Category Archives: NBA

Friday roundup: Clippers broke public meetings law, Vegas seeks MLS team, Buccaneers used bookkeeping tricks to try to get oil-spill money

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Any week with a new/old Superchunk album is a good one! Please listen while reading this week’s roundup of leftover stadium and arena news:

  • The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office has determined that Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer violated open meetings laws by hiding information about the team’s proposed new Inglewood arena’s location and scope when formally proposing it in 2017, even replacing the name “Clippers” with “Murphy’s Bowl LLC, a Delaware Limited Liability Company (Developer).” Unfortunately, the DA’s office noted, it’s too late to do anything about this because the violation wasn’t reported in time, but don’t do it again, I guess? In related news, NBA commissioner Adam Silver says he supports the team’s arena plan, even though Ballmer is being sued by New York Knicks owner James Dolan, who also owns the nearby Forum and doesn’t want the competition, and who was apparently the main reason for all that secrecy on the part of Ballmer. It’s all enough to make you feel sympathetic to Dolan, until you remember that he is an awful person.
  • Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman has announced she’s looking at building an MLS stadium in her city, because “We have not become the pariah anymore, and there is no end to this. It’s so exciting,” which would almost make sense if MLS had previously steered clear of Vegas because of gambling or something and also if MLS were currently about to put a franchise in Vegas, neither of which is the case. The stadium, if it’s ever built, would go on the site of Cashman Field, where the USL Championship Las Vegas Lights FC currently play, and would be paid for by some method that the developers “would have to present” to the city council, according to the mayor’s office. It’s so exciting!
  • The owners of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers tried to get $19.5 million in settlement money from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster on the grounds that the team lost revenue that summer compared to the following summer when it was banking extra NFL checks that the league was stockpiling in advance of a player lockout. Amazingly, that’s not what got the claim rejected — it was only nixed when it turned out the Bucs hadn’t even stockpiled that revenue at the time, but rather did so retroactively on its books when it realized it could use it as a way to try to get oil spill settlement cash. It’s such a fine line between mail fraud and clever.
  • Inter Miami owners David Beckham and Jorge Mas have agreed to pay a youth golf program $3 million to clear out of the way of their proposed Melreese soccer stadium and move, you know, somewhere else, so long as it’s not on their lawn. This is not a ton of money in the grand scheme of things, but it is worth noting that Beckham and Mas are sinking a whole lot of money into this stadium and a temporary stadium until this one is ready and the old new stadium site that they say they’re not building a stadium on anymore; this can either be seen as a laudable commitment to private funding or a dubious business investment or, hell, why not both?
  • The Portland Diamond Project group has gotten a six-month extension on its deadline to decide whether to build a baseball stadium at the Terminal 2 site, and is paying only $225,000, instead of the $500,000 it was originally supposed to be charged. That seems like bad negotiating by the Port of Portland when they had the wannabe team owners over a barrel, but I guess $225,000 just for a six-month option on a site that probably won’t work anyway for a team that probably won’t exist anytime soon is nothing to turn up your nose at.
  • When the headline reads “New A’s stadium could generate up to $7.3 billion, team-funded study predicts,” do I even need to explain that it’s nonsense? If you want a general primer on why “economic impact” numbers don’t mean much of anything, though, I think I addressed that pretty well in this article.
  • The Los Angeles Rams‘ new stadium is reportedly set to get $20 million in naming rights payments for 20 years from a company that lost hundreds of millions of dollars last year, which is surely not going to result in a repeat of the Enron Field fiasco.
  • A reporter at the Boston Bruins‘ 24-year-old home arena was startled by a rat on live TV. Clearly it’s time to tear it down and build a new one.

Cuyahoga County to spend extra $40m on arena repairs after Cavaliers blew through first $22m in record time

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It’s Wednesday, so it must be time for Cuyahoga County to spend more money on the Cavaliers‘ arena:

Cuyahoga County Council is considering whether to issue $40 million in bonds to reimburse the Cleveland Cavaliers for repairs the county is required to cover under the team’s lease agreement on Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.

Also under consideration is a measure that would re-finance $40 million of the $60 million in bonds sold by the county in 2015 as an advance on revenues from the county’s so-called sin tax, which was extended 20 years by a 2014 vote.

That’s a lot of words, but careful readers will zero in on the two numbers: $40 million and $40 million, which added together come to $80 million. It’s not really $80 million in new spending — one set of bonds would be new, the other merely refinanced — but it is a significant chunk of change for an arena that has already gotten a whole lot of chunks in recent years.

The reason for the new spending proposals, as explained in a not very clear article at Cleveland.com, is that the county agreed to cover “major capital repairs” in the team’s lease, and Cavs owner Dan Gilbert (who is reportedly doing better after his recent stroke) has already blown through $22 million in county tax funds while also fronting $40 million of his own money, for such things as “the replacement of the heating and cooling system, retractable seating, sports lights, ADA-compliant restrooms, and other things.” Some of that sounds a bit dodgy as required maintenance — is that replacing worn-out retractable seating and sports lights, or upgrading them? and WTF are “sports lights,” anyway? — but if the lease says the county has to pay for them, there’s not much the county can do about that, hence the rush to pass another $40 million bond issue.

The main problem here is that the county appears to have either seriously overestimated how fast tax revenues would come in, or seriously underestimated how much capital expenses the arena would rack up so quickly. Given that the county previously said it would be using taxes on Cavs playoff tickets to help pay off its existing arena upgrade bonds, and the Cavs currently just finished year one of an umpteen-year rebuild following the departure of LeBron James, I’m putting my money on … you know, probably both.

Friday roundup: Red Wings owner touts his “passion” amid sea of parking lots, cities are terrible stadium negotiators, newspapers are terrible newspapers

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The cryptocurrency-based journalism startup Civil couldn’t have gone much worse, but it did spawn a couple of successes, none more welcome than Hmm Daily, the news commentary site from former Gawker and Deadspin editor Tom Scocca. Or as I will always think of him, the co-founder of Funny Paper, the now virtually unfindable-on-the-internet weekly(ish) political analysis of daily comic strips that was the greatest such enterprise until the great Josh Fruhlinger elevated it to an even higher art form. I’ve been enjoying Scocca’s excellent columns on the militarization of language and how big a giant bee is for months now, but I didn’t feel compelled to bite the bullet and kick in any money until I spotted this photo caption in an article by Scocca’s Funny Paper co-conspirator Joe MacLeod: “I have no beef with the M&M’s homunculus infesting the menu.” If you know me at all from reading this website, you know that I immediately pulled out my wallet and became a paying Hmm Daily subscriber (at the $5 a month level, though the reward at the $50,000 level is truly amazing).

Anyways, on to the sports stadium and arena newses:

  • The District Detroit development around the new Red Wings arena still consists mostly of some state-subsidized parking lots, but Red Wings exec Christopher Ilitch says that’s okay because “Our timelines may change. Our passion, the energy, the way we feel about this community has not.” And truly, who can put a price on feels?
  • The Voice of OC cites “experts” as saying that Anaheim may not be driving a hard enough bargain with Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno on a price for stadium parking lot development rights, and oh hey look, it’s me. Also Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson, who says, “Cities tend to be remarkably bad negotiators when it comes to professional sports,” which, yup.
  • Politifact Wisconsin did a fact-check on claims that the state of Wisconsin will get a “tremendous” payback on its Milwaukee Bucks arena subsidies and found that that’s only if you assume the Bucks would have moved without them, and assume that Bucks fans would have all stopped spending their money in Wisconsin without them, and assume that NBA salaries will quintuple by the 2040s, and further found that Villanova sports stadium researcher Rick Eckstein calls the revenue estimates “fantasy figures,” and concluded that this makes the claim Mostly True. It is just slightly possible that having staff members of the local newspaper that has a record of overarching credulity on the arena deal do fact-checking on it might not be the best idea.
  • The people trying to get an MLB franchise in Portland are running out of momentum as MLB waits for the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A’s to work out their stadium situations before considering expansion, but at least they got a meeting with MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred — no wait, the news report has corrected itself, they didn’t even get that. Well, at least they have weirdly non-Euclidean renderings.
  • Speaking of MLB expansion hopefuls, Montreal’s would-be neo-Expos owner Stephen Bronfman has a deal in place on land for a new stadium … not on buying the land, mind you, but with a developer to help develop the non-stadium part of the land once they buy it. This could be a while.
  • And speaking of the Rays and of terrible newspapers, the Tampa Bay Times’ John Romano wants to know when St. Petersburg and Tampa officials will stop bickering and get to work on throwing money at Rays owner Stuart Sternberg already?
  • The New York Times is a significantly less terrible newspaper, but a profile on A’s president Dave Kaval with the headline “Can This Man Keep the A’s in Oakland?” is not only pretty sycophantic in its own right, but it assumes a lot about the team owners moving without a new stadium when they’ve already gone a couple of decades demanding a new stadium and not getting one and still not moving.
  • Henderson, Nevada, is giving $10 million to the owners of the Vegas Golden Knights to build a practice rink, which is dumb but less dumb than some other cities’ expenses on similar projects.
  • The Arizona Coyotes are getting a new majority owner and the Phoenix Suns are up for sale, according to Sportsnet’s John Shannon, who added, “as one NHL official told me yesterday, when I asked that very question, I said, ‘Does this new owner mean that there’s an arena closer to fruition?’ And the answer was, if you get a new owner, there’s a better chance of a new arena. So you can put two and two together, Steve.” Then the Suns owners and a report in The Athletic on the Coyotes completely refuted what Shannon said, so maybe you’re better off putting two and two together without his help.
  • I was about to write up this news story about a potential rezoning approval for Austin F.C.‘s new stadium, but then I saw that KXAN managed to write “Austin’s Planing Commission” and “this ammendment” in the first three paragraphs, and now I gotta go cry all day about the death of copy editing, sorry.

Friday roundup: Nashville saves (?) $75m by giving Predators $103m, South Carolina offers to give $125m to Panthers practice facility (?!), Oakland A’s shipping cranes are multiplying (?!?)

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Since last week I went off-topic to discuss a review (kindly) poking fun at some of the ridiculousness of Marvel movies, I should note that there’s a TV series that manages to create a fun, exciting superhero universe while simultaneously poking fun at the entire genre in ways that expose not just its ridiculousness but also its fundamentally Manichean politics, and which has now been canceled by Amazon, a company that has been at the forefront of scheming to shake down cities for subsidies in exchange for building its own facilities. Coincidence?!?!?!? Well, okay, yes, almost certainly, but here’s hoping The Tick ends up picked up by a less ethically compromised corporate entertainment giant, if that’s even a thing.

Where was I? Oh right, stadiums, what’s up with those this week that we didn’t get to already?

  • The Nashville Predators have indeed agreed to a 30-year lease extension as first reported last week, and how good or bad a deal it is depends on your perspective: The team’s $8.4 million a year in tax kickbacks and operating subsidies will be reduced to just $4.9 million a year in tax kickbacks, which would be $75 million in taxpayer savings but on the other hand the tax kickbacks will be extended to 2049 now instead of 2028, so that’s $102.9 million in additional taxpayer costs. (Neither figure translated into present value.)
  • A South Carolina legislative conference committee has approved $115 million in tax breaks for a Carolina Panthers practice facility in Rock Hill. Yes, you read that right, a practice facility. State officials say that the 15-year tax kickbacks of all state income taxes will pay for themselves, a conclusion that state senator Dick Harpootlian determined was based on, in the words of the Associated Press, “every Panthers player and coach moving to South Carolina and spending their entire paychecks here and the team buying all the material for the new facility from companies in the state.”
  • Speaking of practice facilities, the Washington Wizards‘ new one is costing $1 million more a year for D.C. to run than anticipated, which is not good after the city already spent $50 million to build the thing for the team’s billionaire owner. D.C. officials recently booked three new concerts for the arena, but expects to lose money on each of them; an Events D.C. board member said they would let “people know that they have a place to go, that this is a fun place,” which I guess is another way of saying they’ll make it up in volume.
  • Omaha is spending $750,000 on hosting an Olympic swim meet, which on the one hand is a lot cheaper than $115 million for an NFL practice facility, and on the other is for a one-time Olympic swim meet.
  • Two unnamed sources tell The Athletic’s Sam Stejskal that New England Revolution owner Robert Kraft is “on the brink of securing a stadium site,” which tells us nothing about the state of the Revolution’s actual stadium plans since this could be a planted rumor to try to gain momentum, but does tell us lots about The Athletic’s poor grasp of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics policy on use of unnamed sources.
  • I wrote a thing for Gothamist about how the New York Mets banned backpacks because they have too many pockets to easily search, but not other bags with lots of pockets, pretty much on the grounds of “the light’s better over here.” The best argument either of the security experts could come up with for the policy is that fewer bags means faster lines which means less time queued up outside stadiums as a stationary target for any theoretical terrorists, which is frankly mostly an argument for staying home and watching on TV.
  • Journalist Taylor C. Noakes notes in an op-ed for CBC News that bringing back the Expos might be nice for Montreal baseball fans, but probably won’t do much for the Montreal economy since “the economic impact of a professional baseball team on a given city [is] roughly equivalent to that of a mid-sized department store,” which, yup.
  • The latest Oakland A’s renderings show it still oddly glowing amid a darkened rest of the city. Plus now there are shipping cranes on both corners of the site! I am about to start working on a theory that this entire stadium plan is just a dodge for John Fisher to build lots of shipping cranes.

Wisconsin TV station reports “immense” Bucks arena windfall after talking only to guy who cut Bucks arena deal

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And now for your periodic reminder in how to read a news article. First, the headline:

‘UPFRONT’ recap: Return on Fiserv Forum will be immense for state taxpayers

Seeing as this appears on the website of the Milwaukee TV station WISN, “UPFRONT” is likely some TV news program. Fiserv Forum is the name of the new Bucks arena. And “immense” means huge, so presumably WISN reporters took an independent look at the return on state spending on the arena and found a lot of money coming back. Or, you know, not:

Fiserv Forum, the new home of the Milwaukee Bucks, will return a “tremendous” amount of money to state taxpayers who helped fund it, said Scott Neitzel, the former administration secretary for Republican Gov. Scott Walker who helped craft the arena deal.

Yes, WISN left out the part where the immense return (actually the quote was “tremendous” but apparently they were trying to cut characters) is entirely according to the guy who negotiated the deal, and who now runs a consulting firm for local businesses, another tidbit that WISN left out. In fact, the entire report was based solely on a single interview with Neitzel, who asserts that the state of Wisconsin will take in $600 million in income taxes for its expenditure of $80 million in tax money. (Plus “the pride of now having a potential championship team here,” because apparently the Bucks owners would have traveled back in time to 2013 and not drafted Giannis Antetokounmpo if they hadn’t received the arena subsidy.)

This is actually something that has already been researched, and Neitzel’s claims, it turns out, are somewhere between overblown and completely fraudulent:

  • The state’s own earlier estimates were for $299 million in new income taxes over the next 20 years, not $600 million. Neitzel gave no explanation for the doubling of his projections.
  • $169 million of that $299 million would come from projected increases in NBA salaries over coming years, something that would only work out if average player salaries rise to $33 million a year.
  • Even that remaining $130 million in state tax receipts assumes that 1) the Bucks would have left without a new arena and 2) people who would have spent money on Bucks games would then take their money and spend it elsewhere. The latter of these has been shown by studies to be categorically untrue, though the presence of an NBA team can move some spending from the suburbs to the city — which benefits Wisconsin state tax coffers, needless to say, not at all, unless you’re luring tons of fans from across the Illinois border.

All of which leaves, well, who knows? But it’s certainly a lot less than a “tremendous” or “immense” windfall, as a call to any independent sports economist, or even a quick googling, would have confirmed. WISN, though, didn’t have time for that, so it was left to viewers to figure out for themselves whether Neitzel was telling the truth or some other thing. And really, isn’t that what journalism is all about?

Friday roundup: Predators sign possibly non-sucky lease extension, NYCFC stadium rumors reach code orange, and why are we laughing at fat Thor, anyway?

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Sorry if I’m posting a bit late this morning, but I started checking Deadspin for any last-minute news, and ended up having to read all of Anna Merlan’s best Avengers: Endgame review ever. If you’re tempted to click that and go read it now, please wait until after reading this post because it will make you forget all about wanting to know about soccer stadium zoning regulations or whatever, and anyway this week’s roundup is relatively short and will let you get back to thoughts on Thor fat-shaming in due haste; if you’re not tempted to click that at all and are wondering how this post went off the rails so quickly, just skip ahead to the bullet points already:

Friday roundup: IRS hands sports owners another tax break, A’s accused of skimping on Coliseum land price, Rays could decide this summer on … something

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Happy Friday! Here is a fatberg of stadium and arena news to clog up your weekend:

  • San Jose Mercury News columnist Daniel Borenstein says the Oakland A’s owners could be getting a discount of between $15 million and $65 million on their purchase of half the Oakland Coliseum site from Alameda County, which is hard to tell without opening up the site to other bids, which Alameda County didn’t do. You could also look at comparable land sale prices and try to guess, which shows that the A’s owners’ offer is maybe closer to fair value; it’s not a tremendous subsidy either way, but still oh go ahead, just write us a check for whatever you think is fair is probably not the best way to sell off public assets, yeah.
  • St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman says he expects to hear by this summer from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg whether Sternberg will seek to build a stadium in St. Pete or across the bay in Tampa. Of course, Sternberg already announced once that he was picking Tampa and then gave up when nobody in Tampa wanted to pay for his $900 million stadium, so what an announcement this summer would exactly mean, other than who Sternberg will next go to hat in hand, remains unclear.
  • Fred Lindecke, who helped get an ordinance passed in St. Louis in 2002 that requires a voter referendum before spending public sports venues, would like to remind you that the soccer stadium deal approved last December still has to clear that hurdle, not that anybody is talking about it. Since the soccer subsidies would all be tax kickbacks and discounted land, not straight-up cash, I suspect this could be headed for another lawsuit.
  • Cory Booker and James Lankford have reintroduced their bill to block the use of federal tax-exempt bonds for sports venues, but only Booker got in the headline because Lankford isn’t running for president. (Okay, also it’s from a New Jersey news site, and Booker is from New Jersey.) Meanwhile, the IRS just handed sports team owners an exemption from an obscure provision of the Trump tax law that would have forced them to pay taxes on player trades; now teams can freely trade their employees like chattel without having to worry about taxes that all other business owners have to, thank god that’s resolved.
  • Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant, for some reason, revealed that “Seattle is having a meeting to try to bring back the Sonics,” but turns out it’s just Chris Hansen meeting with a bunch of his partners and allies from his failed Sodo arena plan, not anyone from city government at all, so everybody please calm down.
  • The rival soccer team that lost out to David Beckham’s Inter Miami for the Lockhart Stadium site in Fort Lauderdale is now suing to block Beckham’s plans for a temporary stadium and permanent practice facility there, because this is David Beckham so of course they are.
  • Publicly owned Wayne State University is helping to build a $25 million arena for the Detroit Pistons‘ minor-league affiliate, and Henderson, Nevada could pay half the cost of a $22 million Las Vegas Golden Knights practice facility, and clearly cities will just hand out money if you put “SPORTZ” on the name of your project, even if it will draw pretty much zero new tourists or spending or anything. Which, yeah, I know is the entire premise of this site, but sometimes the craziness of it all just leaps up and smacks you in the face, you know?
  • The Philadelphia Union owners have hired architects to develop a “master plan” for development around their stadium in Chester, because they promised the city development and there hasn’t been any development and maybe drawing a picture of some development will make it appear, couldn’t hurt, right?
  • Wannabe Halifax CFL owner Anthony LeBlanc insisted that “we are moving things along, yeah” on getting federal land to build a stadium on, while showing no actual evidence that things are moving along. “The only direction that council has ever given on this is ‘dear staff, please analyze the business case when it comes,’” countered Halifax regional councillor Sam Austin. “Everything else is media swirl.”
  • Never mind that bill that could have repealed the Austin F.C. stadium’s property tax break, because its sponsor has grandfathered in the stadium and any other property tax breaks that were already approved.
  • Hamilton, Ontario, could be putting its arena up for sale, if you’re in the market for an arena in Hamilton, Ontario.
  • And finally, here’s an article by the Sacramento Bee’s Tony Bizjak on how an MLS franchise would be great for Sacramento because MLS offers cheap tickets and a diverse crowd who like public transportation and MILLENNIALS!!!, plus also maybe it could help incubate the next Google, somehow! And will it cost anything or have any other negative impacts? Yes, including $33 million in public subsidies, but Tony Bizjak doesn’t worry about such trivialities. MILLENNIALS, people!!!

Indiana gov approves umpteen bajillion dollars in subsidies for Pacers, Indy Eleven

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Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb signed legislation on Monday approving a steady stream of checks for the Pacers and the Indy Eleven USL team, and here’s how the Associated Press reported it:

The dedication of nearly $400 million in public subsidies toward two Indianapolis sports stadium projects has been signed into law.

Close! As discussed here last week — citing coverage in the Indianapolis Star, so it’s not like it was exactly secret information — the total is actually $712 million: $600 million in arena renovation funds and operating subsidies for Pacers owner Herb Simon, and $112 million in stadium subsidies for Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir. In fact, the Pacers piece is actually $777 million over 25 years, but it’s fairer to call it $600 million because that’s how much it’s worth in 2019 present value since some of the payments are way in the future.

The AP seems to have left out the $12.5 million in annual operating subsidies for the Pacers (rising to $16 million by the year 2031) and $10 million a year in “technology upgrades” for ten years on the grounds that that’s not technically part of the bill Holcomb signed, but rather the lease Simon agreed to on condition of Holcomb signing the bill. (Only in the sports world does one get to say, “Okay, I’ll let you pay me more than $20 million a year to play in the arena you built for me — but only if you first give me a check for $295 million.”) Which is misleading to readers, especially readers who are stuck relying on a brief AP report, because nobody in the rest of the Indiana and national media appears to have assigned anyone to write about the bill signing.

At least one national outlet did cover the Pacers situation in depth on Monday: Deadspin, which assigned me to write about the spread of pay-to-play deals in pro sports and how local elected officials set them up by giving team owners lease opt-outs that let them demand new subsidies every few years. You can read the whole thing here, but for now I’ll just share the thoughts of two people with inside knowledge of sports negotiations — longtime sports administrator Jim Nagourney and former Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait — on why mayors keep doing this to themselves:

After one meeting, [Nagourney] recalls, he spotted Steve Hill, the chair of the [Nevada] stadium authority, and “suddenly there’s a dozen reporters sticking microphones in his face, like he’s general manager of the team. It’s a very heady feeling, for someone who’s been in the concrete business. And the teams know it.”…

“Everyone’s at the party, and you don’t really want to be the guy not at the party,” says Tait. “It’s groupthink, and you gotta really be pretty comfortable with yourself to say ‘none of this makes sense.’”

It’s a sobering notion that the main reason mayors love sports stadiums has less to do with economic consulting reports or grubbing for campaign donations or what have you, and more to do with peer pressure, but that really does look to be how it works. The main value in being very rich is that you can hire people (okay, lobbyists, but they’re sort of like people) to hang out around City Hall and talk incessantly about how these subsidies have gotta happen, you’d be crazy not to do it, like used car dealers who somehow invited themselves over for dinner night after night until you forget that they’re not your friends. American democracy is truly a strange and broken thing.

Judge okays suit against Clippers arena land sale for not considering affordable housing first

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I haven’t paid much attention to the citizen lawsuit against the proposed new Los Angeles Clippers in Inglewood since it was filed last summer and Mayor James Butts abruptly ended a city council meeting and ran away when someone tried to serve him lawsuit papers, but now it might be worth perking up our ears: A Los Angeles County judge has ruled that the lawsuit can proceed, accepting the argument of plaintiffs that a state law may have required the city to first try to find an affordable housing developer for the arena land:

“Today’s ruling is a step forward for our neighbors in Inglewood who are simply asking the city of Inglewood to follow California’s affordable housing laws,” says D’artagnan Scorza of Uplift Inglewood. “It simply does not make any sense to prioritize an NBA arena over the needs of Inglewood residents. Public land should be used for the public good.”

Some background: The California Surplus Land Act of 2005 requires local governments that want to sell public land to first offer it up to either low- and moderate-income housing developers or to local parks departments, then engage in “good faith” negotiations to try to get a fair price before moving on to other buyers. Uplift Inglewood is a coalition of “residents, businesses, faith groups, and community organizations all working together to ensure the vision of Inglewood’s future includes and benefits everyone.” Inglewood is a city with lots of poor people and little affordable housing and no rent controls. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is a multibillionaire who doesn’t like his team’s current arena because he doesn’t own it.

As for the legal details, we’ll all find out more when the suit goes to trial in September. Ballmer’s going to have to content himself for a while with his team being called “pesky” for scaring the Golden State Warriors slightly in the playoffs.

Indiana legislature approves $712m in tax money for Pacers, Indy Eleven, but it’s “old” taxes so it’s okay

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The Indiana state senate has approved Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon’s $600 million worth of stadium renovation and operating subsidies, as well as Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir’s $112 million in stadium construction subsidies, because Indiana. The bill now heads for the desk of Gov. Eric Holcomb.

And because every bad stadium deal deserves bad journalism to go along with it, we have this from the Indianapolis Business Journal:

The legislation does not create new taxes, but it does extend the life of some existing taxes that would have otherwise expired and it expands the area where the CIB collects some of its tax revenue…

The bill extends the admissions and auto-rental taxes—which otherwise would have expired in 2023—until 2040 and expands what’s known as the professional sports development area, or PSDA, to include an additional eight hotels.

This is where that whole George H.W. Bush “no new taxes” kerfuffle has left American politics: Anything is considered acceptable so long as the taxes involved aren’t “new.” So even if extending an old tax for 17 years is functionally exactly the same for taxpayers as adding a new one for 17 years, or if siphoning off tax revenues from eight more hotels to pay for sports projects means that local government will have to raise taxes (or cut services) elsewhere to make up the difference, that’s no new taxes, check that box. And media outlets like the IBJ are obligated to repeat that language, because criticizing those in power would be taking sides and therefore wrong.

Anyway, two rich guys are about to get a whole richer at the expense of Indiana residents, and probably Indianapolis is going to get an MLS team eventually. Not that Indianapolis wasn’t going to get an MLS team eventually anyway — everybody is eventually going to get an MLS team — but now it’ll be sooner, maybe? This would all go a whole lot faster if MLS and the USL would just merge, but then MLS owners wouldn’t be getting all these expansion fees and cities wouldn’t be throwing money at would-be expansion owners to get MLS teams, so never mind, artificial scarcity is clearly the backbone of capitalism and I’m sorry I said anything.