Before we get to our regularly scheduled weekly news roundup, this one demands its own item: The city of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, and state of Ohio have agreed to spend $285 million on upgrades to the Indians (soon to be the Guardians) stadium in exchange for the team owner Paul Dolan signing a 15-year lease extension. The money, plus $150 million from Dolan, would go toward “fan-oriented improvements” to the stadium, which was built in 1994 at an official public cost of $84 million — though Judith Grant Long’s calculations have it at $359 million once you include things like land acquisition and forgone property taxes on land that though used exclusively by the private ballclub sits on the county’s books — and another $57 million for renovations just five years ago.
According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “all public funding would come from existing revenue sources.” This presumably means an extension of the cigarette and alcohol “sin taxes” that funded the stadium in the first place, as has been previously floated, but it’s hard to say for sure until the actual agreement is released.
The PD reports that elected officials say this all would be a good deal, because “the ballpark is projected to generate $3.22 billion in visitor spending over the next 15 years, and $21 million annually in state and local taxes.” That’s almost certainly overstated, as most sports economic impact projections are — even if the Guardians draw 2 million fans a year, which would be significantly more than they are now, that would still require $107 in spending per fan per game — and also assumes that without the subsidy the team would not only leave but take all its fans’ spending with it, which ignores the fact that when there’s no baseball, people spend on other things.
About that implied move threat, though: Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish managed to simultaneously claim that Dolan would have taken his team and left Cleveland without the subsidy deal, and also that Dolan threatened to do nothing of the sort.
“Despite our size, we are a Major League community and we want to keep it that way,” Budish said. “We had three choices: renovate the stadium, build a new one, or risk losing the team. To their credit, the Indians never threatened to sell or move, but we understand the realities of the business of professional sports, and we couldn’t take the risk of losing the team.”
Dolan, for his part, said that “our organization is proud to continue our long-term commitment to Cleveland by ensuring we keep our ballpark competitive,” which is decidedly a non-threat threat.
Though the PD headlined this story “Cleveland Indians strike $435 million public-private deal for Progressive Field renovation, 15-year lease extension,” the agreement is just with the mayor, county executive, and governor; it still requires approval from the city and county councils. (Published reports are silent on whether it would require a vote from the state legislature, where Paul Dolan’s brother and co-owner Matt is chair of the finance committee.)
The deal would include two city/county options for five-year extensions, so it could be considered a 25-year extension, though again, without seeing the actual language it’s impossible to know what the conditions would be for that. (Would the public have to cough up more renovation money then?) Assuming a 15-year extension, and $285 million in costs, that’d pay the team owners exactly $19 million a year to stick around until at least 2036. This pay-to-play model has become increasingly popular over the years, but Dolan’s deal would be the second-highest per-year cost of all time, ahead of the Carolina Panthers‘ $14.6 million a year but still behind Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon’s deal to get $600 million in exchange for a 25-year lease extension, which still boggles the mind.
As for what the Dolans plan to do with their newfound boodle, of course there are renderings:
So that’s, um, some kind of mall/club extension onto the left field grandstand, plus redoing the upper deck so that fans can watch the game while strolling hand-in-hand on the concessions concourse carrying glass beer bottles. This should work great so long as 95% of the fans stay in their seats instead of clogging the concessions concourse so that no one can see anything, but maybe the Dolans are assuming that future coronavirus variants will require strict social distancing in concessions areas but not outside?
More on this to come, certainly. Between this and last weekend’s Buffalo Bills proposal, it certainly doesn’t seem like sports stadium subsidy demands are slowing down any in the post-pandemic era, or the mid-pandemic era, or whatever we turn out to be in. I didn’t think I was signing up to spend the entire rest of my life explaining the stadium subsidy game, but as the saying goes, it’s taking longer than we thought.
At age 18, I bet you didn’t think you’d being writing about this schadenfreude. For the last 25 years. Everyday, rinse and repeat. Your “Non Move Threat” article from February 17, 2011 reads just a fresh today, as it did back then (did they have PC’s in the late 90’s when Joanna Cagan and you wrote FoS. Or did you use “type-o-writers.” Like on display in publicly subsidized museums). Bet you sit with your morning coffee at the kitchen table reading articles by Maggie Haberman, thinking “where did I go wrong?” I had dreams of being a NY Times columnist.
Weird, pointless comment above. Thanks so much for your work on ths site.
As a taxpaying Ohioan living three counties away from Cuyahoga county, I can now sleep soundly knowing we will still have a Major League Community in northeast Ohio for the foreseeable future.
The last time I watched the tribe on TV, before I canceled my cable, they had nothing but cardboard cutouts in their stadium! In this era of endless Covidstan lockdowns, what do they need millions of dollars of renovations for? Luxury boxes for VIP cutouts?
Or are they going to upgrade to three dimensional mannequins?
Maybe this is finally it… maybe they need the money to produce the long awaited holographic displays… only the holographs won’t be used for replays, they’ll be images of (computer generated and not actually existing) fans.
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/