Happy heat dome Friday! Hope those of you in the parts of the U.S. that are broiling are staying inside watching soccer tournaments and cranking the air-conditioning and … okay, maybe that isn’t the best plan. We’ll try to come up with a better one before the Paris Olympics, which will once again provide athletes from around the world with the opportunity to compete for medals and maybe die of heatstroke. (Or mutant sharks. But more likely heatstroke.)
Where was I? Oh, right, stadium and arena scams, plenty of those to go around while we wait for the world to boil:
- Missouri elected officials are up in arms over Kansas elected officials’ passage of legislation to allow selling billions of dollars of tax-funded bonds to lure the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals across state lines, and are also prepared to work on their own stadium subsidy legislation in response. “Today’s vote regrettably restarts the Missouri-Kansas incentive border war, ” said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, adding, “We remain in the first quarter of the Kansas City stadium discussion.” Missouri House Majority Leader Jonathan Patterson, calling the Kansas stadium bond legislation “a wakeup call to Missouri,” said he expects his state to put together its own legislation later this year. It’s all going according to plan!
- Meanwhile, some developer dude took it upon himself to hire an architecture firm to design a rendering of a Royals stadium on the Kansas-Missouri border, with most of the stadium in Kansas but the right field wall in Missouri, that wouldn’t cause any problems figuring out which state would collect sales taxes to then kick back to team owner John Sherman. Lots of nice fireworks and people flinging their hands in the air, though.
- WTOP reported Wednesday: “The projected benefits of a new Washington Commanders stadium being built in D.C., which were detailed in a report the city released last week, are largely honest and reasonable, according to a University of Maryland economist who reviewed it.” Unfortunately, three sentences later the radio news station revealed that Michael Faulkender is actually a finance professor, not economics, which is not the same thing at all. The University of Maryland does have an economist who’s an expert in stadium deals, but WTOP didn’t ask him for his opinion, they must have wandered into the wrong classroom building, that probably happens a lot.
- Facing a vote on whether or not to commit to spending $775 million in public money on upgrades to Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s stadium, the Jacksonville city council yesterday pushed back — on spending $94 million on affordable housing and homelessness prevention as part of an accompanying “community benefits” package. The council says it’ll still come up with the money after taking “some time this summer to work on this,” and it doesn’t affect the $150 million from Khan for community benefits (over 30 years, so really only worth about half that amount), so nothing to worry about, elected officials never go back on their promises!
- Charlotte was apparently “working on [a Carolina Panthers stadium] deal for a year and a half” before letting the public in on the details, yeah, that might be a story.
- I personally prefer not to get my news in video form, as you’ve no doubt noticed from the endless scroll of plain text that is this website, but if you do, this report from More Perfect Union on “How Sports Team Owners Scam Communities Out of Billions” is worth checking out: It has me in it, and also an A’s fan organizer saying “we’re all about kicking John Fisher in the nuts,” what’s not to like?
Come on, Missouri…. listen to Joshua: “The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”
My understanding is that heating in the winter in places like Minnesota and the Northeast uses significantly more energy and in turn emits more greenhouse gases than Air Conditioning.
For example, even if it is 120 in Phoenix, the A/C has to bring down the temperature inside a max of about 44 degrees to 76. In Minneapolis the average low is in January is 5 degrees. The heating system has to raise the temperature over 60 degrees.
https://slate.com/technology/2012/08/air-conditioning-haters-its-not-as-bad-for-the-environment-as-heating.html
From the Slate article:
“As of a few years ago, homeowners in cold states like Minnesota were putting out 20 to 25 percent more carbon dioxide through the use of their heaters than were the A/C-happy folks in Florida.”
So your point is the world would be better off if the mutant sharks ate everyone in the winter?
Even better if we get some of those mutant sharks in Phoenix in the summer too.
There’s worse ways to go. Maybe they could even be Mutant Sun Sharks!
A problem with A/C is that it led to postwar car dependent growth in the sunbelt. Any discussion about greenhouse emissions has to take into account all the driving people do in sprawling sun belt metro areas, not just their dependence on air conditioning to stay cool in the summer.
Americans not in the sun belt also do a lot of driving in sprawling metro areas. The sprawling Kansas City metro area is a good example. Minneapolis, Denver, Indianapolis, etc., etc. — none of those are in the sun belt.
So, you can’t blame Willis Carrier for all of the pollution in the U.S.
The Kansas City metro might be large in area, low in density- but it’s got relatively little traffic congestion. While the sprawl is not ideal, the smaller population of the area means a lower per capita contribution to climate change.When you break down congestion/traffic jams on a per capita basis- the worst perpetrators are sun belt cities that have grown untethered for the last 60 years with little to no regional planning. That rapid growth is only possible cuz of AC.
Air conditioners also leak hydrofluorocarbons which are worse than CO2 and, of course, blow more heat out into air.
What’s the over/under on football cliche usage the next few months by Kansas and Missouri politicians?
Off the board.
Oh, and has the price of renderings dropped so low that any rando
can put in their 2 cents?
Here’s an article about the proposed resiliency at st Pete’s proposed stadium.
https://stpetecatalyst.com/rays-stadium-resiliency-takes-center-stage/
From the Kansas point of view, this is kind of like a sports team bidding on a rival team’s superstar free agent who will command an enormous salary. Either you win the bidding and take the player away from your rival, or you force your rival to grossly overpay to keep the free agent.
If Kansas does win the bidding, they better hope these “free agent” signings don’t turn out to be an extremely expensive bust like the Angels signing Albert Pujols. Heh.
Headline from up North: “Coyotes livid as arena plan takes another hit …”
https://www.sportsnet.ca/nhl/article/arizona-state-land-department-cancels-land-auction-for-coyotes-arena-requires-permit/
Over the next 20 years, Salt Lake City taxpayers will fork over thousands of dollars per person to the local billionaire, no accountability required because;
1. The scoundrel previous owner of the now Utah NHL Team was so inept the Coyotes were thrown out of Glendale, made a complete fool of himself in Tempe and forgot to check how big an arena qualifies as a youth arena.
2. Tilman Fertitta is smart enough to realize that bringing NHL hockey to Houston is a fast way to lose a billion dollars.
3. Bettman couldn’t put together an ownership group in Kansas City, despite having an NHL ready Arena and no NBA competition.
4. Bettman refuses to place a NHL team in Hamilton or Quebec City and would prefer to try a high risk market like Salt Lake City to “grow the game”.
KC is not less of a risk for the NHL than SLC. KC has had and lost both NBA and NHL franchises in the past. SLC has the 11th highest per capita income of any US metro area. KC is 63rd on that list.
No argument about the likely public subsidies to be paid out in Utah. Markets where the politicians yearn to be called “big league”, particularly those in states where there is only one market feasible for major pro sports, are easy marks for team owners.
The KC arena is happy to not have a tenet. It’s one of the most profitable arenas in the country cuz they don’t have to block out weekends for pro sports.