Before we get to our weekly cavalcade of doom, some actual good news this week: Tom Scocca, the longtime sports-and-everything-else writer who last got mention here for his excellent newsletter Hmm Daily, which later transmogrified into the excellent newsletter Indignity, announced that he and his longtime running partner Joe MacLeod will be taking the reigns at the online publication Popula, formerly part of the same Civil network of news sites as Hmm Daily. If that was way too many obscure web/email publications for you in one sentence, here’s the tl;dr: Tom Scocca is one of the funniest and most insightful writers out there, and now he’s going to be not only easier to find an link to but he’s going to have a freelance budget to assign more articles by other (hopefully funny and insightful) writers as well. For starters, here’s a column about whether it’s okay to take advantage of the other team not having enough players to run up the score in a flag football game for 9-year-olds. This is the kind of insightful (and funny!) writing that America needs to heal its wounds.
Cavalcade of doom time!
- The city of Calgary and the Flames owners have officially restarted talks on a new arena, nine months after team officials walked away from a previous deal because they were mad they would have to pay too much money. (This seems kinda like city officials are engaging in bad parenting to me, but okay.) Negotiating on behalf of the city will be consultants CAA ICON, best remembered around here for their terrible Buffalo Bills economic impact study; it’s tempting to say better to have them working for the city than against it, but you also have to wonder if they could have found a consultant without both feet planted quite so firmly in the “new venues are the bomb” world.
- Stan Kroenke is reportedly going to be required to pay the NFL $571 million toward its $790 million settlement with the city of St. Louis for yanking the Rams out of town in violation of its own league bylaws. Add in the $3 billion in cost overruns he had to pay for his new L.A. stadium and it’s tempting to see Kroenke as the big loser in the Rams-return-to-L.A. saga, but it’s also hard to see exactly who the winner is — St. Louis got a pile of cash and doesn’t have to spend money on building another stadium, so I guess that’s a kind of win, at least until somebody decides the city needs the NFL back and they spend even more than that on luring an expansion team.
- A giant tranche of public information about the Buffalo Bills stadium project just dropped, though it doesn’t appear to include that Erie County study of the projected cost of renovating the team’s old stadium that the county keeps releasing with all the important bits blacked out. (There is an “alternatives analysis” that rules out renovation on the grounds that “a renovation project of the type that would likely be necessary to encourage a long-term lease renewal would be extensive,” which is studyspeak for “the Bills owners want something real shiny.”) I haven’t dug through it all yet, but feel free to do so yourself, or just enjoy the opportunity to go around saying “tranche” a lot, I sure am.
- Tennessee Titans fans who paid for personal seat licenses for the right to buy season tickets at the team’s current stadium are pissed that they’ll have to pay for new personal seat licenses for the right to buy season tickets at a new one. The Titans say they’ll credit current PSL holders with however much they spent for the old ones, but given that the choice is “give us more money now or else see your entire investment go up in smoke,” I’d be pissed, too.
- St. Louis S.C.‘s new $461 million stadium may not be ready by the team’s MLS debut next spring because some workers broke an electric line, and then it rained. I would make a “time to tear it down and build a new one” joke, but I’m kind of afraid someone would take it seriously.
- Illinois voters are split on whether they want the Chicago Bears to stay in Chicago or move to suburban Arlington Heights, but only 12% are okay with spending tax money on building a new stadium, and only another 28% are okay with devoting public funds to infrastructure for one. None of this should be surprising, given that that’s what polls pretty much always say, though elected officials also pretty much always ignore what the public thinks.
- This excellent Kathryn Schulz article about the history of public lotteries has nothing to do with stadium scams per se, but given that it’s about how government have ended up extracting money from people who can least afford it in order to support a giant private industry while pretending it lets them cut taxes, it at least rhymes.
“The P in PSL stands for Personal, not Permanent!” the Titans didn’t say but might at some point.
Hmmmn. Here I was about to feel good for St. Louis… and then it turns out that really, all Kroenke & the NFL (but mostly Kroenke… gee, too bad you didn’t get Jerry to put up cash in exchange for his affirmation that the Rams ‘belonged’ in LA…) are paying for is the new soccer stadium and maybe a few upgrades to either the hockey arena or the next round of Cardinals publicly funded stadium improvements…
Still, I count it as a win. If they hadn’t got the money from the NFL/K, they’d still be on the hook for future upgrades and the soccer facility.
Good job STL. Looks like you ended up with a free (but dated) football stadium out of all this. Not bad!
The MLS stadium was mostly paid for by the owners.
Please define “mostly” as it applies to this particular funding model. What percentage of the overall cost of the stadium and supporting infrastructure is being paid for directly (and up front, not through a TIF or other delayed repayment model) by the franchise owners?
The stadium cost $460m and got around $55m in tax kickbacks. That’s “mostly” private, though given the insane price tag, even a low percentage subsidy managed to amount to significant public money:
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2020/03/02/15816/st-louis-passes-two-bills-to-give-mls-team-tax-breaks-worth-mumble-mumble-something/
But, as your article indicates, the “stadium” does not cost $461m… that is the expected cost for the full development.
The stadium is (or was) assumed to cost around $200m, with about $60m in NPV tax breaks – which over the lifetime of the project will actually cost the city/state coffers some $97m (6m construction related sales taxes, 34m property taxes & 57m in ticket tax rebates) over the period of the tax exemptions.
I agree you don’t calculate the price of your house by what your mortgage payments add up to over 30-35 years, but you absolutely can calculate that along with property taxes and insurance to see what the net cost to YOU of owning the home has been or will be.
This is why I asked what “most” meant. In this case, the cost of the $200m stadium is being paid for by $100m and change in actual cash or mortgage payments (we don’t know how the owners’ contribution will be funded… it is likely to not be an actual capital contribution up front), along with some $97m over the next three decades in tax rebates.
Sounds more like a 50-50 proposition to me.
“I agree you don’t calculate the price of your house by what your mortgage payments add up to over 30-35 years, but you absolutely can calculate that along with property taxes and insurance to see what the net cost to YOU of owning the home has been or will be.”
You can calculate cumulative cost over time, sure. But you can’t divide that number by a present value cost and get a number that means anything.
$60m in NPV tax breaks divided by $200m in stadium constructions costs means St. Louis is covering about 30% of the stadium costs. Is that good for taxpayers? Not especially. Is it “the team paying most of the costs”? Yeah, it is.
I get your point on lotteries. It is a tax on people who slept through high school math.
However, I am Italian. I am originally from NY. I would rather have the lottery above board and legal rather than run by the Mafia.
The lottery is to gambling what
state liquor stores are to booze, I suppose.