The final shoe fell for the Atlanta Falcons‘ $1 billion stadium project yesterday, as Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development agency, voted as expected to okay the project.

The vote was 10-1, with the only dissenter being Julian Bene, who you’ll recall previously criticized the deal for providing way too few jobs for the public expense. And he still thinks that:

Board member Julian Bene, a management consultant, broke with his colleagues in questioning the stadium’s economic impact on the city, saying it would create “surprisingly few jobs.”

“My perception is that we’re switching one stadium for another and that we don’t get an additional amenity for the city,” said Bene. He urged state law be changed to allow the dedicated hotel-motel tax money to be used for other things, such as a streetcar route for Atlanta’s Beltline.

Atlanta actually would be switching one stadium for another — the Georgia Dome would be demolished once the new stadium was complete — so how about that, Mayor Kasim Reed?

“We’re not simply swapping one stadium for another. We’re building a best-in-class facility that will help us attract new events and retain the Falcons,” Reed said. He added: “They were going somewhere … Whether that was the suburbs or another city, they weren’t staying here.”

Reed also said, “This is really about the best vision of ourselves: Not being mediocre, not being old, not being tired.” Presumably he meant the city not being all of those things, but if he wants to pretend that a new football stadium is a literal fountain of youth, well, it would be right in keeping with tradition.

I sure hope you enjoyed yesterday’s calculation that the Atlanta Falcons stadium deal, after hidden lease subsidies, would cost taxpayers $554 million — because the Atlanta city council sure showed no interest at all, voting 11-4 last night to approve the project to replace the 20-year-old Georgia Dome with a new stadium, with the help of a 30-year extension of hotel-motel taxes. “The council, in a short amount of time, significantly improved the transaction from what was initially presented to us,” council member Yolanda Adrean said afterwards, which is true only if you count a $15 million team contribution to “community improvements” to be significant in the context of a $554 million public subsidy.

Also not interested in hidden cost numbers: The Associated Press, which jumped out of the gate last night to be the first to report on the deal, describing it as “using city hotel-motel tax revenue to cover the $200 million public contribution for the proposed $1 billion, retractable roof stadium.” At least the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, to its credit, described the public share as “the use of city hotel-motel taxes to pay $200 million toward construction costs and potentially several times that toward costs of financing, maintaining and operating the stadium through 2050.”

There’s still a vote to come from Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development arm, later today, but despite one board member’s public skepticism, it’s hard to see them defying the mayor and the council on this one. So it looks as though the Falcons will be playing in a new stadium circa 2017, and the Georgia Dome, built at a public cost of $214 million in 1992 and renovated for another $300 million in 2007, won’t live to see its 25th birthday.

While the writing’s seemed on the wall for this one for awhile, it’s still a pretty stunning development when you step back and look at it: An NFL team in a relatively new domed football stadium, without threatening to leave town aside from a few vague idle threats to go to the suburbs, succeeded in getting the local government to approve more than half a billion dollars’ worth of future tax subsidies by means of a bait-and-switch in which they first claimed they were asking for $300 million, then changing the number to $200 million, all while the actual subsidy figures remained unchanged. Depending on how you want to look at it, it’s a bravura performance of chutzpah, a horrible precedent for other cities facing their own stadium shakedowns, or both.

Plus, you just know that “But the Falcons are getting a whole new stadium!” is likely to be the next rallying cry in Charlotte and Miami, as backers of the wildly unpopular plans to subsidize stadium upgrades for the Carolina Panthers and Miami Dolphins try to jump-start those deals. Suffice to say that the next reporter to call me and ask if the days of major stadium subsidies are behind us will be getting an earful.

According to Atlanta’s 11alive news, the Atlanta city council could vote to approve a Falcons stadium bill as soon as today, which — after the state Georgia World Congress Center Authority gave its expected rubber-stamp on Friday — would pretty much guarantee the project’s passage, with only the vote of the city-run Invest Atlanta needed for final approval. That’s pretty alarming, given that there still hasn’t been any official attempt made to figure out how much the stadium would cost city taxpayers, taking into account the excess hotel-motel taxes that would go to subsidize future stadium operations and improvements.

So if the Atlanta city council isn’t going to do the math, let’s give it a shot ourselves:

• Previously established costs include $200 million in up-front construction costs, $30 million in construction sales tax rebates, and $24 million in land costs, for a total of $254 million.
• Once the first $200 million in public stadium bonds were paid off, anything left over of the Falcons’ share of the city’s 7% hotel-motel tax — 39.3% of the tax proceeds, according to the latest MOU released Friday — “will be applied for the maintenance, operation and improvement” of the new stadium. The MOU doesn’t put a total cap on this annual subsidy, but from the chart of past hotel-motel tax collections (see page 5, and thanks to FoS reader cityzen for the link), we can see that the Falcons’ share of the hotel-motel taxes is currently about $17 million a year.
• Under the MOU, the hotel-motel tax funding for the Falcons would be extended through the year 2050. Thirty-seven years’ worth of $17 million payments equals $629 million.
• Normally, I’d point out that that $629 million is in nominal payments, so we’d need to calculate the present value — the same as when you figure the price of your house, you do it by calculating what you paid now, not by adding up all your mortgage payments for the next 30 years. But since the hotel-motel tax revenues have been pretty consistently going up each year, the two factors should roughly cancel each other out, so we should still be at around $600 million in present value.
• The first $200 million of that $600 million comes off the top to pay for the city’s stadium bonds. Also, whereas previously some of this money was being used to pay off debt on the Georgia Dome, under the new deal the Falcons would pay off the remaining debt, which comes to around $100 million, per Forbes. So that would leave the team with $300 million worth of future excess hotel taxes to spend on pretty much whatever it felt like.
• Add the $300 million to our original $254 million, and we get a total public subsidy for the project of $554 million.

Could this be off? Sure: growth in hotel tax revenues could be less than what it has been; the financing costs for the stadium could eat up more of the money than I’ve estimated; or half a dozen other uncertainties. But as a best guess for how much the Falcons deal would cost the public, “more than half a billion dollars” is an excellent starting point. Now to see if anyone mentions that figure during today’s council meeting.

The Atlanta city council is raising more questions about the Falcons stadium deal, but again, it’s not around how much money this will cost the public:

The city of Atlanta’s economic development arm would get free seats at some events at a new downtown stadium for the Falcons, a provision in the proposed deal that drew questions Thursday as key votes loom on the plan.

“Is this even legal?” councilwoman Felicia Moore asked at a City Council discussion of the stadium plan. She said the city can’t require event tickets in contracts and Invest Atlanta, a quasi-government agency that promotes economic growth, shouldn’t be able to either. “If I can’t get tickets they shouldn’t be able to get tickets.”

Teams giving free tickets to public officials is certainly a concern — especially when there’s an indication of a quid pro quo (that’s Latin for “bribe”) — but usually the issue isn’t stated quite so much in terms of “Hey, where’s my free tickets, then?” In any event, given that this isn’t something that would cost the Falcons anything to give up — in fact, it would get them back some tickets that they could then sell at face value — it’s hard to see it as a major stumbling block.

Meanwhile, two historic churches on the proposed stadium site are deciding whether they’d be willing to sell and relocate to make way for the Falcons. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes this as maybe the “biggest stumbling block remaining” to the deal, but given that the Falcons have the option of another site that wouldn’t require the churches to move, that’s probably an overstatement. The only real stumbling block would be somebody balking at handing over 30 years’ worth of future hotel taxes (which still nobody has enumerated how much they’d be worth), but not a peep so far on that issue.

So Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed holds a press conference to promote his Falcons stadium plan? Well, two can play at that game: Yesterday, Common Cause Georgia held their own press conference to call for a public referendum on the Falcons deal. “We’re asking the people to contact members of the Atlanta City Council and ask them to let the people of Atlanta make the decision,” said Common Cause Georgia director William Perry, adding, “The public is ponying up an awful lot of money. We don’t know what the total is the public is ponying up yet. And so until we know those numbers we can’t say whether it’s a good thing or not.”

Given the continuing confusion over the numbers, he has a point, but that doesn’t mean the council is likely to listen. (One councilmember, Michael Julian Bond, huffed yesterday that “the state law rests that decision with us, where it actually should be.”) Though State Sen. Vincent Fort did do his best yesterday to shift the stadium debate through vivid imagery, saying the proposed deal is “like getting your pocket picked at 800 miles an hour.” You mean like this?

Well, that was fast: Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed announced last Friday that he’d have a revised Falcons stadium finance plan ready to go by the end of the month, and now only a week later, there is a new plan:

Mayor Kasim Reed said the city would provide $200 million of construction costs through bonds backed by the city’s hotel-motel tax. The Falcons franchise, owned by Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank, would provide $800 million and be responsible for construction cost overruns.

The Falcons would pay for up to $50 million in infrastructure costs not included in the construction budget and help retire the last few years of debt on the Georgia Dome, which was publicly financed entirely using the hotel-motel tax.

Also, Blank’s private foundation and the city each would spend $15 million on surrounding neighborhood development.

That’s actually pretty much the old plan, along with $30 million thrown at surrounding neighborhoods to make local city council members happy, though half of that will come from tax money collected by an existing city TIF district, so really it’s only an extra $65 million from the Falcons. And there’s still no official word on the $100 million or maybe more in future tax revenues that the Falcons have been reported to be asking for — the terms of the operating agreement for the stadium aren’t official yet, and that’s where those kind of future subsidies would be revealed. And, of course, it’s not a “deal,” no matter what the headlines say: the Atlanta city council still needs to hold hearings and vote on this.

Speaking of hidden subsidies, this might be a good time for me to address the analysis that Atlanta blogger Al Gray posted recently claiming to show that the Falcons would only be on the hook for $43 million out of a total $1.17 billion stadium cost. Simplifying Gray’s chart a bit, we have:

• Hotel/motel tax money for construction: $359 million
• Hotel/motel tax money for future maintenance and improvements: $178 million
• PSL sales: $150 million
• Construction sales tax rebates: $30 million
• Donated public land: $24 million
• Atlanta infrastructure costs: $53 million
• Value of naming rights and concessions rights given to the Falcons: $128 million
• NFL G-4 program: $200 million
• Falcons: $43 million

There are a couple of quibbles I have here: It’s not entirely clear where that $359 million figure comes from, since Reed is claiming it’s only $200 million in up front hotel/motel tax proceeds (or rather, it’s clear it comes from here, but not whether that represents the actual final bond amounts). Counting PSL sales as public money just because the state would be handling the sales is a bit dodgy, since if anything it’s money that will cost the Falcons some as fans plunk their spending money down on the right to buy tickets rather than on tickets themselves. (You could certainly argue that PSLs could be used to offset the public share of costs, but that’s a different debate.) The Falcons now say they’ll pay for the $50 million in infrastructure costs, though whether that’d be offset by some other concession in the lease we won’t know until that document is released. And naming rights and concessions rights usually end up going to the team, though again, you could make an excellent case that naming rights in particular for a publicly owned building should by all rights go to the public.

Even bending over backwards to eliminate any contestable items, though, we still have $200 million in construction costs, plus $178 million in present value of future improvements, plus $30 million in construction sales tax rebates, plus $24 million in land costs, for a total of $432 million in public costs. And after selling naming rights and PSLs and all, the Falcons would indeed be on the hook for only about $43 million, though in using naming rights and PSL proceeds they’d be giving up a big chunk of the new revenues they’d otherwise be looking to get out of a new stadium. That sounds a heck of a lot worse for the public than the “$200 million public, $800 million private” headlines, but then, that’s undoubtedly why Reed put his number and not the other one in their press release.

The Atlanta city council may have something real to chew on regarding the Atlanta Falcons stadium plan soon: Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has promised an actual financial plan for the project by the end of the month. Or rather, “a detailed review of terms of the conversation” with the Falcons. Which, not exactly the same thing. But at least it’s something to talk about, or rather, to not talk about, since wouldn’t the council really rather talk about what kind of goodies to ask for in exchange for $200 million or maybe $300 million or maybe more in public money?

In related news, the mayor of Flowery Branch, a metropolis of 5,600 people 50 miles northeast of Atlanta where the Falcons have their training camp, has said that he’d love to host a Falcons stadium, saying, “How cool would it be if the Superbowl were in Flowery Branch, Georgia?”

There are two possibilities here:

1. The mayor of Flowery Branch actually thinks that the Falcons would build a stadium in his town.
2. The mayor of Flowery Branch thinks that this is an awesome opportunity to get his town’s name in national newspapers in close proximity to the words “Super Bowl.”

Your call which it is. Though if the latter, he might want to spell it properly, or he’s going to miss out on the full SEO hit.