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Friday roundup: Cleveland, Nashville keep throwing good stadium money after bad

access_time personNeil deMause

Running late today, let’s do a speed round:

  • Upkeep costs for the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena continue to climb, with one estimate placing them at $261 million, and the county-run Gateway Economic Development Corp. still doesn’t have money identified to pay for them. “We need to figure this out,” said Gateway board chair Virginia “GiGi” Benjamin; given that the Guardians’ and Cavs’ leases only run though 2036 and 2034 respectively, Gateway could always just not spend the money and dare the teams to break their leases a few years early, or at least ask the team owners to kick in a bit more if they don’t want Gateway to default, but still nobody seems to be considering that option, or at least pricing out whether it would be cheaper than spending $261 million.
  • The Tennessee Titans owners are seeking another $75 million for a pedestrian bridge to their new stadium on top of $1.26 billion to build the stadium itself, part of $700 million in public spending set aside for the stadium area, move over, Indiana, there may be a new grift-that-keeps-on-giving champion.
  • Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s lawsuit to get the city of Inglewood to repay him for about $400 million in roads, sidewalks, utilities, and other “public services” for his otherwise privately funded stadium has ended in a judge confirming that the agreement for Inglewood to cover those costs was nullified in a previous court ruling, so sucks to be you, Stan Kroenke. Expect an appeal, and for the two sides to try to settle out of court for a smaller amount.
  • NBA commissioner Adam Silver said it is his “hope and belief that the Trail Blazers can be successful in Portland, Oregon” but that they “need a state-of-the-art arena” but that he’s talked to Blazers owner Tom Dundon and wants to “lower the temperature bit in these negotiations,” all of which are very Adam Silver things to say. It seems like Silver would like for Dundon to find a way to accept a very large taxpayer check while also ensuring that the check is as large as possible, which is why the owners pay him the big bucks.
  • The Kansas City Star says the key difference between K.C. giving Royals owner $600 million toward a new stadium and giving Current owners Angie and Chris Long $185 million toward an expanded stadium is that the Longs are the ones selling the bonds instead of the city, which will “protect the city in the case of shortfalls.” Except that the Longs will get to repay their bonds with city sales tax revenues, so if there’s no shortfall in those, city residents are still on the hook for $185 million. Maybe all of Kansas City journalists need remedial economics lessons?
  • The Washington Commanders parking garages are no longer set to be translucent, now they will just be set in a featureless void or way far in the distance instead.
  • Longshot recidivist Chicago mayoral candidate Willie Wilson (not that one) says he would resolve the Bears stadium battle by paying to build a dome atop Soldier Field and sell the Bears owners land for a new practice facility and give the team (and nearby homeowners) property tax breaks, at a cost of nobody has asked him, the media are just reprinting his campaign glurge, this is fine.
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MLB expansion talk focuses on Salt Lake, other cities with major question marks

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Athletics seemingly settled on setting the Fisher family fortune on fire in Las Vegas, and Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski about to receive the spendiest gift stadium in history, the thoughts of bored baseball writers are turning toward expansion. Sure, there’s the little matter of a new union contract first, which could have monumental impacts in terms of incentives for MLB expanding or not. But league commissioner Rob Manfred said he wants expansion cities picked out by the time he retires at the start of 2029, at least before then saying maybe there won’t be expansion after all, so sure, let’s survey the field of candidates.

This week, we’ve had ESPN’s Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports’ Matt Larter, and Sportsnaut’s Lincoln Zdunich all chiming in with their lists of prospective expansion cities. Let’s go through the possibilities — since the three can’t agree on a ranking, let’s do it in order of TV market size:

Montreal: Being in Canada, Montreal doesn’t actually appear on the Nielsen market size list, but it’s pretty damn huge: There aren’t directly comparable numbers, but it looks like if Montreal were in the U.S. it would fall around 14th, between Seattle and Detroit. It also doesn’t have either a workable MLB stadium (unless you count the re-refurbished Olympic Stadium, which MLB probably wouldn’t) or a prospective owner in place; Passan notes that “at the forefront of the latest push is Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the owner of WatchMojo, and he sees himself more as a facilitator than the money man for a bid.” (I’ve now read a fair bit about WatchMojo, and still can’t figure out exactly what it does, which makes it a very 2026 candidate for sports ownership, or at least sports ownership facilitation.) Montreal also still has all the same other issues as when the Expos left, like a sometimes-weak Canadian dollar. Larter calls Montreal a “longshot”; Passan includes it in his top six; Zdunich doesn’t mention it at all.

Orlando: The largest U.S. market without an MLB team, something local team advocates mention at every possible opportunity. It’s also only 84 miles from Tampa, which looks like it will have the Rays to kick around for the foreseeable future, and sure, that’s only a little less distance than Philadelphia is from New York, but Tampa-Orlando isn’t anywhere near as big a combined market as NYC-Philly. (Tampa already swiped Orlando’s prospective lead investor, Rick Workman, as a Rays co-owner, Passan notes.) It’s also in Florida, where MLB expansion franchises go to suffer league-bottom attendance. Orlando does have a name picked out (the “Dreamers”) and a plan for funding a stadium, albeit one that has been rejected by local officials so far. Passan insists that MLB owners “will consider it”; Zdunich says MLB would be concerned about an Orlando team siphoning off fans from Rays and Miami Marlins fanbases that can’t afford to lose any, but that “the Dreamers have time to improve their proposal until an expansion committee is convened” — maybe by moving Orlando to a different state?

Raleigh: North Carolina’s second-largest media market (behind Charlotte) seems to have taken a leap past its neighbor to the south recently, if only because Carolina Hurricanes and Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon has expressed interest in owning a baseball team there, which gets MLB owners salivating. North Carolina doesn’t have a stadium plan (though it’s funded other teams’ projects before), and it has the disadvantage of splitting its population among three markets (Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, and Greensboro) that would each be among the smaller metro areas in MLB. Passan says it’s “punching well above its weight” without really explaining why or what that means, while Zdunich calls it the “surprise frontrunner” while noting “the only remaining roadblock would be [stadium] funding,” which is kind of a significant hurdle.

Portland: Has an actual stadium plan with $800 million in promised public funding (allegedly from player income taxes, though that’s unlikely to work out without dipping into existing public money) and a group eager to land a team, though one without a billionaire on hand to pay the expansion fee. It’s also on the West Coast, and Manfred has said he’d prefer to add one team on either side of the continent, which gives it a leg up on the larger East Coast cities, but not on one smaller West Coast city, supposedly.

Nashville: Like Orlando, it has a team name picked out (the “Stars”). It’s less than two-thirds the size of Orlando, though, and has even less of a plan for a stadium, with public funding unlikely to be coming soon after Nashville emptied its stadium budget for the Tennessee Titans. The consensus opinion appears to be that Nashville’s time as a frontrunner has passed, if the consensus opinion really matters here.

Salt Lake City: On the face of it, Salt Lake seems like a bad place to put an MLB team: It’s the smallest market on this list, and while it’s been growing fast, it’s also running out of water and facing a future of toxic dust clouds. But it does have two things MLB really likes: a prospective owner (the Miller family, former owners of the Jazz) and a plan to spend $900 million in public money on a stadium, though not specifically where the $900 million would come from. This is enough to make Passan call it “by far the most advanced potential bid”; Zdunich writes that “Salt Lake has been known as a sports town for a while,” though that’s another way of saying it already has a lot of teams (NBA, NHL, MLS) for a smallish city.

In short, MLB has a bunch of imperfect expansion candidate cities (San Antonio, Sacramento, and Vancouver didn’t even get mentions this week, but they’re still out there). And while the league can — and certainly will — play them off against each other to see who comes up with the most lucrative bid, beyond a quick infusion of expansion fee cash and possibly some stadium money, none seem like they would significantly increase the league’s revenue going forward, certainly not enough to make up for giving up a 1/32nd share of national TV and streaming and other revenues. This financial calculus is the main reason MLB hasn’t expanded yet this century, and it hasn’t changed much, though the soaring sale prices of sports teams as North America fills up with multibillionaires presumably has at least some baseball owners salivating for a quick cash infusion, even if it would only come to a couple hundred million dollars per existing owner.

Going back to that Marc Normandin article from February that I linked to above, he wrote at the time:

As I put it back in 2023, “As much as the current 30 owners would love to split some 10-digit expansion fees, they’d also love to be able to threaten to take off for Nashville or Charlotte whenever they aren’t getting as much taxpayer money as they’d like for a new stadium or renovations of an old one. And if new teams fill those slots, well. Threatening to move to Manchester, NH just doesn’t carry the same weight, you know?” And while a market as small as (and as bumping-up-against-Boston as) Manchester might never actually be on the table, somewhere like Las Vegas is a whole lot easier to put up with, media-market size-wise, if the Dodgers, Yankees, et al are subsidizing it a bit. “We can’t put teams in another market the size of Milwaukee” doesn’t hold up when you have a revenue-sharing model that makes Milwaukee work better than it already does.

That’s true, but it also means that going into collective bargaining agreement talks that will include discussions of how teams share revenue, big- and even medium-market owners may not want to saddle themselves with even more people in the owners’ club who don’t bring much to the table other than a one-time check and an expectation to get a big chunk of MLB.tv revenue into the distant future despite not providing many new eyeballs of their own. We don’t know without a fly on the wall inside the owners’ suites; it would be nice if access journalists like Passan would use their contacts to suss out what the jockeying for power within MLB really looks like instead of just passing along what certain insiders want repeated in print, but I guess that’s the kind of reporting that is less likely to get you continued access.

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What does $4B Angels sale mean for team’s stadium future, MLB expansion plans? Some investimagations

access_time personNeil deMause

Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno announced yesterday that he is selling the team to Los Angeles Rams/Denver Nuggets/Colorado Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke, and most of the news coverage has — rightly — focused on Moreno not letting the door hit him in the butt on the way out. Moreno, a billionaire billboard baron, bought the Angels in 2003 from Disney for $180 million, and since then has: angered locals by changing the name of the team from the Anaheim Angels to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim to try to appeal to more fans from the populous city to the north; squandered the presence of the best player of his generation by surrounding him with every overpriced, washed-up free agent he could find; tried to obtain $500 million worth of city land around his stadium for only $150 million, and almost getting away with it until the whole thing blew up in an FBI bribery investigation; and declaring that fans don’t care about winning after conducting a survey that didn’t include “winning” as one of the choices, among other lowlights. By this season, fans were openly chanting “Sell the team!” at home games, and it was apparently enough for Moreno to cash in his chips and sell to the Walmart-heir-by-marriage up the road at a huge profit.

Even as fans exulted in Moreno’s departure, some expressed concern about what a new owner — one who already broke the Rams’ lease in St. Louis so he could move them back to L.A. (The Athletic terms this a “proven track record” in stadium development, which is certainly one way of looking at it) — might mean for the Angels’ future. The team’s lease expires in 2032, though ownership has a series of one-year options that could extend it to 2038. And that juicy stadium parking lot land is still sitting there, though complicated by the fact that the state’s Surplus Land Act requires public property to be considered first for affordable housing before it can be devoted to other uses, something the city of Anaheim already paid a $96 million fine for ignoring once.

In addition, just last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law the Home Run for Anaheim Act, which requires the team to revert to being called the Anaheim Angels in any future lease negotiation or land sale agreement (CORRECTION: Only if the team first gets an exemption from the Surplus Land Act), which may or may not matter depending on whether Kroenke shares Moreno’s obsession with the L.A. name. The 79-year-old Kroenke inherits a stadium situation that is ripe for either opportunity or extortion, depending on how you look at it, and his track record for playing hardball in such matters should encourage Anaheim officials to sleep with one eye open, at least.

The other potential fallout from the sale involves the price tag: We don’t know how big a stake the “controlling interest” is that Kroenke is buying from Moreno, but we do know that it values the entire franchise at a new-MLB-record $4 billion. Coming on the heels of the San Diego Padres‘ sale for a $3.9 billion valuation, this is a sign that there are still plenty of billionaires willing to shell out top dollar for MLB franchises. That’s likely to whet league owners’ appetite for cashing in by creating two expansion teams; even if the available open markets are underwhelming and adding teams would just dilute existing owners’ shares of national TV contracts, it’s got to be tough to pass up a cut of what could be a pair of $4 billion or more checks. With the Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays stadium situations now seemingly settled — though we’ve said that before — the next step may be setting up a bidding war among the Portlands and Nashvilles and Salt Lake Citys of the world, to see if any wants to pay enough toward a new stadium to help an expansion owner afford that multibillion-dollar expansion fee. All the kids are doing it!

 

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KC council set to vote on city giving Royals owner $600m plus a crapton of tax breaks, getting almost nothing in return

access_time personNeil deMause

A Kansas City council committee is set to vote today on approving city money toward a new Royals stadium, so naturally the actual legislation didn’t get released until yesterday, providing everyone involved approximately no time to read and understand it. While everyone scrambles to play catchup, here’s an attempt to at least figure out the main gist of the city’s proposal, after looking at the most important bits and emailing with a bunch of economists who did the same (particularly University of Colorado Denver’s Geoffrey Propheter, who should be a finalist for the Nobel Prize for Speed Reading).

At stake is one bill, plus three accompanying agreements:

  • The bill, ordinance 260704, would allocate $20 million from food and beverage taxes to be placed in a Special Obligation Downtown Stadium Bond Fund, which would be used to pay for [scene missing].
  • An accompanying funding agreement, the Baseball Stadium Funding Agreement, would devote $600 million in city money toward a $1.9 billion stadium, with the state and county providing another $540 million. This would include $90 million for “infrastructure” from “funding not otherwise committed to the Project,” plus $510 million in “legally available sources,” which are both fancy ways of saying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
  • The Baseball Stadium Lease Agreement spells out how much rent the team would pay ($1 a year, plus 5% of net non-baseball profits, which as Propheter notes will likely be 0% if the team as operator is smart enough to ensure that non-baseball events run at a loss) and who would get all other revenues, including naming rights and advertising (Royals owner John Sherman, without exception).
  • A Baseball Stadium Development Agreement that probably lays out a bunch of other stuff, I haven’t finished reading it all yet.

The ordinance is super-short, but it contains one slightly worrisome clause: It would authorize “the City Manager to execute a lease, non-relocation agreement, development agreement, community impact partnership agreement, and funding agreement with the Kansas City Royals or an affiliated entity for design, construction, and operations of a new stadium, team offices, and supporting infrastructure.” Previous legislation authorized the city manager to negotiate terms with Sherman; it’s unclear how much additional leeway he would have in “executing” an agreement, though the lease does at least say it’s contingent on a council vote to approve it being held no later than the end of September.

The associated agreements, meanwhile, are very long, and include enough worrisome clauses to keep a council hearing very busy indeed, if anyone chooses to ask about them. In addition to the items laid out above:

  • Sherman would pay no property taxes on the stadium, since it would be city-owned, and would also receive a full sales tax exemption from all spending on construction, as well as on future maintenance and upgrade costs. Total cost: undetermined as of yet, but on a $1.9 billion stadium, likely to be half a billion dollars or more.
  • The city can’t levy any ticket or parking taxes to recoup its $600 million share, which would instead be paid off by an assortment of “economic activity taxes” (not strictly defined, though expected to include a STIF district to kick back city sales taxes) both within the stadium district and outside it.
  • All funds from actual stadium revenue, meanwhile, with the exception of that 5% cut of non-baseball profits if any exist, would go toward paying off Sherman’s costs: $760 million toward construction, plus $55 million in “community benefits” (paid out over 30 years, so actually significantly less than $55 million in present value).
  • Any future state or county taxes that impact the team are required to be siphoned off to fund the Royals’ stadium maintenance, notwithstanding that the state and county aren’t even parties to this lease.
  • The Royals can stop spending anything more than $1 million a year on stadium repair in the final five years of its lease, which would almost certainly be used by whoever owns the Royals in 2051 to extract a new or renovated stadium.

This is a world-historically terrible agreement for taxpayers, with a near-record $1.9 billion stadium being covered 60% by the public while they receive virtually 0% of the proceeds — and, in fact, would lose far more money from all those tax breaks than any meager non-baseball revenue the city might receive. The total public cost would almost certainly be in excess of $1.5 billion, and could reach $2 billion, either of which would be a new record for the largest MLB stadium subsidy ever.

A vote of the city Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee is expected today, with a full council vote by the end of the week. If that seems like a crazy rush when the full deal has only been available to read for less than 24 hours, the goal is to pass legislation by the end of the month in order to avoid any possibility of holding a public vote in November, as a local labor group is trying force the city to do with a petition campaign. So the council is willing to cut some corners on democracy in order to … well, cut more corners on democracy, it’s just cutting democracy all the way down, really. Tune in today at 9:30 am Central (Zoom link here) to see if any democracy sneaks in during today’s committee hearing.

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Friday roundup: Plano residents to vote on $700m Stars arena subsidy, Bears still playing hard to get with IL and IN

access_time personNeil deMause

In case you missed it, sports economist/meme master J.C. Bradbury has a new book on sports subsidy deals due out soon: This One Will Be Different details the latest in stadium and arena deals and why they never pay off for the public, with a particular focus on the Atlanta Braves‘ extraction of money from Cobb County for a new stadium just 17 years after getting their last one, which he had a front row seat for. And for the run up to the publication date, Bradbury has been building out his sports economics website with all sorts of fresh goodies: FAQs on stadium economics and how stadiums are funded, links to academic studies and presentations, and even a series of YouTube shorts on the lessons of past deals and the prospects for future ones. Check it out, it’s entertaining and eye-opening rabbit holes all the way down!

But don’t go just yet, because first we have another week of stadium and arena news to get through:

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Councilmember says his Rays stadium tax plan would leave Tampa “not involved in the financing,” except for all the financing

access_time personNeil deMause

Ever since Tampa councilmember Bill Carlson announced a few days ago that he’d be willing to consider casting a swing vote for a Tampa Bay Rays stadium if the city’s share came out of a different pot of property tax money, I’ve been engaged in a weird, slow-motion discussion with Carlson on the former Twitter about what exactly his plan is, and how it could possibly save Tampa any money. It started out like this:

Calling my report “false” while linking to the same WUSF report I had linked to is a choice, certainly. But I tried again, asking, “You propose eliminating $180m in CRA and CIT funding and substituting $180m in TIF funding for ‘publicly owned infrastructure.’ Could that be used toward the (county-owned) stadium? If not, who would cover the resulting $180m stadium funding gap?” To which Carlson’s reply, in its entirety, was: “The city is not involved in the financing.”

This brings us to yesterday, when the Tampa Bay Times reported:

Carlson said the city would provide an $80 million advance payment to the development district, paid in four annual $20 million installments, at the Rays’ request. He did not specify which city funds would be tapped for that money.

Carlson has yet to explain how sending $80 million to be used for a Rays stadium district is not being “involved in the financing,” though it’s possible he’s making a distinction between stadium financing and stadium district financing. (Carlson has insisted that any money under his plan would only go for “public infrastructure,” but didn’t answer me when I asked if that could include infrastructure for what would be a county-owned stadium.) Carlson also confirmed to the Times that, contrary to what he said on X, his plan would indeed kick back property taxes to support the Rays project, justifying it as “with the property taxes being generated, we can put some of that back in for the infrastructure.”

There are several possibilities here:

  1. Carlson doesn’t understand how money works. This seems unlikely, given that Carlson is currently in his eighth year on the city council, and at least understands tax increment financing districts enough to write a proposal about how to use them. Elected officials, though, keep falling for the Casino Night Fallacy that taxes paid by a development project don’t cost anything for a local government to give up, so we can never rule out stupidity. For his part, Carlson tweeted on Monday, “You’re not dealing w an amateur here. I have been against these deals for years and I can see through BS on both sides,” which would leave us with…
  2. Carlson is trying to pull a fast one. Before he was elected to the council, Carlson ran a public relations and marketing firm, and it’s entirely possible this entire tax switcheroo is meant as obfuscation, to convince the public that he’s cutting a better deal when he knows he’s not really. His X debating style certainly seems to follow the classic PR principle of “if you don’t like the question you’ve been asked, answer a different one that you wish you’d been asked,” so it’s very possible he knows what he’s doing. Unless…
  3. There’s something here Carlson isn’t telling us. Maybe he really has come up with a way of spending city property tax money without spending city property tax money, despite that being not how tax money works. Or he’s figured out a way to use the city’s spending on things completely unrelated to the Rays project, without team owner Patrick Zalupski noticing that he’d be out $180 million. And he just hasn’t explained which it is yet, or where he plans on getting the $80 million down payment, because he’s really really busy, and also the dog ate his laptop keyboard.

All we do know for sure is that Carlson is proposing to withdraw $180 million in city sales and property tax spending on the Rays stadium project, and substitute $80 million in some money from somewhere plus some amount of other money from future property tax receipts — and we also still don’t know who covers any shortfall if those property tax revenues fall short. As for why Carlson is being so obscure, we’re ultimately left with the epistemological dilemma that prompted Hanlon’s Razor, but I for one don’t have enough evidence to say whether that conclusion applies here. It’s a fine line, indeed.

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Arenas that have lost NBA or NHL teams turn out to have done just fine

access_time personNeil deMause

For anyone who holds to the belief that sports fans are mindless boosters who want their elected officials to keep their beloved team owners (or just beloved team’s owners) happy no matter what the cost, I present you with Blazer’s Edge, the SB Nation fan site for the Portland Trail Blazers. Site editor Dave Deckard yesterday did something that the rest of the local media hasn’t yet: He assigned a reader/contributor who goes by the handle BlazerTag (possibly Ryan Whitledge, who used to host a podcast by that name) to investigate whether the Blazers leaving town would really result in an economic and fiscal catastrophe for Portland, with the city left with “a skeleton building, unused and rotting.” And the answer is: If the experience of other cities is to be believed, Portland would be just fine.

The former NHL home of the Arizona Coyotes has been without its anchor tenant since 2022; they’ve moved onto the greener pastures of Salt Lake City. To see how bad the finances got in the immediate aftermath, let’s hear from Glendale City Manager Kevin Phelps.

“The venue (Desert Diamond Arena) smashed its all-time record for revenue after the (Coyotes’) departure,” Phelps said. “The next year, they beat that number by almost $10 million.”

Glendale, you may recall, had an especially horrific lease with the Coyotes, under which the city had to pay the team to play there. Portland, meanwhile, has an especially horrific lease with the Blazers, under which team owner Tom Dundon doesn’t pay any rent or share any arena revenues.

At the peak of their popularity, the Warriors left Oracle Arena in Oakland for a new facility in San Francisco: the Chase Center. So what happened to Oracle (now called Oakland Arena) when the Warriors left? It had its best fiscal year ever and reduced its operating deficit by 97% between 2019 to 2023.

The Bay Area doesn’t have a ton of arenas — it’s basically the Warriors’ new arena in San Francisco and their old one in Oakland (not counting San Jose, the South Bay is really a different market [EDIT: or maybe one market but a really sprawly one or 1.5 markets or something, see comments if this is important to you]) — so getting the Warriors out of the way has been a blessing in disguise for the Oakland arena. Nobody ever talks much about San Francisco as an NHL expansion or relocation market despite its huge population, and this is likely one of the reasons. (The last attempt going extremely poorly would be another.)

KeyArena turned a bigger profit than it ever did with the Sonics. It happened the same way it did in Glendale and Oakland when their anchor tenants left: by freeing up the stadium revenue the sports teams were hoarding for themselves.

It goes on like that, but you get the idea. This is, in fact, a common theme in arena finances: Having an anchor tenant for 40 nights a year is nice, but not so nice when they’re not paying rent and are taking away dates that could be used on concerts that would. It’s still not especially likely that Dundon moves the Blazers, but it does seem that he needs Portland more than Portland needs him.

BlazerTag then summed up with a couple of paragraphs that reflect a position I’ve heard over the years from lots of sports fans who are all too aware they’re also taxpayers:

I’m aware of the sorrow that awaits if no Moda deal is struck. I understand the emotional stakes, but I won’t let them blind me to the cold, hard financial truth.

“Moda Center will crumble without the Blazers” is Stockholm syndrome reasoning from a fanbase being held hostage by ownership. It’s misinformation that I will not suffer.

Blazer’s Edge also did some tea-leaf reading recently of the recently revealed internal Blazers emails in which team lawyer Zandria Conyers suggested just not answering city questions publicly, because “I don’t think our public answers will be well-received.” Deckard noted that while the pissiness was not great, “it was not the kind of nonchalant dismissal one would expect if the organization had already checked out of the process,” which is very true. “The good news: the Blazers do appear to be seeking public funding for the arena for real, which means moving doesn’t seem to be their first option,” concluded Deckard, and while that’s probably stretching the meaning of “good news,” it does argue against the conspiracy theory that Dundon bought the team just to move it, which is better than nothing.

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Broncos execs tired of waiting for someone to give them land and money for stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been almost a year since Denver Broncos owners Greg and Carrie Penner, Mayor Mike Johnston, and Gov. Jared Polis announced plans for a new stadium to be built by 2031 at Denver’s state-owned Burnham Yard railyards, with the big remaining questions being how much the Penners would pay for the land, how they would get it rezoned for sports use, how much public money they would get for “infrastructure” like new roads, whether they would get tax increment financing to kick back sales and/or property taxes to help pay for construction, who would clean up contaminated soil at the site, and what kind of community benefits agreement to agree to. They’re still figuring most of that out, and last weekend Broncos president Damani Leech went to the hustings to tell reporters that team officials are growing annoyed that things aren’t moving faster:

“I’ve got to be honest, I wish we were further along in some areas than we are now. I think areas where we do control, particularly real estate, you mentioned Burnham Yard, real estate, engaging with the community, we’ve done site tours of the location, the design of the stadium continues to evolve, the master plan continues to evolve. All of those things are moving along really, really well, but we also understand that we can’t do this alone.

“There are certain things we don’t control. I think as an example, the community benefits process is something that we can’t control. We’ve had a lot of initial great discussions with community representatives. More recently here, it’s been on more of a staff level. We’re eager to engage with those community members directly, understand what they’re looking for, what needs and interests they have on the development. Things like that, we have to continue to progress. We said many months ago, this is an ambitious timeline, so for that to happen, we need everybody to be involved. We can’t do it alone in order to get to 2031.”

Leech said opening the stadium by 2031 is “still achievable for sure,” but that “everybody has to be involved.”

Is there frustration with the process?

“I’ll be honest, there are days when I have concern,” Leech said, “there are days when I have frustration because you can’t control it all, so I think that’s fair.”

This all starts off reasonably enough — shit takes time, damn that bureaucracy — and it’s unclear from NBC Sports’ Mike Florio’s recounting whether it was reporters or Leech who introduced the word “frustration.” (Denver Sports’ longer quote makes it seem more like the latter.) Still, taken as a whole, this becomes a clear message to city and state officials and community negotiators: Why doesn’t anyone else share our urgency about giving us what we want so we can open our stadium by our chosen date? It’s like you all have other priorities or something!

The Penners did win an agreement in May with the state Department of Transportation for a right of first refusal to buy the rail yards for $45.8 million, $23.6 million less than the state paid for the land and a track easement between 2021 and 2025. (Under the deal, the team will pay for cleanup costs.) But the sale isn’t finalized yet, nor are the rezoning or the TIFs or the infrastructure money, so the total public cost is still very much up in the air.

Meanwhile, Leech also called requiring fans to buy personal seat licenses in order to buy tickets to be “a pretty likely thing to happen,” which is both unsurprising — most other NFL teams do it, as a way to monetize their season ticket holder waitlist while hoping nobody notices that fans often end up holding ticket rights that nobody wants to buy — and likely to be unpopular given how fans of teams like the Buffalo Bills are growing concerned that they’re being priced out of affording tickets. This is absolutely something that city and state officials could be making part of their negotiations, but negotiating is so tiresome, can’t we get to the fun part already where we get to build our stadium? Go write that down, reporters, we’re trying to build a narrative here!

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Friday roundup: Tampa plans for Rays keep going sideways; new stadium funding demands in Orlando, D.C.

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday to those of you who can see this through all the burning Canada! Everyone stay safe, mask up, and stay indoors to read the latest sports subsidy news, only most of which this week involves Florida men:

  • Hillsborough County Commission chair Ken Hagan said Wednesday that if the Tampa city council won’t go along with contributing tax money to a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium, maybe the county will just go ahead without them. Hagan did not go on to describe where he would find $180 million to replace the city’s planned contribution. Rather than object to being threatened with a good time, Tampa council chair Alan Clendenin warned his recalcitrant colleagues, “Unfortunately, there’ll be a cost of the city not having participated in the process.” He didn’t say what kind of cost he meant, but he gave his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough with old Clenny.
  • The chances of convincing Tampa elected officials to spend public dollars on a Rays stadium, meanwhile, could plummet if Florida voters adopt sweeping property tax cuts in November, which would decimate local budgets. On the bright side — sort of — that would at least make any property tax exemption for the Rays stadium project worth less, since there would be less in property taxes to exempt, though it still would leave Tampa in the same budget hole for the project.
  • And finally, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred also chimed in on the Rays stadium situation, saying at the All-Star Game, “Every delay just makes it more difficult to hit a timetable of when the stadium is going to open,” which, yes, that’s how time works. Maybe Manfred would like to impose a pitch clock on stadium talks?
  • The group of wannabe Orlando MLB expansion team owners say they have more than $2 billion in place combined for acquiring a team and building a stadium, and with MLB’s expansion fee expected to be more than $2 billion, they’re asking the state of Florida to kick in $975 million in tourist tax dollars toward a stadium. The prospective ownership group said this would 100% be worth it, as a new team in Orlando would generate $73 trillion dollars in new economic activity in the first week alone (or something like that, I didn’t write down the actual number, mine is equally likely to be accurate). It also raises the question of whether Orlando is really a move threat for the Rays if it would require state money too, meaning state officials would really be bidding against themselves.
  • Some rich people in Nashville would like an MLB expansion team too, but city officials there say that’ll only work if they can privately fund a stadium, good luck with that.
  • The Chicago city council, as expected, approved spending $425 million in property tax proceeds on roads and public plazas and stuff surrounding a new downtown Chicago Fire stadium. Alderman Anthony Beale called the project “what exactly TIF is supposed to be used for,” adding, “When you look at the jobs that are going to be created by this, when you look at the revenue that’s going to be brought into the city by this project, the restaurants, the parking, the ticket sales and all the things that go along with that, that’s how we make our economy grow.” Beale did not explain how moving the Fire from one part of Chicago to another was going to create all this new revenue — or, for that matter, how encouraging construction of new housing in one part of Chicago rather than another — but surely he knows what he’s talking about, no reason not to trust him just bceause he once attended a fundraiser in his honor held by the taxicab industry the week before before voting to water down taxicab regulations.
  • Washington, D.C. council chair Phil Mendelson has proposed spending $300 million in city money on expanding D.C. United‘s stadium to 28,000 seats and building a roof on it, with the team owners on the hook for the other $320 million. In exchange, the district would receive “stadium-generated revenues and economic activity,” which is to say no actual money, just “maybe it’ll host some more concerts and not everyone buying tickets would have been spending their money elsewhere in D.C. anyway.”
  • The city of Portland broke the stalemate in Portland Trail Blazers arena talks yesterday, sending team owner Tom Dundon a draft term sheet that doesn’t include rent payments but does include payments in lieu of property taxes starting at $3 million a year and escalating over time. This came after NBA commissioner Adam Silver griped that Dundon’s plan to get $600 million in public money for arena renovations while putting in nothing of his own money “seems to have gone off track,” then refused to promise that the Blazers would stay in Portland even if the $600 million was approved — which seems to be a violation of Extortion 101, but maybe you do catch more flies with vinegar than honey, who knew?
  • Cleveland’s Gateway Economic Development Corp. just got a $52 million bill for projected repair needs for the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and doesn’t have $52 million to pay it with. Surely nobody could have seen that coming when the city agreed to cover the teams’ future capital expenses as long as they played there! Live and learn, or in Cleveland’s case, just live.
  • More World Cup economic impact data points: Some businesses in Atlanta are doing well, others are not; Arlington businesses are only doing well if they sell tourists on Texas-y things like barbecue or access to cattle drives; New York’s bars made out better during the event than its hotels; bars in England are doing great, too, despite England not actually hosting any games; downtown Seattle got an extra 3 million visitors on World Cup hosting days, but the Downtown Seattle Association didn’t release figures on whether the rest of Seattle got fewer visitors than normal on those days; and Miami and Los Angeles and Arlington should all see massive economic impact, report news sites (mostly former news site CBS) that only cite FIFA’s numbers.
  • Economist Geoff Propheter decided to get into the vaportecture game with AI designs for a new Blazers arena, and after some online kibitzing it ended up here, 10/10, no notes.
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Friday roundup: Pelicans owner seeks deal for state-funded velour, ballot measure on Royals stadium could face court fight

access_time personNeil deMause

First off, a special note of thanks to all the FoS supporters who get daily posts by email for your patience while I’ve spent the last week or two figuring out how to make the formatting more readable on mobile devices. (The actual code took just a few minutes to write; figuring out where to insert it in the convoluted system that sends out notices as soon as posts are published was a much longer saga.) I hope this reduces your eyestrain, even at the risk of easier access to stadium news raising your blood pressure.

And speaking of stoking ire, here’s the rest of this week’s news items that didn’t make the daily cut:

  • New Orleans Pelicans owner Gayle Benson is reportedly working on a lease extension with the state of Louisiana to be signed by the end of this year, which could be a 10-year deal with additional five-year options like Benson’s Saints got. No one’s saying a word about the important stuff — how much the state would kick in for arena renovations as part of the deal, and whether Benson would pay any added rent or revenue sharing to help repay the state’s costs — but given that the Pelicans owner has previously said she wants more luxury suites with crushed velour furniture in order to boost the team’s profits, which are currently only about $77 million a year, don’t hold your breath on this “public-private partnership” including a ton of private.
  • A Kansas City labor organization has succeeded in getting enough signatures to put a vote on the November ballot on whether to use city money to fund a new Royals stadium. Mayor Quinton Lucas has declared “the train’s already left the station” and threatened to get the deal signed off on before November, to preclude the public from having a say; the group Missouri Workers Power has threatened to sue to block Lucas from doing so, citing legal precedents where courts struck down legislative actions taken on issues where voter initiatives were pending.
  • North Carolina house speaker Destin Hall is not so crazy about the idea of setting aside a pile of state money to build a Raleigh-area baseball stadium for a proposed MLB expansion team, saying, “Private companies should pay for their own facilities instead of relying on the General Assembly. However, if someone presents a proposal showing that North Carolina taxpayers would get a strong return on the investment, I am willing to consider it.” State senate leader Phil Berger, who lost his primary by 23 votes in March, has been the main advocate of a stadium funding bill; both Hall and Berger are Republicans, while Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said this week, “We’re eager for this opportunity to be considered, and we’ll do all we can to support it.”
  • Some Illinois state legislators don’t seem inclined to revisit tax subsidies for a Chicago Bears stadium no matter what Gov. JB Pritzker says: Comments this week (all from Pritzker’s fellow Democrats) included, “What the Bears wanted was a blank check We not only said no but, excuse my language, hell no,” “If you come to the table in Springfield and you are a liar, it doesn’t bode well for you,” and “The big issue that came about was, Are we going to give billionaires more taxpayer dollars?”
  • A Cuyahoga County councilmember is suggesting using part of the proceeds of a 0.25% sales tax surcharge meant to cover building a new jail and repairing a courthouse to instead pay for repairs and upgrades to the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, because surely there’s nothing else the county could use that money for. Just not paying for unlimited upgrades ad infinitum and daring the team owners to give up their sweetheart leases — or even threatening to do so in order to get the team owners to agree to a compromise solution — remains an option, guys.
  • Neighborhood leaders around the Chicago Fire‘s proposed stadium at the The 78 site say if the city is going to devote tax money to parking garages for the stadium, it should also kick in for a community benefits agreement to provide funding for transit access, affordable housing, anti-displacement protections, public infrastructure, and support for local businesses. Whether to view this as a vital instrument of democracy to ensure that regular citizens can get dealt into public spending priorities or just a way for developers to buy off local community leaders by cutting them in on the deal is, as always, a reasonable question.
  • Most of the news coverage of the economic impact of the World Cup has disappeared as coverage of the games themselves has taken over, but Seattle’s KUOW did check in on local businesses this week and found that food outlets near the stadium that sell drinks or quick grab-and-go food items are doing great while businesses farther away or those that sell things fans may not crave before or after a soccer match (Vietnamese cookies, vintage clothing) are having a miserable time of it. Yup, checks out!
  • Buffalo Bills ticket prices are too damn high, clearly we need to reduce red tape so the Bills can build more seats.
  • Yes, that Crain’s Chicago Business article claiming Bears tax subsidies weren’t public money was real bad, but as Geoffrey Propheter reminds us, it’s still no Bridge Detroit.
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