The Virginia legislature adjourned on Saturday without taking action on a bill to spend $1 billion(ish) on a development project in Alexandria that would include a new arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals. But does that mean the arena is dead, or just mostly dead? Let’s assemble the evidence:
- Gov. Glenn Youngkin could either propose a budget amendment that the legislature could consider when it reconvenes on April 17 — apparently Virginia has a cockamamie legislature that doesn’t actually adjourn when it adjourns — or call a special session in hopes of using the extra time to do what Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo did for the Oakland A’s last summer. Could that happen, state Sen. Mamie Locke? “We’ll see. Anything can happen.”
- State Sen. Louise Lucas, who singlehandedly blocked the arena bill from getting a committee hearing it needed to move forward, rejected a personal appeal from Caps and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis last Wednesday, telling Leonsis he had done a lousy job providing financial details and selling the project to legislators, complaining that he “treated me as if I was invisible” from when the project was first announced in December to this past week, when he finally invited her to coffee.
- If Youngkin wants to revive the plan, he would need to win over Democratic legislators like Lucas, and so far he’s not off to a great start, vetoing or sending back for changes 20 out of 84 bills that the legislature sent him, and complaining that the legislature sent him “backward budgets that need a lot of work.” Democratic Del. Mark Sickles, who supports the arena plan, told WJLA-TV that the governor has “some work to do. They’re not used to doing this. This is their third year, and they really haven’t developed many relationships, meaningful relationships, over here until now. … When the governor goes out and says, ‘Democrats don’t think the United States is exceptional and we don’t want to be the strongest country in the world,’ that doesn’t help because we disagree with that. He just endorsed Donald Trump.”
- Richmond Times-Dispatch politics columnist Jeff Schapiro writes: “What Youngkin may not appreciate — and this is yet another reminder that, as a government newbie, he is alternately confused by, or contemptuous of, how Richmond works — that senators have little fear of him. That’s because their terms extend beyond his; that they’ll still be here after he’s gone in January 2026.”
- Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson recently drew attention after it was revealed that he had sent a text detailing that his plan to pay for the city’s share of the development was to “tax the crap out of” its users. That doesn’t even appear to be true — there’s no provision for a tax surcharge on the arena development, while there are about $380 million in local property tax breaks — but “tax the crap out of” is never a phrase you want appearing in the paper next to your name.
So to recap: Gov. Youngkin could still try to haggle his way to getting an arena bill approved, but right now the whole legislature is mad at him and the state senator he needs to win over is really mad at him, and Youngkin is signaling that he’s going to make them even madder by vetoing a bunch of the bills they just sent him. Plus, the legislature can always just wait him out, since he’s term-limited out at the end of next year. There have been plenty of miracle comebacks in sports subsidy deals, and I would never rule out the ability of politicians to horse-trade, but it seems it’s getting awfully close to time to go through the arena bill’s clothes and look for loose change.
It is concerning that Democrats don’t seem to be against this arena because it is a bad financial decision. They seem to be opposed simply because they have not been sufficiently flattered.
Yeah, it’s the Striped Bass Principle: Sometimes if you can’t kill a bad idea for the right reasons, the wrong ones will do.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2017/08/14/how-the-soot-lady-and-striped-bass-defeated-the-westway-development-project/
That’s not entirely accurate. Sen. Lucas’s main stated objection is that Virginia would be accountable for the bond payments if revenue projections fall short. There are many senators and delegates of both parties who have said they don’t think it’s a good deal financially for the state.
It’s hard to know what a final standalone vote would have looked like (will look like?) because, on the Senate side, Sen. Lucas blocked a vote from ever happening. And on the House side, a lot of delegates voted in favor just to keep negotiations moving forward on other things they feared the governor would hold hostage (especially extra transit funding to prevent a Metrorail/Metrobus death spiral).
A lot of Northern Virginia senators and delegates are hearing from constituents who hate the deal, both because they know the numbers are phony, but also because the transportation options in and out of that location are pretty awful now and would never scale to allow 20,000 people to all leave at once, even with promised additions to road and rail capacity.
Will the governor take another run at this, and can he push it through? We’ll just have to see, but until now the main strategy has been to try to quickly cram through an all-or-nothing deal, not to do the normal sort of horse trading that gets big-dollar initiatives over the goal line. So what happens if he and Leonsis actually show some flexibility on the details? I think that’s a question a lot of people in Richmond (and Chinatown in DC) are asking right now.
One of the main arguments on social media in support of the stadium deal are complaints that if this deal falls through, no other team will ever want to take the risk of proposing a move to Virginia. Hey, that’s a feature not a bug!
They could solve that problem by annexing DC into Virginia.
Any Republican governor who thinks that way would be committing political suicide.