Albuquerque voters go to the polls four weeks from tomorrow to decide on whether to issue $50 million worth of public bonds for a new New Mexico United USL stadium, and there’s lots of coverage attempting to blind-men-and-the-elephant the story:
- United owner Peter Trevisani said the soccer stadium plan really isn’t about a soccer stadium at all, the Albuquerque Journal reports, but rather “an aspirational project that really can change so many things,” adding that “coming together in this facility is a major step in ensuring that New Mexico United and so many other things yet to come are going to be here in the future.” There are some quotes from stadium subsidy critics (okay, it’s me) that the stadium plan is “basically rolling the dice on a stadium that’s much bigger and more expensive than the USL really can justify. And figuring, ‘Well, if it works out, great. And if it doesn’t work out, we’re not the ones paying for it.’” But Trevisani retorts that his proposal is “a 180” from other cities’ situations, because “the city owns the stadium. New Mexico United is paying rent, sharing some other revenue streams, and I think, more importantly, guaranteeing $10 million to the project before shovel goes into dirt. That’s hard to find across the country.” The city owning the stadium, the team owner putting up less than 15% of the upfront cost plus about 17% more from rent and revenue sharing, and the public being on the hook for the other 68% — let’s make this a fun scavenger hunt for FoS readers to see if you can find anything similar across the country! To make it an extra challenge, try it while blindfolded!
- New Mexico In Depth talked to some actual sports economists about the potential economic impact of spending public money on a New Mexico United stadium, and got the usual litany of “don’t hold your breath”: Michael Leeds of Temple University said, “The consensus is that any impact of a sports franchise tends to be very, very small in terms of dollars and cents”; Victor Matheson of College of the Holy Cross said a stadium is “not something that’s likely to really be a local neighborhood driver because, again, who’s going to start a sports bar that you can use 25 games a year”; and Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First (not an economist by trade, but has studied this stuff as much as anyone) said there’s little net gain from increased soccer spending because “if people go to the soccer games more, they’ll be going to the movie theater less.”
- A poll of 793 likely voters by The Paper finds that 59% are opposed to the stadium bonds, with just 23% in support. This is very different from the 50-38% support a United stadium had in a 2019 poll, so either Albuquerquians changed their mind once they heard the $50 million public price tag, they changed their mind once Covid hit and made them prioritize other priorities, or it’s just an artifact of two different phrasings of the question.
- Some opponents of the stadium funding has started going door-to-door urging people to vote no; “Until everyone in New Mexico has a house, food, healthcare, education, and transportation guaranteed, then we don’t need a stadium,” Bex Hampton, one of the campaigners, told KRQE-TV.
If history is any guide, the outcome of the vote is likely to come down to how much Trevisani is willing to spend on a stadium campaign: It’s been a while since I’ve updated the numbers, but traditionally there’s been a 100-to-1 rule that states that if a team owner outspends opponents by 100-to-1, the ballot measure usually passes, and if they don’t, it usually fails. Whether you believe that Paper poll or not, it’s a fair bet that Trevisani won’t want to leave anything to chance — though given that he’s a mere millionaire and not a billionaire, the usual calculus of “let me spend a few million dollars in order to secure subsidies of many times that” may not apply.