Sixers could move to Camden for $400m arena subsidy, according to shadowy figures maybe wearing Sixers caps

We’ve seen the value to team owners of generating interstate bidding wars in Kansas City, now could Philadelphia 76ers Josh Harris be the next to try the gambit? According to ROI-NJ, which is apparently “the brand-new, go-to media company created to inform and connect businesses in New Jersey,” somebody unnamed wants you to think so!

The state of New Jersey is making a serious push to convince the Philadelphia 76ers to move to New Jersey and into a new arena that would be built in Camden, four people familiar with the discussions confirmed to ROI-NJ.

Discussions between top state officials and leaders from Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment (which owns the team) have been ongoing for the last two months, the sources said.

So that could be people with the state of New Jersey leaking it, or people with the 76ers. Three guesses which one has more incentive to spread this story, and the first two don’t count.

The 76ers’ current arena plans, you’ll recall, are to get out of being a tenant at the Flyers-owned Wells Fargo Center by building a new arena on top of a failing mall near downtown. Since that site comes with a full property tax exemption, it would be partly subsidized by taxpayers, though with few fiscal details having been revealed, estimates of the city cost have ranged all the way from $25 million to $900 million. The bigger concern expressed locally has been the likely impact on the adjacent Chinatown neighborhood, where community leaders have pointed warningly to the near-complete disappearance of D.C.’s Chinatown after an arena opened there in 1997.

As for Camden, there would reportedly be tax kickbacks on the table there as well:

While HBSE’s owners have indicated a willingness to pay for the entirety of the project, coming to New Jersey would make them eligible for a tax credit of up to $400 million through the state’s Aspire program.

Aspire, it turns out, is a relatively new New Jersey state program that provides up to $350 million in “gap funding” for “transformative projects” that have a private investment of at least $100 million and, for commercial buildings, are at least 100,000 square feet in size. (I can’t find any references to $400 million in tax credits being available per project, but there’s a lot of fine print.) Eligible projects also must be “not economically feasible” without the subsidy (easy enough for an arena developer to claim), be located in a designated “Incentive Area” (all of Camden is included as eligible on the state’s map), and “result in a net positive benefit to the State” (“benefit” is not defined here), among other things. Peter Chen of the New Jersey Policy Perspective think tank last winter called the expanded Aspire program “another last-minute lame-duck special that will benefit big developers at the expense of everyone else.”

Would Harris throw away his shot at a downtown Philadelphia arena subsidized by tax money in favor of a Camden arena subsidized by even more tax money? Who knows! Would he like to pit both states against each other, in hopes of shaking loose public money in one place or another? Undoubtedly! Would either state be better off letting the other win being the Sixers’ home, putting up with traveling across the river to see games in exchange for not having to help pay for an arena? Quite possibly, depending on the size of the tax kickback and how much new tax revenue would actually result from having the arena in their state! Will we see in-depth public discussion of all these costs and benefits, or mostly just panicking about who’s “losing” the Sixers? We can always hope, but you probably know the answer as well as I do.