June 30, 2010
New park on Yankee Stadium site (finally) underway
Ground has finally been broken for Heritage Field, the public ballfields that will stand where the old Yankee Stadium once did. New York City parks commissioner Adrian Benape was appropriately sheepish at yesterday's shovel-wielding event:
"We want to thank the local community for having patience with us," said city Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. "Bit by bit, we are keeping our promise."
The original promise was actually to have the fields open by the end of this year, but it now looks like it'll be closer to the end of next year. The public cost of the new parks, meanwhile — which are replacing part of the parkland destroyed for the Yankees' new stadium — has nearly doubled since the original projections, to $195 million.
Meanwhile, Yanks pitcher Joba Chamberlain was considerably less sheepish:
"To be able to come out here in a year and watch these kids play -- you know that is our future and I don't think people really truly understand that. We're giving so many kids opportunities to take the right path," said New York Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain.
Because, you know, those "opportunities" didn't exist when even more ballfields were right across the street.
June 29, 2010
Oilers owner seeks Hamilton arena lease, rattling Edmonton
If Edmonton city officials were hoping to have a quiet summer for Oilers arena talks, looks like that ain't gonna be happening: Word leaked today that Oilers owner Daryl Katz is looking to take control of the lease of Hamilton's Copps Coliseum, which has long been rumored as a potential NHL expansion or relocation site.
What exactly all this means depends on what newspaper you read. The Edmonton Journal calls the move "inflammatory and provocatively timed." CTV notes that Katz has commissioned a study of whether Hamilton could viably support an NHL franchise. The Toronto Star, meanwhile, thinks it's all about a ploy to get control of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, not hockey at all.
Not that this would likely calm down the Edmonton city council, which is predictably flipping out, with councillor Ben Henderson telling iNews 880:
"You know, I like the fact that there was no implied threat about anything else. We were having what we'd hoped would be a healthy conversation about what was good for the city, and how we could facilitate things happening here. If this is intended to put up a cloud of a threat over the city, I don't think that creates healthy discussion. I don't think that creates healthy conversation. We've been down that road before, and I would argue it didn't end well."
If this deal is indeed about hockey, though, Katz probably thinks that any discussion is better than no discussion. That's the popular theory among other sports owners, anyway.
Miami Herald: Impact of incomplete Marlins stadium is incomplete
I've been plenty critical of lazy journalists who fall back on the "stadium to spark development!" meme without a shred of evidence that development is actually en route. That said, it's a bit much for the Miami Herald to complain that the Florida Marlins stadium hasn't helped its surrounding neighborhood when the thing isn't even going to be open for another two years:
East Little Havana has felt little impact yet from the $642 million project, funded mostly by public dollars and pitched to residents with a promise that if you build it, they will come.
As the columns of the enormous structure climb skyward by the day, there are no discernible signs of the stadium spurring retailers, restaurants or businesses to commit to the area.
Of course, it's possible that the Herald is surprised that no restaurants have popped up to serve a construction site because it thinks this is how it's worked in other cities: Reporter Patricia Mazzei writes that in San Diego and St. Louis, "baseball stadiums sparked neighborhood renaissances," and then later that "new baseball stadiums elsewhere -- notably San Francisco and, more recently, San Diego and Washington D.C. -- have triggered neighborhood revivals with stores, apartments, offices and hotels."
Really? St. Louis? Washington, D.C.? If those are your models, a better headline might be: "Lack of Miami stadium renaissance is years ahead of schedule."
June 28, 2010
Philly soccer team debuts new stadium amid dusk-to-dawn curfew
The Philadelphia Union opened their new stadium in Chester yesterday, and by most accounts a fun time was had by all.
As for what Chester itself is getting for its $77 million in public funding (split between the state and county), opening day didn't provide much positive evidence:
Obert Burchell runs a small Jamaican jerk chicken restaurant on Route 291, not far from the new soccer stadium. On Sunday his place was empty. He says business has been dropping for two weeks.
"Very dramatically man," says Burchell. "All we do here is play cards. Food on the stove — nobody come in to buy."
Of course, it doesn't help that half the city is under a 9-p.m.-to-6-a.m. curfew after a series of shootings earlier this month. A curfew that, despite what many residents believe, Chester's mayor insists has nothing at all to do with making visitors to the new soccer stadium feel safe.
Rays stadium wars, day eight: Don't look to Tampa for money
As Noah Pransky noted on Friday, newspaper coverage of the Tampa Bay Rays stadium battle has finally started to include some actual investigations, now that Rays owner Stuart Sternberg has declared that it's on. Yesterday, it was the St. Petersburg Times taking a look at how a new stadium in Tampa might be funded.
And as the Times' three reporters wrote: "Sternberg asked the community to at least start to have this conversation. He might not like how it sounds." It sounds, according to the Times, like this:
"Thank you very much, Rays, for telling us to have this conversation," likely mayoral candidate Ed Turanchik said. "Now please go away for a while. Because we've got to deal with more pressing matters.
"There's no public money for this."
"You're talking about trying to keep your police department and your fire department intact," possible mayoral candidate Dick Greco said. "As much as we love baseball, it may be a very, very difficult thing to make happen."
Bob Buckhorn, definite mayoral candidate, posted on his Facebook page after Sternberg's announcement: "If the Rays are going to move, why not a downtown Tampa stadium?" A few days later, though, on the phone, his initial pep was more muted. The chances his would-be taxpayers might pay for part of it?
"Nil," he said, "or something similar to that."
"We're in the middle of a financial crisis at all levels of government," Hillsborough County Commissioner Mark Sharpe said. "We're not in a time when the government can be laying out hundreds of millions of dollars for a new stadium."
And so on. Now, it's not uncommon for elected officials to make "no tax money" pledges about sports facilities, as they know that public funding is generally looked down upon by the public — it's why TIFs, which have the pretense of being "new" revenue, have become such a popular option. Still, this is a pretty hard line to be taken by politicians being wooed by a sports franchise, especially when you consider the number who say they don't think public money will be worth discussing even five or seven years down the road when the economy improves. (Or not, as the case may be.)
The upshot is that it looks like Sternberg's stadium campaign is going to be a long, long-term affair — declaring that they want to consider all their geographic options is no doubt not just a sign that he'd ideally prefer to be closer to the Tampa side of the bay, but an acknowledgment that he's going to need to cast his net as wide as possible in hopes of finding somebody, anybody who can cough up $400 million in stadium subsidies. As one stadium expert — okay, it was me — told the Times, this is how stadium campaigns have been waged for two decades now: "They find the weakness in the opposition, and just beat people down."
June 25, 2010
Rays stadium wars, day five: St. Pete fires back
Still more news in the brewing battle over the future of the Tampa Bay Rays, which is looking increasingly like a standoff between ownership and the team's municipal landlords:
- St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster backed away ever so slightly from his insistence on the Rays remaining in his city, writing to the team yesterday that he'd consider "any potential stadium site in St. Petersburg or the Gateway,", which would seem to be a backhanded endorsement of the Toytown site just north of St. Pete.
- At the same time, Foster is putting together a legal team to block any Rays move, saying, "The moment they sit down with anyone else, any other party in any other city, that is a violation" of the team's lease on Tropicana Field, which runs through 2027.
- The Tampa Tribune runs down the list of non-Tampa-Bay relocation targets, and find that there isn't much going on there, stadium-wise. (I did a similar list for Baseball Prospectus the other day.) Best quote comes from Bexar County, Texas official Michael Sculley, who says of his city having chosen to issue bonds for a performing arts center and 13 amateur sports facilities instead of an MLB stadium: "We really achieved more with 21 projects than providing an (baseball) owner with a new facility." Which may or may not be true, but it certainly is a good explication of opportunity cost.
- Tampa Tribune columnist Martin Fennelly writes that the Rays don't deserve public money unless they trade for more pitching.
- Rays fans mostly say they'd go to more games if the team plays closer to where they live, and fewer if it plays farther, which is a dog bites man story if there ever was one.
- WFTS-TV's website reports that "Rays fans say they want organization and cooperation" among the region's cities and counties to cut a stadium deal. Only "fans" cited: The director of the Tampa Sports Authority, and the co-founder of BuildItDowntownTampa.org. Hmmmm.
In any case, the only ones whose positions matter much here are the Rays and Foster (and the St. Petersburg city council), since that stadium lease needs to be resolved in one way or another before anyone can start talking about new stadium — or how to pay for them, an even stickier question that so far hasn't been broached at all. TV reporter and stadium blogger Noah Pransky sums up the current media battle nicely:
A NY millionaire flies down and says, "I know you're paying tens of millions of dollars a year for the right to host my (for-profit) business, and I know you still have many more millions to pay...and even though I agreed to stay for 17 more years....I decided it's only going to be 5-10...and I expect you to start paying a lot more money after that."
And somehow we think the bad guy is the Mayor of St Pete, looking out for his taxpayers' investment?
Environmental groups vow to block exemption for L.A. stadium
There hasn't been much public action the last couple of months on that plan for an NFL stadium in downtown Los Angeles, but environmental groups are charging that there's plenty going on behind the scenes. Tina Andolina of the Planning and Conservation League emailed out a sign-on letter on Tuesday morning, saying, "We are getting word that AEG (the owners of the Staples Center in LA) would like a CEQA [California Environmental Quality Act] exemption for a new NFL stadium in downtown LA," and asking recipients to oppose it.
The similarly unbuilt City of Industry stadium plan, you'll recall, was awarded an exemption from environmental review by the California legislature last fall, something that environmental groups at the time would inspire other developers to ask for similar exemptions. AEG officials wouldn't comment on whether they'll be seeking a CEQA exemption.
This seems like a pre-emptive strike by the Planning and Conservation League, but an eminently reasonable one, since you have to figure AEG is at least thinking about asking for the same deal from the state as Ed Roski got in Industry. It looks to be only the beginning of a long, long battle to come.
June 24, 2010
San Diego okays Chargers stadium study
The San Diego city council voted unanimously Tuesday night to approve a $500,000 study of their "downtown's redevelopment future," which is apparently code for "are we gonna build a Chargers stadium?" Though mayoral aide Phil Roth said the study — which will include a look at kicking back property taxes to fund redevelopment — "could be used to finance all sorts of different projects, hundreds of miles of sidewalks, all affordable housing, a stadium, a zoo, whatever you would like to do."
This isn't huge news — city councils typically authorize feasability studies at the drop of a hat — but Chargers stadium czar Mark Fabiani called it "pivotal" (the San Diego Union-Tribune's word, not his), on the grounds that without it, a San Diego stadium project couldn't move forward.
In other news, the sun rose in the east today, marking a key step in BP's efforts to stop the Gulf oil spill.
June 22, 2010
Rays stadium wars, day two: Threats and counter-threats
If Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg's goal yesterday with his vote of no confidence for St. Petersburg was to kick-start public discussion of a new stadium, he got it in spades: Both the St. Petersburg Times and the Tampa Tribune are crammed with articles today on the future of the Rays. Among the highlights:
- Sternberg's declaration that he will only participate in a region-wide stadium search "gave a jolt to the community of developers in the region," according to the Tribune, though the only developer actually cited is former Tampa mayor Dick Greco, who has a plan to build something at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Hillsborough County that might or might not include a stadium. "Everyone needs to come together and work on what sites could suit their needs, with the right location and amenities," said Greco. "This is going to start a race of people trying to do just that."
- As for what he'll do if a stadium plan doesn't materialize, Sternberg told the Tribune editorial board on Monday: "If I don't get a sense that there's real cooperation and movement here, I'd sell the team. And there'd be no reason for anyone else to keep it here." Trib columnist Joe Henderson rightly called this a page from "Strongarm Tactics 101" — though, somewhat oddly, Henderson said he was less worried about the team moving than about Sternberg selling it to an owner who would run it into the ground.
- While Sternberg carefully avoided actually threatening to move the team, he showed that he's mastered the non-threat threat, declaring: "If I were just coming into this, and you dropped me in the middle of the United States, this isn't going to be one of the top five markets that doesn't have baseball." Asked for clarification, he said there are "at least five" markets without baseball teams that are more attractive than Tampa Bay. Immediate speculation focused on Charlotte and Las Vegas, though those are both actually smaller markets than Tampa Bay and, of course, neither has a major-league-ready stadium or any plans for one; after that... San Antonio? Hartford? Stu, can you tell us what letter it starts with?
- St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster, knowing that the Rays have a Tropicana Field lease that could allow the city to sue for damages if the Rays even talk to another city about moving there before 2027, threatened to do just that, saying, "Like it or not, we are married and joined at the hip until 2027. The city of St. Petersburg, quite frankly, won't be brushed aside." Foster did, though, say he'd be willing to negotiate "if the price is right" — though it wasn't clear whether he meant the price of a new stadium or the price of a buyout from the lease.
- Hillsborough County Commission Chairman Ken Hagan fired back, saying St. Petersburg leaders need to admit that "if we do not have a regional dialogue, we may well be looking at the Charlotte Rays or the Las Vegas Rays." The Times editorial board, meanwhile, called on Foster to "stop threatening lawsuits and start thinking more creatively," while praising Sternberg for speaking "responsibly and clearly about the Rays' need for a new stadium," saying, "He did not make threats, and he did not make demands." Not directly, anyhow.
At this point, Foster's position seems a reasonable one: The lease is the only piece of leverage he has, and it's a pretty good one, since there's no way Sternberg wants to go through a protracted legal battle before he can even begin stadium talks in earnest. St. Petersburg's best option might actually be to negotiate a buyout in which Sternberg pays the city to be allowed to talk to other cities — or, more likely, to promise St. Pete a large wad of cash in the event that the team moves out of the Trop before the lease is up. That way St. Pete would get some value for its lease, plus would get the Trop site to redevelop — while letting Tampa and Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties fight for the right to sink money into a new stadium, if they so choose.
Yes, it would mean "losing" the Rays. But if you ask St. Pete residents if they think it's worth $250 million — the minimum public investment needed to build a new stadium, according to Rays exec Michael Kalt — to avoid driving across the bay to see Rays games, my guess is most of them would take the cash.
June 21, 2010
Sternberg: Lease-schmease, we want out of St. Pete
So Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg didn't declare his love for St. Petersburg after all. As Noah Pransky reports:
Stu said the Rays would not negotiate exclusively with St. Pete, despite their current use agreement. Said he'd only listen to stadium proposals through a process that considers ALL stadium possibilities.
Quotes include: "We need to be in a location that makes it easy for our fans to reach."
The Rays will not be playing in Tropicana Field when our current lease expires in 2027."
Or, per Jonah Keri:
RT @jasoncollette Sternberg's presser in one sentence: "Baseball will not work long-term in downtown St Pete". Agree 120%!
Of course, as Pransky notes, none of this is really news: The Rays have been hinting that they want to get closer to their fans on the Tampa side of the bay for well over a year now. (Or as one commenter on the Channel 10 live chat put it: "guess I missed something. He didn't tell us anything.") What Sternberg's statement appears to be is a shot across the bow of St. Pete, as well as an attempt to head off the city's threatened lawsuit, in effect saying, "We're only going to talk new stadiums if we can talk to everyone, so if there's no talking going on, blame St. Pete."
Now, St. Petersburg officials may well not care, given that they have a lease in place that binds the team from even talking about leaving Tropicana Field for the time being. But if nothing else, Sternberg's statement refocuses the pressure on the city, while getting people talking about where a new stadium should go rather than whether one should be built (or, god forbid, who would pay for it) — and that's what good p.r. is all about, right?
Rays to announce new stadium push today?
Fire up the rumor mills: The Tampa Bay Rays have announced that team owner Stuart Sternberg will "make an important announcement regarding the future of the Rays franchise" today at 12:15 pm. (Weird time, but maybe he doesn't want to miss the end of the big Chile-Switzerland match.) Which has the St. Petersburg Times, among others, speculating that Sternberg will "finally expound on the team's position on a new stadium."
Of course, Sternberg's position on a new stadium has been pretty clear for a while now: He wants one, but doesn't want to pay for it. Presumably what the Times is hoping is that Sternberg will say he's picked a site from among Tampa, St. Pete, and northern Pinellas County, all of which have seen stadium plans of varying degrees of bakedness emerge in recent months.
It would certainly make some sense for Sternberg to declare that he's looking to negotiate with St. Petersburg for now, given that the city is apparently going to threaten lawsuits against any other cities that try to lure the Rays to break their lease before it expires in 2027. If talks end up going nowhere, as they did last time, then Tampa and Pinellas will still be there as fallback options, with a couple more years off the clock until the remaining part of their existing lease is short enough to be affordably bought out.
Or Sternberg could be announcing something else entirely. Best guess among the commenters on the Times site: "They are going to announce that they will now host the Yankees and Red Sox 81 times so that people will actually show up."
June 18, 2010
Coyotes buyers prove they're not broke
Well, that's one hurdle cleared: Ice Edge Holdings, the prospective buyers of the league-controlled Phoenix Coyotes, met Friday's deadline to provide proof that they actually have the cash to pull off the purchase. Which may not sound like a huge accomplishment, but given that the company's own CEO said earlier this month he wasn't sure they'd pull it off, it's at least a step forward.
(And, of course, given some of the previous characters who've been approved to buy NHL teams, "not being flat broke" might not actually be that high a bar to set.)
Now all Ice Edge needs is to negotiate a final lease agreement with the city of Glendale, and a purchase agreement with the NHL, and they can happily become the owners of their own bankrupt hockey franchise. Hint to Glendale city negotiators: Try not to give up your right to sue the team if they violate their lease.
Newark celebrates new arena by laying off city workers, selling off water system
With the New Jersey Devils firmly ensconced in their new publicly funded arena, and the Nets set to join them for two years this fall, the city of Newark should be seeing the benefits of that new-sports-team economic pixie dust right about now, right?
To address what he calls the biggest budget crisis in a generation, Newark Mayor Cory Booker is proposing a radical restructuring of city government, which includes massive layoffs, cuts in employee benefits, departmental reorganizations and the creation of a municipal utilities authority.
Erm, okay, not so much, then. But at least the new arena must have helped spur some revitalization of downtown Newark?
The James administration always said the $200 million investment was not about an arena but about downtown development and tax revenue and jobs — not just arena jobs, but jobs from all the new retail stores, commercial spaces and residencies that were going up in the arena district.
On Thursday, all I saw was a lot of parking lots. The only arena district enterprise that the Devils brag about is the Brick City Coffee shop on the ground floor of the Rock's parking deck.
That's Newark Star-Ledger blogger Joan Whitlow, but it's the same thing I saw the last time I walked around the arena. (Though the New York Times' ever-rosy-eyed Ken Belson raved about all the development that is "planned.")
Now, it's certainly true that Newark's fiscal issues run deeper than a bad arena deal (whose total public cost is actually closer to $400 million than the $200 million figure Whitlow cites). But as Whitlow notes, it certainly isn't helping matters that Newark is stuck with hundreds of millions of dollars in added debt and a deadbeat tenant at a time when it's in desperate need of cash:
The previous administration, under Mayor Sharpe James, sank more than $200 million in city money into a lopsided partnership with the New Jersey Devils hockey team. The team put up $100 million to build the arena, known as the Rock. In return, the Devils got a lease so tilted, the team claimed the rent wasn't due because the city owed the Devils money. The lease even precluded the city from taking its recalcitrant tenant to court.
For months the city has been negotiating to collect the rent and get a few million more here and there out of a lease that provides too few financial sweeteners for Newark. But talks broke down this week. Most of the issues are headed for arbitration. The city is suing over the Devils claim for a couple million dollars a year in guaranteed parking revenues. Lawyers fees and legal risks: It's the mess that has grown from what I believe to have been a bad deal to begin with.
The lesson here isn't even so much "don't build a hockey arena"; it's "don't build a hockey arena that assigns almost all the costs to your city and then gets you nothing back in the lease." But then, since getting something for nothing is the modus operandi of most sports teams these days, in most cases no team is going to want your lousy hockey arena unless you agree to let them keep all the money from it.
I hate to say "I told you so," but I'll happily link to it.
Raze first, ask questions later
The city of Detroit, having torn down Tiger Stadium last year, is now soliciting bids for what to do with the resulting vacant lot.
If this seems backwards to you, you clearly don't understand how Detroit works.
June 16, 2010
Yankees garages not paying rent; could raise taxpayer stadium cost to $1.5B
Just when you think the New York Yankees stadium deal (current public price tag: $1.2 billion) couldn't get any worse, along comes word from Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez that the private operator running stadium garages is losing money, thanks mostly to higher-than-expected expenses.
That wouldn't matter to city taxpayers, except that according to its lease with the city, which actually built the new garages, the garage operator doesn't have to pay rent so long as it's losing money. (Or as Gonzalez puts it in today's column, "the city is last in line to get its rent and property taxes.") The garage operator is supposed to eventually pay both back rent and accrued interest, but if it never turns a profit — and given that the Yanks are already drawing at near capacity, it's hard to see how more people are going to show up to park in the future — then the city could be left holding the bag. A bag worth $340 million in garage construction costs.
This is, of course, exactly what Metro New York's Pat Arden warned could happen back in 2007; and what I worried about two years before that. Not that that'll stop people from claiming it was nonetheless unforeseeable.
CORRECTION: David Lombino of the NYC Economic Development Corporation points out that the garage rent payments don't cover the $340 million in total garage costs, but are rather an additional revenue stream that the city was supposed to receive after garage bonds were paid off. So the total exposure to the city if the rent isn't paid is just $2.3 million a year, which after parking inflation and discount rates comes to around $43 million in present value. (My bad for not reading my own spreadsheet, which had the $43 million figure in there all along.)
Since that $43 million was being counted as an offset against the city's stadium costs, this means the total public cost would still rise, but not nearly as much — to $1.22 billion, not $1.5 billion as I'd previously indicated. Apologies for the confusion (and for subjecting you the readers to so much math).
Pacers may not get their lease subsidy before self-imposed "deadline"
It looks like talks over the Indiana Pacers' demand for an even sweeter sweetheart lease will go down to the wire — or a wire, anyway. The team's owners set June 30 as a deadline for resolving the dispute, but Ann Lathrop, president of the state Capital Improvement Board (who was, incidentally, Indianapolis city controller at the time the original lease was signed) says there's no guarantee a deal will be reached by then.
The big sticking point appears to be not the $15 million in annual operating-cost subsidies the Pacers want, which the CIB, despite its own budget woes, seems willing to cough up, at least in part. Rather, according to the Indianapolis Star, "the central sticking point has been who controls Conseco Fieldhouse," with the CIB saying if it's going to take on the cost of paying all operating expenses for a tenant that already pays no rent, it wants control of the arena back. The Pacers are reportedly "resistant" to this.
The Star article also quotes me (as saying that these kinds of talks always drag on longer than expected), but the quote of the day goes to economist Roger Noll, who told the paper: "In the absence of an active attempt by some other city to get them, deadlines like that are meaningless. The crucial issue has to do with whether they have any other options, and those don't come overnight."
In other words, pay no attention to the Pacers' "deadlines," pay attention to what's going on in other cities. Like, say, Las Vegas, which is busily working on new arena plans to lure ... um, whoops, never mind.
Ohio pol: Fund stadiums by cutting health care for poor
Public stadium spending always has a cost — public anything spending always has a cost, as it's money that can't be used elsewhere — but it's seldom made as explicit as in last week's proposal by Hamilton County commissioner Greg Hartmann to pay for shortfalls in Cincinnati's stadium funds by cutting health care spending on the poor.
Hartmann's plan has drawn tons of criticism since, with his fellow commissioner (and longtime stadium critic) Todd Portune saying it proposed paying for “sports palaces on the backs of the sick, the injured, the destitute and the poor," while the Cincinnati Enquirer called it "outrageous" and "simply wrong on several levels." The Cincinnati city council chimed in on Monday, passing a resolution to oppose the plan, with the resolution's sponsor saying Hartmann's scheme "basically takes from the poor, you might say, basically to give to the rich."
All of which is true, but it's worth noting that the original stadium-funding plan — a half-cent sales tax hike, which is currently running shortfalls thanks to the broken economy — was no less so: Not only do sales taxes hit the poor much harder than the rich, but that's a revenue stream that now can't be used for other public benefits (including hospital funding for the poor).
The real problem was giving to the rich in the first place — the only thing left to battle over now is whether to take from the poor (via health care cuts) or the middle class (via property tax hikes, the elephant in the room that the county commission is desperately trying to avoid). Nobody's proposing trying to get the money back from the teams themselves — though I guess Portune tried that with his antitrust suit, only to be tripped up by that pesky statute of limitations.
Oilers rezoning delayed amid money questions
Apologies for not reporting this when it broke last week: The owner of the Edmonton Oilers has postponed a public zoning hearing on his proposed $1.4 billion arena-and-redevelopment plan, originally planned for June 28, until the fall.
The reason, as team VP Bob Black put it: Questions about how exactly the project would be paid for "have been distracting from the zoning application." (Nobody could even focus on the beautiful plumage!)
Read further, though, and it appears that the Edmonton city council were the ones getting antsy about hearing financing details before voting on the zoning, with one calling it "a more intelligent sequence of events." It also can't hurt that after October 18, both mayor Stephen Mandel and the council will be done with their electoral campaigns, so won't have to worry as much about blowback from whatever Katz proposes.
June 15, 2010
Astrodome reno would cost how much?
The Harris County Sports and Convention Corporation, owners of the Astrodome, issued a report yesterday on what to do with the erstwhile Eighth Wonder of the World, which has stood vacant since the Houston Astros left in 2000. The options include renovating it into a convention and science center, "repurposing" it into a science and technology center and a place for storage (with $324 million worth of solar panels on the roof in the shape of a world map), or razing it and turning it into a park or open plaza. (Truly horrifying cheesy renderings here.)
The stunner is the price tags: $1.35 billion for the full renovation option, and $1.13 billion for the world's largest storage shed. Even knocking down the dome would carry a high cost: $873 million if you believe the Associated Press, $128 million per the Houston Chronicle, or a mere $88 million if you use the Dallas Morning News numbers — which is still nearly triple what it cost the build the thing in the first place.
It's hard to say which numbers are correct, as if the HCSCC doesn't seem to have put any financial details into its master plan book, though there are plenty more grandiose renderings. (Including, for some reason, of a monster truck and Minnie and Mickey Mouse. Presumably because when you think science and technology, you think robot cars and horrible human-mouse hybrids.)
In any case, given the huge price tags, most of which would come out of public funds, you might think it'd be cheaper and simpler just to let the dome rot in place — right now it only costs Harris County about $2 million a year in insurance and maintenance, plus debt service, but of course the debt would need to be paid off either way. However, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett insists that the dome must go, and fast, apparently because $1 billion is a small price to pay to rid Houston of an iconic-building-turned-eyesore.
"It's beginning to look like an old ship that just kind of washed up out there," Emmett told the Chronicle, noting that when fans attend the NCAA Final Four at neighboring Reliant Stadium next year, their eyes will be accosted by the sight of the empty Astrodome. "I don't think people will tolerate it much longer."
That's what they said about the human-mouse hybrids.
June 14, 2010
It's June, so it must be Rams move threat time
It's what's becoming a bit of an annual ritual, talk of the "looming" St. Louis Rams stadium crisis has started up again. The excuse, this time: A group of St. Louis business leaders visited the Indianapolis Colts stadium to see what it takes to make an NFL team happy.
The answer: a big stinking pile of money.
In Indy, three years of negotiations led to a deal in which tax dollars covered most of the cost of the $1.1 billion stadium, and in which the Colts get the vast majority of gameday revenue (concessions, signage, etc.). That may not sound like a good deal for the city, but that's not how these people see it.
The way Lucas Oil Stadium's promoters see it, the stadium hosts "100 non-football events a year, from fire department conventions to the rehearsal dinner for the wedding of the Indiana governor's daughter." Of course, many of those conventions are actually booked into the adjacent convention center (which uses the stadium for its big plenary events, just as the Hoosier Dome that it replaced was previously), and you have to hope that the governor's daughter didn't get married just because there was a new stadium to have the rehearsal dinner in.
The more interesting part of the story here, meanwhile, is buried at the bottom of the article, where Kevin Cahill, a former member of the commission that built the Rams' current stadium (way back in 1996) and who's on the RCGA trip summed up the city's options this way: "We can't shrug our shoulders and say (to the Rams), 'you can leave.' I don't think that's the right answer. Just building them a new stadium, I'm not sure that's the right answer either. Maybe we need to find some middle ground."
That smells suspiciously like either "major renovation" or "lease concessions," though I suppose by middle ground he might have meant "build them a new stadium, but ask them to chip in a few million dollars." And, of course, Cahill doesn't necessarily represent the business group, and the business group doesn't necessarily represent the power brokers who'll actually be negotiating a Rams deal one of these years. But if you're looking for tea leaves, read 'em and weep.
With 49ers vote over, bring on the A's stadium articles
The San Jose Mercury News, apparently bereft at the thought of not having the San Francisco 49ers referendum campaign to cover anymore, ran an article today on how backers of a San Jose stadium for the Oakland A's are "buoyed" by the 49ers stadium vote, and "optimistic about their plan's prospects."
And why would that be, exactly? Because, according to San Jose mayor Chuck Reed, "Their transaction was a lot more expensive and a lot more complicated than what we're looking at." Or as A's owner Lew Wolff put it: "It bodes very well, because they had a terrific victory. If they had lost, which I did not expect them to, I would have attributed that to not wanting to put in the public money." And in Wolff's estimation, I guess, as goes Santa Clara, so goes San Jose.
Of course, this is what you'd expect San Jose A's stadium backers to say — if the Giants stadium vote had been defeated, I'm sure they would today be pointing to how these are two very different cities with different projects, etc. — and the major sticking point to the San Jose A's plan at the moment isn't a public funding vote, but rather that MLB stadium commission report that Zennie Abraham has been waiting for (though not Rob Neyer) ever since March. The sticking point is almost certainly how much money the A's will be asked to fork over to the Giants in exchange for invading their official "territory"; economist Roger Noll speculates that the Giants could demand $25 million to $35 million, which sounds low, unless he means per year, in which case it sounds high — though of course you don't get if you don't ask.
And the payoff amount is likely to determine not just Wolff's eagerness to relocate to San Jose, but the ultimate bill he presents to the city for a stadium: Currently $74 million for land and infrastructure, the Merc News indicates that "experts say the public's cost is likely to rise depending on details of the final negotiations between the city and the A's." (No details on which "experts," sorry.)
Meanwhile, not to be outdone in the bald-faced spin department, Giants spokesperson Staci Slaughter insisted that the South Bay is "the heart of our territory, and it's what we have built our organization around for the past 50 years." That's right: Apparently the Giants have been marketing to Silicon Valley since a decade before anyone noticed it existed as such, a love that they expressed by trying to move the team to San Jose as soon as they'd finished trying to move it to Toronto.
June 11, 2010
Jets slashing PSL prices to avoid blackouts
Hey, everybody, remember when New York Jets owner Woody Johnson insisted he wouldn't need to cut PSL prices in order to sell out home games this year, despite reports that more than 10,000 seats remained unsold? Well, that pretense came to a crashing end today:
The New York Jets are reducing the prices of about 18,000 personal seat licenses, including around 9,000 of which are unsold, by up to 50 percent beginning Friday in an effort to sell out the new Meadowlands Stadium by opening week. ...
[Jets VP Matt] Higgins said the team was sending an e-mail Friday to alert fans of the reduced prices in the $1.6 billion stadium. Lower end-zone seats will be dropped from $5,000 to $2,500, as will those in the mezzanine end zone. Seats in the lower-sideline section will be cut from $15,000 to $10,000.
Higgins added that fans who've already paid the higher prices for seats in those sections will receive rebates — something that will certainly avoid the fan outrage that otherwise would have resulted, but that could end up costing the team tens of millions of dollars.
In the end, though, the Jets wind up right where they would have if they'd priced the PSLs at the lower price point to begin with, except they can now be confident that they've explored the market and found that they can't go higher — and get to look like good guys with fans for lowering prices from exorbitant to merely outrageous to boot. Behavioral economics is a funny thing.
Marlins stadium to feature live fish in backstop
Marlins' new stadium to have aquariums behind home plate
Really, there isn't much I can add to that. (Even Marlins president David Samson could only say, "It changes all sorts of things about in game entertainment, that's for sure.") Except that when you add in the Red Grooms scoreboard display, the new Miami stadium seems likely to be either the best ever, or the worst. Or possibly both at once.
Bay Area papers: Oh wait, 49ers stadium finances don't work after all
Now that the San Francisco 49ers' $444 million in stadium subsidies from the city of Santa Clara has been approved, everybody is jumping to say that the private side of the deal looks increasingly uncertain, possibly enough to cause the whole thing to collapse:
- Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News says there are "no guarantees" the 49ers can line up $493 million in private money, given the lousy economy. Meanwhile, the grim naming rights market (that is, outside of websites looking for some quick media exposure) means the city could have trouble raising its $330 million &mdash though as Roger Noll pointed out last week, the "cart before the horse" nature of the stadium plan means the building would be in the ground before the naming-rights shortfall became apparent.
- San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom declared that the Santa Clara plan is "built on shaky economic ground" and that "San Francisco stands ready to welcome its 49ers home" — adding, in an apparent attempt at hardball: "But we will not wait forever."
- Noll tells the New York Times that in his assessment, "there's only a 50 percent chance that it gets built" in Santa Clara.
Of course, everybody's just guessing right now, but "up in the air" seems a fair assessment of the Santa Clara stadium plans. The bigger news from the Times article, came in this tangential bit at the end about Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff inviting a fan who wants to keep the team in Oakland into his luxury box for a chat:
Mr. Leon and his friends talked with the A's owner from the third inning on, at first hardly noticing that Dallas Braden was on his way to pitching a perfect game. Mr. Wolff left in the seventh inning, pulling on an Earthquakes jacket as he walked out of the suite.
That's right: The owner of the Oakland A's apparently left a game in the 7th inning when his pitcher was pitching a perfect game. I'm not taking sides in the issue of where the A's should play, but this should certainly give Wolff a leg up in the race for worst owner in baseball.
UPDATE: The A's fan site newballpark.org has now picked up on this exciting controversy, insisting that Wolff typically heads down to the box seats around the 7th inning, and so didn't miss out on Braden's perfecto. More updates to follow after the surveillance video has been analyzed by the NSA.
Adultery site bids for Giants/Jets stadium name; fieldofschemes.com ups the ante
The sports blog world was much agog yesterday over the prospect of the new New York Jets and Giants stadium possibly being named after a website that has variously been described as a "website that promotes extramarital affairs" and "the dating site for adulterers." (Its slogan: "Life is short. Have an affair.") According to the website's CEO, he's willing to offer $5 million a year for a five-year deal to slap his site's name on the teams' new stadium.
Now, the odds on the Jets and Giants accepting are pretty much zero, but the CEO in question probably doesn't care about that, since he's just gotten his URL printed in dozens of newspapers by doing little more than issuing a press release. (Which is why you'll note I haven't actually mentioned the site's name — fieldofschemes.com's ad rates may be cheap, but I draw the line at free.)
Looked at that way, it's a brilliant move, and I don't see why I, for one, should let the opportunity pass to cash in as well. So, without further ado: Fieldofschemes.com hereby offers the Giants and Jets $20 trillion a year if they will name their new stadium "The Meadowlands Field of Schemes at Fieldofschemes.com Field." This is a serious offer, as evidenced by the fact that I used "trillion" and not "kajillion" or "kersquillion" in the announcement.
USA Today, you know where to find me.
Vegas arena plans tumble after comptroller slams them
The Clark County commission hasn't even met yet to discuss building a publicly subsidized arena, and already one of the prospective arena builders has dropped out: The Las Vegas Arena Foundation says it's pulling out of the bidding, citing the "harsh reality" that "there is no appetite right now among the commissioners, we understand, to support any public funding for an arena."
This leaves two prospective developers, International Development Management and Olympia Development (I'm not actually sure what happened to Cordish Cos., which was rumored to be a fourth candidate last month — and the Las Vegas Sun says that Olympia may soon back out as well.
What's apparently causing all the sudden reticence is a report by county comptroller Ed Finger that notes that arena revenues wouldn't cover the public costs, and calls the need for a new arena "questionable," noting that "numerous studies have come to the conclusion that the economics of an arena with sports franchises are worse than without" and that "current arena owners report that existing arenas have excess capacity." It's still conceivable that a Vegas arena plan will rise from the dead, but don't count on it happening anytime soon.
June 09, 2010
Reinsdorf out, Ice Edge back in, still no Coyotes lease
Stop me if you've heard this before: The Glendale city council voted last night to approve a memorandum of understanding with a purchasing group that hopes to buy the league-owned Phoenix Coyotes. Unlike the last MOU back in April, however, the names of the prospective owners have changed: Jerry Reinsdorf pulled out of the bidding on Monday night, leaving Ice Edge Holdings — that's right, the same guys who originally floated playing some home games in Canada — the winners in the Coyotes derby.
This is potentially a good thing for Glendale, given that the subsidy package demanded by Ice Edge was somewhat less egregious than the one Reinsdorf would have required. But there's still no actual lease deal in place with Ice Edge — the vote last night just gave them a 60-day exclusive negotiating window to secure one — and the city's leverage in those talks are still going to be pretty lousy, given that if they don't approve an owner they're stuck paying $25 million to the NHL and still having the team move to Winnipeg.
Yet another wild card, meanwhile, is that Ice Edge must secure financing to actually buy the team, something that even its own CEO isn't so sure about, according to the Winnipeg Free Press:
Daryl Jones, CEO of Ice Edge Holdings, the lone group in discussions with the City of Glendale to buy and keep the Phoenix Coyotes at Jobing.com Arena, is not sure his team will be able to put together a financing package to purchase the team.
"It's hard to gauge the probability of this deal closing," said Jones.
"Realistically, there has been a great deal of financial turmoil in the world over the last 45 days, sovereign-debt issues and stock market corrections, which are going to make it harder for us, or any group, to close this transaction. That being said, we do remain optimistic."
Furthermore, the Free Press notes that one "source close to the deal" says that even if Ice Edge "can provide proof of financing right now, there's no guarantee it will still be in place when this deal gets near closing." Not to mention that the NHL could still always reject Ice Edge's purchase offer, even once a lease is in place. At which point:
Should Ice Edge fail to close a lease deal with Glendale in the next 60 days, presumably the only option left for the city at that stage would be Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf.
Isn't this where we came in?
49ers get $444 million in Santa Clara cash, just need half a billion more
And so the 100-to-1 Rule stands untarnished: Voters in Santa Clara, where the San Francisco 49ers spent at least $4 million campaigning for a new $937 million stadium, as against about $20,000 by the opposition, have approved the plan, with Measure J winning by a 60-40% margin.
What Measure J actually approves, though, isn't the stadium per se, but rather the package of $114 million in direct tax subsidies, plus $330 million in money that's supposed to be reimbursed from uncertain venue revenues, that the 49ers say they need to make their stadium work. And there's still one huge missing piece of the puzzle: The team says it wants the NFL to kick in via a subsidized loan (actually a grant, since the team could "repay" it via revenues it would otherwise have to give to the league anyway). Only trouble is, the program that supplied these loans ran out of funds three years ago, and it now needs to be renewed as part of the next collective bargaining agreement.
And the only trouble with that is that the old CBA doesn't expire until next March, and the league and players already look to be headed for contract armageddon after that, with the players' union head predicting that the chances of a lockout in 2011 is a 14 on a scale of 1 to 10. So it could be quite a while before the Niners know whether they can count on NFL help, meaning construction likely wouldn't begin until 2012 at the earliest — making the team's plans for a 2014 opening possible, but not necessarily likely.
And it's worth noting that a lot can happen in two years. In 1997, after all, the 49ers won a vote to get $100 million in public money for a new stadium in San Francisco, one that never ultimately got off the ground. Team owner Jed York says this deal is less complicated, without an adjacent mall and with better transportation infrastructure. Still, as San Jose Mercury News columnist Gary Peterson notes, yesterday's vote was "not to be confused with a touchdown. It's more like a first-and-10 from midfield."
June 07, 2010
Could 49ers bail on Santa Clara plan even if vote passes?
The long-awaited Santa Clara vote on a 49ers stadium will finally be held tomorrow, but according to Sports Illustrated's Ann Killion, even a resounding yes vote might not put an end to the controversy. That's because, Killion speculates, the team's owners themselves might not be able to afford their share of the deal:
With cost overruns, it could amount to well more than half a billion dollars. No one thinks the York family can stomach that kind of investment.
"The worst thing that could happen to the Yorks is if this passes," said one source close to the ballot process.
Of course, blind-sourced quotes like this are a dime a dozen, so take this with a grain of salt. The bulk of Killion's column, meanwhile, is devoted to an interview with Stanford sports economist Roger Noll, who gives his clearest explanation yet for why he thinks the stadium deal would represent a substantial risk for the city of Santa Clara:
Santa Clara has assured voters that if $330 million can't be raised through naming rights and seat licenses the 49ers will pay for the costs or the project will be killed. But, in a cart-before-the-horse scenario, the stadium authority will be created and borrow finances before those rights can be sold.
"The sequence of decisions is incorrect," Noll said.
Meanwhile, Niners owner Jed York did an about face on last week's veiled threat to move the team out of the Bay Area, telling our old friend Zennie Abraham that "the San Francisco 49ers will remain in the Bay Area." Not that you should necessarily believe him any more (or any less) this time around, but maybe it'll win a few votes of people who'd otherwise be peeved by the perceived threat to move to L.A. if things don't go the Yorks' way in Santa Clara.
Times blames Mets' ticket sales on road losses
Not to keep picking on the New York Times' Ken Belson, but it's just so easy, especially when he writes stuff like this:
Every time the Mets compile an impressive homestand, they undo the good feeling with an atrocious road trip. And because many fans consider the team's most recent performance when deciding whether to attend a home game, the Mets' buzz-killing road losses (including the game-winning grand slam that sunk the Mets on Wednesday in San Diego) have taken their toll. ... It seems the team's contrasting home and road records are making it harder for fans to justify running out to Citi Field.
The notion that fans are staying away from Mets games, not because the team was terrible last year or ticket prices are too high or the stadium honeymoon has worn off, but because they win too many games at home might seem too plainly demented to debunk ... but I've done so anyway for the Village Voice. The short version: All teams coming off of lousy years draw lousy, and the Mets' attendance was artificially inflated last year already with curiosity-seekers looking to check out their new digs. But why settle for facts when you can instead choose the contrarian wisdom that Mets fans are being driven away by the bad taste of giving up 18 runs in a road game that ended at 1:20 pm local time?
June 04, 2010
A's settle lease crisis by re-signing ... oh, wait, there wasn't a lease crisis
Bowing to the reality that nobody's going to build them a new stadium in the next ten months, the Oakland A's exercised their one-year option to remain at the Oakland Coliseum for 2011.
Again, this isn't really news — what were they going to do, go play in the street? — and I almost didn't even both posting about it. But it's worth noting for one reason only: It's a reminder that just because a lease is expiring does not mean that the team is about to leave if it doesn't get its way in stadium talks — teams can, and frequently do, sign year-to-year extensions. Indeed, an expiring lease can be as much leverage for a city as for the team — after all, the team needs to play somewhere, and there's nothing stopping a public stadium owner from saying, "So, you need a home, huh? Well, we'll let you stay put — if you agree to a new ten-year lease. And pay the first two months' rent in advance as a security deposit."
Not that it ever happens like that, but it's no more ridiculous than teams insisting that an expiring lease is a crisis that requires immediately legislative action.
NBA All-Star Game shows zero impact on Texas economy
The first solid numbers are in for the economic impact of February's NBA All-Star Game, and they're a bit less impressive than expected:
Based on the economic score, the dollars spent, let's look at the economic impact of this year's NBA All-Star Game:
It's not $152 million as predicted.
Tax receipts from the State of Texas show the game brought in zero.
The numbers are reflected in tax receipts from five North Texas cities which were predicted to post large hotel, restaurant and alcohol revenue increases as a result of the game.
But instead of that boost, year-to-year revenue comparisons with 2009 — during the depth of the economic downturn — show only small increases or decreases during February, the month of the game. The All-Star contest was early in the month, allowing businesses ample time to report their revenues.
What the heck happened? Well, presumably there was some of the "crowding out" effect observed by economist Phil Porter, where Super Bowls and other mega-sporting events end up driving away as many visitors as they attract, because of booked hotel rooms and traffic fears. Dallas TV station WFAA, which unearthed the tax receipt figures (and is, incidentally, one of the few TV stations in the country that still does investigative reporting), also notes that the initial projection of $152 million in impact cited "a 'literature search on the Internet' as a secondary source, using numbers — presumably from news stories — about earlier All-Star games in Washington, Philadelphia and Atlanta. But news stories frequently quote economic impact estimates from the consultants themselves."
Consultant Michael Casinelli, who prepared the initial economic impact report, defended his methodology, sort of, saying "There is never enough data" to get reliable figures, and blaming "alarmist" university academics for pooh-poohing the benefits of sporting events. Which he's sure must be there, even if you can't see them.
New Yankee Stadium: A second look
So I visited the new home of the New York Yankees for the second time last week, the first time for an actual ballgame. (My previous visit was for a pre-Opening Day batting practice.)
Suffice to say that familiarity didn't breed any warm fuzzies for the place: Even with 40,000-odd fans making noise and a great game on the field (Robinson Cano grand slam, an Edmondsesque catch by Indians centerfielder Trevor Crowe), the place exudes all the charm of an airline terminal. Our seats, in the upper deck just past first base, felt slightly but noticeably farther from the field than the upper deck in the old Yankee Stadium (despite the new stadium holding 7,000 fewer seats), and the best thing you could say about the stadium design is that it's functional; lacking either the history of the old stadium or the graceful sweep of its grandstand, there's little to engage your eyes, making it all the more difficult to ignore the ADD-inducing cacophony of the giant video board in centerfield.
About that scoreboard: We arrived about an hour before game time, and for the bulk of that time, the video board — which at the old park would likely have been showing either beer ads or old montages of the likes of Thurman Munson — featured a Yankees "reporter" touring various parts of the stadium's concessions areas: Have you visited the Yankees steakhouse yet? Or our new addition featuring "Spanish cuisine," Wholly Guacamole? (Yes, I know guacamole isn't Spanish. Presumably they meant "Spanish-speaking cuisine.")
It took me a while before I realized what the experience reminded me of: the M&M's store in Times Square. Just as there, every element of the new Yankee Stadium is carefully calibrated to be three things at once: 1) an entertainment in itself, 2) a product that you can buy, and 3) an advertisement for the overall brand. The only thing missing to complete the experience, really, was an 800 number for you to order your own versions of the suits worn by Yankees players in their scoreboard photos.
Yankees COO Lonn Trost, it turns out, was wrong when he called the new stadium "a five-star hotel with a ballfield in the middle." What the Yankees have actually wrought is a theme store that happens to have a ballfield in the middle. Judging from the average tastes of American tourists, it'll probably continue to be a big hit — Western capitalism has long since mastered selling our own dreams back to us — but it seems a lot to spend $25 a ticket and three hours of your life on.
Internets Celebrities debut "Stadium Status"
The fine folks at Internets Celebrities have released their latest video, titled "Stadium Status," and I can say without hesitation that it's the finest (and funniest) web video ever made on the subject of stadium scams.
Featured are myself (in the role of talking-head stadium expert) and Killian Jordan (as the angry Bronx resident), plus IC hosts Rafi Kam and Dallas Penn providing an 18-minute tour of the machinations behind the new Yankees and Mets stadiums and Nets arena. Find out why the the New York Times called them a cross between Michael Moore and Dave Chappelle! (Not that Moore has been funny in years. Or Chappelle, for that matter. Hey, wait, was the Times actually dissing them?)
Seriously, it's a great video, and you couldn't ask for a better primer on the ill effects of new stadiums on both our cities and sports fandom. At least, not until I finally get permission to upload video of the Shoddy Puppet Company's shadow puppet play based on Field of Schemes. It's hard to beat shadow puppets.
June 01, 2010
Spending, chattering heat up as 49ers vote nears
The Santa Clara vote on a new stadium for the San Francisco 49ers is exactly one week away, and the papers are alread abuzz with talk about who'll win and ... okay, mostly who'll win, because that's all that papers care about these days.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ray Ratto writes that if the stadium referendum loses, 49ers owner Jed York could go down in history like Giants owner Bob Lurie, which is fightin' words in the Bay Area. San Jose Mercury News columnist Mark Purdy is confused why he doesn't get to vote just because he doesn't live in Santa Clara, but nonetheless praises the 49ers stadium campaigners for "keeping it relatively low-key and businesslike" — notwithstanding the $150 per registered voter they're spending on the referendum campaign, a possible new record for a local election and 180 times what opponents have spent.
Over in the Bay Citizen, meanwhile — which isn't a newspaper and so can pay attention to those other things, what were they called? oh, right, "issues" — Alameda County Supervisor Gail Steele had this to say about Santa Clara's plans to rely on seat licenses to finance the city's $330 million share of the stadium cost:
"They're crazy. ... "I don't want to hear they're in Santa Clara and they're in an upper-income area. Today's market is really really risky — we've been to hell and back with this stuff."
Yes, we noticed.
Finally, the Mercury News speculates that if the Santa Clara vote fails, the 49ers could get a new stadium in "San Francisco, Oakland [or] even Los Angeles" — notwithstanding that the only source in the story who comments about an L.A. move asserts that it's not going to happen. But of course, it's not like this kind of misdirection matters, since it's not like the Yorks are using veiled threats to go to L.A. to encourage pro-stadium votes — oh, wait:
"What's at stake is making sure the 49ers have a permanent home in the Bay Area for the next 40 or 50 years," York said this week in an exclusive interview with Comcast SportsNet.
"Growing up in Youngstown, Ohio, I watched the (Cleveland) Browns become the Baltimore Ravens. And my family never wanted that to happen with the 49ers, to look somewhere else outside the market."
Polls open at 7 am next Tuesday. Vote early and vote often.
Stanley Cup economic impact in Philly: Not so much
Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer featured a rare article that debunks the usual wild claims of economic windfalls from pro sports playoff games: Despite the Flyers playing in the Stanley Cup Finals, notes the paper, neither the team nor the city will reap all that much money as a result.
In particular, notes economist Andrew Zimbalist, the claims by Flyers president Peter Luukko that the city will gain $200,000 in tax revenue per game are likely inflated, since "pretty much all the people who are going to be at the arena will be from Greater Philadelphia, and they spend money at the arena instead of spending it somewhere else in the Philadelphia economy."
Of course, that's not exactly what Zimbalist said in his economic impact analysis paid for by then-New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner, in which he assumed substantial increased tax benefits to New York from moving the Nets to Brooklyn. But like they say in academia, better late than never.
