The Nashville metro council voted to approve the Tennessee Titans stadium deal last night, which should come as no surprise given that it’s already voted about 72 times (note to self: check on exact number) to approve the plan for a $2.1 billion domed stadium to replace the team’s current 23-year-old one. No, if you’ve been following along this far, your question is almost certainly: Yo, what did they decide about that rent increase that the mayor’s office complained would provide an additional $470 million in payments from the Titans over the course of a 30-year lease?
(Yes, complained. The mayor of the city of Nashville was upset that a proposed amendment would ask the team to provide more money to his city, because his office said it would “kill the deal.” Please stop rolling your eyes, you’re delaying getting to the answer.)
The answer: The council voted cut the rent increase way, way back, in the interest of maximizing the stadium’s “competitive potential.”
- Under the initial version of the lease, the Titans would have paid $3 per ticket for each non-NFL event to city coffers. The amendment approved two weeks ago would have raised this by an additional 3% of each ticket, rising each year to a maximum of 10%.
- The new amendment approved last night set team rent at the greater of either $3 or 3% of each non-NFL ticket. This means that for all non-NFL tickets costing less than $100, there will be no rent increase at all. For, say, $500 seats to see Zombie Bruce Springsteen in the year 2043, there will be a surcharge of 15 bucks, which will go to the metro council’s general fund.
- College sports, high school sports, and events held by the Country Music Association, Academy of Country Music, Grammy Awards, and WWE will all be exempt from the tax, which will almost certainly result in attempts to recategorize Zombie Bruce Springsteen as a country artist, or possibly a wrestler.
How much this will end up providing in additional rent from the team is unknowable — the Tennessean reported it as “an estimated $120 million” but not whose estimate that was or whether that was in 2023 dollars or paid out over the next 30 years or what. Other councilmembers begged to differ:
"Two things can be true at the same time," CM Henderson says, "We don't have a very good deal currently, and this deal doesn't make it better."
— nicole is drowning in news (@startleseasily) April 19, 2023
For now, it’s probably best to assume that the total public cost will remain around $1.2 billion, give or take some rounding. And how do Nashville residents feel about that?
A slim majority of Nashville residents oppose the construction of a new stadium for the Tennessee Titans, according to a new Vanderbilt University poll. … The poll, released Wednesday, shows that 52% of respondents oppose plans for a proposed $2.1 billion Titans stadium.
Well, the Nashville metro council is overwhelmingly in favor, who cares what their constituents think? The next vote, which the council swears will be the final one, they can quit voting at any time, really, will be held next Tuesday.