Looks like there’s gonna be a gumfight! With the state of Virginia authorizing $1 billion in bonding capacity for a new Washington Commanders stadium — even if no one quite knows where the stadium would go or what it would look like or how the bonds would be paid off — Maryland lawmakers are getting into the let’s-throw-money-at-suspected-serial-harasser-billionaires game, proposing “hundreds of millions of dollars” in state subsidies for a stadium development, though not, they said choosing their words carefully, for a stadium per se:
The proposal would borrow a huge sum to publicly finance development around the FedEx Field site, where the football team and owner Daniel Snyder already owns more than 200 acres in addition to the stadium itself…
Maryland’s proposal would help build out the team’s vision of a sports-entertainment destination, but not construct the stadium itself. The state would invest in the neighborhood, building transit, roads, bike lanes and other potentially costly amenities surrounding a new stadium built by the team, said the people familiar with the deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a proposal that is not public.
“We aren’t building anyone a stadium,” said Del. Jazz Lewis (D-Prince George’s), who represents the neighborhoods around FedEx Field. “But we can build in and around the neighborhood.”
This is, needless to say, the Oakland A’s/New York Yankees model of stadium subsidies: Heaven forfend we ask anyone to build us a stadium, we just would like a billion dollars or so to improve transportation infrastructure or tear down and replace a couple of parks and build garages or something. This clearly plays better in the public eye — “has better optics,” as the kids today say — than demanding that public money go toward a stadium construction budget, but of course it’s all the same to a team owner like Dan Snyder: Once he gets his billion-dollar check, it doesn’t matter at all to his bottom line whether it goes to pay off the “build stadium” budget line or the “build other crap” one.
The Washington Post’s report, citing “three people familiar with the process,” didn’t provide any details of how many hundreds of millions of dollars in public cash would be provided, of what it would be spent on, or even of who’s behind this idea, though Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s staff is reportedly “involved” and state delegates Jazz Lewis and Ben Barnes are both quoted as supporting some kind of everything-but-the-stadium subsidy plan. However it plays out, though, this now has all the makings of a bidding war, which is exactly what you want if, like Snyder, you’re the owner of the asset being bid on, and exactly what you don’t want if you’re the resident of a state about to hand over your tax money to a wildly profitable company to lure them to locate nearby for the next 20 years or so — though incentives for politicians may differ.
Bike lanes!
Gotta love GOP administrations and their belief of the free market.