The Denver city council voted 11-1 yesterday to approve spending $70 million on land for a stadium for an NWSL women’s soccer team … sort of. The land purchase will move forward, but the stadium itself will face several additional votes in the fall after the council gets more details about the plans and about whether the economy has gone in the crapper by then:
“It’s a dicey time,” said Councilman Paul Kashmann, who voted yes. “We may find things ease up over the next six months, or it may be doom and gloom — and we will have to make some very dire decisions.”…
“We’d be investing in a large parcel that we wouldn’t otherwise be buying just to assist a private ownership group to have a place to build a private stadium,” said Councilwoman Sarah Parady, who voted no.
But this is really — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — a significantly pricier subsidy once you get into hidden tax breaks: a full property tax exemption on the stadium land, a TIF that would potentially kick back property taxes on the stadium itself to pay for the team’s costs, plus whatever tax money the TIF would divert from any surrounding development. University of Colorado Denver sports economist Geoffrey Propheter estimates the total public cost as “definitely less than $300 million but definitely more than $175 million,” which could end up covering the entirety of the as-yet-unnamed team owners’ $200 million cost of building the stadium, if you want to look at it that way. (The team is unnamed, that is, not the owners; the owners are very much named, as is the billionaire husband of one of them.)
So this is definitely something that Denver councilmembers might want more details on, yes. In the meantime, we’re left with just the vague shape of a stadium plan, plus vaportecture featuring a weirdly asymmetrical roof canopy and what appears to be a game underway between two seven-player teams wearing the same color kits. It’s a dicey time for everyone, renderers included.
“We’d be investing in a large parcel that we wouldn’t otherwise be buying just to assist a private ownership group to have a place to build a private stadium,” said Councilwoman Sarah Parady.
How about just, as a matter of policy, NOT FREAKING DOING THAT?
The nearly empty I-25 freeway behind the vapor stadium makes the rendering even more unbelievable!
Left unsaid in all of this is that there is already a soccer-only stadium in the Denver area, the one where the MLS team plays, but the owners of the NWSL franchise want a stadium all for themselves as long as Denver heavily subsldizes it.
There is quite literally no justification for this stadium. There is no reason for there to be two separate soccer-only stadiums in Denver, especially when one of those will be for a non-MLS team in a sport that is extremely volatile outside of MLS (and still not proven stable for the long-term within MLS either).