After more than two years of talks, the city of Jacksonville and Jaguars owner Shad Khan have announced an agreement on publicly funded upgrades to the team’s 28-year-old stadium. And the details are:
The city announced the agreement will be presented to council Tuesday, but until then, it seems the details will be scant, if not non-existent.
“The negotiating team is currently putting the final details on paper, and we will release that information as soon as it is available,” said Mayor Donna Deegan in a statement attached to the release announcing the framework agreement.
That’s interesting, to say the least. It’s certainly a common tactic to wait until the last possible moment to announce stadium subsidy plans, lest people start looking at them and thinking about them and all the other nasty things people are wont to do. But not even releasing them until the council is actually gathered to discuss it is above and beyond the usual hurry-up-and-wait, and resulted in this hilarious back and forth between Deegan and a reporter for Action News Jax:
We asked why the city announced a deal had been reached if it wasn’t willing to provide details for days.
“Did you hear me make an announcement?” said Deegan in response.
We noted the release sent by the city.
“After the news came out. Look I will be talking to you on Tuesday,” Deegan responded.
“Did you hear me make an announcement?” while at a press conference you yourself called is truly peak elected official, A+, no notes.
One hopes that some of the stadium details will leak before Tuesday, or at least that some of the council members will get tipped off in advance so they can ask more probing questions than “Hold up, what page are we on?” At last report, Khan was still asking for close to $1 billion in public money, all to upgrade a stadium that has already been renovated three times in the last 28 years — and that’s presumably before any hidden goodies like tax breaks or infrastructure. Tune in on Tuesday along with the people who’ll actually have to vote on this thing, and find out the whole truth! Maybe.
Can’t wait to see both the football stadium and the Jacksonville monorail undertake questionable renovations at the same time!
The press has been so easy on her so far. This might be the end of the love affair. Get private donors money (175k) to remove private statues in the early hours when the CC was asking for more info. Since then, it appears that the “private dollars left town and the tax are left to pay the big dollars.
If the “love affair” remark is a clever pun given her history in the press (in particular news vans), well done.
I try to leave people’s personal lives out if it but we all know Jax is somewhat of a “Hick” town. . . YOU KNOW IT !!!
It’s clear the Jaguars are trying to rush a renovation through the city council without public scrutiny that could force this fail or a public vote. I still think they’ll hit some type of road block because it’s Florida.
Clearly they’ve seen the recent bad stadium subsidy publicity. Sunlight is not welcome here.
Every NFL team is looking for the Buffalo Billion.
Jacksonville is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to this stadium. There’s objectively little upside in spending over a billion dollars on a stadium that won’t host any more major events than it already has now: there’s little chance the NFL will ever put a Super Bowl there again, and there’s an equally slim chance it will get to host a CFP title game or even have the Gator Bowl upgraded to CFP status. (That very last part also applies to the Citrus Bowl here in Orlando)
On the other hand, not ponying up for a new stadium would put Jax further at risk of not only becoming the first one-horse sports town to lose its only team in some 30 years, but also likely guarantee that Jacksonville will never have a chance at being a “major league” city ever again. And in a city that is still largely anonymous on a national scale, and even on a statewide scale — and is almost always laughed at on the rare occasions it does get national recognition — that would be an even bigger blow than never having had a team to call its own.
All of this is to say, it’s not irrational to imagine the Jax city government wanting to keep the details under wraps for as long as possible because they know the finances of this deal could displease a TON of people locally, and that the mayor and the council members (and likely also the Jaguars) see the emotional cudgel of a relocation threat as a more effective means of drawing support on the ground.
A ton of people would only be about 10 or 15 people. I don’t see that as a big problem.
In all honesty, how much does it matter to the residents of Jacksonville that they be a “major league” city? How important is it to locals that the city be prominent on a national scale or not be a laughingstock?
I ask this not to be contentious, but because this very debate is happening in my adopted city of SLC. There’s been so much talk by elected officials here of Utah being a “major league market” to justify handing over hundreds of millions in tax dollars – and seemingly all of freaking downtown – to Ryan Smith so we can host an NHL team. They want to spend an additional $900 million on a ballpark to bring an MLB club to the west side. Similar to Jax, our city is largely anonymous on the national level and when it is brought up, it’s almost exclusively to mock. We too almost lost our lone pro team almost 15 years ago when the Jazz’s owner died and they nearly left for Kansas City.
But, I don’t get a sense from any regular Utahns that they want SLC to be a major national city. If they wanted a city like that, they’d go elsewhere. Only business bros like Ryan Smith want that or celebrate a zillion chintzy condos getting built over former longtime establishments in downtown. And pro sports won’t do a lick to change a city’s image – see all of the incredibly lazy and half-assed Mormon jokes whenever suggestions for the NHL team name come up. All this “opening SLC up to the world” nonsense parroted by local media has given us is a housing market that’s now top 5 in least affordable.
It just seems like the hand-wringing over a city being a “big league” market comes almost exclusively from politicians, media, and some (not even all) business community members. Average Joes couldn’t give two shits.
Yeah, I don’t think a new or renovated stadium would change anything about how the city of Jacksonville is perceived by the type of people its government wants to impress. I thought the deadline the Jaguars set for a deal it can present to the NFL was pretty unreasonable given its scale, but the fact that they put together the framework for it in mere months suggests there was almost a desperation to get something, anything, in place.
The only other group of people that might really care about Jax being seen as a “big league” city is Jaguars fans my age or younger — which is to say, the first generation of people who actually grew up with them as their one and only team, and have therefore had a literal lifetime of hearing about how their team has no fans, how they’re moving to London (and LA before that), how their city isn’t deserving of an NFL franchise, and so on. There’s a huge measure of defiance (and resentment) among that cohort, and it’s hard to argue against how people feel… on the other hand, hardcore fans like them also only represent a small percentage of people in Jax, just as they do in any given city/metro area.
It may not matter one bit to residents, but you can take to the bank how much it matters to the small-time local politicians and growth coalition hangers-on (CVB and Chamber of Commerce bros, etc). They’re the ones who might get an audience with representatives of the billionaire owner to do his bidding or pose for a photo op with the owner handing him a big ceremonial check. They’re the ones who will get to schmooze and get schmoozed in the owner’s suite or their very own City suite at the stadium on game days. Not the hoi polloi who are paying the freight for it only to get PSL’s, premium ticket and concession prices, and draconian bag policies in return for their free money.
It doesn’t matter to most here, it only matters to guys tootling around in golf carts on the weekends. We’re more concerned about being #7 after Baltimore in US Top 10 homicide rate cities, or with our cars not stalling on flooded streets like Arlington Expressway with every tropical storm. One of the deadliest streets in the city is a stone’s throw from the Jags’ stadium.
The Jacksonville Jaguars are a preview of what fame and prestige the NHL will bring to Utah. In Jacksonville, should I bring my bullet proof vest?
And in Salt Lake City, bring on the Mormon jokes. Wasting a billion dollars on a hockey arena or gold plating the suites in the corner of Florida nobody cares about changes nothing. NHL hockey will encourage families with 5 children to move to an overpriced condo next to the Front Runner station on North Temple? Gold plated suites for 10 football games a year will make anyone want to live in Downtown Jacksonville? The return on these investments is so terrible that it’s really easy to calculate the results, just dump a can of red paint on the floor. The owners are as blind as a bat to how much taxpayers spend so they can make a few more dollars. Bettman didn’t care when Glendale didn’t hire police officers or buy new police cars for years. What difference did it make to Bettman when fire department response times increased drastically or when Glendale almost sold off a library, Bettman got his $25,000,000 and kept his desert hockey delusion alive for another 15 years.
The other problem I have with these multi billion dollar stadiums and $500 million plus renovations is, with these crazy numbers, is there skimming going on? Is there some incredibly wasteful and or unnecessary way these sports palaces are designed and built? Will these billionaire owners stop before they outdo Lous XIV’s Versailles Palace? Not only are billions being wasted on these sports facilities, but how much is this driving up construction costs overall? If people care about housing cost inflation and vote for one of these jokers, like Governor Hochul, they have nobody but themselves to blame.