St. Louis voters went to the polls yesterday and narrowly defeated a proposal to spend $60 million in city tax money on a new soccer stadium for a proposed MLS expansion team. The stadium proposal failed by a 53-47% margin, while an accompanying ballot measure to raise city sales and use taxes by 0.5% and use some of the proceeds to expand the city’s light rail system passed by a 60-40% vote.

Local news coverage hasn’t provided much in the way of exit interviews with voters about why they cast their ballots the way they did, though the St. Louis Post-Dispatch did include this outstanding photo caption on an image of a woman in a soccer jersey peering out from between her fingers:

Lauren Rapp of The Hill watches vote returns creep in at Union Station during a watch party for the Major League Soccer stadium funding on Tuesday, April 4, 2017. “It’s been a rough night,” said Rapp. “And then (Stephen) Piscotty gets hit in the head.”

The failure of the stadium-subsidy vote puts MLS commissioner Don Garber in an interesting position: He’s previously raved about soccer fandom in St. Louis — and did so again last night after the vote, in a statement saying that the city would be “a tremendous market” for MLS but that the vote outcome was “clearly a significant setback” for the city’s expansion bid. Does the league now turn up its nose at St. Louis and say, “Fine, if you don’t want to throw $60 million at us, we’ll go find some other city that will”? Or does it try to find another way to make a go of it there, either by team owners digging deeper and funding the $60 million on their own, much as Orlando S.C.‘s owners did with their stadium, or by the league lowering its $150 million expansion fee request — either of which would risk the league’s standing in future “the subsidy way or the highway” demands?

If I had to guess, I’d predict Garber will take door #1 for this round of expansion, and figuring he can always circle back to St. Louis next time and see if the appetite for stadium funding has improved any, since it’s clear that MLS is going to keep expanding until such time as it runs out of rich guys willing to blow $150 million on expansion fees. In the meantime, the vote makes one thing clear: MLS fandom may be on the rise, but not enough for fan frenzy about obtaining a team to tip the balance against taxpayer distaste for giving public dollars to the rich dudes who’d own it. There isn’t a whole lot of extortion leverage in being an 80-pound gorilla.

Tomorrow is the public vote in St. Louis on whether to spend $60 million in city money on a soccer stadium for a new MLS team, and everybody has a hot take:

• A sports economist and Forbes “contributor” (aka guy who lets Forbes publish his writing for free in exchange for the publicity) says this is a good deal because $60 million isn’t that much, and it’d just be stadium taxes getting kicked back to the team (plus other taxes, but those are on out-of-state purchases so just pretend St. Louis was never getting them, okay?), plus “unprecedented” community benefits! And who can put a price on the “community/psychic/civic value” of civic pride? (Bruce Johnson, actually, and it wasn’t all that much.) Also, soccer is hot.
• The St. Louis Business Journal notes that there’s no evidence that any of the above benefits actually exist. #micdrop

Team owner Paul Edgerley predicts that the balloting will be close, so vote early and vote often!

Looks like we can downgrade the St. Louis MLS stadium plan’s condition from critical to dead, after the sponsor of a city bill to fund $80 million of the cost said she’s withdrawing the legislation:

“That bill will not be moving forward,” Alderman Christine Ingrassia, 6th Ward, said at Tuesday’s meeting of the aldermanic Ways and Means Committee…

Ingrassia said she wanted SC STL to show a proposal that was at least “revenue neutral” on the city’s budget over time.

“It looked like to me, and in the conversations I had with people who have more expertise in the field of public financing, that they were basically just repackaging the same subsidies in different ways,” Ingrassia said. “So they were asking for way more than I feel like we could support here in the city.”

“Repackaging the same subsidies in different ways”? I’m sure I’ve never heard of anything like that before.

It’s not entirely clear what changed Ingrassia’s mind — you go and sponsor a bill to spend $80 million on a soccer stadium, then turn around and say that this is “way more” than you can support? — but it’s worth noting that after newly elected governor Eric Greitens ruled out state funding as “corporate welfare,” Ingrassia started backing away as well. Elected officials are just so susceptible to peer pressure, you know?

If the soccer stadium plan really is dead, at least in this iteration — Mayor Francis Slay held out hope of still getting a proposal on an April ballot, but time’s running out and there’s now no funding plan at all — it’s worth noting that this would be one of the largest MLS stadium subsidies in history, all for a team that doesn’t actually exist yet. Top-level pro soccer in St. Louis isn’t a bad idea — it’s not a bad idea most places, which is why the league is handing out franchises to just about anyone who asks — but providing a near-record subsidy just so that MLS can get away with charging $150 million expansion fees was a terrible one. This alone won’t change the league’s business model, but maybe if Greitens has started something and a few more prospective expansion cities push back against subsidy demands … friends, they’ll call it a movement?

Sorry for the radio silence of the last few days: I was traveling, and while intending to get back to the stadium grind yesterday, a red-eye flight proved to be incompatible with a regular morning posting schedule. (Though I did find time to finish up some music writing I’d been working on, if that interests you.)

Thankfully, Missouri governor-elect Eric Greitens didn’t take the holidays off, greeting us to 2017 by upping the ante on his comments that MLS stadium funding would be “welfare to millionaires” with a great big raised middle finger to plans for state tax breaks for a St. Louis soccer stadium, telling journalists on Monday: “To be very clear, I have completely ruled out state funding for stadiums.”

Greitens reiterated his description of state aid for stadiums as ”welfare for millionaires” but said he “looks forward to meeting with the leaders of the MLS project to see if there’s a way for them to bring private-sector funding to bring a soccer team to the state of Missouri.”

“We are not going to use money from the people of the state of Missouri for what I believe is corporate welfare,” Greitens said. “We’ve got far too many core priorities of government that have to be invested in.”

That’s about as clear as clear can be. Without the $40 million in state tax credits, the MLS proposal has a (wait for it) $40 million hole in its budget, one that neither the city of St. Louis (which would already be putting up $89 million of its own public cash) nor the team’s prospective owners (who would already be, uh, paying the league’s $150 million expansion fee, what do you want from them, blood?) seems eager to fill. Stadium bill sponsor Ald. Christine Ingrassia remarked following Greitens’ remarks, “I was hoping to get to the point where this proposal made sense for St. Louis, but I’m feeling that less and less,” while Mayor Francis Slay’s chief of staff said, “It will be tough to get this done without the state’s support.”

Not that this kills the St. Louis MLS plan dead: $40 million isn’t an insurmountable gap, and the team owners aren’t likely to just walk away from that $89 million in city subsidies without trying to make it work. But with only three weeks before the deadline to get a vote on the April ballot, there isn’t much time to go back to the drawing board if they’re hoping to get something approved this year. Time for everybody to watch Lewis Reed really, really closely.

That proposed MLS stadium for St. Louis that may be about to lose its $40 million state tax kickback could be facing trouble for its planned city subsidies as well, as apparently nobody gave the board of aldermen time to actually discuss funding bills before putting them up for an April vote:

One measure would raise the city’s sales tax by a half percent, with the revenue going to mass transit, public safety and economic development. A second measure would direct the corresponding increase in the use tax to the new stadium…

If [St. Louis Board of Aldermen President Lewis] Reed waits until next year to make those [committee] assignments — something that he’s well within his rights to do — aldermen would have just two weeks to pass the bills if they want the measures on the April ballot.

“I received the bills an hour before they wanted me to assign them,” Reed said. “We should have gotten that information a little bit earlier to really have an opportunity to take a look at the bills, understand what they are, their total impact, and the best assignment for them.”

This could easily be a screwup by the stadium’s sponsors, or it could be intentional: Corporate subsidy advocates haven’t been above throwing bills at legislators at the last minute to avoid scrutiny (or even leaving time for legislators to read the damn things), after all. Reed steered carefully down the middle on the proposed St. Louis Rams stadium subsidy, so it’s probably unlikely he’ll use this as an excuse to throw roadblocks in the way of the MLS deal; whether he’ll use this as an excuse to ram it through with little debate, we’ll see — though the fact that he’s griping publicly about not having enough time doesn’t seem promising for stadium subsidy backers.

Lame duck Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon opened his mouth about the proposed St. Louis MLS stadium on Friday at a meeting with reporters, and this poured out:

“Folks may want to anguish a little bit over all this sort of stuff, but it’s the price of doing business,” Nixon said in a meeting with Post-Dispatch reporters downtown. “And quite frankly, we’re getting in, relative to what other areas of have done, so much more cost-effectively here.”…

“If we’re going to sit around the table and complain about this little part of the deal or that little part of the deal, then the $250 million to $300 million in private money that’s going to be invested will go somewhere else,” Nixon said, “and that site will sit there looking the way it is.”

Nixon has never been known for being the most savvy sports subsidy negotiator, but that’s a whole lot of stupid packed into just three sentences. Let’s break it down:

• “It’s the price of doing business.” This is mostly meaningless rhetoric, but to the extent it has any meaning, it’s “this is the best deal we’re going to get.” Except the $129 million in state and city spending being proposed is literally the team owners’ first ask, so there’s no way to know whether this is the price of doing business or just what a couple of wannabe MLS owners decided they can sucker the public into giving them.
• “We’re getting in, relative to what other areas of have done, so much more cost-effectively here.” There could be a word missing here in the transcript (“of have”?), but regardless, Nixon is off his rocker here, since this would be the second-largest MLS-only stadium subsidy ever, meaning that by definition more than 20 other areas have gotten off most cost-effectively. Unless he just means “ha ha ha ha, we’re making the city foot most of the bill instead of the state,” which is true, but not exactly what most people mean by “cost-effective.”
• “The $250 million to $300 million in private money that’s going to be invested will go somewhere else.” Of that private money, $150 million will go into the pockets of the other MLS owners as an expansion fee — and that will happen regardless of whether a team goes to St. Louis or some other city. (In fact, you could even argue that it would be better for the Missouri economy if the St. Louis-based prospective owners didn’t waste their money on an MLS team, and instead spent it on something else local.) The team would be putting about $71 million into actual construction, but since it would also be taking up a piece of land that then couldn’t be used for anything else ever, not to mention $129 million in public money that couldn’t be used for anything else, that’s not necessarily a plus even if you think the land would likely remain undeveloped for a while otherwise.

Nixon was, by all accounts, a successful litigator and popular state attorney general before becoming governor, so you’d think he might know a little bit more about haggling than he’s shown with his sports dealings. Guess there’s really no accounting for the effect of the toy department.