February 09, 2012
Browns: We built selves restaurant, we deserve public money
Mark Naymik has a column in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer detailing the claims the Cleveland Browns owners used about how much money they've put into renovating their stadium in order to talk the city council into giving them $5.8 million in public cash. And the list is pretty impressive, though probably not in the way the Browns owners hoped:
The team said it spent $50 million on stadium repairs and improvements it wasn't required to spend.
That's a good chunk of money, for sure. The figure, however, is a bit misleading. It includes escalators that were installed when the stadium was built. This amenity was an upgrade the team's late owner believed was necessary to attract fans. The figure also includes a restaurant at the stadium, which generates profits for the Browns.
The Browns also counted sales and tickets taxes paid by fans ($35 million since 1999), team income taxes ($6.2 million) and its elecric bill ($24 million), leading city councilmember Mike Polensek to snort, "I'm glad you pay utilities and taxes like most other businesses." (It's also worth noting that these are agressively feeble numbers for a team paying only $250,000 a year in rent on a stadium it got for free, and casts even more doubt on some of the wilder claims of the tax benefits of having a team in your city.)
The real news here, as Naymik notes, is that the Browns are looking to get the city's sin tax extended beyond 2015, and "there's growing chatter that the Browns will join forces with the Indians and Cavaliers -- whose facilities are 20 years old and in need of upgrades -- to mount a campaign" to extend it. Which should answer anyone wondering what the shelf life is of modern stadiums: until the teams can gather the chutzpah to ask for new (or improved) ones.
November 17, 2011
Indians to seek subsidies for stadium upgrades?
It's tough to beat an article with a headline like "To protect taxpayers, it's time to pay attention to board meetings, even the boring ones." But Mark Naymik's column in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer actually raises a potentially serious issue: The Indians are getting ready to demand major upgrades to 16-year-old Progressive (formerly Jacobs) Field:
The Cleveland Indians are working on a major improvement plan for Progressive Field, which, along with the rest of complex, is nearly 20 years old. It's unclear when the team will present its wish list to Gateway and the board. Gateway has asked the Cavaliers — which is not as far along in assessing its capital needs for Quicken Loans Arena — to present a plan.
When the teams do ask for major improvements, the board will become more interesting. The requests will set off a new debate over who should pay for serious upgrades.
Board meeting minutes show the issue of expanding the current sin tax, which expires relatively soon, to pay for the improvements was discussed at the last board meeting.
As I've noted before, this is going to be an issue not just for Cleveland: The whole initial 1990s wave of new stadiums is getting to the point where team owners feel justified in demanding upgrades, so this could set a significant precedent in terms of who pays for them, and whether the teams need to kick in from the increased revenues that would (presumably) result. It's very early yet, but fans and taxpayers in Toronto, Chicago, Baltimore, Arlington, Denver, and so on should definitely be keeping an eye on this.
April 30, 2010
Orioles, Indians mull stadium refits
The New York Times' Ken Belson has been busy on the stadium beat; today he has a profile of how Janet Marie Smith has been re-hired by the Baltimore Orioles to help spruce up Camden Yards, the stadium whose design she helped oversee 20 years ago. (And which helped set off the whole retro trend that kick-start the stadium-building craze of the last 20 years.)
The most interesting bit, though, may be an aside about the kinds of rethinking that tenants of '90s-era stadiums are considering as they see their honeymoon periods disappearing in the rear-view mirror:
The club levels at Camden Yards will get a second look because the corporate appetite for expensive suites has diminished. It hasn't helped that the Orioles last had a winning record in 1997 and drew their smallest crowd ever at Camden Yards earlier this season.
The Orioles are not the only team thinking about makeovers. The Cleveland Indians, who opened Progressive Field in 1994 (it was Jacobs Field then), are among the 10 teams looking at ways to revive their parks, said Earl Santee, a senior principal at Populous, the architectural firm that designed Camden Yards, PNC Park in Pittsburgh, Coors Field and other retro stadiums.
This has been an issue I've been wondering about for a long time: What do modern stadiums that are designed for the luxury market do when that market evaporates? In olden times, it was easy enough to just rejigger ticket prices, but today's class distinctions are cemented in concrete and steel — you can't easily take just one chunk of glassed-in seats with their own restaurant and private entrance and turn them back over to the great unwashed.
Cleveland is going to be an interesting test case for this, as it has that vertical wall of club seats separating its lower deck from its upper. I'd love to see the recent generation of class-segregated stadiums retrofitted for more egalitarian uses, but it's going to be a challenge.
July 28, 2009
Stadium tax breaks cost Cleveland $18.6m a year
Judith Grant Long has long pointed out that property tax exemptions represent a hidden public cost of sports stadium construction, and now indefatigable Cleveland journalist Roldo Bartimole has estimated the exact costs in his hometown: About $8 million a year for the Browns, $3.8 million a year for the Cavs, and $4.8 million a year for the Indians. All three teams received new homes mostly built with public funds — and made sure that the public would own the buildings as well (though not the profit-making revenue streams they generate), since that absolves them of owing property tax.
Bartimole notes that 55% of property taxes in Cleveland go to the local school district, so that's roughly $9 million a year in education money that isn't flowing in because of the tax abatement. Let's see how the Cleveland schools are doing in the absence of those funds ... oh, dear.