D.C. approves $200m or more in spending on Nats stadium upgrades, calls this “no new cost” to taxpayers

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the day when the United States celebrates the ancestors of some of its ruling class accepting lavish gifts from local residents, while famously providing in exchange smallpox and pain and degradation.

In completely unrelated news, the Washington, D.C. council voted yesterday to approve $515 million in upgrades for the Capitals and Wizards arena that we’ve known about since April, and while doing so they also approved funneling a large but unspecified amount (more on that momentarily) of tax money to the Nationals for upgrades to their stadium, in exchange for the team continuing to play in D.C. for an additional 13 seasons:

On Tuesday, the D.C. Council passed legislation to create a dedicated stream of revenue that the Nationals could use for upgrades and maintenance at Nationals Park, with no new costs to D.C. …

“We’re talking about a site that is generating 150 events per year,” [councilmember Charles] Allen said of the ballpark. “That type of return on investment is what we want, the same way the arena is a place where 250-plus events is creating the investment and the return that comes back on that. It’s a bit ironic we’re voting on both these things on the same day — we don’t want to find ourselves in a position like we did last year.”

Allen did not mention that although the district paid to build the stadium and owns it, Nats owner Mark Lerner gets to keep all the revenue from those 150 events a year. D.C. does get $5.5 million a year in rent from the team, plus whatever sliver of sales tax money it gets from those events that would not be spent in the city otherwise, but that’s nowhere near enough to cover the roughly $30 million a year D.C. is on the hook for in stadium debt. The rest is covered by district business and additional sales taxes that are being diverted to pay off stadium bonds.

Those bonds will paid off soon, though, thanks to tax proceeds coming in — and going back out to pay for the stadium — faster than expected. Which means those tax streams will soon be available to D.C. to pay for other public needs. Or would be, if Lerner weren’t angling to get it for future stadium upgrades instead. As a previous Washington Post article from January noted:

[D.C. Council Chair Phil] Mendelson’s legislation would create the Ballpark Maintenance Fund, ensuring a steady stream of dedicated money — with no new costs to D.C. — that could go toward repairs and improvements that the Nationals had been asking for under the terms of the team’s lease at the ballpark with the city….

“We made a commitment to the team we would build the stadium and we would maintain it, and we just don’t need these stories about deferred maintenance and failing scoreboards,” he said. “So let’s provide a certain path that we’re going to maintain our facility and maintain it as a very attractive ballpark in the major leagues.”

That’s two separate Post articles saying the new funding would be at “no new costs to D.C.,” which is wrong on two counts: 1) D.C. already shelled out the money it promised the Nats owners to pay for stadium construction, so handing over any leftover tax money as well is absolutely a new cost, and 2) the Mendelson legislation would continue to kick back stadium sales tax proceeds and Nats rent payments after the team’s current lease expires in 2037, which is even more a new cost.

How much in new public subsidies this would add up to is unclear: Ol’ “Democracy Dies in Darkness” didn’t bother to calculate a figure, and the D.C. council website doesn’t appear to have entered the bill into the record yet. But if we assume it would amount to at least 13 more years of the same $5.5 million a year in rent and roughly $12.5 million in sales tax money, plus whatever is left over in the current stadium account … let’s estimate the total at upwards of $200 million and leave it at that, though it obviously could end up much more. Lerner still has to okay a lease extension through 2050 to cash his check; one hopes that the D.C. council will post any new lease terms for the public to read, but one probably shouldn’t hope too hard.

This kind of last-minute-before-holiday-weekend stadium renovations approval is going around: Harris County, Texas just approved $35 million in fresh spending on new scoreboards for the Houston Texans to avoid “an embarrassing, unrecoverable failure mid-season.” (No, it wasn’t explained what kind of scoreboard failure would be “embarrassing [and] unrecoverable”; they just can’t get spare parts for the old displays, so presumably we’re not talking about something like this.) And that’s only part of potentially $264 million in upgrades the county is looking at making over 20 years, quintuple its current operating budget for repairs. The grift that keeps on giving is a nice benefit, if you can convince the natives to cough it up.