The Nevada legislature convened yesterday for its second special session of the week to consider a Las Vegas stadium bill for the Oakland A’s, and it didn’t get far: After the start of the state senate’s session was delayed from 10 am local time to 3:20 pm, the day (and night) turned into a marathon of testimony, both by team and state officials and by regular citizens, that still hadn’t wrapped up by the time they called it quits just before midnight.
Part of the reason it all took so long was that senators were asking stadium advocates a ton of questions, many of them quite pointed, about whether devoting around $500 million in public money to an A’s stadium was really as great as they claimed. Among the highlights:
- “You’ve all called us in here for a special session, and are asking, minimally, for the state to give you all $36 million per year for the next five years for a taxpayer-funded stadium, at the same time that the governor has vetoed funding for summer school, a bill to support children’s mental health, a bill requiring paid family leave — all because the governor said we couldn’t afford them,” said Democratic Sen. Rochelle Nguyen. “Can you explain to me why we need to provide hundreds of millions of dollars for a billionaire team to come to the Las Vegas Strip, on some of the most valuable property in the world, if we can’t provide funding for critical resources?”
- Democratic Sen. Dallas Harris asked A’s consultant Jeremy Aguero if the state wouldn’t be giving up more in opportunity cost than it would gain by not spending the money on a more beneficial project like education, which Aguero answered by saying, “The opportunity cost of not building the project is you get nothing. You’re going to have $366 million fewer to spend.” When Harris followed up that “I don’t think most of the people in your profession agree with the statement you just made, that it does in fact create more local revenue” (reminder: Aguero’s degrees are not in economics, but in law and hotel management), Aguero argued that while that might be true for “Des Moines or Tallahassee,” it wasn’t for Vegas. Harris then asked, “Your testimony is that a public stadium is a bad idea everywhere else except for Las Vegas?” to which Aguero responded “no”; when Harris said she was confused, Aguero retreated to saying “I’m not intending to be clever or be argumentative,” at which point Harris rolled her eyes and passed the mic.
- Republican Sen. Ira Hansen, who before the hearing even began taped a piece of paper to his office door declaring he had “shifted his vote from a weak NO to a HELL NO,” argued that “somebody has to make up the tax revenue that is not being generated” when taxes are diverted to the A’s, and “the small business community basically is being used to subsidize a form of corporate welfare for some exceptionally big people that, honestly, should be able to finance their own projects without the need of a Nevada tax.”
- Democratic Sen. Fabian Doñate had A’s stadium czar Dave Kaval called down from a gallery to answer a question about whether the team would pay the state’s live entertainment tax, as the Raiders and Golden Knights don’t, and Kaval avoided answering for several minutes before finally admitting that no, it wouldn’t.
- During the public comment period, a former A’s top exec who now lives in Vegas called his old boss Kaval a “walking, talking bobblehead” who “you cannot trust,” and said the team’s community programs are “a joke in Oakland and will be no better in Las Vegas.”
All of this took a lot of time, and led to a lot of Twitter roasting, but obviously all that matters in the end is if there are enough votes to pass this thing, in both the senate and the state assembly, which hasn’t even started its hearing yet. (Because of the nuances of Nevada law, the entire senate will need to vote as the Committee of the Whole, then as the senate, then the assembly will need to repeat the whole process, before any bill can be sent to the governor for his signature.) We should find that out today, at least on the senate side, but we’ve at least seen that the opposition is loud and not afraid to show it, which is certainly a sign that those many hours waiting for the hearing to start weren’t spent whipping legislators into line, so the outcome of the bill is very much uncertain.
[UPDATE: Found the tweet I was looking for from late last night, where Nevada Independent CEO Jon Ralston wrote, “I count about 8 lean yes, 8 lean no, 5 or so undecided. 11 needed.” It’s going to be close, on the senate side at least.]
And hey, look, Oakland’s longtime U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee is threatening MLB commissioner Rob Manfred with antitrust action if he continues to encourage the A’s to move without engaging in good-faith negotiations with Oakland:
In a July 2022 letter to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, you volunteered that, “The antitrust exemption helps ensure that MLB Clubs maintain deep and enduring relationships with their fan bases, whereas franchises in other major professional sports regularly relocate from one market to another.” That same month, in an interview published in the Los Angeles Times, you are quoted as saying “The principal utility of the exemption is that it allows us to be more aggressive than other leagues in preventing franchise relocation. It is a fan-friendly doctrine in the law.”
Yet in this case, Major League Baseball is actively seeking to subsidize the relocation of the Oakland A’s through your public offer to waive MLB’s standard relocation fee and actively take crucial revenue, and a cultural staple, from the East Bay.
It was a day, and today will be one too. The senate is expected to reconvene today at noon Pacific; once there’s a link to streaming video, I’ll add it here.
UPDATE: Ooh, can I embed a streaming YouTube link here? Let’s see:
I just assumed this was a foregone conclusion last week, now they’ve gone and gotten my hopes up.
The opposition seems to be at least somewhat bipartisan.
Mine too, Joe.
But there’s a long history of elected officials going on camera to ‘ask the pointed questions’ about something like this to win votes at their next election – these things make great campaign sound bites – and then after exposing the fraud and misrepresentation in hearings going ahead and voting for the project anyway.
I hope that doesn’t happen here.
The opposition is taking on a different form here, too, because of other local dynamics. Lots of Democrats are pissed that other legislative priorities got vetoed for budgetary reasons while the Governor pushes this huge expenditure; some Republicans are mad over being kept out of the loop; and every legislator is frustrated that there had to be a special session for the budget in the first place, and now it’s being dragged out over this bill. My hope is that can help sink this bill.
The other part is just how badly the A’s are managing this. The owner, unsurprisingly, is a total no-show and hasn’t bothered to meet legislators. They haven’t met with any community groups besides local Chambers of Commerce. The team president was up in the gallery and had to be called out by a legislator to join. And Dave Kaval is just a thoroughly unlikeable human being. This process was so rushed, haphazard, and disengaged by the A’s from the start. Many legislators have indicated that if the A’s aren’t taking it seriously, neither should they.
The old “revoke baseball’s anti-trust exemption” argument. An empty threat that gets dusted off whenever a congress person disagrees with an MLB decision, but never acted on.
Every so often there are toothless hearings, and MLB has to pretend to make nice for a while. Which is likely the intent of this: To get Manfred to stop posturing about how easy he’ll make it for the A’s to move to Vegas if they get a stadium.
Which could actually make a difference here, given that Gov. Lombardo has been mostly on the sidelines in this debate. (As compare to say, the Buffalo Bills situation, where most of the pro-stadium glurge came from Gov. Hochul.) So it’s left to Kaval and Aguero and Hill to be the entire defense, and they have neither the media clout nor the media savvy to do it very well. Which isn’t to say this definitely won’t pass — it may well still — but it’s certainly not helping the A’s cause that the subsidy critics are managing to control possession. (Sorry for the mixed sports metaphor.)
RE: Senator Hansen’s comment…. I am pleased to see that at least some members understand that all forms of tax subsidy to billionaire sports owners really just redirect the taxes that the billionaires should be paying onto non billionaires in the general area.
But doesn’t it actually make it worse that they understand this and then, generally, still vote to provide these no benefit (to the public) agreements or tax treaties to make billionaires even wealthier?
I mean, I expect elected officials to understand this stuff and am annoyed when they say (after the fact) “gee, this wasn’t what we thought we were getting”.
But if they do actually know there is little to no benefit to their state and that other people (possibly even including them) will have to subsidize the operation of the sports team, I think it’s even more annoying that they vote to ‘go along’.
The fact that Lombardo is not weighing in (at least yet) on the pro stadium side is interesting to me. Is he just waiting? Or is he trying to divine the wind on this thing and make sure he is on the “right” side of the outcome no matter which way it goes?
The worst deal moving forward now is the billion dollar giveaway to the Calgary Flames by Calgary and Alberta. $800 million up front by Calgary, Alberta chips in $300,000,000 in infrastructure, the Flames control the arena and naming rights and the city eats half of overruns. All for a 35 year nonrelocation deal, what are the Flames going to do? Move back to hockey crazy downtown Atlanta?
If Atlanta built a new hockey-only facility and Calgary didn’t, they very well might move there.
The consensus among hockey writers seems to be that the league will give Atlanta another shot if it can get a new hockey-specific building and a deep-pocketed owner.
I don’t know if Georgians are amenable to spending public money on that, however.
There is exactly zero chance the Flames ownership will move them back to Atlanta, just as there was exactly zero chance they were going to move back without a new arena.
They might have threatened to do so, or maybe even flown down to ATL (or Portland, or Salt Lake or Kansas City or Reno or Tucson or wherever. It doesn’t have to make sense) to take a few meetings and flaunt pictures of same on their social media. And they would have done it much better than Kaval’s appallingly badly executed trip to a hockey game in Vegas was… but no, they aren’t moving ‘back’.
Even if this squeaks by the Senate, it’ll have a really rough time in the state Assembly. Democrats have a 2-1 majority there, and even if Assembly Republicans unanimously backed this bill (big if), they’d still need 25% of the Democratic Assembly caucus to support it. Barring some kind of major deal or promise from the Governor on other issues, that’s a tough sell. Adding to it all is that the Assembly Speaker doesn’t appear to be on board in the slightest, so there will be zero arm-twisting from leadership to convince the rank and file to push this over the line. I just don’t see why a full quarter of Assembly Democrats would want to hand a Republican Governor an early victory.
Did any actual economists testify in person that this “deal” was a loser for Nevada taxpayers like every other stadium plan in history has been?
I’m shocked that at least one senator knew this fact.
I’m sad that some senators are opposed because the governor won’t let them fund critical programs for children and families (you know, those leeches on society that always have their hand out!*) but hey, whatever motivation stops this grift is much appreciated.
I will have the popcorn ready for today’s must see tv!
*Sarcasm
“Did any actual economists testify in person”
I can stop you right there: No, unless I missed one after midnight Eastern. Though at least one legislator did read some economic studies off of her phone while questioning Aguero et al.
It was a rhetorical question Neil LOL.
The abject BS by the A’s representatives make these proceedings very difficult to watch. An example: during the conversation about what, exactly currently do for the “community” in Oakland, the woman from the A’s put a few stats out there. The A’s donate to over 1600 community organizations from $1.1-$1.3M every year, which includes everything from cash grants, gifts AND (importantly) ticket considerations.
What do those numbers actually mean though? If you took the median of the dollar amount and divide by the number of organizations, you see that its $750 total on average that they “donate to the community”. As a former Cub Scout parent, who has received comp A’s tickets from the A’s before, every one gets a parking pass ($30 value), everyone gets a median-priced ticket ($40 value) and everyone gets a meal voucher ($20 value).
When you actually do the math and take out the few grants and gifts the A’s actually do, what they’re saying is that their community support is giving away 150 tickets per home game.
I’m sure Nevada will probably ok this, but if they do, they will get the owner they deserve for doing it.
‘…their community support is giving away 150 tickets per home game.’
So that’s how they are getting so many people at their current home games!
It makes you wonder… if the A’s were annoyed with their home city or fans, would they then give away 300 (non saleable) tickets per game instead?
The A’s charitable arm gives away about as much money as the MLB minimum salary every year, or the same amount they pay in stadium ‘rent’.
While pocketing anywhere from $35-50m in profits.
Yeah.
Good luck with those guys, Vegas!
* …profits annually
It appears that the Nevada Senate won’t vote on this bill until next Monday at the earliest. It’s a sign they don’t have the votes to pass this now, but stadium proponents haven’t given up yet. https://www.8newsnow.com/news/politics/nevada-legislature/as-stadium-plan-in-second-day-of-scrutiny-in-nevada-legislature-special-session/
Where was this fight with the Raiders? Why are the A’s receiving so much push back that the Raiders seemingly side stepped?
And to harp on the topic, where is the discussion of the water. The Colorado River is sick and likely dying. And the A’s want to build a very large drinking fountain. I do not understand the logic.
While I would love to think that Nevada pols learned their lesson, I suspect a lot of it is that Sisolak was both more invested in and more experienced at selling the Raiders deal compared to Lombardo, who was Clark County sheriff before becoming governor just last fall.
Also, didn’t the Raiders have Sheldon Adelson’s blessing for awhile. That name carried a lot weight.
Yeah, that opened a lot of doors, even if Adelson didn’t end up being the one to walk through them.
Really, whatever ultimately happens here, Fisher has done everything possible to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. That he may yet win after all that is probably a sign of something I don’t want to think to hard about.
1. Mark Davis initially partnered with the incredibly rich and influential Sheldon Adelson, who deployed his team of lobbyists to work the legislature. By the time the Davis/Adelson relationship fell apart shortly before the vote, that lobbying had paid off.
2. The NFL is the king of American sports and the Raiders, bad as they’d been for most of the two decades prior to the move, are and were a premier brand in the entire league.
3. A football stadium with a roof can host Super Bowls, Final Fours, Wrestlemanias, Taylor Swift concerts, major boxing/UFC events, etc. I’m sure the A’s will try to book other things but nothing that couldn’t be held at Allegiant.
4. Vegas had wanted a major league team, any really, for years. The Knights franchise had been awarded but hadn’t started play yet. Getting the Raiders was a huge splash for certain politicians that wanted to be “big league.” Now they have the Knights and the Raiders and even people who have no problem in principle paying billionaires public funds are willing to think twice because they don’t particularly need a bad baseball team to boost their civic ego.
Abstracting away from the personalities and local politics, #3 seems like the biggest difference here. Unlike most cities, Las Vegas stadium boosters can talk about major events pulling in legitimate tourism dollars. A baseball stadium is much more difficult to use for non-sporting events, and given the proposed size it is unlikely to get much more than 1 token All-Star game.