The Missouri Independent ran a long article on Friday about the current border war between Missouri and Kansas over the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, much of which is about how throwing money at sports teams to move to your state is pointless, which you can probably skip if you already read this website. What’s more interesting, to me anyway, is what it says about how and why elected officials in both states are totally chill about engaging in a bidding war despite agreeing to a binding ban on interstate bidding wars just five years ago:
“I do not like this. It feels gross,” Kansas state Rep. Jason Probst said during a caucus meeting of House Democrats in June. “This whole show that’s going on feels disgusting to me. And it’s still the right thing to do.”
In an interview, Probst, who is from Hutchinson in central Kansas, said the reality of professional sports requires governments “to play the game” and offer public assistance, lest they risk losing teams altogether.
“You can stand on your principles. … But if another state isn’t playing by the same set of rules you are, then they’re going to make that investment and they’re going to take that away,” he said.
Yeah, that whole “this is bad policy, but if we don’t do it somebody else will” thing is precisely why development subsidy watchdogs have been saying there’s a need for cross-border nonaggression pacts for almost 30 years now. And Kansas and Missouri did just that in 2019, but unfortunately it only seems to have applied to Kansas’s payroll-tax-kickback program, not the sales-tax kickback program it plans to dip into for $1.4 billion or more of state stadium spending, so oh well! Also, apparently legislators back in 2019 forgot to say out loud that they were including an unstated “sports teams don’t count” clause:
“The sports teams are sort of in a special category of their own. I don’t think that’s what that legislation really was meant for,” [Missouri House Majority Leader Jonathan] Patterson said of the truce.
The article also includes some dirt on the STAR bonds program that Kansas has approved for use on new Chiefs and Royals stadiums, noting that it is “often-criticized” and has mostly “failed at its goal of increasing tourism” and has even led to defaults on one project’s bonds when sales tax revenue came in slower than expected. Kansas officials point out that since these are revenue bonds, the state can just let the bondholders swing in the breeze if the bonds default; University of Colorado-Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter counters that that’s never going to happen:
“In the real world, there’s a huge risk to Kansas state taxpayers,” he said. “They’re going to have to decide to either bail out the project or do nothing. And if they do nothing, their credit, the state’s credit worthiness, will take a hit. And that will make all future borrowing more expensive.”
All of this is an excellent example of why relying on states and cities to agree to stop raiding each others’ businesses is a hopeless cause: As the 1995 Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis paper cited above notes, there have been lots of attempts at interstate nonaggression pacts, and they’ve always ended up being broken by one state or another. The only solution is for Congress to step in — which U.S. Rep. David Minge tried to get it to do back in 1999 by taxing local level subsidies out of existence, only to find that his colleagues in the House had no interest in even giving it a committee hearing, doubtless because business leaders in their states wanted to keep those subsidies flowing.
The next best hope is that local officials on one side of the state border or the other decide to say “too rich for our blood” and let the neighboring state “win” the team and all the stadium costs that go with it, knowing that those can never be paid off by whatever small bump results in local tax revenue. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like anyone made this point in the Independent article, but hang on, I’m not to the end yet, oh look:
But this sort of jockeying between states only benefits team owners, said Neil deMause, a journalist who has written a book about stadium subsidies. Taxpayers and fans, he said, stand to gain little, especially if game tickets become more expensive at new facilities.
“All the economists I know say the best thing you could do is reject it for your state and have the stadiums get built in the other state,” deMause said. “You still get to go drive across the border and see the games the same way as you would otherwise … but you don’t have to pay for building the thing.”
What that guy said.
Green Day (from Oakland) played at Skydome and the lead singer spray painted over the A’s logo in a hallway.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/green-day-singer-spray-paints-over-oakland-athletics-logo-at-rogers-centre-during-toronto-visit/article_4918f3da-51a6-11ef-b64b-bb7539cafd87.html
Atta boy Billy Joe!
BJ’s “Bono Vaillancourt Fountain” moment ?
Both equally stupid.
There is no ‘wrong forum’ for displaying disdain and disgust for an organization owned or run by John Fisher.
At least John Fisher isn’t 88 years old and so senile that he thinks hobbling down to Springfield will get him a billion dollar subsidy when his White Sux lose to John Fisher’s A’s to extend their losing streak to 21 games.
Uhhh, the actual name of that Toronto stadium is Rogers Centre.
Rogers Entertainment Group hasn’t paid me anything to use the new name.
The “win” for the local politicians is the re-election campaign-friendly gladhanding photo ops with a smiling celebrity billionaire (not to mention the even more re-election campaign-friendly donation kickbacks), breathless local coverage of the ceremonial golden shovel groundbreaking, use of a municipal luxury suite for schmoozing and “city” business purposes (never personal business, of course), and all the other perks that land at the feet of the politicians who write the Big Ceremonial Check but not the hoi polloi who fund it. By the time the rent really comes due, it’ll be someone else’s problem to deal with anyway.
Except only one mayor has ever been voted out of office after losing a team, while lots of elected officials have been voted out of office for approving stadium subsidies. So neither the photo ops nor the campaign kickbacks seem to actually be working.
I guess I was recalling my experiences living 25 years in self-proclaimed Sports City USA where, unlike their most famous “partner,” generations of city leaders have truly been all-in in their readiness to hand over checks to every sports team owner, minor college conference, abandoned bottom-tier bowl game, governing body, practice facility, and development league that smiles and makes small talk with them.
Likewise, the city’s PR department and local growth coalition has the citizenry almost completely onboard with the alleged economic windfalls from sports treating every CSL-worthy Economic Impact Study as a lost gospel from the Bible. Fitting since CSL has a base of operations there that the city built for them.
Please pardon my ignorance Gary but what city is/was that?
Frisco, TX
The Warriors had a golden shovel ceremony for the Chase Center when it was starting to get built and the city of San Francisco put next to nothing into the arena. So either way the politicos get an invite to a photo op.
Have any of these ceremonial golden shovels ever showed up on Ebay or are they priceless heirlooms?
“….been saying that there’s a need for cross border non-aggression pacts for 30 years now…”
It’s not like there aren’t options though.
One very good one would be for the professional politicians to set their staff onto “doing the actual math”, as some districts have impressively done (Halifax springs to mind… but others have done so as well).
This almost always (in my experience) results in the civil servants coming back a few months later with “even in the rosiest projection we can create that bears any relation to reality, the maximum the new tax revenues would pay for is about $100-120m in new spending… and even then it’s doubtful frankly”.
The politicians – who have already decided (incorrectly, as Neil points out above) that their electoral fate is down to getting to “yes” on this very question – generally ignore their own employees’ work and tell them they are being debbie downers and that the team owner’s numbers look so much better for the taxpayer.
Just do the math and let it speak for itself. If the end result is that every single taxpayer in a city/region is going to be down $1200 annually over the term of the financing deal in order to provide their local welfare billionaire with his/her required subsidy – and the subset of those taxpayers that actually want to buy tickets to/watch the team in person will also have to pay $1,000 more a year on avg to do so in the new stadium – then tell people that.
Whether you are buying a house, a car or someone else a billion dollar stadium, shouldn’t you be required to know the price before the decision to purchase?
In the example above, those of you who want to watch the team in person will end up paying “less” to do so than the average non-attendee will pay in tax increases (the attendee will also pay those increases, so it’s not an entirely fair statement… but then, think of the corrupt scheme we are talking about here…)
And while the civil servants are at it, they might want to calculate what it would cost the 20,000 “in city” fans who will drive to the neighbouring state/county to see the team to travel there. Given that the only real difference is fuel costs (you pay for parking or transit either way) I bet it’s less than the $1200 a year the politicians would be committing every single taxpayer to pay to “keep” “THEIR” team…
Yes, but you are ignoring the idea that footbawwwwwwwww is important. Or something.
People deserve what they get when they don’t hold their elected officials accountable.
Let these teams with their extortionists owners head on down the road. Their product on the field SUCKS anyway and THEY should be paying fans to show up. See Chicago White Sox.
Sixty games under .500! Now that is trailblazing!!!!
The A’s were supposed to so terrible this year that they’d break the ’62 Mets 120 loss record. Now they beat the White Sux to move 20 games ahead of senile old Reinsdorf’s White Sux!
Reinsdorf chased away legendary sportscaster Harry Caray, put the White Sux on scrambled TV in 1982 and then started begging Thompson and Madigan for a new stadium on 35th Street. Now Reinsdorf has gotten so bad that what’s left of his White Sux might not even be able to beat a minor league team. Too bad a manager can’t fire an owner.
Of course Kansas wants to subsidize a sportsball palace! It’s to keep up with their fellow politicians one state east.
https://www.rawstory.com/missouri-gov-mike-parson-signs-tax-break-for-kc-nuclear-weapons-manufacturer/
In Kansas City now to catch a few Royals games – Kaufmann Stadium is a gem! What’s more, it’s surrounded by land, so have they (& the Chiefs) been offered the opportunity to build the entertainment district of their dreams right here in the Harry S Truman complex? Makes too much sense?