The Sacramento city council is set to vote today at 2 pm Pacific time on creating a property-tax kickback district to provide $92 million toward a Republic F.C. soccer stadium with boring vaportecture, and — wait, who said what now?
Sactown Sports 1140 host Carmichael Dave: “When Golden 1 Center was approaching, there were two no votes, and you were one of them. … The deal, for whatever reason was not to your liking.”…
Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty: “I’m a Kings guy, I’m a sports guy. But yeah, at that time, I just thought my job as a city councilmember wasn’t as a fan, it was a steward of the public money. And, you know, I’ve always been kind of leery of these subsidies across the country, I’ve read the book Field of Schemes about how cities just get fleeced, and I just want to make sure it’s in the best interest.”
Huh! McCarty was certainly a longtime critic of the deal that gave the Kings owners $334 million in cash and other goodies toward a new arena, and later as a state assemblymember opposed fast-tracking environmental review for a Los Angeles Clippers stadium, decrying it as “billionaire justice.” I’m pretty sure I never spoke to him, though, and didn’t know he’d read our book — glad to know it found its way into the hands of some decision makers, at least, even if they got outvoted.
Anyway, how has now-Mayor McCarty’s depth of literary material affected his feelings about the Republic F.C. proposal?
“Several years ago, when Darrell Steinberg was mayor, he asked me if I would consider supporting this one, and I did, in large part because there is minimal risk to the city of Sacramento. There is no risk to the general fund. This is going to pencil out, I’m certain it is, but if for some reason it doesn’t for the team, they’re 100% on the hook. We have nothing in the stadium, they’re paying for the stadium privately. We’re just focusing on building the roads and the intrastructure around there and giving essentially a tax rebate that says ‘Hey, if you build a new stadium and development around the rail yards, as new tax revenue comes in, we will reimburse you for the roads, infrastructure that you build.’ So, zero risk for the general fund, a good deal for the taxpayers, a win-win all around.”
Well, no. This is a common myth about tax breaks: It’s money the city wouldn’t have gotten if the development wasn’t built, so it doesn’t cost anything for the city to kick it back to the developer. But that ignores a bunch of things: that tax expenditures are, fiscally speaking, no different than just cutting checks to developers, even if “rebates” sound better than “spending”; that property taxes are meant to pay for services needed to support new development, so not collecting them absolutely costs the city’s general fund; that once you start offering one developer tax breaks, they’ll all want one, until your city tax base ends up looking like Swiss cheese. It’s taxpayers’ money, Felix, don’t come talking to me about your isosceles triangles!
And, in fact, there’s a bunch of discussion of tax-increment financing, as this kind of kickback scheme is known, in Field of Schemes the book, starting with a mention of how the Minnesota Twins owners tried an early variant on it as early as 1997:
Proponents argued that this was no different from other fees, such as hunting licenses, that were earmarked for specific purposes; critics pointed out that as these funds would otherwise go into the state’s general fund, this was as direct a subsidy as there could be. “The financing of the thing is too screwy,” one Star Tribune reader wrote to the paper’s Web site, noting that if players’ income taxes could be used to pay for a stadium, “I think my income tax should go towards improving the place I work.”
And a bit later on:
First developed in California in the 1950s, TIFs took off in the ’80s as local governments sought ways to find money to entice developers. … Since Proposition 13 curtailed property-tax hikes in California, TIF has become “an industry unto itself,” reports Howard Greenwich of California’s East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, with TIF projects soaking up 8 percent of all property taxes in the state….
But there’s a pitfall to TIFs, and it’s a doozy. It’s what development experts call the ” but-for” problem. … The grassroots Neighborhood Capital Budget Group (NCBG) in Chicago studies thirty-six districts’ property-tax growth rates before and after TIF. Their findings: Of the $1.6 billion in “incremental taxes” redirected to TIF projects, $1.3 billion would have gone into city coffers even without the special tax districts. As a result of this, the NCBG calculated, Chicago public schools had lost more than $600 million. “They sell it as ‘cost-free,'” complained the NCBG’s Patricia Nolan. “But there’s always a tradeoff.”
Compared to the Kings arena deal, the Republic F.C. deal is undeniably less bad: It’s less than a third as much public money, for starters, and doesn’t include nearly as many goodies for the team owner. But selling TIF funding as risk-free for the city treasury (while wearing a Republic F.C. jersey, incidentally) isn’t just wrong, it’s spectacularly wrong, and if McCarty didn’t get that from reading Field of Schemes, I feel bad that we didn’t spell it out more forcefully, maybe put it in boldface or something. Though if he’s just changing his mind about sports subsidies because that’s what city councilmembers tend to do once they become mayor, sure, that tracks.
The preoccupation with “signature projects” and “legacies” is significantly more obvious for city mayors than they are for city council members. That the only people who will care are the people who lived there when it happened is a moot point: just the idea of putting your name on some defining moment for your city is intoxicating enough.
Yup, edifice complex. As I have said to journalists innumerable times now: It’s hard to affix a plaque with your name on it on reduced kindergarten class sizes.
Speaking of minor league teams…
You’ll be shocked – shocked! – to find out the Salt Lake Bees’ attendance has plummeted since moving to an expensive new ballpark with higher ticket prices in a worse location with fewer amenities nearby. Good thing these people aren’t the same ones trying to bring MLB to a proposed stadium site that’s [checks notes] also not in downtown SLC with no nearby amenities and will have high prices!
https://www.sltrib.com/sports/2025/06/10/salt-lake-bees-attendance-down-new/