The Knoxville city council yesterday followed their kin on the Knox County Council in approving $65 million in public bonds for a new downtown Tennessee Smokies stadium, the bulk of which will be repaid by future city and county tax money. The city council vote wasn’t unanimous like the county vote — the final tally was 5-1, with two abstentions — but the measure still passed.
And that, pretty much, is that. This was the last vote by an elected body on the stadium project, as everything from here on will be negotiated between Smokies owner Randy Boyd and the freshly created public sports authority, which is run by a bunch of developers and financiers and the “longtime President of the Knoxville Quarterback Club,” so you know you can totally trust them to look out for the public purse. Boyd is already talking about starting construction in time to have the new stadium open by spring 2024, so barring celestial intervention, it looks like Knoxville just won itself one of the priciest Double-A stadiums in history.
How pricey for taxpayers, exactly, will depend on a bunch of things: I already did a long writeup on the financial numbers in September, so go read that, or settle for the tl;dr version of “not the whole $74.5 million stadium cost, but a hell of a lot more than nothing.” If the key implement in the 21st-century stadium-subsidy-grubbers’ toolbox is impenetrable complexity, Boyd has produced a masterpiece, featuring rent payments and “payments in lieu of taxes” and future sales taxes that may or may not come in and/or cannibalize existing tax revenues, and have your eyes glazed over yet?
And that’s not including one piece still to be voted on by the city and county, which is additional subsidies for the development around the stadium, because what self-respecting wealthy former gubernatorial candidate would build a whole stadium district without, ahem, “incentives” for every piece of it? Given that tax receipts from the rest of the development are supposed to help pay off the stadium bonds, one would think that the council might have wanted to ensure that the whole package was approved at once rather than letting Boyd piecemeal his way to more and more tax kickbacks — but, you know, surprises can be fun, too! Tune back in in a decade or so, when maybe we’ll have a final public cost, or maybe just Boyd demanding more subsidies for a stadium upgrade to keep MLB from vaporizing his team once his ten-year licensing agreement expires in 2031. (Oops, sorry, spoilers!)