The Alexandria Economic Development Partnership revealed some new slides about the financing of the proposed $2 billion Washington Capitals and Wizards arena complex yesterday, and they are very clear-plastic-bindery indeed:
So according to that first slide, deploying a calculator to translate from percentages into actual dollar amounts, the $2 billion total cost would be repaid by:
- $420 million in cash from the teams.
- $420 million worth of future lease payments from the teams.
- $100 million in cash from the city of Alexandria.
- $460 million in kickbacks of taxes from the project.
- $600 million in “private revenue streams,” which is presumably parking and naming rights, but the chart doesn’t say.
That would amount to just $560 million in taxpayer spending, which is a lot less than the $1.5 billion previously estimated. However, it leaves out some important pieces: $150-200 million in spending by the state of Virginia on transportation upgrades, plus around $380 million in property tax breaks, which would get the total subsidy comfortably back up over $1 billion.
Plus, of course, neither the pie chart nor that other Sankey diagram (which isn’t really used the way Sankeys should be, but it does look pretty) nor any of the rest of the presentation to yesterday’s town hall provides any indication of where the numbers came from, so they could all be just entirely made up. (It’s one of the many questions local residents asked at the town hall.) But here they are and we can’t unsee them now, so that’s some data viz money well-spent by the AEDC.
I can’t help but feel that cab hailing purse woman has been unreasonably marginalized in all this.
Maybe she is not, strictly speaking, necessary to accentuate a pie chart… but once you’ve moved to material flow diagrams, surely she has to be a part of the system?
Also, wouldn’t a proper material flow diagram in this case simply be a giant red line from “public coffers” to “private owners” with a large arrowhead (no pun intended) on the “private” end???
That pun was totally intended!!!
Would the transportation upgrades only benefit this project?
Unclear. We only know what the WaPo reported: “Virginia would in fact make an upfront investment of $150 million to $200 million of redirected existing transportation funds, through a separate agreement between Virginia and Alexandria that has yet to be negotiated.”