Nashville mayor reveals final plan to give Titans $1.2B+ in public cash, cost taxpayers nothing thanks to elfin magic

Nashville Mayor John Cooper and the Tennessee Titans owners announced their proposed $2.1 billion new stadium deal yesterday, and here’s what they said:

“This new stadium proposal protects Metro taxpayers by not spending a single dollar that could be spent elsewhere on our core priorities like education and public safety,” said Mayor John Cooper in a news release. “Doing nothing was not a legal option for us, and renovating the current stadium proved to be financially irresponsible.”

Yeah, no, not that. Every single local elected official says that in their spending on big development projects, whether for stadiums or chip plants or whatever, of course no public money is going to this that could be spent on schools or repairing Main Street — that’s just Stadium PR 101. This here is a respectable journalism establishment, and we want some hard, cold facts! Or at least hard, cold numbers we can interrogate to see if they’re facts!

Fortunately, Cooper’s actual press release does lay out the Titans stadium financing plan. Unfortunately, it’s a little convoluted, but where would be the fun in it if it were clear as day?

Jumping to the “sources of funding” bullet points:

• Football-Related Sources: Titans, NFL (subject to final NFL approval), and PSL sales;

• State: a one-time contribution contingent on the building of a new, enclosed stadium;

• Hospitality: Tourists and visitors through a new 1% hotel/motel tax contingent on the building of a new, enclosed stadium; and

• Stadium/ Campus: Sales and use taxes collected at the stadium and on its campus.

No dollar figures included, good, good. But the first two items we know the value of already from elsewhere in the document and previous reports: The Titans/NFL/PSL sales would cover $840 million (up from $700 million in previous reports). The state of Tennessee has already approved $500 million in bonds (to be paid off with proceeds from taxes on, uh, something). On a total price tag of $2.2 billion, that leaves $760 million to be covered by the city, via those last two bullet points.

What, exactly, do those items mean? The first is a 1% hotel/motel tax surcharge that would cover hotel stays anywhere in Metro Nashville, as the state legislature okayed in April. Yes, this is technically money that Nashville wouldn’t be allowed to spend on other core priorities — because the state only approved it for funding a football stadium — but it would preclude leaving the hotel tax where it is and going back to the legislature another time to seek to hire taxes for another purpose. Or to leave hotel taxes where they are, since raising them will drive some unknown number of visitors away from Nashville once they see how high their hotel bills are. (A city factsheet attributes this money as being provided by “tourists,” but fails to mention that it will equally apply to tourists staying in Nashville in, say, April, when the Titans won’t be playing.)

The second is just regular sales taxes at the stadium “and on its campus,” which means anywhere in the new 130-acre development that the Titans would be building around the stadium. Since this is money that otherwise go to the metro government and the state — sales taxes from fan spending at the current stadium goes to the public treasuries, obviously, and most of the spending at new stores around the stadium would just cannibalize spending at stores elsewhere in the city or state — it’s verbal prestidigitation bordering on outright lying to say that this is tax money that couldn’t otherwise be spent on other public needs.

Meanwhile, that bullet-point list leaves out the question of property taxes, which presumably Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk wouldn’t be paying since she would be leasing the property from the city. (Cooper presented this as a selling point, since the city would get the stadium land back after 30 years, carefully not mentioning that if the Titans left after 30 years, the city would just be expected to build them another new stadium then. Also not mentioned: Funneling property tax money to Adams Strunk this way also enables Cooper to evade any possibility of a voter referendum, which would be allowed if he were to use a TIF.) Cooper bragged earlier this year that he wasn’t going to be siphoning off property taxes via tax increment financing, but the difference between diverting property taxes to pay for a stadium and exempting a team owner from property taxes so they can use it to pay their own stadium bills is zero from a fiscal point of view — meaning any property tax breaks would go a long way toward paying off the Titans’ share of costs.

(How far they would go is a bit beyond the math at my disposal this morning, but with Nashville’s property tax rate around 3% per year on assessed value equal to 40% of appraised value, even if it’s just limited to the $2.1 billion stadium, that’s still around $25 million a year, or enough over time to pay off nearly half of the stadium’s “private” costs.)

As for what Nashville would get for all its money, we’ve already covered the unlikelihood of any significant economic bump from replacing one NFL stadium with another nearby can hold fewer fans. Residents would get a domed stadium with an L.A.-style translucent roof and open sides, if that floats your boat; would get to take possession of a 30-year-old stadium in the year 2058 or whatever; and would get out of $62 million in debt remaining on the Titans’ current stadium, which Adams Strunk would generously take on in exchange for her ten-figure tax subsidy haul.

The city council still needs to approve all of this, meaning Cooper’s big reveal is mostly just a “Tada!” moment with no real meaning other than codifying the same proposal he’s been talking up for months. I don’t think we even got any fresh vaportecture renderings, meaning we’re stuck with the incredibly dull image the team released back in April. For $1.2 billion, you can’t even spring for some fireworks and lens flare?