Monday roundup: Royals stadium could cut into KC police budget, leave old site “blighted”

access_time personNeil deMause

Like I promised you, posts at unexpected times! Let’s kick off the week with the news of last week, extended:

  • The Kansas City council has approved plans to use sales tax money for a new Royals stadium that would normally be set aside for public safety expenses, which could end up cutting into avaible public funding for things like a new jail and police body cameras. “For us to divert those revenues to pay for a for-profit business,” said councilmember Johnathan Duncan, one of two councilmembers to vote against the measure, “is a concern. And I wish it were more of a concern to the mayor and my colleagues.”
  • With both the Royals and Chiefs apparently headed for new homes, a Truman Sports Complex Task Force has released renderings of what the site of their old homes could be redeveloped as, including what looks like a scaled-down Arrowhead Stadium, no Kauffman Stadium at all, “scenic trails” adjacent to a parking lot, and, sure, throw a Ferris wheel in there for good measure. No indication of how much all this would cost or who would want to pay for it, but “if we don’t do something with that area, it will stay in disrepair and it will be a blight,” said Jackson County Executive Phil LeVota, maybe somebody should have thought of that before offering to move the Royals to a new stadium?
  • The Athletic’s Portland sportswriter Jason Quick is officially done with new Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon already after he’s kept hinting at the possibility of moving the team if he doesn’t get every penny he wants for arena upgrades. It’s likely an idle threat, writes Quick: “A member of the St. Louis sports authority said the city has no interest in the Trail Blazers, and the appetite among citizens to build an arena is at an all-time low. Same thing for Raleigh, N.C., where Dundon’s Carolina Hurricanes play. And Nashville is not currently interested in taking on an NBA team and too close to another NBA market. City officials from Kansas City and Austin didn’t return calls. So I’m not sure where Dundon could take his circus next.”
  • Los Angeles Rams and Angels owner Stan Kroenke won a get-out-of-environmental-oversight-free card from the California state legislature for a planned San Diego arena project; the San Diego city council still need to approve the deal.
  • Here’s a rundown of the $5 million in campaign donations made by donors with ties to the Tampa Bay Rays this election cycle, including up to $25,000 apiece to Hillsborough County commissioners who voted for the team’s $2 billion stadium subsidy, and $48,000 to a commissioner who voted against it, more evidence that campaign donations don’t buy votes so much as they buy access.
  • Meanwhile, for anyone wondering how the Rays owners landed on Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry campus as the site of their new stadium, turns out it was local copier company CEO Dan Doyle Jr. who spotted it on an aerial map while visiting a local developer’s office: “I told them, ‘Let’s get in the car,’ and we all drove there. I said, ‘Guys, this is your site.’ And they loved it.” Nobody even needed to get in a helicopter!
  • Adding a roof to D.C. United‘s stadium would allow it to host an additional 65 events annually, according to a consulting report by CSL, LOL.
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D.C. to spend $410m on Nats stadium upgrades because “teams rely on happy players”

access_time personNeil deMause

The Washington Nationals‘ stadium won’t even turn 19 years old until next spring, but the D.C. city council already approved spending tax money two years ago for renovations, including such important upgrades as “wrapping the exterior of the parking in a more visually appealing material.” And we’re now finding out how much it will cost Washingtonians to have prettier parking garages, and that figure is $410 million:

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s bill to fund the renovations was formally filed Thursday. It would authorize the issuance of up to $410 million in bonds — but not any more than is needed to generate $380 million in net proceeds….

It is unclear how much the Nationals would contribute to the renovation.

Sports Business Journal doesn’t have much more in the way of details on what all this will pay for, though it does mention making “the concourses of the stadium feel wider” and upgrading player areas because “all teams rely on happy players,” according to deputy mayor for planning and economic development Nina Albert.

As discussed back in 2024 when the price tag was only “at least $200 million,” this is money coming from the same taxes that paid for building the stadium in the first place, which would soon have started flowing into D.C.’s general fund if not for legislation two years ago that instead diverted it to a Ballpark Preservation and Improvement Fund. That fund is expected to have $380 million in it by 2030, so Mayor Muriel Bowser introduced legislation last week to sell bonds on that future revenue, in order to “transform the stadium into a vibrant, state-of-the-art venue that competes with newer facilities.” Nationals owners the Lerner family reportedly already extended their lease through “the 2058-59 season” as part of the ballpark fund deal, which raises questions about whether somebody thinks baseball will be played in the winter by then, possibly because D.C. summers will be too damn hot to go outside in.

The Nationals money is part of a spree of district spending on sports facilities, coming on top of $515 million in upgrade cash for the Wizards and Capitals arena and $6.6 billion for a new Washington Commanders stadium. (That Commanders number should probably now be $6.9 billion, as the council just added $305 million in subway and bus upgrades for the stadium; while those are transit upgrades that anyone will be able to use, they’re also upgrades that will mostly benefit the Commanders, so it’s probably fair to count them as a Commanders subsidy, stadium math is hard!) Bowser has so far opposed spending $300 million on upgrades to D.C. United‘s eight-year-old stadium, but the council will still be discussing that plan later this month. At least at that point D.C. will be out of stadiums to upgrade, at least until the Commanders’ stadium turns eight in 2038, if there’s a risk of any players being unhappy because the parking garages aren’t visually appealing enough.

Programming note: I’ll be traveling through October 19, so expect posts here to be a bit more sporadic than usual and possibly at odd times of day. There may or may not be a Friday roundup this week, or maybe it’ll be a Saturday roundup, consider it a fun surprise!

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New clown document claims Royals stadium will generate $1.4B in vapordollars

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City released a consulting report it commissioned on a new Royals stadium yesterday, with the intent of showing how it will pay off about $1.4 billion in taxpayer costs while team owner John Sherman is on the hook for less than $600 million. Let’s see how it compares to the typical clown documents:

Questionable authorship? The report is unsigned, so we don’t know exactly who at Chicago-based real estate consultants Hunden Partners actually wrote it. But company president Rob Hunden is a former real estate exec with a bachelor’s degree in finance and music while executive vice-president of consulting Bethanie DeRose has a bachelor’s in media studies and political science, so there doesn’t look to be a lot of economics firepower behind it. Hunden also boasts that he worked in the Indianapolis mayor’s office from 1996 to 1998, which may not be as much as a flex as he thinks given that this was the heyday of Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who never met a sports giveaway he didn’t like.

Opaque methodology? Most of the numbers are cited only to “Source: Hunden Partners,” which is not the footnoting style they should be teaching in finance and music school.

Fancy charts with big bold-faced numbers that don’t mean much? Absolutely. The key slide is this, which shows Hunden’s calculations of how much more money will be spent in the five-square-mile stadium district where sales, income, and hotel taxes will be siphoned off to pay for city stadium costs:

This projects that the “impact area” of the stadium will see an increase of sales of $880 million over 30 years, if you believe the big number at left, or an $80 million increase in its first year scaling up to $590 million in year 30 — and okay, those numbers can’t both be right, since the latter would add up to way more than $880 million over 30 years, even discounted for present value.

Not that it really matters, though, because Hunden appears to have only looked at impact on sales in the stadium district, not impact on sales in the city as a whole — so moving spending from in and around the Royals’ current stadium to a new one across town is counted as a net plus, even if it’s the same people spending the same money in a different part of the city.

Then there’s the following slide:

So $880 million in new spending around the stadium is somehow going to result in $687 million in new tax revenues for the city. That still isn’t enough to get to $1.4 billion, but don’t worry, there will also be another $462 million in tax money from “stadium” (?) and $120 million in restaurant taxes (separate from the restaurant taxes from the impact district?) and other stuff, according to [no source given, not even “Hunden Partners” this time].

Vaportecture with fireworks? Check:

The more I stare at this stuff, the less sense it makes. But then, I don’t have an economics or even a music degree, let’s see what a professional makes of it:

The Kansas City Star, to its credit, contacted University of Colorado-Denver sports economist Geoffrey Propheter, citing him as “skeptical” and “cast[ing] doubt on the district looping in businesses that could be miles away from the stadium and calls for incentives that align more closely with the footprint of the stadium itself.” According to Propheter, though, this isn’t quite what he said:

In short: There may be some actual information somewhere in this consulting report by underqualified professional sports hype masters, but we’d need a lot more background information, and probably some extreme rose-colored glasses, to see it. It all resulted in headlines saying “$1.4B in revenue,” though, so mission accomplished! Bats are giant bugs, film at 11.

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New Seahawks owner says “never say never” on moving team, blames media for accurately reporting what he said

access_time personNeil deMause

Vinod Khosla, who bought the Seattle Seahawks for $9.6 billion last month, was asked by Axios last week if he would “formally commit” to “keeping the team in Seattle long-term,” and while there were lots of fan brownie points to be earned by saying “yes” or at least “that’s our plan,” the venture capitalist billionaire decided to go in a different direction:

“I will never say never. Will this team be in Seattle 500 years from now? But I have no current plans to change anything about the team, including the coach, president, operation or Lumen Field. It all functions well.”

This went over poorly, especially since Khosla is a former minority owner of the San Francisco 49ers and had mentioned in an introductory press conference that he’s a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, after which Khosla griped on X that “reporters will make every molehill into a mountain just to get column inches to write or video minutes.” And Khosla went back on social media to try to put out the fire over his “never say never” remark:

To all @Seahawks fans and @12s, we have no plans to move the team, have never discussed it, haven’t even thought about it. End of story. I’ve said repeatedly we have no plans to change anything. Feel sad for the reporters looking for views and clicks who distort my answer out of context and sent an entire city into a spiral for no reason.

As discussed here last week regarding the Portland Trail Blazers, it’s a tricky balancing act to both declare your love for a city and hold out the threat of leaving if you don’t get what you want, and Khosla is clearly still learning the ropes. (Blaming the media isn’t going to win him any friends there, either, something he’s going to need going forward.) Seattle sports fans don’t sound remotely placated, so clearly this isn’t end of story for them.

As for why Khosla feels the need to hold the move threat stick in reserve, the Seahawks’ lease expires in 2032, and while he has extension options all the way to 2062, he’s presumably at least thinking about what he can demand in exchange for not threatening to leave town six years hence. Any demand for upgrade money from the city of Seattle will be complicated by Initiative 91, passed way back in 2006, which requires the city to get a positive return on investment for any sports subsidies — the way the initiative is written, it doesn’t actually prohibit giveaways to local sports owners, but it does set expectations for how any sports funding will be conducted. Khosla may be thinking about asking for state or county money instead; or he may not be thinking at all, and just needs a new PR handler.

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Bears reportedly seeking $1.5B+ in tax money from Illinois

access_time personNeil deMause

Crain’s Chicago Business has some (rumored) details of what NFL and Bears execs talked with Illinois officials about last week, and it’s a new way to give the team a heaping helping of tax breaks:

The Chicago Bears’ potential path to building a new stadium in Arlington Heights is veering toward a model that would leave ownership of the venue to a new public authority rather than the team itself.

The approach — which cleared the Illinois Senate in May but never reached the House — has emerged as a focus of recent discussions among the Bears and state officials, sources familiar with the talks said.

Public ownership of sports stadiums, as a reminder, isn’t generally like public ownership of other things: The team still controls all the actual stadium revenues, while a public authority just holds the deed. This takes the stadium off the property tax rolls; the team could make payments in lieu of taxes or pay rent instead, but neither of those sounds like they’re on the table here. The Bears owners have long been angling for a reduction in taxes as part of a stadium deal in Arlington Heights, but that’s faced legislative pushback, so instead they’re pivoting to this — it’s not clear why Illinois elected officials would be happier about having the Bears pay no property taxes instead of reduced property taxes, but legislators gonna legislate.

The previous best estimate of the cost to taxpayers of a property tax discount was $700 million; zeroing out property taxes entirely could raise the price to somewhat higher than that, though probably not all that much higher. But that’s not all Bears owner George McCaskey would get under the plan that passed the Senate in May:

The Senate bill as passed by the chamber also included the ability for a municipality to create Sales Tax & Revenue, or STAR, bond districts that would dedicate state and local sales taxes to back bonds supporting infrastructure projects. The team estimated last year its stadium-anchored entertainment district on the 326-acre Arlington Park site would require $855 million in new publicly-funded infrastructure.

How much sales tax money a STAR district would siphon off depends on the size of the STAR district, which as we’ve seen in Kansas can be as big as anyone wants it to be, so $855 million is a reasonable enough target cost. That would put the total cost of a Bears stadium to Illinois taxpayers at more than $1.5 billion, which is, as they say, starting to be real money.

None of this necessarily means that the Bears owners will necessarily give up on an Indiana move if Illinois coughs up tax subsidies — or, for that matter, that the Bears definitely will move to Indiana if Illinois doesn’t. If Crain’s unnamed sources are to be believed, though, it’s going to be on the table during a brief legislative session in November and December; hopefully local reporters will uncover more official details before then.

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Friday roundup: Goodell meets with IL leaders on Bears, KC okays public vote it says won’t apply to Royals

access_time personNeil deMause

Slow news week, busy Friday roundup, as the saying goes. (I didn’t say it was an old saying.)

  • Roger Goodell and a Chicago Bears minority owner met this week with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative officials, and if you want to take that as a sign that the league and team want a better option than moving to Indiana, go for it. If you want to take it as a sign that they’re trying to create leverage on Indiana counties to approve all the requested tax subsidies, that works too. Could be both! It’s always important to have a backup plan.
  • The Kansas City council has scheduled an April ballot measure on whether future sports stadiums and arena funding will subsequently require ballot measures, prompting an immediate debate on what “future” and “subsequently” will mean for the Royals stadium plans. Missouri Workers Power says a yes vote would apply to a Royals project, Mayor Quinton Lucas says nuh-uh, this seems destined to be resolved by the robot lawyers.
  • Buffalo Bills execs say they’re listening to fan complaints about obstructed views and not being allowed to bring in water bottles to refill at their new taxpayer-funded stadium. “We anticipated it would be a bit of a learning process,” said Bills president of business operations Pete Guelli, who never could have expected fans would want to see the game or drink water, these kids today are so coddled.
  • Athletics owner John Fisher still hasn’t tapped the $380 million in state money he’s been promised for a Las Vegas stadium, after spending $700 million of his own money and money borrowed from Goldman Sachs and with $1.4 billion still to go. Why? Fisher hasn’t said, but it doesn’t really matter whose dollars get spent first, unless bond rates keep soaring and Nevada ends up having to finance the more expensive part of the stadium debt, that’d be bad.
  • MLB is looking at building a temporary stadium in a national park oh never mind they’re not now.
  • Sedgwick County, Kansas has run out of sales tax surcharge money to pay for upkeep of Wichita’s arena, leading local officials to try to find other money to avoid dipping into property tax revenues that would otherwise go to the general fund. (The county does collect some arena profits and naming rights money, but not enough to cover maintenance costs.) And since any money that the county spends on the arena is money that could have gone into the general fund, the current plan appears to be hitting up the city for the cash, on the grounds that the county “built the arena as a favor to Wichita,” sure, sure.
  • “Cities keep shelling out taxpayer money for sports stadiums, yet the economics almost never makes sense.” Accurate! Most of the Conversation essay by University of Tampa economic professors Abigail Hall and Aaron D. Wood will be familiar to regular readers of this site, but it’s worth bookmarking, if only for all the useful links to studies it contains on everything from how little positive economic impact sports venues have to how most sports spending is by local residents who would spend that money elsewhere nearby anyway.
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Blazers exec declares Dundon “committed to Portland” but won’t commit to accepting arena deal

access_time personNeil deMause

There are, when it comes down to it, really only two ways to conduct a campaign for public money for a sports facility: good cop, and bad cop. You can work to field a winning team, and then argue that it deserves a stadium to match; or you can field a terrible one, and warn that it will never be any good without a new home. At the same time, you can play up the possibility of a team relocation as a carrot or a stick: that a new building is the best way to ensure the long-term future that everyone wants, or that if taxpayers don’t cough one up, you won’t hesitate to hit the road.

In general, the whole catching flies with honey vs. vinegar dichotomy applies well here: It’s harder to get the attention of the public or legislators if no one cares about your team and/or they’re busy burning you in effigy. But where it gets tricky is when you have an offer on the table, but you want a richer offer. That’s what’s going on in Portland, where Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon won a promise of a $600 million check from the city, county, and state, but only if he agrees to pay about $110 million worth of rent and payments in lieu of property taxes. How to say “Thank you for the lovely gift, but fuck off if you want me to pay anything at all” without sounding like, you know, a dick?

Here’s how one Blazers exec attempted to thread that needle on Monday:

“We’re committed to a deal that works for our ownership,” President of Business Operations Dewayne Hankins told reporters Monday during the team’s preseason media day at the Moda Center. “We’re committed to a deal that works for our public partners. We’re doing everything we can to ensure that the Trail Blazers stay right here.”…

Hankins assured reporters the team is “committed to Portland” but didn’t offer specific details about where Moda Center discussions stand, even when asked about sticking points from earlier in the summer.

The only way the Trail Blazers wouldn’t “stay right here” is if Dundon chose to move them elsewhere, so this is more than a little like a protection racket enforcer insisting he’s “doing everything I can” not to break your kneecaps. Dundon previously said that the only deal that works for him is one where he pays nothing (or less), so Hankins’ statement doesn’t indicate much more than a willingness to continue talking, and presumably a continuing unwillingness to give in even a smidge on the owner’s demands.

This is a honey-forward statement — the resulting Oregon Public Broadcasting headline stated “Trail Blazers executive emphasizes commitment to Portland” — but with just enough vinegar to try to keep city councilmemmbers scared. The problem he faces is that there’s no real reason for the Portland city council to cave here: If Dundon doesn’t sign a deal by the end of the year, his whole $600 million evaporates and he has to start again from scratch. It’s a game of chicken, in other words, and if chicken goes better with honey and carrots than … you know what, I’ll see myself out.

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Royals mega-TIF district to divert taxes from much of downtown KC to pay for stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City has revealed the dimensions of the mega-TIF district where all increases in sales and income tax receipts, and half of all increases in hotel tax receipts, would be siphoned off and given to Royals owner John Sherman to pay off a new stadium, and it looks like this:

The city didn’t provide an exact size for the district, but it looks to be a little over five square miles of downtown Kansas City. That means that, as the Kansas City Business Journal puts it, redirected taxes could “range from utilities selling power to new East Side homes to customers buying tacos along Southwest Boulevard, a roughly two-mile drive from the Royals’ site.”

On the face of it, that’s not as egregious as the Chiefs‘ plan to grab sales taxes from a 293-square-mile swath of northeast Kansas — though given that downtown K.C. is a lot more thickly settled than Wyandotte County, it could be close. The tax district is expected to generate $710 million in funds — over what time period hasn’t been reported — to help pay off $560 million in city stadium bonds, up from $510 million previously because reasons.

That’s a lot of tax revenue to give to the team, so how did Sherman and Mayor Quinton Lucas’ office justify it? By rebranding the TIF district as a “stadium impact area,” in the hopes that people will focus less on handing over sales taxes collected far from a new Royals stadium and more on how a Royals stadium will (somehow) create new economic impact miles away. That’s pretty bald-faced, and even K.C.’s legendarily credulous local news media couldn’t possibly—

Restaurants like Brick House and Martin City Pizza’s Crossroads location fall within the draft boundaries, and both said they are ready for the boost.

Deep, soul-rattling existential sigh. Much of my gripes on Friday about the glacially slow pace of change in the world of sports grifting were more musings from fatigue than anything — I didn’t really expect one book, or even many, to turn around a public policy that is creating so much in profits for such powerful people, like Silent Spring or something — but if journalists reporting on it could be just slightly less gullible, that’d be a nice start.

 

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Friday roundup: Rays stadium sticks Tampa students in trailers, Wyden wants Blazers owner to accept arena money or else

access_time personNeil deMause

After a summer where the owners of the Kansas City Royals and Tampa Bay Rays each landed, in quick succession, about $2 billion apiece in public stadium funding despite widespread public opposition, I’ve been thinking even more than usual about what this site is hoping to accomplish. To report on and analyze sports subsidy shenanigans, obviously, but to what end? Over the years, the implicit objective has gradually shifted from “expose the scam so that people are empowered to stop it” to “inform people so that if ever there comes an opportunity to make change, they can take action” to “reassure people boggling that this is still going on that we’re not crazy.” And while the earlier goals are still around at least aspirationally, it’s becoming pretty obvious that, as the old Straight Dope tagline had it, this is going to take longer than we thought.

When Joanna Cagan and I set out in late 1995 to research the first article that ultimately became Field of Schemes, I could not have conceived that I would still be writing about sports subsidies 31 years later; I couldn’t have conceived that the public-money-for-private-stadium-profits game would still remain largely unchanged 31 years later. It still needs writing about — now more than ever, probably — but any hopes that calling out the emperor’s new clothes would result in prompt reforms are fading just a bit. Maybe the publication of J.C. Bradbury’s This One Will Be Different next month will be what it finally takes to shift the balance; probably not, given [waves generally at all of history], but sometimes things do get better, even if seemingly not lately.

Where am I going with all this? Venting, mostly: Continuing to do the same thing and hoping for better results may not always be crazy, but beating your head against the same wall does lose some of its charm after a while. But also thanks to those of you who continue to read and support this site, and to debate where all this is going and what it means for both sports and society in general. Hopefully someone somewhere is learning something useful enough to make a difference eventually, even if progress seems elusive much of the time.

Or maybe it’ll just let us laugh to keep from crying until the idiot robots kill us all. Either works!

  • Hillsborough College students are just now finding out they’re going to have to start holding classes in temporary trailers so the Tampa Bay Rays can demolish much of their campus for a stadium, and they are not pleased. “It’s kind of strange that we got to be in a trailer for classes,” said one student who claimed not to have received any word from the community college about the plan. “I’d say that’s definitely not really ideal for college students paying a lot of money to come to college.”
  • U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden is reportedly threatening to get Congress to consider rescinding federal tax-exempt bonds for sports projects unless NBA owners talk Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon into sitting down by the end of the year to negotiate how many hundreds of millions of dollars in public money he’ll accept for arena renovations. Given that Wyden is supposed to be acting on behalf of the American people at large and using tax-exempt bonds for sports venues is of zero benefit to the nation as a whole, if he has the power to get rid of them, he probably should just do it; if he just wants to get to keep meeting former Blazers players courtside, though, you do you, Ron.
  • What the headline says: “Chiefs’ stadium move already showing impact on real estate in Wyandotte County.” What the article says: One local real estate agent says one (unnamed) client got an offer on a property (unspecified) he’d been trying to sell for years after the Kansas City Chiefs stadium was announced. Surely a commercial realtor would have no reason to try to goose the market by inventing fake anecdotes, so I guess we’re all fact-checked here!
  • The Kansas City council is fine with holding a public vote in April on the Royals stadium funding plan, so long as it doesn’t actually affect anything. Construction is slated to have already begun by then, but ballot measure sponsor Missouri Workers Power says the vote could impact further city actions needed for the project.
  • I don’t know if “Ohio Democratic state minority tells the Republican gubernatorial candidate to fund his ineffective and regressive gas tax holiday scheme by using the money that would otherwise go to a Cleveland Browns stadium” is serious or a troll, but even if it’s the latter it’s a pretty funny one.
  • Jacksonville Armada F.C., a former NASL minor-league soccer franchise that’s been “on hiatus” since 2018 but is supposed to join the MLS Next Pro minor league next year, has failed to build a new stadium (likely having something to do with the previous clause in this sentence) on land it got from Jacksonville for $1, and now the city would like to be paid for the land, please. This is a pretty minimal ask — the land is likely valued at less than $1 million — but if this is a week for appreciating baby steps, at least it’s something.
  • The public park built next to the new Yankee Stadium to make up for the new Yankee Stadium being built atop a public park is falling apart, and it’s up to the city to find $54 million to fix it. “Everyone was excited about a new additional park in the community but no one thought about how expensive it is to have and maintain,” remarked city councilmember Althea Stevens, who may not be remembering quite right.
  • Las Vegas could build yet another arena for an NBA expansion team, because the umpteen it already has aren’t shiny enough.
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T-Wolves exec, Minneapolis mayor float using public money to replace one downtown arena with another

access_time personNeil deMause

Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez have been muttering since buying the teams in 2021 about wanting a new arena, and team officials just started muttering louder and indicating whether they’ll be seeking public money, three guesses what the answer is:

CEO Matt Caldwell did not promise to keep the venue in downtown Minneapolis and implied the project would seek some form of public assistance — a subtle but notable shift from previous statements that ownership was prepared to privately finance a development…

“There will be a lot of money invested in it from the ownership, for sure,” Caldwell said…

[Mayor Jacob Frey] suggested the city will have a role supporting development around a new venue, evoking visions of restaurants, retail and housing catalyzing an adjacent part of the urban core.

“We’re not just talking about an arena,” Frey said. “This is a massive opportunity to shift how downtown functions.”

The current Wolves arena is only two blocks from the struggling Nicollet Mall that has been floated as a new arena site, but sure, maybe a new arena will cause restaurants, retail, and housing to spring up because this one will be different. (Studies have found “no evidence of any effect, positive or negative, of new sports facilities on new businesses around these facilities,” but there’s a first time for everything, right?)

Frey’s office had said last year that the mayor held that “any new arena for the Timberwolves must be built without relying on taxpayer dollars,” and Lore and Rodriguez said at the time that they were ready to fund an arena privately, but as we’ve seen time and again, promising to pay for construction of a stadium or arena almost never means promising to do so without asking for any tax breaks, or free land, or infrastructure money, or something else on the public tab. The teams’ lease on the arena — which was just renovated with the help of $74 million in city money in 2017 — doesn’t expire until 2035, but Lore and A-Rod can buy their way out for just $50 million, so this issue could easily start to heat up sooner than later.

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