Category Archives: Orlando MLS expansion team

Orlando City Soccer Club still seeking stadium money, everywhere but own pockets

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Amid all the talk about poor billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross and how he’s not getting his public stadium subsidy this year, let’s not forget about the Orlando City Soccer Club, which also lost its expected windfall of state cash when the Florida house didn’t pass a stadium funding bill last week. Nonetheless, both Mayor Buddy Dyer and Orlando City president Phil Rawlins insist that a stadium will be built, and it’ll be awesome, and no, they have no idea how it’ll be paid for.

The best part of this story, really, is the screengrab of the Fox 35 report with the caption “Bringing Soccer to Orlando: Where Will Money Come From?” You really couldn’t ask for a better example of how the media help set up stadium deals as a fait accompli, where the question isn’t whether to build, but rather how to pay for what must be built. Let’s all say a quiet thanks to Fox 35, for providing an image that we’ll be able to link to for years, every time we want to shake our heads sadly about how news outlets are complicit in stadium shakedowns.

But anyway, sure, let’s try to answer the question: Where will the money come from? Let’s see, how about … the soccer team that’s going to be getting the revenues from the stadium? If soccer in Orlando is such a great idea, they can pay for their own building, right? Like, maybe with naming rights fees, for starters?

[Orange County Mayor Teresa] Jacobs also has raised the possibility of using an estimated $10 million to $20 million in projected revenue from naming rights — the money a corporation would pay to slap its name on the venue — to help pay for construction.

But Rawlins insisted that future naming-rights revenues should go to the team and not be part of the capital-financing plan, even in light of the lost state funding.

“I don’t think those two issues are connected,” Rawlins said.

Right, of course money paid for the name of a new stadium couldn’t possibly have anything to do with how to pay for building the stadium. Don’t know what we were thinking.

Florida senate approves subsidy money for Dolphins, Orlando MLS, anybody else who asks nicely

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Okay, so remember way back yesterday, when the Miami Dolphins stadium bill was stalled in both the state house and senate with only four days to go, and it looked like the clock might run out? Forget all that, because NFL commissioner Roger Goodell flew into town yesterday and sprinkled his magic pixie dust around (read: held out the carrot of the Super Bowl, and likely also the threat of a relocation to that imaginary stadium in Los Angeles), and the state senate responded by voting 35-4 to okay $13 million a year in new tax subsidies to pro sports teams in Florida.

That’s sports teams in general — the senate bill sets up a $13 million a year pool of funds, then allows any teams (with the exception of the NBA, but the Heat have already gotten two new arenas in the last 25 years, which presumably will hold them for a while) to apply for funds from it. The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity would make recommendations, and the the legislature would vote again on who gets the money. In addition to $3 million a year for the Dolphins, the prospective owners of a prospective Orlando MLS expansion team would be expected to ask for $2 million a year, and then you’ve got your spring training sites, and so on.

The house still needs to pass the bill, but speaker Will Weatherford indicated yesterday that he’s happy with it, and with the overwhelming passage in the senate, it looks way more likely than it did yesterday that the whole mess (the Dolphins part of it, anyway) is going to be headed to Miami-Dade voters to decide. Voting, and robocalls to influence the voting, started yesterday; given the most recent polling, you’d think the stadium subsidy would be looking at long odds, but if the 100-to-1 rule holds, it’s going to be more about the ad campaigns than public distaste for throwing good money after bad.

Florida bill to subsidize soccer stadiums clears first committee vote

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That bill to give sales-tax kickbacks to pretty much any sports franchise in Florida that doesn’t already get them moved ahead yesterday, as a state senate committee unanimously approved giving $2 million a year to two MLS franchises for the next 30 years. For good measure, the senate commerce and tourism committee also approved giving added tax breaks to Lockheed Martin and Fidelity National, which have already gotten nearly $7 million in subsidies apiece, and could still consider requests for additional money from the Miami Dolphins and Jacksonville Jaguars.

For those keeping score, if the MLS bill is signed into law, it would leave the Orlando City Soccer Club just $45 million short of its $75 million subsidy demand for a new stadium. ($2 million a year for 30 years adds up to just $30 million in present-day expenses because some of it would have to pay for interest on bonds.) It would also potentially open up a road to subsidies for these guys, though they’d have to actually join a real league first.

Wannabe Orlando MLS club to ask for $75 million in stadium costs, because Florida is close to Europe

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When last we heard from the minor-league Orlando City Soccer Club about its plans for a new stadium so it can apply to move up to MLS, the price tag was $90 to 95 million, and team president Phil Rawlins said, “I think it’s too early to say exactly where those funds would come from.” Four months later, the projected cost is $105 million and the source of the funds would be mostly from Florida taxpayers:

There’s been no agreement on a financing plan between [Orlando Mayor Buddy] Dyer’s administration and Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs’ administration. But here is what’s being discussed:

•$30 million from the team.

•$30 million in state sales taxes.

•$25 million in hotel taxes from the county.

•$20 million from the city, mostly in land costs.

“This is moving far quicker than I ever anticipated,” Dyer said. “There is a lot going on right now, and there are a lot of moving pieces.”

That’s from a report in the Orlando Sentinel that is mostly focused on the slightly surreal notion that the news that Brazilian-born, Barcelona-living language-school chain owner Flávio Augusto da Silva is buying the team is a reason for the public to cough up money for a soccer-only stadium. To which da Silva added his own unique logic:

“Orlando is a very special city, because it is very close to the South American market and close to the European market, two regions that really love soccer,” Augusto da Silva said. “We were researching a franchise in another place, but we believe Orlando is a really good city to invest.”

Other cities that are even closer to Europe and South America combined: Port-au-Prince, Monrovia, and Halifax. Maybe they’ve all already maxed out their hotel taxes.

Florida legislature proposes subsidies for MLS, Jaguars, Daytona Beach, your mom

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Florida has long been one of the most generous states in terms of stadium subsidies, offering $2 million a year in subsidies to pretty much any major-league team that says it needs them to build a new stadium. “Major league” is here defined as MLB, NFL, NBA, or NHL, though, so state senator David Simmons has proposed adding MLS to the list, making major-league soccer teams eligible to put as much as $30 million or so in stadium costs on the public tab.

Simmons is from the Orlando area, and it’s fair to assume he’s carrying water here for the Orlando City Soccer Club, a minor-league team that’s hoping to get a new stadium and move up to MLS, only without, you know, having to actually pay for all of it. His bill would allow up to two MLS teams to receive funds, though, so presumably the Tampa Bay F.C. people could get involved as well.

Which would only be fair, since everybody else in the entire state of Florida with claims to being a pro sport is already looking to get some state money:

The help for a future Orlando soccer team comes in addition to a request by the Miami Dolphins NFL team for help with stadium renovations, and the speaker of the House said Wednesday that he expects other bills to be filed to provide help for renovations to Daytona Beach International Speedway and for the Jacksonville Jaguars to make renovations at EverBank Field.

Florida is actually projecting a state budget surplus this year, mostly because it cut so much in past years that there’s some extra money now that the local economy doesn’t totally suck, so it looks like everybody is figuring that it’s time to strike while the iron is hot to grab a piece for themselves. There’s no telling whether all of this bills will pass, but given Florida’s past history in such matters, I wouldn’t bet against it.

 

Garber: MLS talks with Queens “at finish line,” otherwise known as starting gate

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Lesson #367 in why it’s important to read the whole article, not just the headline: MLS commissioner Don Garber gave his state-of-the-league press conference yesterday in advance of Saturday’s MLS Cup, and declared that discussions with New York City over a new stadium in Queens are “at the finish line.” And what exactly did he mean by that?

“There’s a lot of work that needs to happen to finalize our agreement with New York City over our use of the land and our ability to lease that land to build a stadium,” he said. “I do believe that we will resolve that shortly. I can’t put any timetable on that, but we are at the finish line. Once we are there, we’ve got to go into a formal approval process that all developers have to go through in New York City. That will take some time. We need to reach an agreement with the city, with the local community and with the state of New York on replacing the land that we will be utilizing for the stadium.”

In addition, MLS is negotiating with the Mets to use the parking lots adjacent to Citi Field.

So basically, MLS thinks that it will soon arrive at an agreement with City Hall on a stadium proposal, which will then proceed through the ULURP process, which will involve nine months of public hearings before any deal can be finalized. So while getting Mayor Michael Bloomberg on board is an important step, it’s also arguably the easiest one, and a lot could still happen, especially in a year where city council speaker Christine Quinn is going to be involved in a tight race to replace Bloomberg as mayor.

Garber, meanwhile, went on to discuss possible expansion teams in Atlanta (“If [a new Falcons stadium] is able to come together, [we'll] try to figure out how an MLS team could be part of their plans”) and Orlando (“at some point if they are able to finalize a stadium plan that makes sense, we would be very interested in working with them”), as well as stadium campaigns for D.C. United (“I believe there is new momentum in D.C.”) and the New England Revolution (“though there is nothing new to report, the family is focused on it”). So basically, every current or potential team wants a new soccer-only stadium to play in, and damned if he’s going to say anything negative about any of them.

As for who’d pay for them, Garber said of New England that “we are looking for public support up in that area because of the cost of developing a project there,” while saying that D.C. United’s owners have “the capacity to be able to put more private equity into a deal, and that makes the opportunity far more viable during these economic times than perhaps it would have been when [the team] was looking for an enormous amount of public support.” You can read something into that if you’d like, but it mostly just comes down to “We’re looking for as much public cash as we can get our hands on, but we realize we’re MLS and can’t throw our weight around as much as some leagues,” which has pretty much been his modus operandi all along.

So really, not much new here at all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled David Beckham wild rumors, already in progress.