Category Archives: Oakland Raiders

Friday roundup: More renderings, more on the LeBron effect myth, and more bad Raiders PSL decisions

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Wow, it’s Friday already? How did that happen? Anyway, let’s see what’s left in the ol’ news hopper:

  • Whoops, forgot to include the stadium renderings that David Beckham’s group released this week in my last post, probably because they’re really boring and have no fireworks or spotlights or lens flare or anything. Also not pictured: the fleet of trucks carrying off the toxic waste that sits under the site.
  • Somebody has finally studied the actual economic impact of LeBron James on the Cleveland area, and far from the urban legend, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that overall GDP growth in the metro area has actually slowed since James returned from Miami. Now, that doesn’t mean that James is bad for the Cleveland economy — there are way bigger factors at work that affect GDP — but it does mean that at best, he didn’t really move the needle much on local earning. Can somebody please tell Drake now?
  • The Las Vegas Raiders announced their PSL pricing, and it’s a whopping $20,000 to $75,000, more in line with what the San Francisco 49ers are charging than, say, the Atlanta Falcons or Minnesota Vikings. And there will be other seats with no PSLs attached, so if fans want to go to games, they can always opt for the no-down-payment option and just sit in the nosebleeds. I feel like I’ve seen this somewhere before and it didn’t go well — oh, right.
  • The Arizona Coyotes have a new CEO, Ahron Cohen, so what does he have to say when asked about the team’s arena plans? “Really, the most important thing for us right now and what we’re focusing on is achieving our core goals. Those are building hockey fandom in Arizona, building a competitive team on the ice, and positively impacting our community. Ultimately, we have to figure out our long-term arena solution. But that problem is solved by achieving those three goals I laid out.” Put that into Google translate, select Corporate Bureaucrat to English, and we get, let’s see: “Hell if I know.” Glad to see some things are consistent with the Coyotes!

Friday roundup: Kraft tries to use World Cup to get new stadium, Roger Noll says Austin MLS subsidies are indeed subsidies, NC mulls new tax breaks for Panthers

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Posting this while watching the first World Cup match at the crazy stadium with the seats outside the stadium. (I haven’t honestly even noticed who the teams are yet, I’m just watching the architecture.) Anyhoo:

Friday roundup: Why Pistons fans can’t bear to watch, Broncos land grab move, Donald Trump could win Morocco the World Cup, and more!

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All evidence to the contrary, spring (and the spring end-of-legislative-session season) must be getting nearer, because the stack of weekly roundup news items in my Instapaper is getting longer and longer each week. Better get down to it:

Friday roundup: Crew claps back at Modell Law suit, Cincy mayor thinks his citizens are dumb, Wrigley Field is a construction zone again

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This week brought thundersnow that led to a fireball in a subway tunnel, but the stadium and arena news was reasonably exciting too:

  • Columbus Crew owner Anthony Precourt says the lawsuit to force him to offer the team for sale to local owners before moving it to Austin is groundless, since he made “significant investments” in the team “both on and off the field” and yet the team isn’t making money hand over fist like he’d like it to. I would have gone with “fine, you can buy the team if you want, my asking price is one quattuordecillion dollars,” but that’s why Precourt pays himself the big bucks.
  • Oakland Raiders management says it has identified room for 27,000 parking spaces within 1.5 miles of its Las Vegas stadium, and 100,000 spaces within three miles. “Now, obviously, people don’t want to walk three miles, so you have to have a pretty strong infrastructure program and transportation plan in place,” said Raiders president Marc Badain. “We’re working on all of that.” Cool, get back to us!
  • Residents of the West End opposed to building an F.C. Cincinnati soccer stadium on the site of a revered high school football stadium there are all about “maintaining disinvestment, maintaining the status quo and not closing racial and economic gaps but keeping them divided,” Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley said this week. “I think that’s wrong.” But enough with the pandering to your constituents, Mayor Cranley what do you really think about them?
  • Because no arena project can truly be cost-free for the public, the new Muni Metro stop being built at the Golden State Warriors‘ new San Francisco arena has now risen in cost to $51 million, and the city of San Francisco hasn’t figured out how to pay for $17 million of that yet. Not that a new mass transit stop isn’t a public benefit for people other than Warriors fans, but just saying.
  • This is what Wrigley Field looked like as of a couple of weeks ago. There’s still time before opening day, so hopefully this renovation will go better than the Chicago Cubs‘ last big one.
  • Does an “asteroid the size of a sports stadium” zooming past Earth count as stadium news? It does to my custom RSS feed for “stadium” news, so enjoy!

Raiders’ lease blocks Nevada from levying ticket taxes, we’ve heard this song before

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The Washington Times had a big article yesterday on the Oakland Raiders‘ lease for their new stadium in Las Vegas, and how it contains a provision that would prevent the state from trying to recoup its $750 million in stadium costs by levying new taxes on the team down the road:

An unusual provision in the Raiders agreement with the state allows the team, currently playing its final seasons in Oakland, to break the lease and look for another home if Nevada attempts to impose new taxes over the next three decades on the team, stadium, fans or players. That includes visiting teams and fans as well.

The provision applies to any “targeted tax” aimed at collecting revenue specifically from players or fans. It would not protect the team or its fans from any new taxes applied generally on businesses or individuals across Nevada, however.

I’m quote in this article, calling the lease clause “adding insult to injury” since it “makes sure Nevada taxpayers never see a penny from the stadium.” Which is true, but what the Times left out was that I mentioned this isn’t unheard of — other teams have leases that prohibit local governments from levying team-specific taxes as well. This is probably because I didn’t actually cite any examples to the Times reporter — I was busy and couldn’t look any up — but a quick search through the FoS archives reveals two examples right off the bat:

  • The Cincinnati Bengals and Reds owners have lease clauses that allow them to block ticket tax surcharges during the course of their leases, and did so in 2010.
  • The owners of Minnesota United asked for limits on that state’s ability to impose future taxes on the team, though I’m having a hard time confirming whether that provision made it into the final lease agreement. (The world really needs a database of stadium leases. Get right on that, world, okay?)

I realize this isn’t overwhelming evidence, but it is a sign that the Raiders clause isn’t entirely unprecedented, even if the Times reports that Temple economist Michael Leeds said, in the paper’s words, that this provision “goes beyond anything he has ever seen.” And it makes sense that team owners would try to forestall ticket surcharges: As we’ve covered before, targeted ticket taxes tend to mostly come out of team owners’ pockets because, unlike other taxes, they reduce the amount of money an owner can get away with charging for tickets. So if you sign a 30-year lease and then the state turns around and says, “Hey, $10 surcharge on all your tickets, we get the money!” and you can’t get out of the lease, that’s a huge chunk of change that is suddenly going out of your pocket and into the public’s.

Which, of course, is exactly why it’s so disappointing that the Raiders lease contains this clause — with the state already on the hook for $750 million, a ticket tax would have been one of the only ways for taxpayers to get some of that money back. But the Raiders had smart contract lawyers, so that’s not going to be happening. Evidence really is accumulating that Mark Davis may be smarter than he looks.

Ban on tax-exempt bonds would add $100m-plus to Nevada’s costs for Raiders stadium

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That provision in the U.S. house tax bill to bar use of federally tax-exempt bonds for pro sports facilities is already starting to freak out proponents of the Oakland Raiders‘ planned $1.9 million stadium in Las Vegas, which is set to use $750 million in public bonding:

“We stress-tested the model for things like higher interest rates,” [Nevada economic analyst Jeremy] Aguero said. “We understand the potential that comes with either legislative risk, or interest-rate risk or development risk, for that matter. I wish I could tell you it’s going to cost X amount of dollars in order to make it work but we need to go through the exercise of making sure we understand all the components of that legislation because that’s not the only one that will affect municipal finance.”

Okay, sure, figuring out how exactly this bill’s passage would affect the Raiders stadium costs is complicated. Figuring out roughly how much it would affect it, though, is dirt easy: Tax-free bonds typically allow an interest rate 1-1.5% below taxable bonds. So adding that much to the financing costs on the state’s where to buy lorazepam online 0 million would mean an extra $7.5-11.25 million a year, which over 30 years, converted into present value … I get between $115 million and $173 million worth of added interest costs.

So that’s a hefty chunk of change, and the big question would be who would pay it: The state or Raiders owner Mark Davis? That all depends on what it says in the team’s stadium lease — and in all likelihood it just says “we’ll use tax-exempt bonds,” meaning the whole thing would need to be renegotiated to settle who’d be on the hook for the extra cash. That would certainly be interesting.

(Note: It’s also important to remember, as I almost didn’t while writing this headline, that this would not be an increased cost of the stadium — it would just be shifting $115 million to $173 million worth of costs from the federal treasury, which would have been subsidizing it with tax exemptions, back to the state. It would make a hidden subsidy less hidden, in other words, but somebody’s paying those costs regardless.)

Friday roundup: Raiders talk lease extension, Rams attendance woes may set record, and more!

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Here’s what you missed this week, or rather what I missed, or rather what I saw at the time but left till Friday because there are only so many hours in the week, man:

Las Vegas Raiders to have fans park in Idaho, and other Friday stadium news

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I’ve been busy this morning working on further research into Jeffrey Loria’s Miami Marlins windfall for an article set to run at Vice Sports on Monday, so rather than let the day slip away entirely, let’s do another round of news briefs:

Las Vegas study estimates Raiders stadium road costs to be “we’ll figure that out later”

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Hey, remember when it was revealed that Las Vegas had yet to study the cost of transportation improvements needed to support a new Raiders stadium, and I noted that that was a terrible idea, given how “build first, study transportation later” had turned out in Cobb County? Well, now we have our first Las Vegas Raiders traffic study, and its estimated cost projection is “who the hell knows?”

The study lists close to 40 on-site and off-site transportation improvement measures that include widening Polaris Avenue, constructing multiple access roads to the stadium and creating traffic signal timing plans for games and other events.

But the county currently has no estimates on costs or timelines to complete the suggested improvements, most of which need to be ready by the 2020 NFL season.

“All of that is going to be determined later,” county spokesman Erik Pappa said. “A traffic study is only one part of the process, and it will have to be reviewed and accepted. Each proposed feature carries a cost and perhaps more traffic features will be sought by staff and the County Commission.”

Okay, then! Thought somebody might have wanted to know the cost before approving the stadium, or at least before the stadium is actually open and Clark County suddenly is faced with a bunch of unanticipated costs, but I guess that’s not how they roll in Vegas.

Also, how about the Las Vegas Review-Journal, actually reporting on potentially negative aspects of the Raiders stadium? Guess Sheldon Adelson doesn’t mind actually reporting on stadium cost news now that it’s no longer his stadium.

Las Vegas approves Raiders lease that will pay taxpayers $0 in rent for next 30 years

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The Las Vegas Stadium Authority unanimously approved a lease with the Oakland Raiders yesterday, and it’s online and everything so we can look at it! Good news first:

  • The Raiders owners have to pay all maintenance and operating costs, as well as putting $2.5 million a year into a Stadium Authority Capital Projects Fund that they can then spend on themselves.
  • There doesn’t appear to be any kind of “state of the art” clause that would allow the team to break its lease if the county doesn’t provide stadium upgrades.

And the not-so-good news:

  • In exchange for its $750 million in construction subsidies, the public gets absolutely zero revenues from anything: ticket sales, naming rights, concessions, ad boards, you name it. The Raiders’ rumored $1 a year rent turns out not to be true; they will actually pay $0 a year.
  • The stadium, despite all of its revenues for the next 30 years being controlled by its private tenant, will pay no property taxes.

This isn’t quite as bad a lease as I’d feared — a state-of-the-art clause would have been a real disaster, since it would have allowed the Raiders owners to demand future upgrades in a decade or two under threat of moving again — but it’s still not very good for taxpayers. It was apparently finalized in a hurry because of the team’s threat to stay in Oakland for another year if a lease wasn’t worked out this week; Mark Davis may be bad at a lot of things, but he seems to have this whole gamesmanship thing worked out pretty well.