The planned construction of a new Kings arena in downtown Sacramento should provide a significant boost for the area’s economy and job market, a University of the Pacific forecaster said today.

Although the region’s job growth will remain modest this year, the effect of arena construction should begin to be felt sometime next year, said UOP’s Jeff Michael in his quarterly forecast.

Michael, director of the university’s Business Forecasting Center, said California and the Sacramento area are experiencing another year of moderate economic growth this year. Prospects should improve statewide in 2014, he said, and the arena effect in Sacramento will bring a spark to the region’s otherwise “tepid job growth.”

I bet you’ve already spotted the problem here, but to make it easier, let’s make this multiple-choice. Is it:

1. The Sacramento arena financing plan still hasn’t been approved by the city council, so it’s uncertain at best whether the project will get underway and start hiring people until well into 2014.
2. Sacramento is paying for the arena out of future parking revenues (and probably hotel taxes as well), yet Michael fails to take into account the opportunity cost of the lost economic activity that would arise if the city were spending that money elsewhere (or lowering taxes with it).
3. Even if the arena does start construction soon, and does front-load the 6,000 construction jobs that the city is promising, the short-term effect on unemployment may be fairly modest. The unemployment rate in Sacramento County is 9.2%, out of a labor force of 679,939. That would mean the arena could put one out of every eleven unemployed county residents to work — assuming they’re all trained construction workers, of course. If not, then the project would have to bring in workers from elsewhere, not helping Sacramentans any. And, of course, those jobs would disappear once the arena was complete — but the construction bills would keep on going.

And the answer is: all of the above!

Now, for your bonus question: When Michael wrote that the arena project “has the potential to accomplish broader city goals and help other city assets like the Convention Center,” what is the appropriate response?

Oh, I’m sorry, the correct answer was “shake your head sadly, with just the faint hint of a bitter laugh.” But we have some lovely parting gifts.

“The best possible outcome would be a relocated Madison Square Garden,” said city Planning Commission chairwoman Amanda Burden…

“What a 15-year period can do is create an opportunity for city, state, and federal government agencies to reach an agreement with Penn Station and the railroads for a comprehensive plan to relocate the arena,” she said.

“There is no more important initiative for the region.”

Since Burden is appointed by the mayor, this is presumably an endorsement by Mayor Bloomberg of the plan to move The World’s Most Famous Arena (Except For The Ones With The Same Name That Went Before It Somewhere Else) and make way for a new above-ground Penn Station. And so the city planning groups that came up with that plan are … hopping mad?

“This would essentially allow four people in a room to decide for themselves what is best for commuters, the future of the area and the vitality of the city— requiring only a rubber-stamp approval from planners without further public review or City Council oversight,” said Robert Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association and co-founder of the Alliance for a New Penn Station, in a statement.

That would be a reference to this loophole, which would allow MSG to remain in perpetuity if it works out a deal with the railroads to upgrade the underground Penn Station. Or as Mayor Bloomberg explained to Capital New York (if you’re lenient about the definition of “explained”): “Because you’re right above this mass transit location and if you needed to do something for the greater good of the city, leaving the city in the position of being able to do something down the road. Doesn’t mean they’re gonna do it. But we would be derelict in our duty, I think, to take that away.”

Clearly something weird is going on here, since Bloomberg’s office has now created an out for the Garden to stay put as long as it wants at the same time as its city planning chief is saying that the Garden needs to get out of the way, because progress. The city council still needs to vote on this, so hopefully by the time of those hearings we’ll be able to figure out who’s on what side here — perhaps most importantly, the person who’s likely to be mayor when plans for 15 years from now actually get decided.

For those of you who read FoS regularly and would like a way to support the cause, you can now become an FoS Supporter. Members will get not just the warm glow of knowing that they’re enabling me to keep on reporting daily on stadium and arena news while silencing the voice in my head that says “Shouldn’t you be doing real work?” but will also get the ability to place an ad in the top-right banner space, which will be viewed on a rotating basis with no more than nine other ads. Messages can be anything from “I Support Field of Schemes and I Vote” to “Read My Website, It’s Way Better Than This One” or anything else that will fit legibly in a 90×250-pixel space. (You’re welcome to send me your own display ad, or I’ll design one for you if you send the text.) I do retain veto power over needlessly offensive or inaccurate messages, so “Jeffrey Loria Is a Booger Brain” would be ruled out of order. Probably. Unless you could provide citations.

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“We are excited to have received league support today for our stadium revitalization project at Lincoln Financial Field,” said Eagles President Don Smolenski. “We will share the details of this project with our fans in the coming weeks.”

And not just with fans, one hopes, but with Philadelphia legislators as well, since one of the conditions of the G-4 program language is that any funded projects must be “public-private partnerships.” So the only way this is going to work is if the Eagles seek some public money for upgrades to 10-year-old Lincoln Financial Field. If those cost $60 million to $100 million as previously projected, then we’re talking about $30 million to $50 million in public money. It’s the sort of thing you’d hope that any of the numerous articles about the renovation plan would have mentioned, but I guess it’s a lot to expect today’s newspaper journalists to think outside the press release.

Instead, let’s turn to how downtown development in Sacramento is expected to boom as a result of the new Kings arena, according to a downtown developer — oh, just forget it.

Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber announced today that a partnership of global sports powers, Manchester City Football Club and the New York Yankees, has acquired the League’s 20^thexpansion club. The new team will be named New York City Football Club (NYCFC) and expects to begin play in 2015.

“We proudly welcome two of the most prestigious professional global sports organizations to Major League Soccer,” said MLS Commissioner Don Garber.“This is a transformational development that will elevate the league to new heights in this country. The New York area is home to more than 19 million people­, and we look forward to an intense crosstown rivalry between New York City Football Club and the New York Red Bulls that will captivate this great city.”

This announcement was expected for a while now, but there are a couple of unexpected bits:

• First off, the involvement of the Yankees, which seems like mostly a minority investment and an excuse to get Randy Levine — the former deputy mayor with the apoplectic purple face — involved in stadium negotiations. Levine managed to get the new Yankee Stadium project shepherded through the political process largely before anyone had noticed, and while it’s too late to do the same here, his political connections can only come in handy for MLS.
• The New York City Football Club (which incidentally is a terrible name — they couldn’t at least have gone with F.C. New York?) will, according to the MLS website’s report, “arrange for an interim venue but will also seek a permanent home in New York.” This is a bit of a surprise, given that the best leverage MLS had was to refuse to grant the expansion team until a stadium site was approved — doing it this way risks that they find a temporary venue (Citi Field? New Yankee Stadium? The newly turfed Brooklyn Cyclones stadium?) and then once they’re here nobody wants to shell out the money or the land for a whole new stadium, as we’ve seen happen some other places.

Presumably the MLS’s bet is that the two will cancel each other out: Even if pre-announcing the team before getting the stadium reduces leverage, Levine will be able to strong-arm something through the city council regardless. Though the MLS announcement also said that the league will “continue to look at other potential sites,” so maybe they’re backing off of the Flushing Meadows deal entirely. Or maybe that’s more leverage to tell Queens pols, “Give us parkland or we’ll go to Staten Island!” Only Randy really knows for sure.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune article on this includes the first photo I’ve seen of the actual e-pulltabs, so let’s take a look and OH GOD UNCLE SAM WANTS ME TO DEPOSIT MY IMMORTAL SOUL IN HIS TOP HAT!

“Our hope,” Allied Charities director Al Lund told the Star Tribune, “is we increase money for our [charity] missions by selling more games, which in turn provides more tax revenue for the state, and ultimately we hope enough revenue to pay for the stadium.” Come on, people of Knucklehead’s! The fate of Minnesota depends on your misplaced faith in the law of averages!

The city will in fact propose a 15-year renewal, rather than a 50-year one, which is in theory a victory for the planners. But the proposal also contains a major loophole: if the Garden meets certain conditions during those 15 years, it can get a permit to remain on top of Penn Station in perpetuity.

Namely, the Garden would have to come to some sort of an agreement with the three railroads that run beneath it to make improvements to the station, like adding new escalators and elevators. If such an agreement were to reached, and the City Planning Commission’s chair (who is appointed by the mayor) were to approve it, then the Garden could remain where it is, on top of the ever-more-crowded Penn Station. Its special permit, in other words, would have no expiration date.

Whether you think this is a good idea or a terrible one probably depends on your ultimate goals: If, like the Regional Plan Association and Municipal Art Society, you want to get the home of the Knicks and Rangers out of the way (to some undisclosed new location) so you can build a new, grander Penn Station (with some undisclosed source of money), then this is terrible, since it means the Garden can stay put just by buying some improvements for the underground train station. If, on the other hand, you just want MSG to have to pay for its right to use city land instead of getting to remain there for free, then this is potentially an okay deal — depending on what “improvements to the station” mean, obviously, and how this multipartite deal between MSG, Amtrak, and the commuter rail lines would actually be negotiated.

(Or, if you’re the head of the city’s business lobbying group, you think it’s a terrible idea because MSG just spent $1 billion on renovations, and if they don’t get an endless permit to remain in place they’ll … unspend the money or something?)

Meanwhile, a far more constructive bit of government action would be if the state legislature would actually revoke the Garden’s endless property tax break, which is now a public gift of $15 million a year and climbing. Or, hell, even demand that MSG build some escalators if it wants to keep it. Don’t hold your breath, though, given that 1) the New York state legislature never actually does anything if it can help it, and 2) MSG has hired Gov. Cuomo’s former director of cabinet affairs, just in case.

That cocoa-drenched cloud you inhale when you walk into the Times Square Hershey’s store isn’t candy — it’s ScentAir.

In recent years the company’s olfactory empire has expanded to include sports venues such as the Dallas Cowboys’ and Atlanta Hawks’ stadiums. At the St. Louis Rams’ stadium the air is redolent with a “cotton candy” fragrance that’s meant to “create a positive first impression for fans,” a team spokesman told ESPN.com.

It’s only fitting that the Nets are resorting to this, given that they were among the first franchises to pipe in fake crowd noise to make it sound like fans were actually cheering. Nobody’s allergic to loud sounds (okay, maybe Roger Miller), though, unlike smells — you have to wonder if the first sports-fan lawsuit against smell-spritzing can be far off.

Meanwhile, NBC Sports blogger/NFL mouthpiece Mike Florio decides that this is a perfect time for a quip:

Earlier this year, new owner Jimmy Haslam sold the naming rights to FirstEnergy.

Hopefully no discounts or rebates were involved in the transaction.

Get it, see, because FirstEnergy is an electricity company, and they like to offer discounts and rebates to their customers! [UPDATE: Or maybe because Haslam has his own problems with rebates — thanks to commenters for pointing this out.] And also, the idea of discounts and rebates being involved in a sports stadium deal is so unheard-of, it’s hilarious!