Two Commanders stadium bills approved, could differ by hundreds of millions in level of tax kickbacks

Quick update on the Washington Commanders stadium funding bill that passed the Virginia legislature this week: There are actually two separate bills, one approved 62-37 by the House of Delegates on Monday, and one approved 32-8 by the state Senate last night. And they differ significantly in where they would come up with $1 billion in cash for the project:

• The senate bill, as discussed yesterday, would create a mega-TIF to kick back both state sales taxes and team income taxes on the stadium “campus” to create a massive pool of funds for construction. Senate sponsor RIchard Saslaw estimates (based on what it’s not clear, since no one knows yet what this project would look like) that this would create a revenue stream of $153 million a year in annual tax revenue, of which $34 million a year would go toward bond repayment, which isn’t nearly enough to pay off a 30-year $1 billion bond, but hey, it’s what he said, man.
• The house bill would still kick back all sales taxes at the stadium and “on the campus,” but for the rest of the money would rely on the Commanders providing “at least 50 percent of any naming rights revenues” to the stadium authority, unless such time as the bonds are paid off.

While there are no actual numbers in either bill, that’s a huge difference: Where the senate version would provide all $1 billion in tax money and let team owner Daniel Snyder keep all of the naming-rights money, the house bill would demand a slice of the latter to pay off the public’s cost. How much money that would amount to is impossible to say without more details — and it’s possible to imagine the Commanders taking advantage of many loopholes, from signing a naming-rights deal and saying “Oh, all that money is really for the advertising sign they put up in the end zone, we gave them the stadium name for free” to signing a deal where naming-rights checks don’t start to flow until after the stadium bonds are paid off. But at least it’s something, which is better than the senate bill, whose sponsor promises it wouldn’t cost the state “a nickel” while simultaneously creating a firehose of state tax money to direct into Snyder’s pocket.

Both houses of the Virginia legislature must now vote on the opposite chambers’ bills, and if both pass, then the two will go to a conference committee to reconcile which funding mechanism to use. It’s entirely possible that the naming-rights money will be stripped from the final bill, but it’s also possible that it won’t be — for a provision that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to taxpayers, you’d want this to be debated in public for all to witness, but you don’t always get the kind of democracy you want.