It’s Friday of another week, and at this writing Los Angeles is still extremely on fire. For a good writeup that also has a sports spending angle, check out yesterday’s excellent article by the excellent Alissa Walker, in her excellent 2028 Olympics newsletter Torched. Her takeaway from the fires darkening her skies: “Here’s what residents should ask themselves when surveying LA’s ashen neighborhoods: if our leaders haven’t yet put together a coherent strategy for something we supposedly want to happen in LA in three years, how can we believe that they’re going to put together a coherent strategy to address the worst-case scenario that confronts us now?”
We don’t always get the life-changing megaevents we should have seen coming that we want, we get the ones we … no, “deserve” isn’t right, either. Maybe: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, and if it’s not too much trouble I would really like to have a word with the playwright.
Meanwhile, in the parts of the country where only our hopes for an equitable, democratic system of government are on fire:
- Kansas City Chiefs ownership is going to email its fans asking them whether they want a new or renovated stadium, and if that doesn’t already raise all kinds of questions like “How will they make sure it’s scientific?” and “Shouldn’t this be up to all Kansas City area residents, not just those on the Chiefs’ mailing list?”, wait till you see who’s conducting the survey. This is clearly a push poll, yet the K.C. media is reporting it as a way to “decide the stadium debate,” add journalism to the list of things that are on fire.
- Chicago Bears chair George McCaskey says “we’re making progress” on a new stadium while team president Kevin Warren says “downtown still remains the focus” but also “we have 326 acres of beautiful land in Arlington Heights” and “I remain steadfast that the goal we have is shovels in the ground in 2025.” Pretty sure that’s not how performative utterances work, but points for trying!
- The Los Angeles Rams playoff game has been moved to Arizona because of the fires, and Newsweek is upset that the stadium there is named after an insurer that canceled insurance coverage for homes in areas at high fire risk. One would hope that the denial of coverage would discourage people from building (or rebuilding) in fire-prone areas, but the state of California provides insurance if private insurers won’t, and anyway you don’t need insurance if you buy a house with cash rather than taking out a mortgage so it won’t discourage the truly rich; trying to solve societal problems with economic incentives always seems to run into the problem that some people’s incentives are more economic than others’.
- Cincinnati business and political leaders debated (at the local Rotary Club, of course) where the city should build a new arena, which is a nice way to avoid discussing the $560 million in sales taxes, alcohol/tobacco/cannabis taxes, and rideshare surcharges that it’s currently proposed the city spend on the project. Mayor Aftab Pureval said of the arena, which would be the new home of the Cincinnati Cyclones ECHL team, looks like, and that’s it: “We’ve got to do everything we can not to kick this down the road again, but to come together as a community, have a call to action and decide, ‘Yes, we’re doing it,’ and that needs to happen now.” Or, you know, “No.” “No” is also a decisive action!
- Ohio state senate president Rob McColley says if the state is going to put $600 million into a new Cleveland Browns stadium, “There would have to be an ability to be paid back.” That’s a reasonable demand for state lawmakers to make, though McColley went on to say “I think there very well could be conversations regarding that going forward, but we’ll see,” which makes it sound less like a requirement than a thing that legislators will maybe ask for but not refuse to do a deal without, doesn’t anybody ever read my articles?
- The Salt Lake Tribune ran a big article on whether history shows kicking back property taxes to a new Utah baseball stadium would require taxes to be raised elsewhere, and while I will freely admit I lost track of some of the fiscal details when it started talking about “mosquito abatement districts,” the answer is yes, obviously yes, cutting property taxes in one place either causes them to rise elsewhere or for services to be cut, that’s how math works.
- There are new renderings for the Buffalo Bills stadium that is costing New York taxpayers $1 billion and costing Bills fans a pile of money in PSL fees, and they come with extra fireworks! Also a quote from NFL stadium consultant-for-life Marc Ganis about how the stadium will feature “airiness and interaction” and not for “a sophisticated urban environment where people want to get dressed up and go to the game” but for “fans who take great pride in showing up when it’s snowing,” all of which is a nice way to say “We could have built a roof but that would have been too expensive, you live in Buffalo, deal with it.”
My advice to Cincinnati: Before you build an NHL/NBA quality arena without a team in either league, contact Kansas City, MO; Hamilton, ON and Quebec, QC and see if it is worth the cost and effort.
Supposedly Kansas City’s arena is the eighth-busiest in the country? I think one year it was even higher, and that’s without one of those sports anchor tenants.
(KC also doesn’t have another appropriate event/concert venue, as Kemper has been repurposed and the one in Independence is small and way out there.)
But, yeah, it’s a gamble. St. Pete obviously did it back in the late 80s to try and attract a team, which they eventually got (for better or worse) in the Rays (and before that, the Lightning and Arena Football’s Storm for a time). But the costs are so much higher now.
*can include San Antonio’s Alamodome too.
It’s so busy because it’s always available.
And if fewer people showed up, that would be even more true.
Speaking of Hamilton.
The major junior team that was there, the Bulldogs, moved to Brantford while Hamilton’s arena was being renovated.
They are owned by Michael Andlauer, who now owns the NHL Ottawa Senators. He is going to sell them to Zach Hyman (of the Edmonton Oilers) and his family, who will keep them in Brantford.
Meanwhile, the Sens’ AHL team plays in Belleville, where it gets small crowds. Largely, I think, because Belleville is small. As it turns out, the aforementioned Bulldogs (called the Bulls, as I recall) used to be in Belleville until Andlauer moved them to Hamilton.
So the obvious assumption is that he would move the AHL Sens to Hamilton. It’s a bigger city. More of an obvious AHL market (and has been before.)
But he said today he does not want to do that. He likes having the AHL Sens near the NHL Sens so they’ll stay there.
So who is going to play in Hamilton’s renovated arena?
If I were spending 1,000,000,000 dollars on a building in Buffalo, I would want, nay demand, a roof!
Having a home field with poor weather is actually a huge advantage for NFL teams. Putting a roof on it after stealing $1B in public money would be adding insult to injury.
You can already see the feel-good talking point coalescing for LA2028: “a triumphant return after unprecedented destruction, in a city where the show always goes on no matter the obstacles or adversities.” Meanwhile, the worst-hit areas will almost certainly still be in ruins by the opening ceremony — and with the Games being held in dry midsummer, there’s still a specter of further devastation during those couple of weeks.
The Olympic Games are a sunk cost. A f—king lemon. I legitimately feel bad for Angelenos, especially those who have lose everything in these fires. These Games won’t be the cathartic displays of “recovery” that the IOC and the broadcasters (and even the city’s PR army) will want everyone to believe that it is.
It is a good example of the utter lack of imagination within our ruling class.
Their only ideas for how to fix anything are to shovel more money into the old ideas that don’t work – fossil fuels, one-off tourist events, trickle down economics, electric luxury cars, colonizing Mars, whatever – because they either enrich that class or, at least, don’t really cost them anything or threaten their status.
I forget who wrote it, but there was a great piece about how all of the “imaginative” ideas from
Musk and Trump and guys like that are just taken from mid-20th century scifi and, not coincidentally, a lot of that scifi was written by fascists.
Oh, guess what… The Sixers abandoned the Chinatown project. Which is good.
So they can build a brand new arena with the Flyers. Which is not so good.
The Inquirer coverage keeps changing as to whether this would be a new arena or just a new arena district. Hopefully the multiverse will collapse into a single reality by tomorrow morning.
Sounds like a new arena next to the old one.
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/officials-sixers-abandon-center-city-plan-will-stay-in-south-philly/4075455/?amp=1
NoHomerun.com commissioned a poll on building a new stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays. People said yes, until they saw the price tag. The @tampabaytimes
and TV news kept most of the total cost hidden with a complex maze of tax breaks, discounted land and no interest loans.