New Tennessee Titans stadium plan set for release Sept. 14
How it’s going:
The short version of the story is that the Nashville Metro Council indeed met last night to discuss the Tennessee Titans‘ stadium plans, but didn’t have actual plan details to discuss. The longer version involves sifting through two news reports, one by the bullet-points-are-life outlet Axios and one by the every-sentence-gets-its-own-paragraph true believers WSMV-TV, so this isn’t going to be pretty, but let’s see what we can suss out.
Mayor John Cooper’s office told Axios in advance of the meeting that Cooper and the Titans owners wouldn’t actually have a stadium financing plan ready, but either didn’t give a reason why or Axios didn’t think that was important to say. Axios did say (in a bullet point!) that “the two sides are ‘optimistic’ they will have an agreement soon after months of talks,” without saying who actually said that.
Turning to WMSV’s reporting after the fact on the meeting, we have the mayor’s office making a presentation last night with no final price tag or cost breakdown, but with city officials (which ones? sorry, that might require a second sentence in a paragraph) saying “they want the Titans and price investors to be the largest providers for that price tag,” whatever it is. (The Center Square’s Jon Styf tweeted that it was Nashville deputy mayor for policy and innovation Sam Wilcox who made this promise at the meeting.)
That’s not a lot to go on, but it does seem apparent that there’s been some holdup in the talks over how much to spend on a new Titans stadium and how to pay for it. The last time anyone provided hard numbers, back in April, the state was set to put in $500 million toward stadium construction, the city was looking at putting in maybe $700 million, or maybe $1 billion, with the Titans putting in the remaining $700 million. That’s not the Titans being “the largest providers for that price tag,” even if you agree to count state taxpayers and city taxpayers as two different “providers,” and even if you overlook the fact that $200 million of the Titans’ costs would come from the NFL’s G-4 stadium funding program, but what’s half a billion dollars among friends?
The real question is what’s holding up the talks, and we didn’t get much on that, though Styf did tweet that there’s “active” negotiation over who would get to keep any diverted tax money that exceeds the $1.5 billion to be used for the stadium, which obviously if it ended up going to the team would represent an additional subsidy.
So really this could be anything: an actual disagreement between the mayor and Titans execs over who’d pay for what, a delay to figure out how to spin the Titans putting in $500 million less than city taxpayers (and $1 billion less than all Tennessee taxpayers) as the team funding the lion’s share of the project, everyone needing more time because they’re too busy watching the new Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings prequels, you name it. Whatever the reason, it’s apparent that the Titans and Cooper will announce a financing plan when they’re good and ready, and that the local press coverage of it will probably be terrible, especially with the mayor’s office calling up local reporters to yell at them about their reporting when they don’t like it. In the meantime, we have sports economist J.C. Bradbury’s theory:
If you're not familiar with what's going on here, it's called "oh shit!" mode. Leaders thought they would have already rammed the stadium deal through. People put some things in writing that they wish they hadn't. Now it's time to stall until the deal is finalized.
— J.C. Bradbury (@jc_bradbury) September 13, 2022
Works for me! It’s almost enough to make you give up on news outlets entirely and just go directly to Twitter, except that Twitter isn’t edited or fact-checked at all, and also elected officials are seldom embarrassed into changing course by being dragged on Twitter, so it kind of fails that watchdog role that journalism is supposed to provide. Maybe schadenfreude is the new oversight? (Looks around at the entire 21st century so far.) Yeah, that seems about right.