Before we get to the week’s news roundup, a couple of programming notes. First off, my apologies for the ads that have kept appearing in the middle of posts on this site — I keep telling Google Ads not to put them there, and it keeps ignoring me. I think I may have finally succeeded in turning those off, but do let me know if they reappear for you. I may end up dropping Google as this site’s ad provider if it keeps this up — that is, if I don’t drop Google anyway for firing workers upset that it successfully created Project Nimbus from the famous science fiction novel Don’t Create Project Nimbus.
Second, I know that the Dark Mode function is pretty broken again, often displaying dark gray type on a black background. I’m in discussions with the plugin provider about bug fixes, and also once again looking for alternatives that work more consistently. In the meantime, you can sometimes get it working by refreshing your browser; if that doesn’t work, just don’t use Dark Mode for now, and hopefully everything will be back in working order before your eyeballs explode from the screen glare.
And now for the news:
- Nevada assemblymember Danielle Gallant tried, despite a very unhappy dog in the background, to explain her vote last summer for $600 million in public money for a new stadium to bring the Oakland A’s to Las Vegas, and ended up having to apologize for not understanding how the financing worked at all. “I hope future errors you make are met with more kindness than some of the responses I received,” tweeted Gallant, presumably inviting those among you who haven’t accidentally given $600 million to a billionaire sports owner to cast the first stone.
- Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who previously praised Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s proposed stadium development that would require $2 billion in public subsidies and said “everything is on the table here,” now says that some things are off the table: “I’ve always said that ownership has to put some skin in the game,” Johnson told reporters this week, adding that he opposes kickbacks of city ticket taxes to Reinsdorf to help fund the project.
- If you’re a Buffalo Bills fan outraged that the team is charging as much as $50,000 for personal seat licenses before you can even buy tickets to their new stadium that is being built with over $1 billion in your tax money, good news: Now you can instead be upset about the fact that Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to make the PSLs exempt from sales tax, costing you and your fellow New Yorkers around another $25 million. Or I suppose you can be upset about both, but life is short, you have to pick your priorities.
- Tampa Bay Times opinion editor Graham Brink, who previously defended spending $1.5 billion in public money on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium on the grounds of “collective pride,” is now back with a list of other ways it would allegedly be a good deal: extending the Rays’ lease will keep the team in town longer, their development partner is “the real deal,” they’re using stadium designers who’ve designed stadiums before, owner Stu Sternberg has an “astute front office,” and … that’s all he’s got so far, stay tuned for “Economists may say Rays stadium is a boondoggle, but aren’t puppies great?”
- Meanwhile, if you ask St. Petersburg residents if $1.9 billion is too much to spend on a Rays stadium, they say yes, and if you ask them if a new stadium would be a good idea in the abstract without telling them how much it would cost, they also say yes! The truth must lie somewhere in the middle!
- Where will the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs owners turn for stadium money now that voters told them where to stick their sales tax hike? “It’s not something that’s going to just kind of be thrown up into the ether out of nowhere,” says Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas of city funding, and a spokesperson for Gov. Mike Parson says there’s no state money in the works either. Clay County Presiding Commissioner Jerry Nolte says he hasn’t heard from Royals execs lately, and there’s no talk of fresh funding from Jackson County after the sales-tax plan failed, which leaves only … the team owners’ pockets? KMBC-TV for some reason doesn’t mention this option in their article, the internet must have run out of bits before they got to it. The Kansas City Star, meanwhile, reported on noted sports business expert George Brett’s thoughts on whether the teams will now move out of town, it’s truly not a great week for Kansas City journalism.
- Now that the Arizona Coyotes are moving to Salt Lake City in the fall, everyone wants to know what the team will be called, and new owner Ryan Smith confirms that it will “start with Utah.” No word yet on what it will rhyme with or how many syllables, but presumably Smith will reveal that eventually — just maybe not this fall, don’t want to rush into things, “Utah Professional Hockey Club” sure has a nice temporary ring to it.
- Tempe city councilmember Randy Keating has complained that the reason the Coyotes are leaving town is because team execs “ran a terribly inept campaign” for arena subsidies. Better luck next time finding ways to overcome massive public opposition, Randy, there’s got to be a way around this whole “democracy” thing.
- A’s concessionaire Aramark threatened to fire stadium workers who openly criticize the team’s coming move out of Oakland, which turns out to be a violation of labor law, who could have known?
- This Ringer article on fan opposition to the A’s departure is really long for anyone who already knows the basics, but its deep dive into the history of fan protest movements does quote Field of Schemes and also includes the priceless quote from Oakland activist Bryan Johansen that his goal is “to fucking haunt John Fisher for all of eternity,” so it’s worth it if you have the time.
As much as I am thrilled that the Coyotes are finally leaving Arizona, I will say the campaign was ridiculously bad. Worse than Hillary not campaigning in Wisconsin bad. The owner acted like he was in the witness protection program and had his abrasive team president doing all the talking for him. I don’t know if that would have made a difference, but he had people calling him a charlatan and hiding is not a way to improve your image
agreed. It seemed quite clear that he didn’t care what people thought of him or his faithful sidekick XG.
It’s a strange way to run an entertainment business (as is telling your fans up front that you think you can make this business work by economizing on player salaries). These guys were utterly clueless from the beginning. Which begs the question: “Did they ever intend to do anything but flip the franchise for a huge profit within five years?”
From my perspective, they essentially ran it as an asset stripping operation. They bungled that side of it too, but fantasy pro sports franchise valuations eventually came to their rescue (as it has for other owners of this franchise as well).
Turns out you can do very well buying a money losing franchise and mismanaging it for a few years before selling. Surprised Mitt Romney and Bain didn’t get in on this…
Meruelo is undeniably a clown owner. (Apologies to clowns.) But it’s possible to acknowledge that without going all the way to “If only we had an owner who wasn’t constantly stepping on rakes, we could have arm-twisted the public into approving an arena deal.
Kansas City area is proof of that. The Chiefs are incredibly well run. And the Royal’s often have a watchable product. Even then, the public felt the stadium was the team’s responsibility, not there’s.
I don’t know if I’d call the Chiefs incredibly well run. Ownership just got lit up in the most recent NFLPA survey.
Has there been any movement on developing that land for something else?
The Tempe land that didn’t get the Coyotes’ thing built on it? Or the state land trust land that they hope to win at auction?
I thought the Tempe land needed a bunch of remediation to be usable, but maybe not. Don’t know who would.
The other land, obvs, hasn’t been won yet.
The Tempe land.
Supporters of that deal called it a landfill. Opponents said it is just for compost.
As far as I can tell, it *was* a landfill that has been covered up and is now where the city parks a lot of vehicles and does its compost and stores some other stuff. On Google earth, it doesn’t look like the best use of that land in a city with a booming population, but it’s not really a festering eyesore teeming with rats and seagulls either. (I’ve been to actual landfills before.)
There was a piece in the AZ Republic about that – I can’t find it now.
Perhaps they didn’t talk to enough experts. but the takeaway I got from it was that at least one expert believes the remediation would not cost nearly as much as Meruelo said it would.
He was trying to make it look like he was the only option. But if the dirt isn’t actually toxic, then it wouldn’t cost as much to prepare the site for construction and other options and other proposals start to look better.
At least, I think that’s where it was. But that article was a long time ago, before the vote.
Perhaps one of our Arizona correspondents knows more.
No one should apologize to clowns. They are generally awful with very few exceptions.
#notallclowns
“The owner acted like he was in the witness protection program and had his abrasive team president doing all the talking for him. ”
You could say the same thing, word for word, about John Fisher.
Say hello to the Utah Phoenix!
I love that name
“…ownership has to put some skin in the game..”
(extends frail near 90yr old hand shakily, not at all warmly and in as dismissive a fashion as possible)
“Hi. Jerry Reinsdorf. Apparently we’ve never met”.
Amusing comment from the Nevada legislator article:
“Oakland is like a Third World country with the amount of homeless that are lining the streets and the amount of crime that is being committed on a daily basis there,” she said.
Cheap bait copied and pasted from within the Fox News-led outrage complex, of course. But one can just as equally argue that Nevada is like a third-world country, with a rubber-stamp legislature that’s so easily bought. Rather unimpressive that the honorable assemblywoman can’t take what she’s trying to dish out.
Nevada’s unhoused population is also growing. Same story as in California – rents are growing faster than wages, addiction and mental health support is inadequate, etc.
You know what might help? $600m.
Danielle thought Clark County was going to make interest on the bonds…?!?! Does she also think credit card companies pay her 23% interest on a balance?
I’m increasingly convinced that our whole civilization rests on the decisions of people who do not understand the technical details of the things they’re entrusted to understand.
A new wrinkle.
A’s want to intervene in Nevada case. For their proposed Vegas stadium, time is money
https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2024-04-19/athletics-intervene-nevada-stadium-lawsuit
Nice!
However, isn’t there effort to intervene in the challenge likely to have the same effect as any/all other delays? Namely that the clock runs out on them (or more specifically, their welfare windfall from the taxpayers)?
I guess it makes sense if they think they can somehow prevent the referendum from being held (or delay it enough that some shady backroom deal is struck to dismiss the suit because the referendum can’t possibly be held before the funding deadline… you know, the standard kid-who-murders-his-parents demanding clemency because he is an orphan…).
If all they end up doing is delaying the start of the signature collection period (and thus the referendum – possibly even pushing the actual vote off a year or?), though, aren’t they working against themselves?
Oh, right, it’s the Fisherkaval-cade we are talking about…
I could see a situation in which, having failed to get the money approved by the ‘deadline’, they sue someone/everyone for a like amount for ‘deliberately and wilfully failing to subsidize them in an acceptably timely manner’ etc.
I wonder if this would work in a standard bank job? You know, you do the hold up and then after you are caught sue the police, the bank, some judges, your own lawyer, the security company and the prison contractor for depriving you of the assets you had clearly and demonstrably accrued…
That was my thinking as well. He’s acting against his own best interests, I think.
I don’t see an upside to this approach – unless his plan is actually to sue everyone.
Or maybe he wants to end up selling the team and this is his escape hatch.
It’s all bizarre.