The Center for Economic Accountability, a friend of this site, announced its annual “Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year” award for 2024 this week, and the winner was the city of Charlotte, for giving $650 million to Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper for renovations of his team’s stadium. CEA said in a press release that “Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium deal stood out from the rest of the competition for a combination of factors that included its high cost, lack of transparency, poor returns, questionable economic justifications and the Panthers ownership’s checkered history with subsidized projects.”
There’s certainly a lot to be said for the Panthers deal as a terrible one: The city of Charlotte put up $650 million out of $800 million for renovations to a 28-year-old stadium it didn’t build and doesn’t own, in exchange for Tepper extending his lease for just 15 years and getting to open “good faith” negotiations for a new stadium as early as 2037. Still, it’s worth looking at some of the other contenders from 2024:
- St. Petersburg and Pinellas County providing over a billion dollars in cash, tax breaks, and discounted land to Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg to build a new domed stadium right next door to the old domed stadium that everyone said was bad because it was a dome and in a bad location.
- Washington, D.C. giving Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis $515 million in renovation money for what’s effectively a three-year lease extension, even after the state of Virginia rejected Leonsis’s bid for an arena there, which should have left D.C. officials able to drive a hard bargain.
- In the non-sports world, Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker lists four megadeals that came in at more than $500 million in subsidies, including $929 million in fresh tax breaks that the state of Indiana offered to Eli Lilly for an expansion of its campus in Lebanon, in a deal costing Indiana taxpayers $1.4 million for each new job created.
- A bunch of states upped their film tax credit offerings, something that has been proven time and again does next to nothing to create jobs, instead just shuffling them from state to state while movie studios get to have taxpayers underwrite huge chunks of their ever-expanding production costs.
All worthy candidates, even if there can be only one winner. The lesson here isn’t that Charlotte is singularly bone-headed when it comes to handing out public money to local billionaires; it’s that siphoning off public money for private profit is a pandemic with no end in sight, and even the less-bad deals would be scandalous in a saner world.
The worst deal of 2024 was Salt Lake City raising sales taxes for 30 years and handing the money over to Ryan Smith with few questions asked. Demolishing half of the Salt Palace for an entertainment district when the Gateway entertainment district is already on the other side of the Delta Center is idiocy. Trying to convert a basketball specific arena into a hockey arena has never worked, more idiocy. Just watch Ryan Smith blow through the billion dollars, and start crying that Utah really needs a new arena for the 2034 Olympics, another billion or two billion dollars please.
Meh, the reno plans seem fine. The arena will be used 250+ dates a year. The silliest subsidies will always be for NFL stadiums, they just don’t host that many events.
Where does the deal between the City of Jax and the Jaguars rank in “worst of 2024” list? The average annual subsidy is less than Charlotte’s, and the renewed lease is officially twice as long (~30 to the Panthers’ 15), but there’s no state money involved, AND they’re still allowing the Jags to hoist one home game away from town every year. The latter give has to be one of the most egregious in the history of American stadium deals.
Even as a Jags fan (albeit from out of town), I think there was a legitimate case to be made that Jacksonville would have ultimately been better off letting the Jaguars go at some point — not even from the economic perspective, but because the Jaguars have been so rancid on the field (and even off it, at times) for so long that they’re actually dragging the city’s reputation down with them.
We have the fine people of Charlotte to thank for PSLs, too, don’t we? Had they told Jerry Richardson to go pound sand back in the mid-90s, others might not have been able to make PSLs just a way of life. (And yes, when the Cowboys built Texas Stadium, you had to buy a bond to buy season tickets, which, fortunately for them, was just as they were finally becoming a good team.)
The Charlotte “deal” is fairly bad even when you take out the financial component and consider the bones of the stadium. Not sure what can really be done to improve on the bland environment that’s existing on site.
As outrageous as the St Pete situation appears, at least it’s a new baseball stadium that will get used a whole lot more than football. The dome thing is a non-issue as there’s no need to have a retractable roof that will rarely be open.
I really think that Washington giving the farm away to the Commanders will beat off of these in 2025.