Maryland says no “bidding war” for Commanders while offering to build team a “stadium district”

Something weird is going on with Maryland’s end of the nascent bidding war to build a stadium for the Washington Commanders:

• On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that the Commanders’ stadium campaign had “hit more roadblocks over financing and concern about widespread sexual harassment allegations involving the organization,” with Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan saying team owner Daniel Snyder was “using everyone back and forth as they have been for eight years” and adding: “We’re not going to get into a bidding war over them. … If Virginia wants to do that, and they want to go to Virginia, I would say, ‘Good luck.’ ”
• On Wednesday, two of the same Post reporters revealed that Maryland and Prince George’s County officials have “proposed far more than economic incentives or a publicly financed stadium,” sending an 89-page proposal to Snyder last May that included a new 65,000-seat roofed stadium next to the team’s current home, plus an adjoining “stadium district” that would include a hotel, a convention center, retail, housing, and all the other usual stuff that stadium districts promise. If there were any cost or public subsidy figures in the plan, the Post didn’t mention them.
• Maryland Del. Jazz Lewis told the Washington Times he thinks Prince George’s County is “still in the game,” because [Washington Times article too short, no room for followup questions like “Oh, are you really?”].

Now, there are a bunch of possible ways all these things could be true. Hogan could have changed his mind since last May, deciding that the bidding war is getting too rich for his blood (a spokesperson for the governor dismissed the May pitch yesterday as “pro forma information and boilerplate language”) and that he’d rather focus on throwing $1.2 billion at the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles instead. Or he could just be finely slicing his rhetoric, saying the state won’t directly put up money for a Commanders stadium but could offer indirect funding — he also said on Tuesday that a Commanders stadium was “not going to happen with Maryland tax dollars,” which could leave the door open to anything from county funding to tax-increment kickbacks that the governor can claim aren’t really public tax dollars even when they are. Or, really, anything, given that the history of elected officials saying one thing and doing another is long and undistinguished.

Couple this with Virginia state legislators’ vow to only spend $350 million on a Commanders stadium aside from all the other money they would spend on it, and this bidding war is as clear as the mud being stirred up by Big Boat 2.0 as it got stuck in Chesapeake Bay. (Yes, this is a tortured way to shoehorn in a link, but I can’t let another Big Boat stuckage pass entirely unremarked, now can I?) We’ll know more once we see final legislation in both states (and D.C.), obviously, but in the meantime there’s simply no way for the public to know exactly how much public money the Commanders are being offered, which is no doubt just how Daniel Snyder likes it.