Vegas A’s stadium bill dead for now, team could move anywhere or nowhere

The clock ran out last night on the Nevada legislative session, and there was no vote on the bill to provide $500 million in tax kickbacks for an Oakland A’s stadium in Las Vegas. It also didn’t finish passing a state budget, and Gov. Joe Lombardo says both will now be taken up in a special session this summer:

“My office and I are conferring with legislative leadership this evening, and I anticipate calling a special legislative session in the morning,” Lombardo said in a statement released at 1 a.m. on Tuesday. “I will issue a proclamation to outline agenda items for the special session when finalized.”

State assembly speaker Steve Yeager, however, immediately said screw that:

Obviously, anything can still happen: Right now both the Republican governor Lombardo and the Democratic legislative leadership are playing hardball over their state budget fight, and Lombardo lost the first round. We still don’t know how much support the A’s plan has in the legislature, nor how much bad will the governor has built up in the budget standoff and whether that will eventually torpedo the A’s stadium plans. (I’ve even heard speculation that neither Lombardo nor the legislature is really that serious about the A’s bill, and only offered it up knowing it would fall victim to the budget standoff but could say “hey, we tried,” which, sure, maybe?) We don’t even know how Nevada voters feel, though an internet poll by the Nevada legislature that anybody anywhere can vote in multiple times shows massive opposition, for whatever that’s worth.

All this will presumably push back a planned vote of MLB owners next Tuesday to approve a Vegas relocation of the A’s, though it’s always possible they could approve it conditionally in hopes of encouraging the legislature to okay the public funding. Really, anything is possible at this point, including team execs trying to gin up interest in moving the team to yet another city — the only thing for sure is that A’s owner John Fisher’s attempt to rush through a Vegas stadium bill with only one public hearing in the final week of the session came up empty. And whatever does or doesn’t happen in a special session, there will now at least be time for legislators and the public to maybe read this article and consider sports economist Victor Matheson’s conclusion: “The fact that anyone in [Nevada] gave them a dime when the team has literally nowhere else to go is the worst bargaining in the world.”

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21 comments on “Vegas A’s stadium bill dead for now, team could move anywhere or nowhere

  1. It ultimately won’t get to the “go play in the street” scenario for the Athletics, but it also doesn’t seem like there are a cities out there (outside of, or maybe even including Oakland) that are serious about allowing that particular franchise to call it home at this point. Then again, that would be perfect befitting for an outfit that’s been proven to be completely and utterly unserious, especially in recent years.

    1. If I were the city of Oakland, any agreement I consider with the current A’s ownership going forward would be dramatically less subsidy oriented than the one they offered just a few months ago.

      “Wanna continue playing at the coliseum you’ve been bashing for decades while not paying your share of the operating costs and upkeep?

      We’ll think about it. Maybe. But the current price of $1.2m a year when it costs nearly $20m a year to maintain doesn’t work…. we’ll let you rent it for a dollar a year, but you need to pay all the operating costs. Don’t like it? Tough. Go play in Summerlin or Henderson or at whatever Tucson Electric park is called these days.

      Oh, that’s right. You CAN’T.

      Wanna build at Howard Terminal?
      Ok. We’ll sell the parcel we own to you at FMV. You can develop it yourself, but you’ll have to take into consideration access and business arrangements with all the existing tenants and landowners in the area. Oh, and you surrender your vague and thus far not-paid-for interest in the coliseum lands to us up front.

      I would say Oakland does not need to be nice to the Athletics organization. That time has passed. And no, a public apology from the team for their dishonest and duplicitous behaviour in the past will not suffice.

  2. Wow! Governor Lombardo just won’t give up on this thing. He obviously is putting his own personal interests before the taxpayers. The very powerful A’s lobbying group met with Joe Lombardo last month, and he went from “were not going to raise taxes to build a stadium” to “we are going to create a special tax district and raise taxes to pay for the stadium, along with cashing in bonds, tax credits, etc. All for a last place team that nobody wants, with horrible ownership. Now he’s going to veto the budget bill, so that he could get his A’s bill passed. I would love to know what the a’s lobbying offered him.

    1. I think you have it backwards: Lombardo vetoing the budget bill (which he’s been threatening to do for weeks) is what kept the A’s bill from having a chance of passage. Whether he sees this as a feature or a bug is something only the governor knows for sure.

      1. I think it’s a feature- Nevada can say it tried to put a deal together but the clock ran out, Kaval and fisher were jerks during the whole process, and with the guarantee of an expansion team we can get things done in the future.

    1. I agree.

      Or, if you want to remain open to MLB… revise your offer to the current A’s ownership group to $0. Then allow as how you would still make up to $300m available to an ownership group that did not include John Fisher to renovate or rebuild at the coliseum site.

      You know that at least half of the present ownership group would just nod at the condition and understand it completely.

      1. Gotta be careful about that. Ownership can always get worse, as the Coyotes have shown.

      2. It’s kind of like the Washington football situation. Nobody wanted to deal with Snyder.

    2. …Not even the fee for the gaming license, which I would appreciate if you would put up personally.

  3. In this case, as with the Coyotes, it seems pretty obvious that the smart long-term (or perhaps, even short-term) business move for the league as a whole is for the other owners to force the current franchise owner to sell to somebody who can actually get a deal done. Ideally, that new person would be a decent human being who would build their own stadium just because of the principal of the matter. But that’s probably too much to ask for.

    That is, more or less, what happened with the Washington Commanders. All of the very terrible things Dan Snyder did to his employees and fanbase didn’t bother the other owners. Even him brazely stealing from their pockets didn’t seem to move the needle too much. What does seem to bother them is that he is/was the main impediment to the team getting a new stadium and maximizing the revenue that they share.

    But the owners of these leagues are absolutely unwilling to formally vote one of their own out, even though they have the power to do so. Even the NBA, which managed to get rid of Donald Sterling and Robert Sarver didn’t actually formally vote to kick them out.

    1. “…. but it shows initiative…”

      They rarely ‘openly’ banish any of their own number. That’s what they have commissioners for (and recall under what circumstances Kennesaw Mountain Landis became baseball’s first commissioner).

      But they do have ways… McCourt no longer owns the Dodgers and Marge Schott/the Schott family no longer own the Reds.

      It can be done if the will is there.
      Clearly the will is not there at present.

      1. Both of those were Selig decisions though. Selig was not a normal commissioner in that he was a member of the Lodge himself (even after the family sold the Brewers) and as such had a different dynamic with the other owners. I don’t think it’s the type of thing that will come up organically amongst ownership, and a commissioner like Manfred is going to have a tough time selling his bosses on removing one of their own, particularly when there isn’t any clear transgression besides being unsuccessful and cheap.

        1. He was also against opportunists seeking to swiftly write a check in the dead of night to purloin a franchise out of one town and into another.

          Yet that is pretty much how he became the Brewers used car dealer come principal owner.

          1. John, is it actually too late for Oakland to re-engage with Fisher? Or do you (or can you) see Fisher selling the team at this point? In other words, what really are his options at this point?

          2. Not sure I am the right person to guess at that (actually, pretty sure I am not, Dean, but thanks for asking).

            It’s never too late I guess. Other cities have played hard ball (or at least said they would… cancelling negotiations etc) and then agreed to reopen. Those cities have typically ended up giving the owner more than they originally asked for after their brief attempt at hardball.

            It seems that dating back to the original Wolff/Fisher days, he wasn’t interested in selling the franchise no matter what. I recall pondering why someone would buy the Oakland A’s and then immediately begin complaining that they own the Oakland A’s and not the NY Yankees… which he has been doing roughly since the day he and Wolff bought the club.

            It seems like he still isn’t interested in selling. As others have suggested, there are big money people in the bay area who would buy the team tomorrow for more or less any reasonable market valuation.

            Yet Fisher won’t entertain the thought of it so far as we can tell.

            I guess if you own one of 30 franchises, you always have options. But Fisher’s options appear to me to be dwindling.

            I would imagine if they quietly sent some sort of diplomatic offering (some part of Dave Kaval that isn’t being used? His brain perhaps?) to the city that negotiations would be restarted.

            He could also explore non-Vegas options as Neil has suggested. But where?

            He has (and has always had) more money on offer from Oakland than anywhere else.

            As plenty of people on this forum have said, his best option is and always has been to rebuild at the coliseum. It could be a major reno or a new 32,000 seater in the parking lot. Oakland has offered enough money to get most if not all of that done.

            And he and Kaval told them to go pound sand.

            Odd thing to do when you have no funding elsewhere, no permission to build a ballpark elsewhere, and have not yet received MLB’s permission to move.

            I find myself wondering what would happen if, for example, Vegas offers $200m (in some combination of incentives, TIF or tax credits and probably no cash at all) + the Ballys or Trop land (leased or whatever), but Oakland still has $400-500m on the table for a larger market.

            Would MLB approve the move to a smaller market with a smaller subsidy?

            If they did, I would have to think it is because they know they can sell Oakland as an expansion location.

            Not sure if that helps or not. What are your thoughts on the matter?

          3. Bud Selig was part of the consortium that purchased the Seattle Pilots out of bankruptcy court and moved them to Milwaukee. That was during spring training in 1970, mere months after the Pilots’ one and only season.

  4. Thanks John. You and Neil seem to have had a good read on Fisher and the A’s during this saga (saga for a long-time Oakland A fan). The special session called for this morning seems to have sealed the fate of the Oakland A’s heading to Vegas. Sad day if so.

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