Search Results for: D.C. United starts beating Baltimore drum

Friday roundup: Rays may have bot-lobbied for stadium funds, OR gov says not rubber-stamping Blazers cash is “playing politics”

access_time personNeil deMause

We’ve run off the end of April, and — spoiler alert — neither the Chicago Bears nor Tampa Bay Rays stadium situations have yet been resolved as team owners had hoped. Sportswriters often like to portray a slow approval process as dysfunction, but it can equally well be the opposite: Taking your time and driving a hard bargain are good negotiating tools, and when billions of dollars in tax money are at stake, rushing to get something approved just because the local billionaire is impatient is a great way to end up with unexpected costs. It’s still very much unknown whether residents of Illinois and Florida will end up with better stadium deals as a result of legislators taking their time, but it’s hard to imagine it’ll end up being any worse than if they’d just signed off on whatever they were presented with without reading it.

Anyway, lots of news did happen this week, even in Tampa Bay and Chicago, so let’s get to it:

  • Hillsborough County Commissioner Joshua Wostal claims that somebody sent more than 2,000 bot-written emails from a single IP address in Los Angeles urging county commissioners to hurry up and approve the Rays’ stadium deal. Wostal says he doesn’t want to move forward with any stadium plan until the Rays owners provide documentation of where they’ll get the money to finance their part of the deal, which would include more than $1 billion for the stadium plus possibly billions more for surrounding development (some of which would be recouped by tax and land breaks), though the team hasn’t actually committed to what exactly it will build; a Rays statement said only that it would provide financing details “at the appropriate time as is standard with similar public-private partnerships,” which must be ownerese for “maybe after we’ve cashed your check.”
  • Bears executives held a meeting with NFL officials this week, in which everyone agreed that the best stadium options are either in Arlington Heights or Indiana. The assembled dignitaries then warned Illinois legislators that if a stadium bill to the Bears owners’ liking isn’t approved ASAP, the team and league could meet again.
  • Count Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek among the hurry-up-and-rubber-stampers: After signing a bill to provide $365 million in state money for Portland Trail Blazers renovations, she chided city and county officials for not swiftly approving their own $235 million, saying, “This is not a time to play politics. This is a time to get it done.” (“Playing politics,” in this case, includes things like not wanting to sign a nondisclosure agreement before entering into arena funding talks.)
  • The Cleveland Browns held a groundbreaking for their new Brook Park stadium, even as legal questions remain about the state unclaimed funds money that is supposed to pay $600 million toward the project. Everyone involved is still moving full steam ahead, though: Browns owner Jimmy Haslam said that “we’re not attorneys, OK?” but after talking to actual attorneys “we do think it’ll be resolved,” while Gov. Mike DeWine reassured everyone that if this public funding plan fails, the state could always go back to his plan to raise sports gambling taxes and give the proceeds to sports teams that everyone hated. No one is saying exactly what will happen if the state — and the city of Brook Park, which is still negotiating its own $245 million in stadium spending — can’t come up with the money after stadium construction is already underway, probably because nobody wants to admit that “let the Haslams figure out how to find the rest of the money” is still an option for fear of risking the benefits of moving the Browns from Ohio to Ohio.
  • But if (greater) Cleveland doesn’t get a new stadium, how will it host a Super Bowl? Don’t worry, it probably won’t get one anyway unless it builds more hotels, says NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who pointedly did not mention this during the runup to the stadium funding vote.
  • MLS has a prospective Las Vegas bidder for the Vancouver Whitecaps: a group led by Grant Gustavson, the 30-year-old son of Kentucky’s wealthiest billionaire. This doesn’t necessarily mean the Whitecaps will move if they don’t get a new arena deal in Vancouver — Vegas doesn’t have a soccer arena at all (though Gustavson said he’s ready to “privately finance” one, without providing details) and is getting dangerously close to a market glut of sports teams — but it’ll likely light a fire under officials in British Columbia, who already started scrambling the jets once the league announced its Vegas move threat earlier this week.
  • Team owner insists he needs state money for a new stadium, state says no you can’t have any, team owner finds an existing stadium to play in. Happy endings all around in the CT United F.C. story, unless you’re team owner Andre Swanston, who now has to settle for just selling tickets to watch soccer matches instead of getting $127 million in state aid to help boost his team’s bottom line.
  • Would this Comiskey Park–inspired stadium design be a better place for Chicago White Sox fans to watch a game? Undoubtedly, since it would bring back that ballpark’s close-to-the-action upper deck. Would it make more money for the White Sox owners? Probably not, because it would be missing the wall of luxury suites that are to blame for the current stadium’s unloved distant upper deck: Extra-nosebleedy cheap seats in modern stadiums are a feature, not a bug. Maybe work on reducing soaring income inequality that has created such a soaring market for high-priced tickets, and then we can get back to stadium design that actually works for everyone.
  • How did the economic impact go from the NFL Draft that Pittsburgh canceled school for? Not so hot, according to one restaurant worker who fought through draft-related bus rerouting only to have her hours cut because fewer customers than usual showed up. (Economists are shocked, shocked!) The city tourism agency responded with a statement that really the NFL Draft was less about bringing in new spending than “positioning Pittsburgh as a modern, globally relevant city well beyond the weekend.”
  • In related news, New Jersey transit officials are recommending that state residents work from home during World Cup matches to avoid the transit nightmare caused by rerouting trains to take fans to matches since they won’t be allowed to drive there. This could be good news for New Jersey restaurants, maybe, unless everyone just makes their own lunches those days, see why economic impact of sporting events is harder to calculate than just adding up all the fans and declaring “> ? > profit”?
  • No, the Athletics aren’t going to change their name to the “Las Vegas Black Fire” just because they listed that as a location in a job listing, it’s just the name of a co-working space in Vegas. Thanks to SF Gate for clearing this up, maybe everyone should have done a little more research before firing up the AI jersey designs.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Has Cleveland’s mayor actually found a way to make Guardians and Cavs owners help pay for own repair costs?

access_time personNeil deMause

No time for a lengthy roundup intro today, I’m too busy catching up with the latest problems resulting from sending Microsoft Outlook into space. Plenty of juicy bullet points, though, you can dig into those right now:

  • Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb is proposing establishing sales tax surcharge of up to 5% in and around the Guardians‘ stadium and Cavaliers‘ arena to help fund what could be $400 million in ongoing repairs and upgrades at the venues, expenses the city’s sports authority is required to cover under the teams’ leases but which it has no money for. Cleveland.com describes this as “Cavs and Guardians fans footing the bill,” but actually a lot of this could fall on the team owners, as fans are unlikely to put up with higher prices on tickets (or, to a somewhat lesser degree, hot dogs or souvenirs) just because taxes went up. One catch: Any “New Community Authority” would require any property owners to agree to join and be subject to the tax; the stadium and arena are owned by the sports authority, though, so it’s at least possible Bibb could force this on the teams over their objections. Lots of team prepare for such backdoor funding attempts by inserting “no ticket tax surcharge” clauses into their leases — I’m not spotting any in the Cavs and Guardians leases on an initial look, but feel free to search for yourselves.
  • NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell turned up the heat on the Chicago Bears stadium situation on Tuesday, declaring: “They need to find a solution for a stadium. … I think it’s really important that they come to a resolution on this relatively soon. … This is an important time to get this resolved sooner rather than later.” Okay, that’s less “heat” than “typical commissioner whingeing,” no reason to report on this as upping the pressure in any real oh come on, NBC Chicago.
  • Predatory lending tycoon Tom Dundon has been approved as the new owner of the Portland Trail Blazers, and he was not pleased at all that one of the first questions he got was why he hasn’t committed any of his own money toward an arena renovation that the team is seeking $600 million in public subsidies for. “No one’s ever told me I didn’t have skin in the game before,” snapped Dundon. “We don’t know each other very well. So, look, we’re going to negotiate and do a market deal.” Easy for him to say since he’s already landed the first $365 million in state funding, but at least maybe this will give local legislators a bit more backbone as they negotiating the remaining $235 million — especially since minority owner and venture capital succubus Sheel Tyle declared, “I don’t want people to be concerned or scared. We are committed to Portland, 100 percent. Full stop.” Somebody please alert Ron Wyden.
  • The Maryland legislature has killed legislation for the 2026 session to spend $217 million in public money on a stadium to host new Baltimore men’s and women’s soccer teams, partly because there’s community opposition to building it atop a public golf course that was the site of some of the first integration of the city’s public facilities. “When we introduced the legislation, the purpose was not to get it funded,” bill sponsor state Sen. Antonio Hayes told the Baltimore Banner, “the purpose was to keep the conversation going” — so you can rest assured we’ll hear about this again in the 2027 session.
  • Denver Broncos owner Greg Penner says he won’t be able to meet an “ambitious” 2031 target date for opening a new stadium without help from “a lot of key partners at the city level [and] at state level.” In particular, Penner still needs to finish acquiring land for the stadium — he said if the new stadium isn’t ready by 2031 he could just extend his lease at the old one, so it’s not clear why anyone would feel pressured by this deadline other than him, but this is just how team owners roll.
  • The Missouri legislature is considering cutting $2 million from its stadium maintenance budget and redirecting it to a fire department program in retaliation for the Kansas City Chiefs announcing they’ll move to Kansas in 2031 — though in the meantime, it would also reduce maintenance spending on the Royals stadium as well, assuming the Royals stick around.
  • World Cup participant countries typically get tax exemptions during their teams’ time spent in the host nation, but because Trump administration is only extending that courtesy to nations that have signed specific double-taxation agreements with the U.S., “It’s going to cost most non-European countries a lot of money to go to the World Cup” this summer, says tax consultant Oriana Morrison. And that’s before visiting fans pony up for the inflated cost of train tickets to the games in Massachusetts. Props to both the federal and local governments for finding ways to claw back some of the costs of hosting the World Cup, I guess, though taking it from the pockets of Haitians seems just slightly cruel and unusual.
  • Inglewood is spending $8.5 million to “revitalize” its downtown so that it’s more lively in advance of the 2027 Super Bowl and 2028 Summer Olympics, hey wait, weren’t Super Bowls and Olympics supposed to revitalize their surroundings? U.S. news media, we await your corrections.
Share this post:

Maryland Gov. Moore facing 2027 deadline to okay Orioles development deal or face early lease exit, thanks to Maryland Gov. Moore

access_time personNeil deMause

If you can remember as far back as two winters ago, then-Baltimore Orioles owners the Angelos family agreed to sign a 30-year lease extension for Camden Yards in exchange for $600 million (or more) in state money for stadium renovations. The new lease had an out clause, though: If the Orioles owners can’t agree with the state on a development agreement around the stadium by the end of 2027, they can break the lease after just 15 years. As I wrote at the time:

What’s left now is for the state and Angelos to negotiate the development agreement, but [Maryland Gov. Wes] Moore has effectively tied his own hands in those talks, since if he doesn’t agree to what the O’s owner wants, Angelos can spend his $600 million and then walk. Or, more likely, spend the $600 million and then demand more in about a decade, since he’ll be able to point to his expiring lease.

The end of 2027 is getting ever closer, and for the Orioles owner — now private equity goon David Rubenstein, who bought the team from the Angelos family in 2024 — the above scenario is becoming ever more real:

Catie Griggs, president of business operations for the Orioles, said this week the priority for the club and the Maryland Stadium Authority was to complete the upgrades to the ballpark this winter.

“What I will tell you is MSA has been an incredible partner throughout the process of getting this done,” Griggs said, “so I have full confidence that as we enter the season to sort of pick our heads up to look around again, that they will continue to be great partners.”

That sounds like a … backhanded compliment? Veiled threat? One of those?

Early indications were that the development agreement could amount to a whole lot of extra free money for Rubinstein — as much as $7.1 million a year in new revenues just from taking over the historic warehouse in right field for 99 years, in exchange for less than $1 million a year in rent. And Rubinstein has the hammer in the form of that 15-year out clause, though I suppose Gov. Moore could be equally hard-nosed and say he’ll pull out of the entire development deal if it’s too rich for Maryland taxpayers’ blood, damn the extra 15 years of stadium lease. That could work, just so long as he doesn’t first … oh noooooooooo:

“The thing that we know is that we’re completely aligned on this being the long-term home of [the] Baltimore Orioles,” Moore said of the priorities for the city, state and team owners. “That was a key priority for me. Gone are the days when we were doing one-year deals and two-year deals. I would only accept a long-term deal because we need to have certainty for downtown Baltimore and certainty for the Baltimore Orioles, and I’m grateful that, with this new leadership team, we got that.”

Yup, Wes Moore is very, very bad at this.

If you want to learn more about how the Orioles stadium came to be, meanwhile, student journalists at the University of Maryland have put together a website with a bunch of videos that claim to be the “most complete telling of the Camden Yards story.” I haven’t watched it yet, because I’ve already read (several times) an extremely comprehensive story of the making of Camden Yards. But admittedly that didn’t include hour-long video clips of Edward Bennett Williams testifying, so if you have a ton of time and an enjoyment of YouTube, neither of which describes me, it may be fun to poke around in.

Share this post:

“Privately funded” Bulls/Blackhawks arena development asks for $55m in tax breaks, could seek more

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been almost two years since the owners of the Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks announced plans for a $7 billion development housing-and-concert-space-and-hotels-and-0ther-stuff project on the parking lots around the United Center arena, without exactly indicating who would be paying for it, though it’s been widely described as “privately funded.” And now we have one sliver of an answer: a $55 million property tax break.

[Chicago Mayor Brandon] Johnson introduced the estimated $54.7 million in property tax incentives to the City Council on March 18. Under Cook County’s Class 7b special assessment, the project’s property tax rate for the first phase would be 10% for the first 10 years, 15% for Year 11, then 20% for Year 12…

“Cook County incentives such as a Class 7B are standard incentives designed to encourage private investment in underserved areas, and this project is exactly that,” [an unnamed United Center] spokesperson said. “Developments across Cook County routinely pursue these types of incentives, and we’ve done so with the understanding that the development will generate significantly increased property tax revenue over time.”

Developments across Cook County indeed receive tons of property tax breaks — it’s a Chicago specialty — but that doesn’t necessarily make them a great idea. Yes, a new development will pay more in property taxes than parking lots would have, but it would also come with new costs, starting with schools for all the kids at the new housing to attend; and that’s assuming that any new development at the United Center doesn’t lead developers to build less somewhere else in the city, which is very much something that can happen. (The Chicago Tribune editorial board points out that the planned music theater could also siphon off concerts from other city venues.) As for categorizing the arena’s Near West Side environs as “underserved,” that’s possibly a bit of a reach when it’s had the second biggest increase in property values in the entire city since 2000.

That said, $55 million in tax breaks for a $7 billion project wouldn’t be the worst sports-related development deal, if that’s all that Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Blackhawks owner Danny Wirtz would be pocketing—

The project is also in a tax-increment financing district, which could give city officials another way to subsidize the project or the infrastructure it needs, including a new station on the CTA’s Pink Line.

Sigh. Okay, file this one under “Public cost: TBD” for now. Maybe we’ll learn more once the Chicago city council, which unanimously approved the project itself last year, takes up consideration of the tax breaks, at a time also TBD.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Pittsburgh cancels in-person school while hosting NFL Draft, this is just a thing that happens now?

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been quite a week: In case you missed it, I spent much of it keeping up with the comment storm after this Q&A about a paper on housing policy published on Monday. (Turns out people have very many feels about housing policy.) Add in a busy week of stadium news, and I should probably take the day off from typing to avoid a repetitive stress injury — but not before taking a run through the week’s additional stadium and arena news, that’s more important than my wrist tendons.

Share this post:

Getting new stadiums in big markets “critical” for MLS, but cities aren’t driving hard bargains

access_time personNeil deMause

The Athletic, aka the non-union (for now) sports website that the New York Times replaced its sports department with, ran an article yesterday about MLS and its desire for new stadiums that sits firmly in the pantheon of “the business of sports business writing is business” reporting: The first words are “Chicago Fire owner Joe Mansueto’s eye for Chicago real estate,” and it just gets more investment-bro-y from there. The ostensible topic is how the Fire and NYC F.C. and the New England Revolution are all working on new stadiums, and how MLS needs them to “wake up” those “critical markets” and “make those teams truly matter in those cities.”

If this means anything, it presumably means getting more people to go to MLS games in those cities. The Revolution and Fire were 7th and 8th in MLS attendance last year — to the extent that official MLS attendance figures mean anything — while NYC F.C. was in 14th. Those figures, all in the 21,000-24,000 per game range, pale in comparison to Atlanta United (41,000 per game) or the Seattle Sounders (31,000), but then those teams play in NFL stadiums, so they have the capacity to draw more. And in fact the new Fire stadium would only hold 22,000 and the Revolution stadium 24,000, both less than the teams claim to be drawing now, so it’s going to be tough to see much increase in announced attendance, though perhaps fewer fans will show up dressed as empty seats.

Either way, the fact that a soccer reporter is asserting that “activating the country’s biggest markets is critical for [MLS] building relevance and establishing a superior television audience” is an indication that MLS needs big markets more than the big markets need MLS, so if new soccer-only stadiums in those markets are truly what will make the league a success, its owners can reasonably be expected to find the capital to build them themselves. Both NYC F.C. and the Fire (Boston is still in the planning stages) are covering construction costs, but both are also being built on land that is at least partly exempt from property tax, amounting to subsidies of around $538 million in New York and $700 million (not all of it for the stadium) in Chicago, plus perhaps another $200 million in infrastructure costs for New York. Could those cities have cut better deals, knowing that the league needed to get them done in order to build relevance and establish a superior television audience? We’ll never know — though early indications in the Revolution’s stadium plans show that holding firm and refusing to give up the store is an option, when savvy city negotiators recognize their leverage.

Share this post:

Bears hedge on Illinois vs. Indiana decision as public cost of Hammond stadium remains moving target

access_time personNeil deMause

When the Illinois legislature canceled Thursday morning’s planned hearing on a property tax break bill for a Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights, it turns out, it wasn’t just a bureaucratic scheduling glitch. Rather, the legislature did so at the request of Bears president Kevin Warren so that the bill could be revised — or, as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker intimated, maybe just because “Indiana had asked them to say that they’re going to move forward with the negotiations in Indiana.” (Indiana officials had demanded some kind of commitment from the Bears before moving ahead with their own stadium financing package.) Either way, the Illinois bill is supposed to be resubmitted at a new hearing later this week.

Sports Mockery claims (citing no sources whatsoever) that Bears owner George McCaskey was “livid” with Warren for committing so heavily to Indiana, leading to the Bears president issuing a statement Saturday that “we continue to work with Illinois’ leadership and appreciate the progress being made.” All of which has led to even more speculation that McCaskey and Warren are mostly trying to play the two states off against each other to drive up the level of public subsidy, which of course they are, Chicago sports owners practically invented that game.

Indiana’s state Legislative Services Agency, meanwhile, issued a fiscal impact statement on Friday that starts to spell out how much each of the tax streams for a Bears stadium in Hammond, Indiana would cost state and local taxpayers:

  • The state would create a stadium tax district in Hammond that would divert all new property tax, income tax, and sales tax within the district above what’s currently collected there to paying off the stadium, for up to the next 35 years. Since no one knows how big the district would be or what would be built within it, there’s no way to know how much this redirected tax revenue would amount to; the fiscal note observes that other similar districts in the state divert as much as $10 million a year, but then immediately adds that “the amount of revenue deposited in the fund is
    indeterminable and will depend on the plan for the designated district,” which is legislativese for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
  • A 1% food and beverage tax surcharge in Lake and Porter counties, on top of the state’s 7% level, would generate an estimated $12-18 million a year, or possibly more if a stadium district leads to more local food and beverage sales.
  • Doubling the Lake County hotel tax from 5% to 10% would generate “at least $5.4M annually,” again possibly more if hotel stays go up thanks to a stadium.
  • A 12% ticket tax would generate about $12 million a year.

(In addition, that previously reported bit that “the stadium board will retain all revenues from operation of the capital mprovement” appears to actually mean all net tax revenues from the stadium (“all excise taxes and net income from operation of the capital improvements”), which is far less exciting than it sounded when it appeared Indiana might actually get a cut of stadium revenues.)

How much would all those redirected tax revenue streams add up to? Given all the unknowns it’s impossible to say, plus the fiscal note doesn’t indicate if and how these annual tax expenditures are expected to rise over time. Discounting the ticket tax because that mostly ends up being paid by teams, we have a baseline of around $27 million a year, which would come to around $440 million in present value; but, of course, those unknown subsidies from a stadium tax district could easily add hundreds of millions if not billions more if Indiana diverts taxes from a big enough area, as Kansas is planning on doing with its infamous 293-square-mile district for the Kansas City Chiefs.

All of this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is expected to be signed off on by the Indiana legislature this week, while Illinois considers if and how to respond. Getting some more certainty about, at the very least, how big Indiana’s stadium tax district would be before holding a vote seems like the absolute bare minimum of due diligence, but it’s unclear if anyone will attempt that in the five days left before the legislative session ends; blank checks are seldom a good way for public officials to go into a stadium negotiation, but it sure looks like where things are headed.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends read stadium news coverage, Bears’ list of places not to move to keeps growing

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the things you learn if you read enough articles with the word “stadium” in them, as I am condemned by an ancient mummy’s curse to do, is how very many news reports are just about nothing. For every article that tells us some actual information, there are easily five to 10 that are just meant to fill pixels with something easily reportable, regardless of whether it qualifies as “news,” let alone “reporting.”

Just this week, we’ve had: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is in favor of the Tampa stadium plan that his co-bosses the Rays owner wants and he’s “optimistic” about getting it done; a Baltimore soccer stadium is “gaining momentum,” according to a headline describing a press conference by Baltimore’s mayor, who didn’t actually even say that; Denver Broncos president says team leaders are “laser-focused” on building the tax-subsidy-funded stadium in a rail yard they already said they want; the Broncos president says actually the rail yard is only the “preferred” site and team execs are still considering other options; Minnesota Timberwolves co-owner A-Rod says a new arena is a “necessity” for the 6th-in-the-Western-Conference, $3.6-billion-valued franchise “to compete”; Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas says he’s determined to build a new Royals stadium that will create “economic development” in a way that’s “fair and transparent for our taxpayers,” no details provided.

That’s a whole lot of Important People giving press conferences in order to get their message out in the news media, which the news media is happy to oblige for them. For normal people, meanwhile, the only option is to try to get space on an op-ed page, if you can convince the op-ed editors that you should be allowed to have an opinion that diverges from that of Important People. It’s also an awful lot of reporters’ time spent on this when they could be trying to investigate all the open questions about what these stadium deals would actually entail for taxpayers and why elected officials are pushing them — but asking questions takes up valuable time that could be spent transcribing press statements. As the old journalism adage goes, “if your grandmother says she loves you, take her at her word and put it on the front page, so long as she owns a local sports team.”

Enough whining about the news media, time to attempt to do some actual reporting by, uh, seeing what’s in the news media:

  • The Chicago Bears have almost as many places now in neighboring states wanting to be their new home (without offering any money toward it) as they do in the Illinois suburbs: In addition to Gary, Indiana, there’s now Portage, Indiana, plus the entire state of Iowa. While the Bears moving to Iowa sounds like a joke and probably is, at least there’s a bill there to provide actual state tax credits toward a stadium; in Indiana, meanwhile, even the bill to create a stadium authority with no funding attached now isn’t going to move forward, Indiana legislators say, until the Bears owners first commit to moving there if it does. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative leaders might want to just bide their time and see if all the new Bears move threats evaporate just like the last round did, though it sure sounds like they’re more interested in throwing state money at the problem while the move-threat iron is hot.
  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer still wants the major stadium renovation he asked for last April before he’ll sign a five-year lease extension, and Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan has assured Glazer that the county’s plan to divert more than a billion dollars in tax money to a Rays stadium won’t get in the way of diverting money for the Bucs. In exchange for only a five-year extension, by the way, it would only take about $220 million in subsidies to break the record for priciest per-year lease extension in U.S. sports history, you can pretty much take it to the bank that that’ll be the plan.
  • On the subject of that Baltimore soccer stadium, D.C. United owners said on Thursday that they’re planning to build a 12,000-seat venue on the site of Carroll Park Golf Course, to host a minor-league MLS Next Pro franchise and a pro women’s team owned by former NBA star Carmelo Anthony. And by “planning to build” I of course mean “hoping to receive $216 million in state money to build.” One of the state lawmakers sponsoring bills to provide the cash says “the stars have aligned” now that Carmelo Anthony is on board, maybe somebody should call a local economist to see if studies have found that involving Carmelo Anthony increases economic impact? If nothing else, it would be interesting to see what they’d say if they could ever stop laughing.
  • Foxborough, Massachusetts officials say they may not issue a permit for men’s World Cup games to be played at the New England Patriots stadium in June unless someone helps cover $8 million in security costs that the town is currently faced with paying, Asked why Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whose team is worth an estimated $9 billion, couldn’t just cut a check, FIFA World Cup Boston 26 organizers said the Krafts are offering up the use of their football stadium for two months in “peak period” of the NFL offseason, what do you want from them, blood?
  • The Center Square is a libertarian-leaning news site that has generally been pretty skeptical of stadium subsidies, so for it to run the headline “Seahawks’ Super Bowl win temporarily jolts local Seattle economy” is pretty notable — or would be if the gist of the actual article weren’t “U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims Seattle will benefit from the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl, economist Victor Matheson says one study found a short-term bump in per-capita income from Super Bowl-winning cities but it may have just been a spurious finding because ‘when you test 100 different things, even if all those things are random, one of them is going to end up being the best.'” At least the Center Square called an actual economist, unlike those corporate stooges at Al Jazeera in their article on how the Super Bowl will be a windfall for the San Francisco Bay Area despite the 49ers not being in the game and also economists consistently saying no it won’t be.
  • If Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam can’t get money to build roads and pedestrian bridges around his new Brook Park stadium from the state of Ohio, he’ll ask for $25 million from the federal government instead, there’s got to be someone to stick with the bill that isn’t named Jimmy.
  • Also in K.C. Mayor Quinton Lucas news, marginally more newsworthy edition: The mayor wants to cut spending on everything except a Royals stadium and more cops.
  • Plans for an Indianapolis MLS stadium have gone from on hold to pretty much dead, according to Indiana legislative leaders, though in stadium deals just like in comic books, only Uncle Ben ever stays dead for good.
  • The Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas Athletics just applied for another billion dollars in building permits for their planned Vegas stadium, everyone gets that applying for a permit doesn’t mean you’re actually committing to spend the money on the project, right? Maybe requiring personal seat licenses to buy some A’s tickets in Vegas will help raise the needed funds to employ the permits, anything is possible.
  • Nope, nobody got back to me from Wyandotte County about how their Kansas City Chiefs stadium subsidy numbers were arrived at, I’ll just assume it was the traditional “dart board and add lots of zeroes” algorithm.
  • If you have time to kill next Thursday at 3 pm Eastern/noon Pacific, tune in to Alissa Walker’s Torched Talk with me and Chris Tyler from Strategic Actions for a Just Economy on whether it’s worth it to Los Angeles to host the 2028 Olympics, and what the city could do to try to extricate itself if it’s not. Zoom link is here, calendar it now, see you then!
Share this post:

A’s denied trademark on “Vegas Athletics” name, everybody LOL

access_time personNeil deMause

LOLAthletics social media has been lit up for the last 24 hours with the news  — actually first reported on Friday on an intellectual property blog, but hardly anyone noticed for a few days — that the United States Patent and Trademark Office denied A’s ownership a trademark on the names “Las Vegas Athletics” and “Vegas Athletics,” the presumed preferred names for the team once it presumably moves to its presumed new stadium in 2028, presumably. The reason given by the USPTO: “athletics” is a generic term, and while the MLB franchise has used it in four different cities now over the course of more than a century, attaching “Las Vegas” to it doesn’t make it a trademarkable term:

The name ‘Las Vegas Athletics’ describes a professional “athletics” organization located in Las Vegas. And, the team has not yet begun widespread commercial use of that name for many of the goods and services listed in its applications. Without that use, there is limited evidence the USPTO can rely on to find that the mark has acquired distinctiveness in the marketplace…

The real problem here is procedural timing. Because the team has not yet started operating as the Las Vegas Athletics, it cannot easily produce the kind of marketplace evidence, such as sales figures, advertising spend, media recognition, and consumer perception, that would normally overcome a descriptiveness refusal.

This adds one more element of hilarity to the A’s dumpster fire of a relocation process, but it doesn’t seem likely to be a major roadblock to the A’s moving to Vegas. IP lawyer Josh Gerben writes on his blog that he expects the franchise to eventually get its trademarks once it has real-life Vegas fans it can point to. And until then, the worst John Fisher will have to deal with is not being able to rein in bootleg “Vegas Athletics” t-shirt sellers, which is significantly smaller fry than paying for a $2 billion stadium; for that matter, there’s nothing stopping third parties from making their own “Athletics” shirts and selling them in Sacramento right now, if they thought anyone would buy them, but that hasn’t stopped the A’s from thriving (LOL) there.

Another option would be to change the A’s name once the team moves — when the former Arizona Coyotes absconded to Utah and couldn’t get a trademark on their preferred name (the Utah Yeti, LOL), they pivoted to Mammoth instead, though that’s also not going great, trademark-wise. There have been dumber complications to sports team relocations, and the A’s have already hit most of those, so may as well go for the full set!

Share this post:

Kansas council rep sets up website to calculate how many billions Chiefs stadium would cost taxpayers

access_time personNeil deMause

The Kansas Reflector has done a deeper dive into how the STAR bonds for a new Kansas City Chiefs stadium in Kansas would work, and while it doesn’t change the likely total subsidies much — we’re still talking a couple billion here, a couple billion there — there are some worthwhile takeaways.

First off, this is the most coherent concise summary I’ve seen yet of the problems with Gov. Laura Kelly’s “no new taxes” argument:

It is accurate when state leaders say no new taxes will be implemented to move the Chiefs across the border, said Ian Graves, a Prairie Village City Council member and self-described public finance policy wonk who has been studying the details.

However, the project may require new taxes down the road to cover the loss of revenue growth that would normally flow into the state’s coffers, he said.

That’s exactly right: The issue isn’t that Kansas will lose money it’s getting now, but rather that it will lose money it would otherwise get in the future — which, since money is money, still has the potential to blow a huge hole in the state budget. And in fact Kansas could even lose some money it’s receiving now: The state secretary of commerce would have the power to set the base value (taxes that won’t be handed over to the Chiefs) at below what the state is receiving now in the stadium district, cutting into public funds currently available. “They could just make everything zero,” notes Washburn University economist Paul Byrne. “If they choose a base value that’s below what would typically be a base value, well then you’re even more clearly capturing sales tax revenue or property tax revenue, or whatever would have gone to the state and to the local government.”

There’s also that issue of local governments: Kansas Commerce Department chief counsel Bob North said he “anticipates” both Olathe County and Kansas City, Kansas, to kick in their share of increased sales taxes to help pay off the STAR bonds, calling it “really important, and something that we’re monitoring very closely.” Local governments would seem to have zero motivation to kick in out of their own future tax revenues — it would just shift costs from the state budget to city and county budgets — but maybe if state officials argue that it would otherwise blow up the Chiefs moving in, they can be arm-twisted to contribute.

To make sense of all this, or at least show the range of possibilities, Graves, the Prairie Village council member, has created an interactive STAR bond site where anyone can tweak the parameters of the deal to see how it affects two key metrics: 1) whether the bonds are viable (i.e., if the STAR bond fund actually runs dry) and 2) how much tax money will eventually be diverted into the Chiefs stadium project. For example, here’s the default settings, with a 5% bond rate and Olathe and KCK kicking in funds:

The good news: The amount of new tax revenue raised starts being enough to cover bond payments after five years, after which it just siphons off a flat $175 million a year in sales taxes, but anything over that goes back into the general fund. The bad news: That’s still nearly $5 billion in state money over 30 years, which would be around $2.7 billion in present value, still the second-most expensive NFL stadium subsidy in history, by a wide margin.

And if we change the assumptions just a bit, things could be much worse. Let’s say we assume a full $3 billion for STAR bonds for both the stadium and accompanying development (plus financing costs), ratchet the interest rate up to 6% because these are risky bonds (if the economy collapses, any reduction in sales tax growth could quickly put them underwater), and say that Olathe and KCK decline to participate:

Now it’s 12 years before the state of Kansas can start using any new sales taxes from the stadium district on actual state needs, and the total subsidy has swelled to $8 billion over 30 years, which is nearly $4.8 billion in present value. And Chiefs owner Clark Hunt’s share of the costs sinks from 24% to 17% — and that’s before accounting that he can pay off his share out of stadium revenues, while the state would get none of those, not even naming rights on a publicly owned building. (The state would get whatever incremental tax revenues it could steal from across the border in Missouri, but that would require a whole other set of sliders depending on your assumptions about who’d be seeing Chiefs games and where else they’d be spending their money otherwise.)

Sorry for sounding like a broken record, but while there are still lots of unknowns here, it’s still largely a question of whether this Chiefs stadium deal would be real bad for Kansas, or catastrophically bad for Kansas. It’s at least good to see these questions being asked, by both local media and local elected officials, before all the final signoffs are made on the plan. It’s not often that terrible stadium deals are blocked or improved once they’re announced, but it does happen from time to time; the ball is now in the court of city, county, and state officials in Kansas, as well as Kansas residents who need to decide how much lost state revenue is too much to pay not to have to drive a few extra miles to see Chiefs games across the Missouri line.

Share this post: