The Tampa Bay Rays stadium fiasco is dominating the headlines right now, but I don’t want to ignore the news out of Buffalo, where the Bills‘ $1.5 billion stadium is now going to cost at least $2.1 billion, because the economy or something:
Bills president Pete Guelli said he was not surprised by the amount, given how the numbers have been tracking up since construction began 16 months ago. And he said the projected total represents the commitment the Pegulas have to the community because they are sticking to their vision for the facility without cutting corners to reduce costs.
Previous reports cited “increased labor and material costs” for the rising price tag — Guelli didn’t explain why it’s since gone up even more, or indicate whether the pending deportation of a large chunk of the construction workforce has been factored in. Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula remain on the hook for all cost overruns beyond the $1 billion committed by the state and county, leading to this hilarious moment:
Love the fact that the Erie County exec said that the cost overruns are actually good news because it makes the county's $250M giveaway to the richest family in upstate NY a smaller percentage of the total stadium cost. apnews.com/article/bill…
Props to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Erie County executive Mark Polancarz, I guess, for making sure the Pegulas would be responsible for any costs over the initial $1.4 billion. Significantly fewer props for putting up $1 billion in public money in the first place without allowing any public or legislative debate, as one does, but Hochul in particular needs all the Ws she can get right now.
To anyone who watched the whole hearing, though, those six votes were clearly cast for a couple of different reasons. Four members — Chris Latvala and Dave Eggers, who voted no on the stadium deal back in July, and Vince Nowicki and Chris Scherer, who were newly elected this month — were strongly opposed to the county going ahead with selling $312.5 million in stadium bonds at all, arguing that it’s a “bad deal” for the Rays to only pay $1 million a year in rent on a new stadium when they’re paying $15 million to play in a minor-league stadium in Tampa for a year (Nowicki) and that the entire thing is an “egregious demand” by Rays owner Stu Sternberg when he could just go to a damn bank and borrow the money (Scherer). With seven members on the commission, that was enough to block the bond sale.
Commissioners Kathleen Peters and Brian Scott, meanwhile, voted for a delay in the bond vote only because they didn’t want it to fail entirely — as Scott said, “I’ll freely admit I was never the best at math, but I can count to four.” Only Rene Flowers, whose district the stadium would be built in, voted no on the delay, arguing that further debate is pointless and the commission may as well decide and move on.
This puts the ball firmly in the Rays’ court, and so far they’re not talking. Team presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman attended the meeting but did not speak, instead letting their letter saying they had “suspended work on the entire project” stand for itself. The other theme of the day was that that letter went over very badly — even Peters and Scott called it out during the meeting, with Scott terming it “totally ridiculous” — and the commission members are not about to be rushed into making a decision on bonds that the July deal itself said don’t need to be approved until next March at the earliest.
What looks to have happened here is that the destruction wrought in the Tampa Bay region in October, coupled with uncertainty about where the Rays would play while the roof on its current stadium was repaired, led Peters, Scott, Flowers, and the since-departed Janet Long to join Latvala and Eggers in pressing pause on the bond sale. Then, a week later, election results tipped the balance on the commission, adding stadium deal critics Nowicki and Scherer, and suddenly it’s too late for Peters, Scott, and Flowers to unpause the bonds, even though they would now like to.
It will now be down to those three, plus Rays execs, to peel off one of the four no votes by December 17, and it looks like that won’t be a trivial task: None of the four diehards focused on whether the Rays will play games temporarily in Pinellas, for example, instead focusing in on wanting to renegotiate the entire deal so taxpayers don’t foot as much of the bill. That’s not to say it won’t happen — horses are born to be traded — but none of the core four proposed an easy path to winning them over. If they continue to hold out, Sternberg could be back at square one in his years-long stadium campaign — only now without even a major-league facility to play in in the interim, and with his fellow owners breathing down his neck to get something done in Tampa Bay so they can focus on exploiting cities like Nashville and Charlotte for expansion fees rather than leaving them open as Rays move threat targets.
Oh yeah, and the St. Petersburg council has its own votes coming up tomorrow, including one on whether to go ahead with repairing Tropicana Field’s roof. St. Pete administrator Rob Gerdes said at yesterday’s county hearing that the city fully intends to go ahead with roof repairs, but of course Gerdes doesn’t have a vote on that (though his nephew does). The city council meeting starts at 1:30 tomorrow and can be viewed here; I don’t plan on doing another liveblog, but feel free to chime in in the comments, or on Bluesky, or wherever your heart desires.
Today’s meeting of the Pinellas County Commission that is supposed to vote on Tampa Bay Rays stadium bonds (or not!) is finally almost through its first batch of agenda items, it was all about debris removal and floodplain insurance, don’t the commissioners know that there’s a baseball team owner waiting to find out if he’ll get a billion dollars? I mean, priorities!
Anyway, item 22, “Pinellas County adoption of a Tourist Development Tax Revenue Supplemental Bond Resolution Supplementing Resolution No. 24-42 adopted on July 30, 2024, and approval of the documents to support funding for the design and construction of a new stadium in St. Petersburg to be the new home of the Tampa Bay Rays Major League Baseball franchise,” let’s do this:
3:30 pm ET: Rays management released a letter saying “we will not be answering questions” (though they’re at the hearing) and the bond issuance was supposed to be a “formality” and now that it didn’t happen in October this “ended the ability for a 2028 delivery of the ballpark” and “decades of work [and] more than $50 million” invested by the Rays has been “jeopardized by the county’s failure to live up to its agreement.” So why didn’t the stadium agreement require bond issuance to happen before March if — oh, sorry, that’s a question, my bad.
3:44 pm ET: The commission just moved on item 35 to item 2, then skipped immediately to item 18. If you’re scoring at home, please do yourself a favor and stop now.
3:51 pm ET: “We are going to the long-awaited item 22.” Here we go!
4:05 pm ET: The public has sent lots of emails, says commission chair Kathleen Peters! The two new commissioners didn’t get them, which is a shame, because they tell a beautiful story that cannot be summarized! Anyway, on with the public testimony!
“Are we dealing with stupid Stu or are we dealing with sly Stu?” “Now is the time to move forward with our legally bound requirements!” “What would it tell other businesses in the future if we said at the 11th hour that we are going to pull the rug out from under the Rays?” “We have seven times the amount of vacant units as we do homeless people!” “This is not about opposing baseball; it is about prioritizing what truly matters for the future of Pinellas County.” (I have sat through a lot of public testimony in my day, and I gotta say: It’s not working. You can almost hear the commissioners actively not listening.)
4:14 pm ET: “Look at Oakland, who lost all of their sports teams! No longer a thriving city!” If you were still wondering why MLB owners approved John Fisher’s move to Las Vegas: It may end up a catastrophe, but at least it gives his fellow owners a handy cautionary tale.
4:19 pm ET: Oh hey, can I embed the hearing video here? Let’s see if this works:
4:22 pm ET: There are some okay enough arguments being made here and there — one guy noted that if St. Petersburg holds off on stadium bonds while the Rays go play in Tampa for two years, that’ll provide some useful data points about how important the team is to the city economy — but I swear, the first person who chooses to forgo reading from a stilted two-page essay and instead submits their testimony in the form of a freestyle rap will get a standing ovation, or at least encourage the attendees to lift their heads from their desks.
4:31 pm ET: Down to the final public speaker. The rhetorical lines for the public testimony have been pretty clear: “Just because you voted in July to do something dumb doesn’t mean you have to go ahead with it” vs. “No backsies!” Time to find out which one the elected officials agree with!
4:44 pm ET: Chris Latvala is first up, leading off by confirming that he doesn’t have to recuse himself from voting just because the Phillies and Rays both donated to the campaign fund of a family member of his. (So many questions.) He takes issue with the idea put forward by Rays owner Stu Sternberg that the delay in approving the bonds “upended” the stadium process, noting that there was, you know, a hurricane, and the Rays took their sweet time finalizing the agreement in the first place, so don’t start with me about delays!
Latvala asks if there’s a possibility that the Rays will never return to the Trop, and instead play in Tampa until a new stadium is ready. St. Pete city administrator Rob Gerdes takes the podium and says it could happen, but he doesn’t expect it. Latvala asks if the Rays could sue the city if it doesn’t repair the Trop; Gerdes says the city intends to repair it, so that’s not an issue.
4:57 pm: Dave Eggers: “I am not going to feel rushed by the statements that are made by the Rays.” Also: “I’m not an anti-stadium person. I just want to make sure we get a deal done and it’s fair.”
Then he asks if the stadium deal and development deal are separate in that the one can go forward without the other? Chief assistant county attorney Don Crowell says, “The answer to that is a very lawyerly answer of: It depends.” Not issuing the bonds today, Crowell says, doesn’t kill anything. If the Rays fail to meet their requirements, then there’s a provision that would prevent them pursuing the greater development, but not if the county is the one balking.
5:12 pm ET: Rene Flowers is asking questions of the county administrator, but it’s unclear where she’s going with them. The stadium and the greater development “are somewhat intertwined,” she says, and this appears to be an opportunity for the community to benefit from construction and other jobs, okay, got it, don’t want to make the perfect the enemy of getting at least something. If she’s mentioned the amount of money the county and city would be paying for that something and whether that’s a reasonable return, I didn’t hear it.
Flowers says she understands why the Rays wouldn’t want to play in Pinellas County, because she’s been to Al Lang Field for Rowdies games — “I don’t know much about soccer, I just cheer when the ball go in the goal” — and anyway, if the Rays owners say that and the Phillies stadium in Clearwater aren’t good enough for them, that’s good enough for her.
Definitely going in a pro-stadium-bonds direction here, but then, she’s not one of the four strongest opposition votes on the commission, one of whom needs to be flipped to get the bonds passed — that’d be Latvala, Eggers, Nowicki, and Scherer.
5:14 pm ET: The county’s bond counsel pops up to quickly confirm that the county isn’t on the hook yet for any delays in issuing bonds. “That cost us a lot of money, I’m sure,” quips someone, sparking the first laughter of the afternoon.
5:20 pm ET: Vince Nowicki asks county administrator Barry Burton how come the Rays are set to pay the Yankees $15 million a year to rent their Tampa stadium while they’ll only be paying $1 million a year in rent: “To me that’s a bad deal, no?” “Not at all,” says Burton, because the Rays will be taking on the risk of future improvements to the stadium in exchange for getting all the revenue (and not paying much in rent). He’s not wrong, per se — evaluating any deal means looking at the costs and benefits — but he also doesn’t explain how he calculated that this deal is better than in other cities, let alone good.
5:28 pm ET: Nowicki cites a figure that only 3% of local tourists go to Rays games: “Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze?”
He asks Crowell what happens if the bonds aren’t passed. His answer, in lawyerly words: Dunno — the agreement doesn’t say.
Nowicki: “We’re hearing a lot about the Rays, but not from the Rays.” Would kill for the camera to cut away to Rays co-president Brian Auld right now.
Scherer, the final strong “no” vote, is up. “I’m very disappointed that the Rays are forcing this issue today,” he says. “I don’t see that it’s required, it’s not a condition of our contract. I don’t even see that it’s needed … why do we even need to float bonds? I don’t know that we do. … This is an egregious demand, and it reeks of corporate selfishness. .. I have a lot of questions about the feasibility of financing a new stadium and our infrastructure needs. … If I’m going to make an error, I’m going to err on the side of caution.”
This is sounding an awful lot like it’s headed to a 4-3 vote in favor of holding off on the bonds and — maybe? — trying to renegotiate the deal, but we’ll know soon enough, hopefully.
5:41 pm ET: Brian Scott says he has no questions (yay), only comments (groan). These come down to: We spent a long time negotiating this deal, and if we reopen the deal we could end up with something worse. Then he also gripes about Sternberg’s letter, saying sayig a three-week delay kills the deal is a “totally ridiculous statement” — if the Rays owner doesn’t win this vote via his 11th-hour threat gambit, he certainly didn’t win any friends with it.
He also says that Auld surprised him by saying that the Rays were worried the numbers were no longer looking good on their end. “This is the first indication I had that the Rays were having second thoughts,” he said. “At this point you can only conclude one of a couple of things: Either Sternberg wants out of the deal, he wants to renegotiate the deal, and he wants to hang the failure on the county commission, particularly our newest members, who I think he’s counting on the vote no, personally.” Bold reverse psychology move: Voting no on the stadium bonds is exactly what Sternberg wants, don’t give it to him!
5:44 pm ET: Peters is last up, and argues that the St. Pete city council president was for the Rays stadium deal and was re-elected, so clearly people in St. Pete like the deal! This is not how polling or elections work, but she’s on a roll, let her have her moment.
5:50 pm ET: Now she’s on to arguing that people from Pennsylvania move to Clearwater because the Phillies play spring training there. And if Tampa Bay loses the Rays, it won’t get major league soccer! And her sons love baseball! The defense rests.
6:00 pm ET: A twist! Peters says she supports kicking the can down the road so everyone can think on this, and especially so the new members can learn more about it. (Again, wish the camera would cut to Nowicki and Scherer to see how they feel about being called clueless newbies.) This wouldn’t really decide much — there’s no real deadline for issuing the bonds, apparently — but would give Sternberg more time to try another tack that’s not “You guys ruined everything, maybe I’ll just take my team and leave.”
And I, unfortunately, have to go afk and can’t see this through to the final vote, or decision not to vote, or whatever it ends up being. Feel free to continue to discussion in comments, and we’ll reconvene for a full recap and reaction tomorrow morning.
We spend a lot of time here looking at ways wealthy sports team owners lobby for public spending on new stadiums and arenas to make themselves richer, or at least give them fancier places to entertain their friends and make their competitors jealous, as one does. But then there are the cases where the sports-industrial complex takes on a mind of its own and demands subsidies for buildings that no team in particular stands to benefit from, on the general principle that all the other kids are doing it, so it must make sense.
One can usually depend on local chambers of commerce to lead the charge for public money to be used for this kind of thing, and sure enough, that’s who’s pushing for Cincinnati to spend around half a billion dollars on a new arena:
“What became clear through our work is that our region is an epicenter of cultural vibrancy, music, art, and sports in the Midwest,” said Brendon Cull, President & CEO of the Cincinnati Regional Chamber. ” In terms of assets, we are missing one key component: a modern arena. Our study makes clear that the opportunity before us is more concerts, more sporting events, more family entertainment, and more comedians that contribute to growth in population, the economy, and cultural vibrancy in our region.”…
“The results of this study mark a significant advancement in the ongoing conversation about the necessity for a state-of-the-art modern arena for Greater Cincinnati,” said Bill Baker, Vice President & Managing Partner of MSA Sport. “By being located in Cincinnati’s vibrant urban core, a new arena will attract more visitors and events, spur additional investment in the city, and further enhance our great region.”
Okay, there’s not no self-interest at work here: MSA Sport would be in line to design and build a new arena, so clearly they have their own reasons to want to drum up business. Other names on the study are the Machete Group, Turner Construction, and Populous, all big names in the sports construction world. (They say they consulted with the owners of the Cincinnati Cyclones minor-league hockey team, who have “expressed a willingness” to partner on the project if the city brings its checkbook; FC Cincinnati owner Jeff Berding has been hot for a new arena for years now as well, though it’s not clear if he thinks he could get operating rights to one or what.) The report’s authors argue that if the city puts up 70% of the money toward a $675 million–$800 million arena project, it could reap $829,000 a year in new tax revenues, which would only amount to a $30 million a year or so annual loss — hey, nobody said they were big names in math.
The study also includes a list of musical acts that toured nearby in recent years but skipped Cincinnati, with the clear implication that it’s because their arena is a dump:
Build a new arena, and Elton John will come! Or, well, maybe not, but somebody will, and who can put a price on that? Sure, pointy-headed economists probably, but who wants to listen to them when there are arena contractors with such nice clear plastic binders?
Today at 2 pm, the Pinellas County Commission is set to vote on whether to approve selling $312.5 million in bonds as part of $1 billion in public subsidies toward a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium, in a test of whether newly elected commissioners and the fallout of a devastating hurricane can reverse a decision that was seemingly set in stone back in July. Or, you know, maybe they just won’t:
Sworn in Monday night, new Pinellas County Commissioner Vince Nowicki thinks Tuesday’s vote on funding for a new Rays stadium won’t happen.
“I think the seasoned politicians will rule the day,” he said. “And kick the can down the line to the next meeting.”
That would clearly be the safe move, as there don’t appear to be the four votes needed to approve the stadium bonds, and voting “no” would close the door on renegotiating the deal, which is what it appears several commissioners are now angling for. The Tampa Bay Times’ Colleen Wright, who seems to get all the “actually doing journalism” assignments while Marc Topkin and John Romano issue the thinly veiled team press releases, has a rundown of who stands where, which comes down to:
Chris Latvala and Dave Eggers want to renegotiate the deal. Eggers says he would vote for it if Rays owner Stuart Sternberg kicked in more money; the others haven’t specified what changes they’re looking for.
Nowicki wants to just go ahead and vote no, on the grounds that “you might as well just take a vote on it and see where the chips fall.”
Kathleen Peters and Brian Scott voted to delay the vote in October but are still pro-stadium, with Peters saying confusingly, “I’m not going to continue the fray of that banter.”
Rene Flowers voted for the stadium bonds in July but voted to delay them in October, and said she’s “still making up my mind.”
We’ll find out at 2 pm ET today (or more likely a bit after, as the stadium is 22nd on the meeting agenda) how this shakes out, but kicking the can does seem a likely scenario, especially since the bond deal doesn’t have to be finalized until March. At which point we’ll find out how Sternberg responds, after all but saying on Saturday that he’ll take his ball and go somewhere else TBD if he doesn’t get bond approval ASAP. Will he book a flight to visit Nashville, or does Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf have dibs on that move?
Anyhoo, see you back here at 2 pm. Watch along if you want, or I’ll be liveblogging if I can manage to stay awake through the first 21 agenda items.
On Saturday, though, Sternberg broke his silence in a big way: The Tampa Bay Times’ John Romano ran a column largely devoted to quotes from the team owner, and he minced no words in threatening that the city and county needed to live up to the stadium deal they approved back in July, or else:
“Last month, the County Commission upended our ballpark agreement by not approving their bonds, as they promised to do,” team owner Stuart Sternberg said. “That action sent a clear message that we had lost the county as a partner.
“The future of baseball in Tampa Bay became less certain after that vote…
“We’re going to exhaust all that we can here until, and unless, it comes to that. … We’ve been in that sort of position before, in a sense, but without an expiring clock. An expiring clock that just exploded, basically. If we had 10 years, 12 years left, it’s a different conversation. If we had one year left, it’s probably a different conversation. If we had no plans to do a stadium here, it’s a different conversation.
“But, as you point out, it’s a confluence of events and without the minds here coming together, [relocation] is not an unlikely conclusion.”
If that wasn’t saber-rattly enough, Romano upped the ante by writing that it’s “likely” the Rays stadium deal is “all but dead” and speculating that “the Rays could reap millions from redeveloping the Trop land while moving the team and building a stadium elsewhere.”
If the threat of moving the team if Sternberg doesn’t get his way is unmistakable, so is the timing: Last Thursday, team execs announced the Rays would play the 2025 season across the bay in Tampa, which several Pinellas County–side officials have cited as a kick in the teeth at a time when the city and county are being asked for a billion dollars for a stadium while figuring out both how to do hurricane cleanup and how to rebuild Tropicana Field’s roof until the new building is ready. (“If they want our county and the city of St. Petersburg to fund [almost half] of it, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation to expect them to work with us and to collaborate to make everyone feel good about the funding for the new stadium,” Clearwater Mayor Bruce Rector told Romano.)
More to the point, the county commission is set to hold its re-vote on the stadium bonds tomorrow, making Sternberg’s statements a clear shot across the bow to say: If you don’t rubber-stamp this deal, you realize this means war. Not that he has any great options of other metro areas to move to — don’t forget that he just spent several years first threatening to play half his team’s home games in a nonexistent stadium in Montreal and then when that didn’t work threatening that he’d sell the team to someone else who would figure out a city to move it to — especially since he now has a lease that expires in three years and a non-functional stadium that he needs St. Petersburg’s help to fix. He’s also going to face pressure to make a decision from his own fellow owners, who have been waiting not so patiently for the Rays to figure out their future so that MLB can try to play potential expansion cities off against each other for both the largest expansion fees and the biggest stadium deals, and who now may be stuck in a holding pattern again.
The most reasonable way of understanding Sternberg’s weekend threats, then, is as an attempt to head off any mutiny by the county commission, in hopes that “we’ve got to approve this thing now or else the team will leave” will turn at least one of the four skeptical heads on the seven-member commission: Chris Latvala, Dave Eggers, Chris Scherer, or Vince Nowicki. We’ll find out on Tuesday if they call his bluff; if so, things will start to get really interesting.
UPDATE: Putting this here as a reminder to myself as much as anything, since no one else seems to be reporting the details of tomorrow’s county commission meeting: It’s set to start at 2 pm, but the Rays stadium bonds are quite a ways through the agenda, so they likely won’t get to that until … 3 pm? 4 pm? It looks like the meeting will be livestreamed here, so maybe I’ll do a liveblog or something if it seems worth it.
The verdict is in for where the Tampa Bay Rays will play the 2025 season while waiting for their roof to be (probably) repaired, and the answer is: Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, spring-training home of the New York Yankees and rest-of-the-time home of the Tampa Tarpons. I’m going to go ahead and call this a fine enough decision: The stadium holds 11,000 people, not too far off of the Rays’ average 2024 attendance of 16,515; as a spring training site, it has major-league amenities; and it’s still in the Tampa Bay region, so Rays fans won’t have to drive across the state or the country to get to games. Plus, there are multiple fields on the site, so there’s no worry about schedule conflicts, since the Tarpons can just play on one of the back fields while the Rays take over the main one.
Of course, it’s also not in Pinellas County, which is already ticking off Pinellas County commissioners who already held up a vote on approving bonds for a new Rays stadium last month amid concern that the team might play elsewhere for a season or three. Commissioner Chris Latvala, who voted against the stadium deal in July, called the decision “unfortunate,” saying, “there’s going to be over $1 billion public funds dedicated from Pinellas residents to the Tampa Bay Rays, and the thank you that the Rays gave them was to play the games across the bridge in Hillsborough County.” Commissioner Rene Flowers, meanwhile, who voted for the deal in July, told the Tampa Bay Times she’s now not sure if she’ll change her vote, saying, “I’m waiting to see how it looks for us financially” — spoilers, Rene, it still looks just as bad as it did then.
And then there’s this tidbit:
The Yankees will receive about $15 million in revenue for hosting the Rays, a person familiar with the arrangement told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because that detail was not announced. The money won’t come from Tampa Bay but from other sources, such as insurance.
Um, Associated Press, you drunk posting? First off, “Tampa Bay” is not a government entity, it’s a collection of disparate municipalities and counties, so who isn’t the money coming from, exactly? And “such as insurance” is both awfully vague and puzzlingly specific, as the only insurance policy that’s been discussed is that held by the city of St. Petersburg, which is already committed to paying for a chunk of the estimated $55 million cost of repairing the Tropicana Field roof.
Still many questions, in other words. Anyone else want to chime in?
“I’ll be excited to set a record for rain delays in a season,” Rays reliever and union player rep Pete Fairbanks said.
And as for the week’s other news:
Orlando’s stadium formerly known as the Citrus Bowl is set to get $400 million in county-funded renovations, something that Orlando mayor-for-life Buddy Dyer first proposed last year and which the county gave preliminary approval to back in January. The money would come from the “tourist development tax” — the same pool of hotel-tax money that Pinellas County is currently debating whether to hand over to the Rays — which according to the authorizing legislation can be used for building stadiums, or building auditoriums, or funding aquariums or museums or zoos or beaches or advertising tourism or a whole lot of other things, so long as the purpose is to get more tourists coming to your county. It’s actually somewhat difficult to argue that renovating a stadium that hosts a handful of college football games each year in order to make it “fully symmetrical” is what’s needed in order to encourage tourists to go to freaking Orlando, but this is what the county commission is being asked to vote on in the next couple of weeks, with a straight face.
A report by consultant Econsult Solutions Inc. commissioned by the city of Cleveland claims that the Browns leaving downtown would cost the city $30 million in annual economic activity and $11 million in annual tax revenue, which on the face of it doesn’t make any sense since Cleveland doesn’t have any taxes that are at 36.7%. A quick look at the report itself doesn’t reveal any more methodological details, except that Econsult apparently calculated its estimate that Cleveland would lose 29% of Browns-related spending by dividing the population of the city by the population of Cuyahoga County, LOLconsultants.
Personal seat license prices at the new Tennessee Titans stadium are in some cases going up from $750 per seat to $10,000 a seat, and season ticket holders are not pleased. But at least the PSL money will help pay off the public’s $1.2 billion share of the construction — oh, what’s that, the seat license money is entirely going to pay off team owner Amy Adams Strunk’s share of the costs? The Hog Mollies didn’t mention that part!
The city of Oakland’s sale of its half of the Oakland Coliseum site to private developers is on hold, apparently because Alameda County is dragging its feet on the transfer of its half of the site which it had previously sold to A’s owner John Fisher. No, that doesn’t make sense to me either, it looks to involve a lawsuit in progress charging that the sale violates the state’s Surplus Land Act requiring that public land first be offered up for development as affordable housing — similar objections were raised about the Los Angeles Angels deal, you may remember, but that fell apart before it was ever resolved, so who knows what’ll happen here.
One long-rumored stadium site the Kansas City Royals definitely won’t be moving to is the old K.C. Star building, because it’s being converted into an “AI innovation facility.” A local wine bar owner called this “not the most exciting thing for the neighborhood” but at least a plan that wouldn’t require displacing local businesses, which is probably about right.
Diamond Sports Group, aka Bally Sports aka FanDuel Sports, has emerged from bankruptcy reorganization, with lots of consequences for the MLB, NBA, and NHL teams it formerly provided cable broadcasts of. ESPN has a rundown, but the main takeaway is that a bunch of teams are going to getting less TV money than they expected, which will effect everything from their player budgets to the relative importance of market size in terms of team profitability, while fans will get some new options including the ability to do pay-per-view of single games for a mere (?) $7 a pop. More on this as more dominoes fall, maybe, or check Marc Normandin’s Marvin Miller’s Mustache newsletter later this morning, if I know him he’ll be weighing in on this.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman is reportedly exploring new stadium sites, including some across the state line in Kansas:
“The Royals are in real and advanced discussions with the state of Kansas to potentially build their new stadium in Johnson County,” [sports radio host Bob] Fescoe said on his show Tuesday morning, citing multiple sources. “It’s going to move fast and a lot of quickly.”
A lot of quickly, eh? Fescoe went on to say a potential announcement (of a site? of how a stadium would be paid for there? he didn’t specify) could come before the MLB Winter Meetings that start on December 8. The two sites mentioned by Fescoe are a former Sprint campus in Overland Park about six miles south of downtown Kansas City and two miles from the state line, and another a couple of miles northwest of there.
This represents the first real flareup of Kansas move threats since June, when that state’s legislature gave approval for secretary of commerce David Toland and eight legislative leaders from both parties to unilaterally approve selling upwards of $700 million in bonds apiece for new stadiums for the Royals and Chiefs, with the debt to be paid off with money from state sales tax receipts and state lottery proceeds. At the time, it wasn’t clear if Sherman and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt were serious about a Kansas move or just trying to nudge officials in Missouri to up their own ante — but since the latter has mostly fizzled for now, kicking the tires on Kansas makes sense as the next move, whether the team owners are serious about a move or just seeking to poke the embers on a bidding war.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, at least, seems game, saying “the border war that [the Kansas STAR bond plan] has reignited is unhelpful” and then in the next breath that “I think Kansas City and the state of Missouri are in an active position.” Lucas said he spoke to Sherman as recently as last week about stadium plans on his side of the border, though he didn’t divulge any details about a site or what kind of public money could be used now that voters there rejected a sales tax hike to pay for one.
If all this is reminding you of the Chicago Bears‘ eternal parade of potential stadium sites, it should, because it’s the same strategy: Keep dropping hints about different locations until one either sticks or shakes loose money from a different government body afraid of being left out when the music stops. For the Bears it’s been a matter of trying (unsuccessfully so far) to pit Chicago and its suburbs against each other; the Royals already attempted that last year with Kansas City and North Kansas City, but getting Kansas involved as well gives Sherman more options, for threats if nothing else.
Not that it’s much of a stick: If you don’t give us stadium money we’ll go across the border and let somebody else pay for it only works as a threat if the potential economic gains from hosting the Royals are greater than the public construction cost, and there’s almost no chance of that happening. But all you need is for one set of elected officials to bite, so expect Sherman — and the Bears owners, and the Cleveland Browns owners, and pretty much any other sports owners with two local jurisdictions that can be played off each other — to keep up the move threat gambit as long as is necessary to shake loose some government cash from somewhere.
The answers to how long a repair of the Tampa Bay Rays stadium roof is expected to take and how much it’s expected to cost are in, and they are: one year and $55.7 million. That’s according to a damage assessment report conducted by, uh, that Tampa Bay Times story didn’t bother to say, thanks, Marc Topkin! Here we go, Bay News 9 has a link to the actual report, it’s by Hennessy Construction Services and AECOM Hunt; these are the kind of firms likely to be hired to do the work, so I’m inclined to believe they’re not lowballing, or at least not by much.
The Hennessy/AECOM report goes on to say that the roof’s 24 support columns show “no signs of cracking or other distress,” and the cables that held up the roof and their anchorages look to be undamaged. It recommends replacing the old PTFE-coated fiberglass fabric roof with PVC-coated polyester fabric, noting that this while would only be rated to last five years, that hardly matters since the stadium is slated to be torn down in three. The fabric itself would cost about $15 million, with the remaining $40 million for other repairs (including $6 million already allocated by the city to emergency waterproofing), insurance, and other sundries.
The big question before the St. Petersburg city council is: Do they go ahead and repair a stadium that would, by the time it reopened in 2026, only have two years of life left? Probably yes: The city is in line to get $25 million back from its insurance, and $30 million to get two years of use out of a stadium isn’t awful. (By comparison, the public is spending around $1 billion for a new stadium that will likely only be in use for around 30 years, so that’s more than double the cost per year.) Plus, St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch noted that the Rays’ lease on Tropicana Field says it is “suspended” if the stadium unplayable for a year, which would mean it could be extended through 2028, with the new stadium not opening until 2029, in which case you’re only talking about $10 million per season of use.
And if Welch or the St. Pete council really wants to play hardball, there’s this: Having the Rays play at Tropicana for two seasons rather than in a minor-league stadium would be way more of a benefit to Rays owner Stu Sternberg than to the city — so there’s no reason the city couldn’t ask Sternberg to chip in some for repairs, as a token of good will toward hurricane-ravaged citizens and appreciation for the $1 billion taxpayer check he’s about to cash. (There’s also the question of whether the roof repairs fall under the Rays lease’s “repairs” clause that the team has to cover after insurance or its “force majeure” clause that the city has to cover, but that’s the kind of thing that lawyers are likely to have to hash out.) Yes, threatening not to repair the roof otherwise could mean breaking the team’s lease; but then, the lease is only good for another two (or three) years anyway, and Sternberg already has a new stadium approved, so what’s he gonna do, move to Greensboro in a huff over $30 million?
Add in that the Pinellas County Commission might conceivably now have an anti-stadium-deal majority, and pretty much anything and everything is back in play now. The likeliest scenario is still that St. Petersburg agrees to shell out $30 million for a temporary fix, the $1 billion in city and county money for a new stadium goes ahead, and Sternberg doesn’t dip into his own pocket for any of his $800 million net worth, nor the estimated $68 million in profits he earned from the Rays last year. Still, it’s not impossible that at least some of this goes back to the drawing board, all thanks to an untimely hurricane, an even more untimely decision by the St. Pete council to cut their insurance coverage to save a few dollars, and a timely election; if so, that would be one hell of a plot twist.
After publicly labeling the former Michael Reese hospital site as unsuitable for the new venue, the team is said to be reconsidering the 49-acre property south of McCormick Place in hopes of jump-starting discussions with politicians to keep the team in Chicago, according to sources familiar with the talks.
So let’s start with this: “To keep to team in Chicago” is bald-faced propaganda, since Bears execs have never even threatened to relocate the team out of the area, and no other cities are offering them a stadium. (If Crain’s Chicago Business means “keep the team from moving to the suburbs” it should say that, but even then the Bears have no serious offers there either.)
As for this alleged new site, it’s actually an old site on the South Side near the lake that was suggested last May by Chicago’s nonprofit Civic Federation and summarily rejected by Bears CEO Kevin Warren as “too narrow.” (It’s also long been targeted by the city as the site of a new mixed-use neighborhood, no word on how adding a football stadium would pair with that.) It’s now being thrown back into the mix by [source needed] on the grounds that state officials from Chicago might like it better, though the public subsidy required is still unknown; Crain’s reports, citing nobody at all, that “the Bears understand a larger private investment is needed,” but also Civic Federation president Joe Ferguson previously noted that the Reese site is “eligible for TIF funding,” though also it’s owned by the city of Chicago, would it even pay property taxes that would have to be refunded via a TIF? So many questions for whoever is floating this idea now, too bad they’re anonymous so we can’t ask them any questions!
