4 billion combined cost — including, notes University of Colorado economist Geoffrey Propheter, $1 million a year in kicked-back “possessory interest taxes,” more than half of which would come out of school budgets — but it sure would be nice to see some clarity on this before the legislature wraps up its session … wait, today? Well, that’s suboptimal.
  • NBC Chicago obtained emails showing that Mayor Brandon Johnson and Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf had their comms departments work together to concoct a press statement about the team’s stadium plans in January, and while it’s sort of understandable given that it was about a meeting between the two, it’s also maybe not the best sign of a mayor being interested in driving a hard bargain for his constituents that when the White Sox asked the mayor’s office to vet their press release, the response was “Could we do a joint statement?” Especially when the resulting statement referred to a meeting “to discuss the historic partnership between the team and Chicago and the team’s ideas for remaining competitive in Chicago in perpetuity” and didn’t mention anything about the $2 billion public price tag.
  • Chicago political consultant David Axelrod tweeted that the White Sox stadium plan would be “a game-changer for the city” and immediately got piled on for “peddling disinformation” (The Athletic’s Keith Law), told “You’re not an economist, so how about trust the economists who are” (economist J.C. Bradbury) and “Claiming stadiums catalyze economic development is like arguing vaccines cause autism” (Bradbury again), among many, many others.
  • Comcast Spectacor, the owners of the Philadelphia Flyers, are talking about doing a $2.5 billion redevelopment of the parking lots around their arena, to include “hotels, residences, restaurants, shops and a 5,500-seat performance stage.” Funding for the first phase would come from Comcast and its development partners, while the second phase would be paid for by “yet to be determined,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which isn’t a red flag at all.
  • The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill handing over the RFK Stadium site to Washington, D.C. for redevelopment which will likely mean a proposal to build a new Commanders stadium there. Every representative from Maryland but one voted against it, as did four of 11 members from Virginia; “It’s most certainly not a level playing field when one interested jurisdiction receives a free transfer of federal government subsidized land,” said Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland. We’re still a long way from actual stadium plans or price tags, and the D.C. council may yet vote to use the site for something other than a stadium, but it definitely adds one more potential competitor to what’s been a mostly quiet of late three-way bidding war.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred called the Oakland A’s Las Vegas relocation plans “solid” and immediately got piled on for damning it with faint praise. Manfred also acknowledged that “to most effectively build the [2025] schedule, we need to know at some point in the spring exactly where they’re going to be,” which isn’t exactly giving A’s owner John Fisher a deadline, the commissioner knows who signs his checks. Fisher is apparently hoping that if he agrees to sell his share of the Oakland Coliseum site to the local group that wants to develop it, the city of Oakland will grant him a lease extension to play there through 2027, which isn’t the deal the Oakland mayor’s office has been talking about at all, so we’ll see what the reaction there is.
  • Tennessee’s tourism department has asked the state legislature for the right to deny public access to public records about how much it offers the NFL for the right to host the Super Bowl at the new Titans stadium under construction. “The Super Bowl deal is often embarrassing for the NFL because of the demands they make and for the politicians that agree to give the league things like free high-end hotel rooms and police escorts,” notes College of Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson.
  • Toronto is now expecting to spend $380 million on hosting six 2026 World Cup matches, which is, let’s see, $63 million per match. It says it expects an economic boost of $392 million in GDP and tax revenues of $119 million, which seem both optimistic and mismatched unless Toronto has a 30% sales tax rate, but since World Cup impact numbers are generally garbage anyway — Matheson once called them “so outlandish as to defy common sense” — we can safely ignore them entirely.
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A’s execs are thinking of a Vegas stadium design, you have to guess what it looks like

On Tuesday, the blog The Rickey Henderson of Blogs noticed that Oakland A’s management had “recently (and quietly) updated its Las Vegas ballpark page on MLB.com” to include what it hilariously called “verbal renderings” of the team’s proposed new stadium:

That’s a screenshot and not a blockquote because the A’s swiftly removed the first four updated paragraphs from their site. But among the things it said before it was tossed down the memory hole:

  • The stadium would “exude” an “outdoor feel” with a roof with “five overlapping layers” that is “inspired by traditional baseball pennants” but wouldn’t actually retract, except for an opening to the north to “allow for natural light.”
  • There would also be “the world’s largest cable-net glass window” on its northwest side (corner?), though it’s not clear if that would cover the opening or what. Also not clear: Who could look out the window, since the northwest side of stadiums is traditionally the third-base grandstand, so that hitters don’t have to look into the setting sun.
  • The stadium would feature “an 18,000-square-foot jumbotron,” “the largest video board in MLB,” which would be placed neither in front of the opening nor the window, but somewhere else undisclosed.
  • The team hired Bjarke Ingels Group and HNTB as the architect on December 4 to design all this.

December 4, December 4, that’s oddly familiar — oh yes, that’s the day that the A’s were scheduled to announce new stadium designs, until they were suddenly delayed because two Nevada state troopers had been killed by a drunk driver four days earlier. So were those renderings drawn by somebody other than BIG and HNTB? Did they never exist at all?

Anyway, we now have some more details of what a Vegas A’s stadium might look like, or at least what somebody thought it might look like before it was taken down from the A’s site. (Sadly, Wayback hasn’t archived the A’s site lately so we can see exactly when it changed; people, please submit the page to Wayback regularly so we can see how it’s changed over time.) And we have even more questions, which hopefully will be answered soon by some BIG/HNTB renderings, though given past Bjarke Ingels renderings, those may only raise more questions themselves.

Meanwhile, A’s president Dave Kaval tweeted about how “the 2024 season will be a celebration of our fifty plus years in Oakland,” and the reaction is going about as well as you’d expect. It’s truly very kind of A’s ownership to fill the post–writers strike release drought with so much fresh entertainment content.

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Friday roundup: Opposition builds (somewhat) to sports subsidy plans in Virginia, Kansas City, elsewhere

It’s been a rough week, what with new stadium demands dropping every couple of hours, half of them from Jerry Reinsdorf. But there have also been signs of new organized opposition from all corners, some of them involving heavy hitters:

  • The Northern Virginia AFL-CIO came out against the proposed Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria after being unable to reach an agreement with the teams and the state on whether a hotel that would be part of the $2 billion project would employ union workers. “If they’re against it, then the arena deal is probably going to have a very difficult time,” remarked Virginia House Speaker Don L. Scott Jr. afterwards, as the arena bill heads for reconciliation talks between the house, which passed it, and the senate, which didn’t even give it a hearing. “If it dies, it dies.”
  • Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas, meanwhile, upped the ante on her opposition to Alexandria arena plans, challenging D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Twitter to “compete by both offering $0 in taxpayer dollars to these teams and let them decide where they want to pay to build their own arena.” (Bowser’s account did not respond, unless this counts.) Former Alexandria mayor Allison Silberberg, who is part of the Coalition to Stop the Potomac Yard Arena campaign, was so pleased that she brought Lucas a cake.
  • After the Kansas City renters’ group KC Tenants came out against the upcoming April 2 referendum to renew Jackson County’s 0.375% sales tax surcharge and give the money to Royals owner John Sherman as part of a potential $1 billion in public money for a new downtown stadium, calling it “$167 per household, per year, all to pay for a playground for the wealthy and for tourists,” a group of city residents have formed the Committee Against New Royals Stadium Taxes to likewise oppose the tax hike. The group has “little to no money in its bank account,” according to the Kansas City Star’s account of campaign manager Tim Smith’s characterization, but it does have a parked domain name and its organizers are members of the extremely active Save Kauffman (Royals) Stadium at Truman Sports Complex Facebook group, which is a recommended follow if you want to see how extremely angry many Kansas City residents, and Royals fans, are about this whole state of affairs.
  • Arthur Acolin, a real estate economics professor at the University of Washington, released a three-page report on the proposed downtown Philadelphia 76ers arena that found that disruptions to existing businesses during construction and operation could cost the city and state between $260 million and $1 billion in lost tax revenues. The math is a little rough — it looks like Acolin just added up all the economic activity in the area of the proposed arena and calculated what would happen if it fell by sample round numbers — but as he writes, “the 76ers have provided nowhere near this level of details nor any of the analysis behind their figures.” It was enough to get the 76ers to respond by calling the report “fatally flawed” and “another attempt by those who oppose the project to obfuscate the truth by pumping out misinformation and half-baked theories instead of engaging in productive dialogue,” in a CBS News article that repeatedly refers to Acolin as “Albert Alcoin,” which should get all their copy editors immediately fired, if they had copy editors, which they probably don’t.
  • Arizona Republic sportswriter Greg Moore wrote a column about Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick’s threat to leave town if he doesn’t get public stadium money that includes the subhead “I don’t like bullies,” and really the rest of the column is just icing on that four-word cake.
  • I brought my mighty rhetorical weight to the airwaves, or at least the internetwaves, by going on the Sox Machine podcast to talk about why giving Reinsdorf $1.7 billion in tax money for a new Chicago White Sox stadium development (since upped to $2 billion) would be crazytown.

So that’s it, then, the tide is finally turning, and maybe soon we can all stop pushing this damn rock back up this damn hill day after day? Hahaha of course not, the forces of vacuuming up money and giving it to rich people so they can have more money (because that’s what makes them rich people) continue unabated:

  • The Utah legislature advanced a bill to hike sales taxes in Salt Lake City by 0.5% to generate $1 billion for an arena for a nonexistent NHL team, with the backing of Mayor Erin Mendenhall. This would be on top of $600 million or more in proposed hotel tax hikes to help pay for a stadium for a nonexistent MLB team. Hockey bill sponsor state Sen. Dan McCay denied that this was giving in to threats by the Jazz ownership that they could move out of the city limits without a new subsidized arena, then added, “you’d hate to see downtown lose the sporting opportunities they have now,” so, yeah.
  • Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson delivered up a fresh bowl of word salad about whether he’ll endorse city money being used for a new White Sox stadium: “As far as public dollars, we haven’t gotten into any of those specifics just yet. But I will say that we’re gonna explore all options. … Everything is on the table here. But again, I want to make sure that there’s a real commitment to public use and public benefit. … There’s no guarantee that they’ll get it from the city. What I’ve said repeatedly is that we need to make sure that our investments have real public benefit and that there has to be a commitment to public use. Those conversations are being had, and there are some promising developments that eventually we’ll be able to talk about out loud.” He has it right here on this list
  • The new $27 million Rhode Island F.C. soccer stadium in Pawtucket will now cost state taxpayers $132 million over 30 years, because the Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency got a terrible bond rate. State commerce secretary Liz Tanner defended the pricey borrowing by pointing out that even though the state legislature could have just appropriated the money and saved taxpayers a ton of interest payments, “there would’ve been a level of uncertainty without knowing whether the legislature was going to pass those dollars or not,” and we can’t have that, now can we?
  • The Dodger Stadium gondola project — surely you remember the Dodger Stadium gondola project — lurched forward again on Thursday when the Metro Board of Directors signed off on its environmental impact report. The gondola still needs approval from the city of Los Angeles and parks and transit officials, plus to figure out who exactly will pay for its potential $500 million price tag, but if nothing else it lives to gondola another day.
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is reportedly focused on staying in Oakland until a new Las Vegas stadium is open in 2028, and also Sacramento is the frontrunner to be the temporary home of the A’s, this is way too blind-men-and-the-elephant for me, maybe let’s all calm down about the latest rumors you heard, guys.
  • And in non-sports news, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry defended signing a bill to remove the requirement that recipients of state development subsidies report how many jobs they’ll be creating, because “this program is about capital investment. It is not about job creating.” Just gonna sit here and let that roll around in my brain for a while, have a great weekend and see you back here Monday!

 

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Friday roundup: Bears set arbitrary stadium deadline, A’s now have three different sets of stadium renderings they won’t show you

A reporter asked me this week if I thought there was one particular thing driving the current wave of stadium and arena demands, and I said not really, though there are a few factors influencing it — lots of ’90s stadiums hitting the end of 30-year leases, local governments feeling a little more flush thanks to federal infrastructure and COVID relief money, baseball teams rushing to get deals in place before expansion takes move threat targets out of play. But at the same time, man is the sports subsidy news ever a firehose right now: This site is seeing multiple posts a day right now, and still I feel like I’m leaving more news than ever for the Friday roundups.

Which is all fine and good and I’m happy to do it, it can just be a little exhausting to write. If it’s not too exhausting to read as well, and you want to throw some additional coins in the tip jar to help me shoulder this increased workload, that’s always appreciated. I’m sure things will die down some once we get to the end of various legislative sessions in the spring and early summer, but right now we should all be taking our vitamins to keep our stamina up.

And speaking of the firehose, let’s turn it on and get blasted:

  • Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren says as far as a new stadium goes, “the timeline has to be in 2024,” adding, “Time is money. It takes probably three years once you put a shovel in the ground. ’24 should be the focal point.” Oh hey, it’s our old friend the Two-Minute Warning from the standard stadium playbook! As is de rigueur, Warren did not indicate what would happen if his team didn’t get a new stadium approved in 2024, but given that right now he doesn’t have a lot of viable alternatives, I’d wager that holding his breath until he turns blue is not off the table.
  • And speaking of arbitrary deadlines, St. Petersburg is pushing back a council vote on Tampa Bay Rays stadium funding until May, so there’s enough time for committee meetings first. Rays president Brian Auld warned back in October that “any delay is going to fundamentally alter the entire agreement”; nothing yet from Auld on whether he has a problem with this delay now, but given that it looks like relatively smooth sailing right now for Rays owner Stuart Sternberg to get a potential $1.5 billion in public cash, I’m expecting he won’t complain too much about waiting a few extra weeks for the check to arrive.
  • MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle, who previously said he had seen the mythical Oakland A’s Las Vegas stadium renderings and that they were “spectacular,” now says he’s seen three different versions of where the stadium would go on the current Tropicana resort site, and it’s holding up his plans to renovate his resort across the street until he sees the final design. “I have to believe, in the next 30 to 60 days, we should find out more,” Hornbuckle said; maybe he has to believe it in order to sleep at night, but with the stadium renderings now overdue by two and a half months and counting, we are under no such obligation.
  • The meeting between A’s execs and Oakland officials about a potential short-term lease extension at the Coliseum were “really positive” according to an unnamed team official and “very open and frank” according to Alameda County supervisor David Haubert, who added, “No food fights.” I read somewhere that I can’t find now that the whole thing only lasted about 30 minutes; more meetings are expected, at which there should be plenty of time for food fights.
  • For the many of you expecting Joe Lacob to ride to the rescue and buy the A’s from Fisher and keep them in Oakland, Lacob has an update of sorts: “I’ve not checked in recently. It’s his team. If he decides he wants to sell, he knows who to call, that’s all I’ll say. We might be interested, obviously. We’ve said we were interested in the past. But I don’t think he’s doing that. I think he’s very committed to continue to own the franchise. Looks like he’s committed to Las Vegas. We’re always there. But I’m not calling anybody, it’s his team. I want to stay out of the way. We’ll cross that bridge if it or another team comes available.” Read those tea leaves as you prefer.
  • Jacksonville mayor’s office lead negotiator Mike Weinstein says Mayor Donna Deegan is considering paying the public’s share of $2 billion in Jaguars stadium upgrades by using money in the city’s pension funds, which would be repaid by (scroll, scroll) nope, he didn’t say how, so this is very much the equivalent of explaining how you’ll afford a new purchase to your spouse with “I’ll put it on our credit card.” Note to First Coast News headline writers: This is not what “paying for” means.
  • Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas says her finance and appropriations committee will “absolutely” strip funding for the proposed Alexandria arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals from a 2024 budget bill: “I’m not changing my mind.” We certainly seem headed for a scenario where the state house approves an arena bill while the state senate does not, though there’s still lots of speculation that Senate Democrats are just haggling over their price, possibly for cannabis legalization, an increased minimum wage, more affordable housing, or possibly a pony.
  • An analysis of the Virginia arena deal by the D.C. city council, which obviously isn’t impartial, estimates that it would actually cost taxpayers more than $5 billion counting maintenance and debt service. That’s not entirely fair since a bunch of that money would be paid out in the far future — it’s the old fallacy of calculating how much your house costs by adding up all your mortgage payments over 30 years — but the report does note that the arena plan includes a publicly covered $12 million a year repairs slush fund that would grow at 2% a year, so that’s maybe another $250 million in cost that hasn’t been accounted for by the first $1 billion or so in public money, add it to the list.
  • Another stadium playbook standard is the Home Field Disadvantage, claiming that the old place is just too decrepit ever to stack up with modern buildings, and the Kansas City Royals deployed that one this week, having Populous stadium designer Earl Santee say it’s “just not feasible” and “not realistic” to renovate the team’s current stadium, on account of it having what’s called “concrete cancer.” Oh, really, Earl? This didn’t come up when the Royals stadium was just renovated last decade? Do you have an engineering report to show us, or a price tag on what it would cost to subject Kauffman Stadium to concrete chemotherapy? Hello, Earl, we have followup questions! Earl!
  • Buffalo Bills execs say that their new stadium will have a steeper upper deck that will allow it to bring fans closer to the field, so that, in WGRZ-TV’s words, “fans who sit in the last row of the general concourse will be 54 feet closer to the field than they are at the current stadium.” Yes, that’s how geometry works, and yay for them for applying it — except that the old stadium holds 71,608 fans and the new one will hold only 62,000, so really a lot of the improvement is just from lopping off the farthest 10,000 seats, so not so yay after all.
  • The city of Pawtucket sold $54 million worth of bonds last week to fund a new Rhode Island F.C. stadium, and while that’s a lot for a minor-league soccer stadium and double what taxpayers were supposed to be on the hook for less than a year ago, perhaps most alarming is the news that the bonds were sold at “a yield of 8.24%, equivalent to almost 14% on taxable securities.” Nothing tops off massive public cost overruns like the worst interest rate imaginable, that’s what I always say!
  • I was on the radio in Chicago this week to talk about the new White Sox and Bears stadium proposals, and props to WBBM’s Rick Gregg for leading with my juiciest quote: “I think we went in fairly skeptical, and we came out of our research horrified.” Click the link above to give it a listen, and have a good long weekend for those who celebrate!
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A’s and Oakland officials plan talks on Coliseum lease extension, world to end on Thursday

DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER! MASS HYSTERIA!

The Oakland Athletics will meet with officials from the City of Oakland and County of Alameda on Thursday to discuss a lease extension at the Coliseum, the Chronicle has learned.

Industry sources told the Chronicle that Thursday’s meeting will involve Oakland chief of staff Leigh Hanson, City Council member Rebecca Kaplan, county supervisor David Haubert and A’s President Dave Kaval.

So, a couple of things before we take this news, passed along by the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Shea, as an inevitable sign of the apocalypse. (There are very much inevitable signs of the apocalypse, they’re just different ones.)

First off, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao will not be attending, instead sending Hanson, her chief of staff, who has been at the forefront of presenting laundry lists of what A’s owner John Fisher would have to do (leave the A’s name behind, get MLB to guarantee Oakland an expansion team) to make it worth the city’s while to grant a short-term lease extension while Fisher waits to get a Las Vegas stadium built. More significantly, she could also demand that Fisher give up his share of development rights to the Coliseum property in exchange for a lease extension, which should be reasonable ask given that Fisher can’t do much with the rights when the city owns the other half.

The bigger piece of leverage that Oakland has, though, is Fisher’s $70 million a year cable deal, which would vanish if the A’s played next year in Sacramento or Kuala Lumpur or even Las Vegas. That is a sizable chunk of change, and while Fisher could make some of it up through bonus revenue-sharing payments if he had to spend several seasons wandering the desert, for Oakland to ask for a large cut of that seems like a no-brainer.

More after tomorrow’s meeting, hopefully. For now, let’s just take it as a sign that in the sports business world, no bridges are ever too burned not to revisit, if the alternatives look too bleak. This doesn’t necessarily boost the A’s-stay-in-Oakland long-term odds, but it doesn’t not boost them, either.

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Here are your betting lines for whether the A’s will end up in Vegas or Oakland or on a moon of Jupiter

The polls have closed, and it’s time to check in on the voting on what you all think will be the endgame of Oakland A’s owner John Fisher’s attempts to move his team to Las Vegas. There were 576 responses, and the final results are:

John Fisher sells the A’s to Joe Lacob, who builds a stadium at the Coliseum site and keeps them in Oakland
119 (20.66%)
Nothing gets decided until after Oakland is underwater and Las Vegas is a desiccated ghost town
94 (16.32%)
John Fisher sells the A’s to Joe Lacob, who builds a stadium at Howard Terminal and keeps them in Oakland
87 (15.10%)
The A’s move permanently to Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Nashville, Portland (either one), or Greensboro
71 (12.33%)
The A’s move to Las Vegas, in a new stadium somewhere else
62 (10.76%)
The A’s move to Las Vegas, in an abandoned silver mine under Area 51
42 (7.29%)
John Fisher keeps the A’s and keeps them in Oakland, and bygones are bygones
37 (6.42%)
The A’s move to Las Vegas, in a new stadium on the Tropicana Hotel site
36 (6.25%)
None of the above
28 (4.86%)
TOTAL 576

That’s a pretty strong expression of faith (35.76% total) in Joe Lacob riding to the rescue and keeping the A’s in Oakland, which seems high to me, honestly, given that Fisher clearly doesn’t want to sell, and though Lacob keeps saying he’d be interested in buying, he hasn’t said at what price. Though given the state of Fisher’s Las Vegas stadium progress (going backwards, if anything), the other options don’t seem that likely either, which is probably why “A’s set to wander earth forever” placed second. And definitely why Fisher’s current preferred plan finished dead last, ahead of only the winner of the Nevada Republican presidential primary.

Anyway, the whole point of this exercise was to set betting lines, so let’s grab a conversion table and get to work:

  • A’s move to Las Vegas: +312
  • A’s stay in Oakland: +137
  • A’s move somewhere else: +711

The people have spoken! The most likely ultimate location for the A’s is Oakland, though even then you’d be better off betting on the field. Maybe we needed more options, like “A’s become a permanent road team” and “Vegas stadium finally starts construction, only to be interrupted by the end of baseball as a competitive sport in 2042.”

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Friday roundup: Browns rattle suburban move saber, AZ gov met with Coyotes before land bid

Before we get to the news, please take a moment to vote in yesterday’s poll on the fate of the Oakland A’s if you haven’t already done so: So many of you responded that Survey Monkey made me pay an obscene amount of money to see the results, so may as well get my money’s worth! I’ll close the poll and present the results on Monday.

While we wait for the returns to come in, how about some nice, crunchy news?

  • The Cleveland Browns owners are reportedly “looking at” land in the southwestern suburb of Brook Park as a possible stadium site, though the mayor of Brook Park says he has heard “nothing” from the team. “As part of our comprehensive planning efforts, we are also studying other potential stadium options in Northeast Ohio at various additional sites,” the team said in a prepared statement, which either means 1) we’ll consider a stadium anywhere that we think we can get a pile of money for it, 2) we don’t want to move to the suburbs, but if it helps throw a scare into the city to give us money, that’ll work, or 3) either way works, we’ll take what we can get.
  • Arizona Coyotes CEO Xavier Gutierrez met separately with both Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and her chief of staff before filing an application to buy state trust land for a new arena at auction, and the chief of staff used to be a lobbyist for the Coyotes, and this is just a rat’s nest of conflict of interest. “That is just one of those fundamental principles that you can’t go into government and then help your former employer,” said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota Law School professor who co-authored an ethics guide for public employees, and it’s possible he has mistaken “can’t” for “shouldn’t,” because [gestures at the entire history of U.S. politics].
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said Thursday that he’ll be “disappointed” if a new Las Vegas stadium for the A’s isn’t open by 2028, and that a decision on the team’s temporary home will be made “in the next few months,” adding, “it’s clearly going to be someplace in the West.” No word at press time on whether Manfred indicated how many syllables it will have, or what it rhymes with.
  • Speaking of commissioners commissionering, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell says if a new Chicago Bears stadium, wherever it may be, has a dome, it could host “additional events,” and even if he didn’t say “Super Bowl” you know he meant the Super Bowl. And you get a Super Bowl, and you…
  • Now economists J.C. Bradbury and Geoffrey Propheter are tag-teaming all the misinformation Washington Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis is spreading about the economic benefits of his new $2 billion Alexandria, Virginia arena project that would cost the public more than $1 billion, and it’s kind of awesome.
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Will the A’s end up playing in Las Vegas or Oakland or a vacant lot somewhere?

Oh, fine, let’s all try to guess how the Oakland A’s situation will turn out! You first:

Create your own user feedback survey

(I swear I wrote this before I saw Tim Kawakami’s latest column, but that does make a good study guide.)

Vote early and vote often. Show your work in comments.

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