Blogger again claims Browns owners want Brook Park dome, just as soon as they get $1.2B in public cash

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s time for another missive from NEOtrans, the Cleveland blog that first reported that the Browns owners were seeking a new stadium rather than renovations to their existing one way back in June 2022. The blog’s proprietor, railroad expert Ken Prendergast, has a particular propensity for stories with no named sources, and his latest is no exception:

It seems that the clock has run out on city of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County leaders on keeping the stadium downtown for the Cleveland Browns football team’s home games. NEOtrans has learned that the Browns’ owners, the Haslam Sports Group, are due to make an announcement soon, possibly by the end of this month, that they will put all their efforts into building a new covered stadium in suburban Brook Park.

Prendergast gives no indication — not even a “sources close to the team” or anything — who he has learned this from, so there’s no way to tell if this is news or a rumor he heard from someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about or an attempt by somebody to put pressure on Cleveland city officials to up their ante or what. And on top of that, it’s a rumor we’ve heard from him before: Back on August 6, Prendergast wrote, “In the coming weeks, the owners of the Cleveland Browns will reveal their plans to build a $3.6 billion domed stadium and associated development in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park.”

That was ten weeks ago, so this still qualifies as “coming weeks,” but only barely. The latest post doesn’t provide any new info on Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam’s decision, repeating earlier reports that the stadium would cost $2.4 billion and the Haslams would want $1.2 billion of that in public money.

As for the Haslam’s half, there’s more unsourced reporting on where that could come from:

The Browns appear eager to tap a new source of capital. In August, the National Football League (NFL) owners approved the use of private equity investment as a component of the ownership structure of its teams. Private equity firms could purchase as little as 3 percent or as much as a 10 percent equity stake in a team…

Based on that value, a firm could pay anywhere from $180 million to $600 million to take an equity stake in the Browns. That, perhaps as much as anything, is why the Browns are now focused on Brook Park.

Huh? Sure, the Haslams could sell 10% of their team to private equity to raise half their private share of a stadium cost. But before this they could have likewise sold 10% of their team to a minority owner, or used 10% of their team as collateral for a bank loan, or sold some of their other $4 billion worth of assets, or any of a number of other things. Billionaires don’t generally lack ways to raise cash for a stadium deal — even A’s owner John Fisher has sources of money, if he can figure out how to pay it back — so much as ways to raise cash that don’t cost them more than they’d make on the deal, and giving up 10% of a franchise worth $6 billion according to CNBC ($5.1 billion according to Forbes, the more conventionally used guesstimate) would be a significant cost, especially since the theoretical private equity goons would presumably want a cut of future revenues from the hypothetical future stadium.

This whole “NFL teams can tap private equity money” bit is making the news rounds at the moment — look, here’s Forbes contributer (aka unpaid blogger) Phil Rogers theorizing that it’ll make it easier for the Chicago Bears to raise money for their own $2 billion–plus stadium. But while it does increase the universe of potential investors in NFL teams, it doesn’t change the main calculation: how to get public funding for these buildings, since that wouldn’t have to be paid back out of owners’ pockets.

The public price tag for a Brook Park stadium for the Browns remains $1.2 billion, which the Haslams have previously said would come from “innovative funding mechanisms with local, county, and state officials that would leverage the fiscal impact of the project,” whatever that means. Brook Park doesn’t have any significant money, Cuyahoga County says it’s not interested in paying to help move the Browns out of Cleveland, and there’s been no word lately of Gov. Mike DeWine offering to carry the bulk of the $1.2 billion load — so we’re back at “Haslams want a suburban dome as soon as someone else agrees to pay for it.” They can “announce” that as their first choice if they want, but until someone shows up with a $1.2 billion novelty check, it’s more a wish than an agreement.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Special Tampa Bay Rays roof crisis edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Seems like all anybody wants to talk about today is what the Tampa Bay Rays will do now that their stadium roof blew off and also how insensitive it is to be talking about what the Rays will do when millions of people are still without power, so let’s get right to answering your questions and/or offending your sensibilities:

  • Rays management put out a statement yesterday saying “our priority is supporting our community and our staff” and “over the coming days and weeks, we expect to be able to assess the true condition of Tropicana Field,” which is PR for “dunno yet.” Playing without a roof apparently isn’t an option because the stadium doesn’t have a drainage system for when it rains, so it looks like the Rays and the city of St. Petersburg are going to have to look into a rush job of repairing the roof on a stadium that is set to close in three years regardless. Just in case, sportswriters are over are rushing to publish their lists of other places the Rays could play the start of next season, including various minor-league stadiums in Florida, the Oakland Coliseum, the Texas Rangers‘ still-standing old stadium next door to their new one, or, sure, Montreal, maybe its roof will be fixed before Tampa Bay’s is.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers‘ stadium got off without much damage after being flooded during Hurricane Milton, but the first responders using it as a shelter did have to evacuate. All of this should be having people rethink the whole “stadiums can double as emergency shelters” thing, maybe?
  • Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren says a Chicago lakefront stadium is still “the focus” but his stadium architects are designing a building that would be “agnostic” with regard to location, which doesn’t really make sense — you have to at least know which direction fans would be arriving from and where the sun would be, for starters — but it’s the kind of thing you do when you’re trying to play off against each other multiple cities that have all shown little interest in throwing money at you.
  • If you’ve been wondering what’s up with Diamond Sports Group’s ongoing bankruptcy and its effect on MLB TV rights, Marc Normandin has a good writeup in Baseball Prospectus. Tl;dr: Two more teams have been dropped by Diamond (the Rays and Detroit Tigers) and the Texas Rangers had their contract expire, meaning it’s likely that MLB is going to end up running TV rights for a bunch of teams in 2025. For now it sounds like the league will be paying teams based on what they were getting from Diamond, but if you want to dream on a future where MLB holds NFL-like control over the whole league’s broadcasts and doles out money evenly and market size no longer matters, I’ve got you covered.
Share this post:

Tropicana Field roof demolished by angry gods

access_time personNeil deMause

Hurricane Milton raged across Florida yesterday, making landfall just south of Tampa Bay, sparing that metro area the worst of the storm surge. But while it’s hardly the most important thing about a storm whose damage is only just becoming apparent, Milton also did this to the Rays‘ stadium:

If you, like me, weren’t actually aware that the Tropicana Field roof was made of fabric stretched on a steel frame, our new 21st-century climate decided to make it clear to all. Only a couple of panels remain, with shreds of the rest now littering the field below in a scene reminiscent of the final days of the Pontiac Silverdome:

Ironically enough, the dome was set up with cots to be a shelter for first responders during the storm, which thankfully it wasn’t being used for yet at the time.

There’s been no response yet from the Rays or the city of St. Petersburg (the stadium’s owner) about how bad the damage is or how long it will take to repair. The internet is already joking about the Rays relocating elsewhere for the start of next season or just playing with no roof (okay, the latter was me). Updates once they become available, which may be delayed slightly by a crane falling on the Tampa Bay Times’ office building.

Share this post:

Tropicana hotel demolished to make way for Vegas A’s vaporstadium

access_time personNeil deMause

The Tropicana Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was blowed up real good last night, to clear the land for an eventual Las Vegas A’s stadium along with other redevelopment by the site’s owner, the Bally’s Corporation:

And speaking of that planned A’s stadium, how’s the financing for that going?

In July, the Athletic’s’ executives said the stadium would be financed in three parts. Nevada taxpayers would pay about $350 million, debt financing would contribute another $300 million, and Fisher would pay the remaining $850 million.

That’s true as far as it goes, but A’s board member Sandy Dean’s testimony at the time was incredibly nonspecific about where Fisher’s $850 million would come from, beyond saying that A’s owner John Fisher was in “good shape” raising money and that “it would be a positive to have outside investors” — a positive for Fisher, sure, though it’s still unclear what Fisher would have left over to offer to investors after paying off $300 million in loans plus whatever ROI his family will want for their cut of the stadium costs. The team still hasn’t submitted a detailed financial plan to the Vegas stadium authority and may not until December; stadium authority chair Steve Hill, who moonlights as an unregistered A’s lobbyist, said yesterday that after something between “an audit and a look” at the Fisher family’s finances, “it is clear that the Fishers have the ability to provide the financing for the stadium, period,” which isn’t the same thing as saying that the Fishers can pay for the stadium and earn their money back, which would seem to be the point of the whole exercise.

Until Fisher presents an “irrevocable” financing plan, Nevada won’t release its $380 million in stadium funding approved last summer — along with an additional $180 million in property tax breaks and $100 million in ticket tax exemptions — so right now the whole thing still remains on hold. Except for the site being cleared, but Bally’s is free to use that for something other than a stadium if Fisher’s financing falls through. In the meantime, enjoy the sardonic laughter of the Bay Area’s KGO-TV news anchors as their reporter notes, “If the A’s can get it together, they hope to start playing in Las Vegas in 2028.”

Share this post:

Ex-Salt Lake mayor drops referendum bid against Jazz arena sales-tax hike

access_time personNeil deMause

If you were getting all excited about former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson saying he planned to stage a public referendum on the city’s plans to sell $900 million worth of Utah Jazz arena renovation bonds and pay for them with a sales tax hike — for new readers, yes, this is the kind of thing people can get excited about here, don’t say you weren’t warned — you can stand down, as Anderson said late Friday that he’s not actually gonna do that:

We know many are disappointed that the issue of a new sales tax was never put to public vote. We share in that frustration. However, efforts to pursue a referendum will distract time, effort, energy, and resources from the important work of addressing essential issues facing our city, and undermine the opportunities for working together with SEG on matters of mutual passion and concern. Also, there is no certainty about the prospect of meeting the requirements for the sales tax increase to appear on the ballot for a vote. Therefore, to achieve a cooperative alliance that allows us to work together from this day forward for the benefit of the entire community, we will not pursue a referendum.

That’s a lot of words (and a lot of nosism) that comes down to two things: 1) I’d rather work with Jazz owner Ryan Smith than agin’ him, and 2) that whole referendum thing might not have worked anyway. Door #1 sounds more like a cover story for #2 than the other way around, and FoS commenter Ian noted last week that the referendum felt dodgy from the start: Utah referenda can’t be used to overturn legislative decisions that passed by a two-thirds supermajority in both the state house and senate, and the sales tax hike for the arena easily cleared that threshold. So it looks as if Anderson may have been talking before his ass had had a chance to talk to its lawyers, and now that he’s heard back he’s decided to pivot to “Can’t we all just get along?”

The Jazz/Utah Hockey Club (man, is that going to get old to type by the end of this season) arena deal still isn’t finalized, mind you, since Smith and the city still need to agree next year sometime to a lease extension on the renovated arena and the planned surrounding development. With city and state legislators both overwhelmingly in favor of the deal — even if Utahns as a whole are not — it doesn’t seem real likely that this will be a major roadblock, but stranger things have happened, occasionally. If you’re a local (or ex-mayor) with hopes of changing this sales tax subsidy, you know which clouds to yell at.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Houston readies stadium upgrade cash, Oakland Coliseum buyers seek new payment plan

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks for your patience while I’ve been traveling this week (and watching Mets playoff games at 3 am), though honestly it’s been a pretty slow news week as well. Not completely dead, though, so let’s get to the weekly roundup:

  • The Houston city council is refinancing its bonds for the Astros and Texans stadiums and Rockets arena, which will let it spend an additional $150 million on renovations. The Houston Chronicle says the money is expected to be allocated as part of lease negotiations — the Texans’ is up in 2031, the Rockets’ is up in 2033, and the Astros’ not until 2050 — but also that the bond money is expected to “be split between the three venues evenly,” so maybe the city plans to set aside $50 million for each team, then see what it can get in lease extensions for that? The Houston Business Journal also reports that the Astros and Rockets leases require “renovations to maintain the first-class status of the venues” — the Astros can terminate their lease in 2035 if the additional spending isn’t made, though there’s no estimate provided of how much maintaining “first-class status” is expected to cost. Friends don’t let friends sign state-of-the-art clauses, let’s just leave it at that.
  • The city of Oakland has rearranged the payment schedule for the African American Sports and Entertainment Group to supply $105 million for the city’s half of the Oakland Coliseum, and the Oakland police union wants answers, calling the change in timetable “strange and weird.” Apparently the new payment schedule also still needs to be approved by the city council before it’s final, so I’m going to go ahead and say that the whole thing is strange, though “weird” will have to wait until we have further information.
  • Destruction from Hurricane Helene is expected to cut into hotel tax revenues earmarked for paying off the Tampa Bay Rays‘ new $1.3 billion stadium, though it’s too soon to predict by how much. Sports economist Geoffrey Propheter notes that if bond buyers balk at purchasing bonds because the tax revenues don’t seem sufficient, Pinellas County could have to allocate more public money to reassure them and keep interest rates from soaring, this should be fun.
  • If the prospective owners who want to get an expansion franchise in Portland, Oregon are successful, and if they then are able to build a stadium where they want, it could have the side benefit of shoring up the approach ramps to a neighboring bridge so they don’t collapse in an earthquake. Neither the earthquake nor the expansion team appears imminent, but this is still news, apparently, so consider yourself informed.

If there’s anything else up, it can get discussed in the comments, or else wait till Monday when I’m back on a normal schedule. See you then!

Share this post:

Salt Lake again okays spending $900m on Jazz arena, still punts on lease details

access_time personNeil deMause

The Salt Lake City council finally got around last night to authorizing the $900 million in city bonds that were first approved back in July for renovations to the Utah Jazz arena, plus building out a wider entertainment district around it. The bonds will be paid off via a 0.5% citywide sales tax hike, though what happens if sales tax revenues fall short still isn’t clear.

In fact, a whole lot still isn’t clear about the details of the arena plan, even three months after it was first announced. In particular, Ryan Smith, the owner of the Jazz (and whatever the Utah Hockey Club ends up being called once it gets around to picking a name), still hasn’t worked out a lease deal for the arena and surrounding land, which you really would have wanted to work out before cutting a $900 million check. That’s not going to be resolved until sometime in 2025, so really yesterday’s approval wasn’t any more final than July’s was, though it’s certainly another step toward finalizing the deal.

I’m writing all this from a weird time zone, so going mostly off a very poorly written KSL-TV article, but there are at least some signs of opposition to the deal, including former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson saying he plans to subject the arena plan to a public referendum, sometime in the future, maybe. Earlier reporting indicated that the project is popular because it brings together both the business community that wants downtown “revitalization” spending and arts groups that want the Utah Symphony’s Abravanel Hall preserved, but also that Utahns as a whole oppose the tax hike by a 54-38% margin, so maybe not actually popular? Utah journalists have until sometime next year to get their act together and actually report on what’s being negotiated and what people think about it, I’m not holding my breath but we can always hope!

Share this post:

Friday roundup: A’s bid Bay adieu, D-Backs give Phoenix the finger

access_time personNeil deMause

This week’s roundup is a little abbreviated as I’m traveling again, but I didn’t want to miss out on all of the week’s remaindered news:

  • Last night was the final Oakland A’s home game ever, maybe, and it went … okay? Let’s go with okay: Fans got to chant “Sell the team!”, the A’s won, and nobody tried walking off with any stadium seats. Sure, there was some light throwing of objects and one person running on the field, but compared to some other cities hosting last-ever MLB games, that was downright tame. My sympathies to A’s fans, and here’s hoping that the East Bay gets another team — or, hell, the same one — in not too long.
  • Last week’s roundup missed this update on how the Arizona Diamondbacks owners’ lease extension talks with Maricopa County are going, which can be summed up as “badly.” Tl;dr: The county only wants to rezone the area around the D-Backs’ stadium for a mixed-use development (along with giving tax kickbacks to team owner Ken Kendrick) if the D-Backs promise to spend at least $200 million on stadium renovations, and team execs are steamed. (Sorry, that was pretty tl itself, hope you still read it.) Diamondbacks CEO Derrick Hall said the county’s latest offer is “ridiculous” and he doesn’t “see a deal in sight,” and now he’ll “continue to work with the state and city” to work out a deal that he’s happy with: “If we can find that by [early 2025], we’ll be fine.” Or else what, he didn’t say, leaving that to the imagination of sportswriters.
  • The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the NFL have selected four stadiums to be “mission ready venues” in case of national emergencies, which I suppose is nice and all but which only gets the bridge of this stuck in my head.
  • The group in Portland, Oregon that wants an MLB expansion team bought some land to put a stadium on, now all they need is the money to buy an expansion team and build a stadium.

Posting may remain a bit sporadic early next week depending on my internet access — if so, feel free to use this item’s comments as an open thread for anything that needs discussing in the meantime.

Share this post:

Philly mayor reveals Sixers arena details, including tax breaks and 33-cents-a-year rent

access_time personNeil deMause

As promised when she made her initial announcement last week, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker released a pile of documents yesterday relating to the proposed 76ers arena that she now endorses. I’m still going through them, but here are some of the highlights:

The pieces making all the headlines, presumably because they’re the ones that Parker is calling attention to and that are easiest to understand, are:

  • a promise by the arena developers to use “best and good faith efforts” to hire diverse contractors and workers on the construction project, and
  • a Community Benefits Agreement under which Sixers owner Josh Harris would provide $50 million over 30 years toward various education and small business projects

While the CBA is being described as going primarily to “impacted neighborhoods” — read: Philly’s Chinatown, which overwhelmingly opposes the arena project — the only pieces that directly deal with the impacts of the arena are $1.6 million in grant to “assist small businesses impacted during the construction” and $3 million in loans (available starting in 2030) to “stabilize and help expand Chinatown businesses.” A look at the timeline in the CBA payment schedule shows that the bulk of Harris’ CBA spending would come in the year 2032; the irregular spending makes it hard to calculate how much it’s all worth in present-day dollars, but I’m going to guesstimate around $30 million.

Meanwhile, the potentially bigger piece is a Rube Goldberg device of nested property transfers, in which the city would acquire the Sixers’ mall property and lease it to the Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development, which would in turn sublease it to the team. This is the same plan that Harris first proposed last year, and it would have a bunch of immediate effects, some more clear than others:

  • By putting the arena site in public hands, it would immediately become exempt from property taxes. Currently the site is under a tax-increment financing agreement that caps its property taxes at around $1 million a year; under the new plan, Harris would pay $5 million a year (scaling up by 10% once a decade) in payments in lieu of property taxes on the whole $1.55 billion development.
  • Sports economist and property tax superexpert Geoffrey Propheter, after a quick look at the agreement last night, calculates that Philadelphia would get a total of $109.3 million in present value from the future PILOTs, which he says is “pitiful” for a project that size.
  • Harris would pay $10 in rent for the entire 30-year lease term.
  • It’s not immediately clear if the city would be paying anything to Harris for the arena property, or if he would be handing it over for nothing in order to get the tax exemption and PILOT deal.

With this many moving parts, it’s tough to say exactly what the total public subsidy to the Sixers arena project would be, but it’s certainly more than the Sixers “financing [the] project with no city funds,” as Parker put it.

Parker is promising a month of public town halls on the arena proposal, the first of which was last night’s — which Chinatown leaders skipped on the grounds that it was a dog and pony show announced with little warning. (The civic association of the adjacent Wash West neighborhood also came out against the arena last night.) City councilmember Mark Squilla has likewise promised a 30-day public review period. Parker says she’ll submit the legislation to the council on October 24. That’s not much time to suss out the fine print of the arena plan, but it’s better than nothing: sports lease experts and Philadelphia journalists, time to get cracking.

Share this post:

A’s owner Fisher marks last Oakland home game with misspelled non-apology letter

access_time personNeil deMause

The Oakland A’s are scheduled to play their last home game ever in Oakland after 57 years there this Thursday, and team owner John Fisher marked the occasion yesterday by releasing an open letter to A’s fans. It is, and this will not surprise you if you have observed literally anything Fisher has done ever, very, very bad:

  • “Triumphs, near misses, the 1989 Loma Preita earthquake in Game 3 of the Bay Bridge Series, the 20-game win streak, a Hollywood movie, and an unmatched cast of players, coaches, and fans,” the letter said. “We’ve had it all.” That’s an odd list — filming “Moneyball” get a shoutout but not the A’s threepeat in the 1970s? — but most of the attention has been focused on the misspelling of Loma Prieta, which is pretty bad if you know how Loma Prieta is pronounced and how Spanish vowels work, at least one of which Fisher or his ghostwriters apparently does not.
  • “We proposed and pursued five different locations in the Bay Area. And despite mutual and ongoing efforts to get a deal done for the Howard Terminal project, we came up short. … Though I wish I could speak to each one of you individually, I can tell you this from the heart: we tried. Staying in Oakland was our goal, it was our mission, and we failed to achieve it. And for that I am genuinely sorry.” Actually, Fisher and top honcho Dave Kaval abruptly announced they planned to focus on moving the team to Las Vegas amid a snit over whether Oakland would provide more than the $775 million in infrastructure money it had agreed to now that interest rates were on the rise and the Howard Terminal project no longer looked as juicy to Fisher’s accountants. As apologies go, this came off as somewhat less sincere than Dave Grohl’s.
  • The bit about “I wish I could speak to each one of you individually” rang hollow for an owner who famously doesn’t attend his own team’s games.

Still, it’s all very on brand for a guy who announced his own team’s temporary move to Sacramento by not being able to name a single A’s player.

Whether this is actually the final A’s game in Oakland is still a somewhat open question: Fisher still doesn’t have financing finalized for a stadium in Las Vegas, and he can’t keep playing in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento indefinitely. It’s at the very last the last game for now, though, and Fisher is reportedly marking the occasion by hiring extra security out of fears of fan violence, even telling A’s manager Mark Kotsay not to address the fans after the game but “instead retreat to the clubhouse.” And so the Oakland A’s end, not with a bang but with a whinge.

Share this post: