Too damn hot! Gonna see how few words I can use today, to save electricity, y’know. That headline already caused voltage reductions across Brooklyn!
- A poll by two Portland city councilmembers found that city residents oppose spending $600 million on Trail Blazers arena upgrades 49-42%, but only 45-44% after they’re told that it would be a good idea because economic impact blah blah. Councilmember Steve Novick said Blazers owner Tom Dundon should agree to start paying rent to convince holdouts like him, which is an interesting response to his constituents saying “Most of us don’t want to do this even if pollsplained at that it’s a good idea.”
- The Kansas City council voted yesterday to authorize City Manager Mario Vasquez to negotiate a deal to give $235 million to the owners of the Current to expand their 2-year-old stadium and build other stuff. “Today’s decision reflects Kansas City’s belief in bold ideas and transformational projects,” said team owners Angie and Chris Long while releasing new renderings with more fireworks.
- The Tampa Bay Rays owners may try to sway holdouts on the Tampa city council by having Hillsborough County take on kicking back about $100 million in property taxes instead of the city, or maybe it’d be the same city property taxes but the county would be responsible for selling the bonds and then repaying them, the Tampa Bay Times’ John Romano isn’t clear and this sentence is getting long enough already.
- Is Porter County still likely to throw a wrench into Indiana’s proposed Chicago Bears stadium deal over not wanting to raise taxes to pay for a stadium that’s not in their county? Yup.
- North Carolina House Speaker Destin Hall has clarified that he isn’t necessarily opposed to spending $1.7 billion on a stadium for a nonexistent MLB expansion team in Raleigh, he just wants to see what other cities are bidding first.
- The NHL is giving the Friedkin family (owners of Roma, Everton, and a whole lot of Toyota dealers) six months to determine if spending $3.5 billion on an expansion franchise in Houston or Austin is worthwhile; the price tag would include arena costs, would the NHL lower its expansion fee if the Friedkins had to pay 100% of arena costs, hahaha, just kidding.
- Boston Celtics owner Bill Chisholm still wants his own arena, maybe, so he doesn’t have to share digs with the Bruins, if he can find a site and probably a way to get one without paying to build it, unnamed political insiders continue to tell Boston Globe reporters to write about.
- Cleveland Browns stadium to be buried in ground so planes don’t hit it.
- “Taxpayer-Funded Sports Stadiums Are a Massive Scam,” ya think?
Kinda funny that the Jaguars and Jacksonville escaped mention in the write-up about stadium subsidies being scams, even though basically the entire NFL and sports fan/media ecosystem has been taught to hate Jacksonville — and even though the stadium deal there is arguably even more burdensome for the home city than either the Bills and the Titans deals (which were cited in the piece), since unlike with those two, the state isn’t chipping in with a single dime on the project.
Is that already underway?
The Bills one is a good hook for a story because it just opened.
The Browns “underground dome” could be called The Coffin
Or the Under Ground Pound
“Cleveland Browns Football: You’re That Much Closer to Hell”
When the previous Celtics owners bought the team, they added some real estate guys to their group, and the talk then was that they would eventually build their own arena. They have kept signing lease extensions since then.
Can Boston support 2 arenas? It’s slightly smaller than the Phoenix area, which has 2 and was attempting to build a third. The San Francisco Bay Area has 3.
However, where is probably the biggest question
It’s hard to guess. A lot of moving parts.
qu: How much ‘negotiation’ is involved in signing a deal whereby you agree to hand $235m to the owners of a franchise so they can modernize a 2 year old stadium?
That’s laughable. And why wouldn’t they be back in another 2-5 years for a couple hundred million more? Who knows, the seat cushions might be showing some wear by that time…
With regard to the new Browns stadium, if it’s going to have a fixed roof why not put most of it underground? I mean sure, it costs money to dig deep holes… but not having to clad maybe 25-35% of the exterior saves a little money. And being partially buried saves on heating and cooling costs as well.
The best part about burying a significant amount of a major stadium is that it doesn’t dominate the skyline. I would be in favour of burying at least half of any stadium or arena. Granted Cleveland’s effort is a bit more than half, but it still seems like a good idea to me.
I suppose building below grade is usually more expensive, otherwise it would be more common.
I suppose it is common in Canada.
It solves a lot of insulation issues, but creates challenges with water leaks and access, especially for repairs.
Portland’s alt-newspaper did a dandy job of using both math and history to sharpen perspective on Dundon’s anticipated daylight heist:
https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/moneyball-the-moda-center-controversy-explained/
You can’t go wrong betting on him to get every bit of his way. The state has already kicked in their share (it’s an election year, and the struggling Dem governor running for another term can use all the friendly billionaires she can wrangle) and, while the city is like most municipalities post-Nov 2024 missing very much the federal contributions to most every social service agency, the mayor and a cadre of council members are busy diverting every dollar to the police (via the clean energy fund; it’s a whole thing) so they’ll find the bucks for this. Despite one or two vocal opponents, welfare for billionaires is a done deal there as elsewhere.
It is kind of neat that a women’s professional team has its own venue, but at the same time it is crazy that an MLS team and NWSL team don’t share a venue in the same market and tax payers are paying for it.
Must be nice to be able to pit two states against each other for public funds without leaving the market.
Unless the ownership is shared, it makes no sense for the second team to be a tenant, especially if they can get someone else to pony up for their own yard.
Revenue capture and retention has been the key to SSS since what was then the Home Depot Center opened in 2003. That’s the play.
Unless one entity owns the MLS team and the NWSL team (as, apparently, is going to be the case in Columbus?), groundsharing doesn’t help the tenant team. (Better for taxpayers, obviously, but we have long since excised them from the equation.
I would argue the opposite: It makes no sense for two teams that can play in the same building to build redundant ones instead, subjecting themselves to twice the construction costs (even if taxpayers are covering a lot of these) and then competing with each other for the same events. A soccer stadium isn’t in use anywhere close to half the days of the year, so aside from ease of scheduling, there’s no real benefit to having two stadiums — you’re just spreading the same number of matches, concerts, etc. over twice as many calendar slots.
Yes, everyone wants “revenue capture,” but the only reason why tenant teams don’t get revenues is because the teams that own the stadiums — or in most cases in the US, just control operating rights — are demanding leases where they get to keep a large chunk of both teams’ revenues for themselves. So we end up with situations like the Flyers and Sixers in Philadelphia, where one owner had to threaten to build a whole second arena that nobody needed or wanted just to get the other owner to agree to a joint revenue sharing agreement.
Perhaps that’s what is going on in Boston too.