Search Results for: Hansen hopes for Seattle NBA arena deal by summer

Ohio legislature proposes omni-TIF to funnel tax money to Browns and other stadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

Ohio’s Statehouse News Bureau has obtained the draft legislation that would provide $600 million worth of state tax dollars to Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam for construction of a new stadium, as well as potentially more money to other teams such as the Cincinnati Bengals, and an initial read reveals some interesting details:

  • The proposed state budget amendment would allow the state legislature to redirect all state taxes “attributable to the professional sports franchise,” after first subtracting out how much in state taxes were paid by the sports facility district in the year prior to the first year of a team’s lease. This would include taxes levied under chapters 5739, 5741, 5747, and 5751 of the state code, which are sales tax, use tax, storage tax, income tax, and commercial activity tax.
  • The district is defined as “the geographic area encompassing the land upon which the 19 transformational major sports facility mixed-use project is located,” with no apparent limit on the size of the area within which taxes will be kicked back.
  • The money would be available to any “transformational major sports facility mixed-use project,” which would be defined as any project that 1) includes a “major sports facility,” 2) includes any size of mixed-use development, and 3) “is expected to generate increased state tax revenues.”

This is, in technical budget terms, some damn sweeping legislation. By allowing the state to create stadium and arena districts of any size where all new sales, income, and other tax revenues are kicked back to the team to pay construction costs, the bill would effectively prioritize projects on otherwise vacant land — or at least land that can be made vacant by the year before the stadium lease starts. And there’s no provision for determining whether the “new” tax revenue in a stadium district would be new to the state as a whole — meaning Ohioans could end up paying a team to move its economic activities from one part of the state to another, then 20 years later paying them again to move it back.

There have been plenty of sports projects in the past funded by tax increment financing, or TIF, projects, which usually just mean kicking back increased property taxes; occasionally, other taxes are rolled in too, creating the less common mega-TIF. This legislation ups the ante even further, and really deserves a new name: “Omni-TIF” has a nice ring to it. The state legislature will be debating what’s in the final budget until next Tuesday, April 1, with a full floor vote slated for the following Wednesday, April 9 — we should get a sense by then how much this language would be expected to cost Ohio taxpayers, but with the ability to draw a circle of unlimited size around a stadium and kick back and any all taxes from it, looks like the sky’s the limit.

Share this post:

Rays execs proposed staying until 2038 if taxpayers spent $400m to upgrade Trop, got shot down

access_time personNeil deMause

On Friday afternoon, news broke — or Tampa Bay Rays co-president Matt Silverman declared, which isn’t quite the same thing — that Rays management had proposed an alternative deal to building a new $1.3 billion stadium with $1 billion in public money: instead spending $600 million, $400 million of it from the city and the county, to upgrade their current home of Tropicana Field. As part of the deal, the Rays would agree to a 10-year lease extension that would keep the team at the stadium through 2038.

“It is one of many possibilities that has been discussed with the city and the county since the hurricanes,” Rays president Matt Silverman said Friday. “We are open to any and all avenues that results in the Rays thriving here in Tampa Bay for years and for decades.”

It’s kind of weird for Silverman to only publicly mention it now, when his boss, Rays owner Stu Sternberg, has officially stuck a fork in St. Peterburg stadium plans and been met by Mayor Ken Welch sticking a fork in his willingness to work with Sternberg. But setting aside for the moment whether Silverman is sincere or just trying to save some public face with a “well, we tried,” would this have been a good deal for St. Pete? And why did city and county officials reject it?

On the first question, spending $400 million in public money is a lot better than spending $1 billion, obviously. But we also have to keep in mind the length of the lease: If the Rays could demand a new stadium again in 2038, that’s a cost of $40 million per year of the team’s commitment to play in St. Pete, whereas the new stadium would have been $33 million per year. There is some benefit to kicking the can further down the road.

Plus, there are a couple of other potential reasons Welch in particular may have been unenthused about Sternberg’s offer:

  • Welch could have his heart set on a wider redevelopment of the Gas Plant District. All indications are that the bit about this project that truly excites the mayor is redeveloping the site of an old African American neighborhood that was demolished in the 1980s to make way for the dome. Just gussying up the Trop, even at a lesser price tag, might not have seemed worth it.
  • A lease extension would come with other pitfalls. If Sternberg’s renovation plan would have included a simple extension of the lease as-is, then he would have retained 50% of the stadium site’s development rights for another 10 years, whereas allowing the lease to expire in 2028 will mean the city can reclaim those then. That’s a significant amount of value, and handing it over to Sternberg along with $400 million would start adding up to a pile of money. It’s worth noting that Welch said on Thursday, “We need to get the termination [letter], if they’re going in that direction, to make sure that all the boxes are checked there. And we’ll talk with the council and with the community about the paths forward.”

St. Pete Chamber of Commerce CEO Chris Steinocher did express mild enthusiasm for the plan, saying, “I do believe those conversations will happen as everybody calms down” and “At some point, we can open the door to when and how a plan like this might work.” Steinocher doesn’t get a vote on the city council or county commission, though, and since the old stadium deal was decided last July both of those legislative bodies have gotten new members who are not so enthused about giving Sternberg a pile of public cash. There’s a whole lot of jockeying for leverage to come, it’s clear, so expect lots more gambits like these in the coming weeks and months — unless MLB really decides to throw a bomb into the proceedings by telling Sternberg to sell the team if he knows what’s good for him.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Rays, Coyotes, A’s fiascos keep on fiascoing

access_time personNeil deMause

All kinds of news of the week to cover this morning, and I already lost a couple of hours getting up early to yell at my senator’s window about this fiasco. Let’s start with the Tampa Bay Rays‘ own fiasco, and then work backwards:

Share this post:

Sternberg says Rays “cannot move forward” with St. Pete stadium plan, all bets are off for what happens next

access_time personNeil deMause

And to think today looked like a slow day at first:

“After careful deliberation, we have concluded we cannot move forward with the new ballpark and development project at this moment. A series of events beginning in October that no one could have anticipated led to this difficult decision. … We continue to focus on finding a ballpark solution that serves the best interests of our region, Major League Baseball and our organization.”

That’s Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg, in an official statement released at noon today, sticking a fork in the St. Petersburg stadium plan that he himself negotiated last year. Sternberg faced a March 31 deadline to file paperwork to accept the deal — which came with approximately $1 billion in cash, tax breaks, and free land — but apparently decided he was ready to bail now.

As for why he’s bailing, that remains anybody’s guess. Some leading theories:

  • It’s the delays. This is the official company line from the Rays: Things just got so much more expensive in the two months it took the city council and county commission decided whether to approve stadium funding following last October’s Hurricane Milton that the St. Pete deal no longer made financial sense. Except of course that the original deal never required the city and county to approve stadium bonds before this April, so if Sternberg only wanted to build this stadium if he could get started in fall 2024, why didn’t he put that in the term sheet?
  • The St. Petersburg location sucks. Ever since the St. Petersburg stadium plan was announced, people have been asking, “Wait, the Rays are really going to build a stadium right next door to the one everybody hates because it’s impossible for people from much of the region to get to?” Initially, it looked like Sternberg was willing to overlook the accessibility problems in order to get his $1 billion — Tampa, on the more populous, well-off side of the bay, doesn’t have nearly that kind of ability to raise public funds — but maybe he is using the delays to back out of a deal he didn’t realize was dumb at the time but does now?
  • Trump tariffs and construction costs. New U.S. tariffs on foreign steel are set to drive construction costs higher, so maybe Sternberg is getting cold feet for that reason.
  • MLB has pressured Sternberg into selling the team and stepping aside. MLB owners made clear earlier this week that they wanted Sternberg to take the damn St. Pete stadium deal or else sell the team to someone who’d consider it, so that they can check off the Rays situation and resolved and move ahead with expansion plans without worrying that Sternberg would want to use a prospective expansion city as leverage with Tampa Bay. There’s no way a team sale could have taken place by the end of this month, so maybe Sternberg agreed to back out of the stadium deal now in anticipation of a sale process. Or maybe Sternberg decided to give his fellow owners the finger and say if he wants to play footsie with, say, Charlotte or Nashville, he’s damn well gonna! So hard to say unless you’re Evan Dreilich. (If you are Evan Dreilich, feel free to remark on this in the comments, or on Bluesky, or wherever.)

Is everyone now freaking out? Here’s what we have so far from local officials:

  • In a statement, St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch called Sternberg’s decision “a major disappointment” and said “if in the coming months a new owner, who demonstrates a commitment to honoring their agreements and our community priorities, emerges — we will consider a partnership to keep baseball in St. Pete.”
  • In another statement, MLB said, “Commissioner Manfred understands the disappointment of the St. Petersburg community from today’s announcement, but he will continue to work with elected officials, community leaders, and Rays officials to secure the club’s future in the Tampa Bay region.”
  • City council chair Copley Gerdes said, “I continue to believe St. Petersburg is a major league city and both with baseball and hopefully continued with baseball, but no matter what, I think it’s a major league city,” and “I’m hopeful that the relationship with MLB and the Rays continues to move forward.”
  • City council member Richie Floyd said,  “It’s frustrating that we’ve had so much time wasted by unwilling partners, clearly. I think we’re in a good position as a city to still redevelop the area around Tropicana Field and come out ahead of where we would have been.”

If nothing else, since it was Sternberg who called a halt to the deal and not St. Pete, the city gets back full development rights to the Tropicana Field property whenever the Rays’ lease expires. (I think that’s now following the 2028 season, assuming the Trop is back in game shape by 2026, but at this point that may be up to the lawyers to hash out for sure.) And if nothing else, the city and county now have back that $1 billion to spend however they want, and none of it has to be on a $1.3 billion baseball stadium for a team whose owner doesn’t really want to play in it anyway.

As for the Rays’ future, here’s a CBS Sports story running down all the possible scenarios, though it does leave out “Elon Musk buys Rays, makes them first team on Mars.” Plus it includes the possibility of the Rays moving across the bay to Tampa, and as Marc Normandin noted yesterday at Baseball Prospectus, “If Sternberg truly doesn’t have the resources to handle a more expensive version of a new St. Pete stadium, then one in Tampa is right out.”

This is a breaking news story, which is journalese for “I need to hit ‘publish’ now, but there are more things I’d still like to research.” Watch this space for further updates, either in this news item or in tomorrow’s Friday roundup. In the meantime, stock up on popcorn, it looks like Rays Stadium Survivor has been renewed for an umpteenth season.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: A’s hire ex-Raiders stadium czar, Texans want renovations paid for by somebody

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another week, and, yeah, it sure has. Feeling this very strongly this morning, you all go on ahead and read this week’s bullet points while I get my second wind.

  • The Athletics have new Las Vegas stadium renderings (pretty similar to the last batch, only with more entourage) and a new president, Marc Badain, who formerly worked in the same role for the Las Vegas Raiders before abruptly quitting. Badain’s role in getting the Raiders’ stadium built (with $750 million in public money) and the fact that the Nevada legislature is coming back into session this year have people speculating that Badain could be on board to go back to the state for more cash to fill owner John Fisher’s budget hole; there’s no actual evidence that’s in the works that I can tell, but this entire project has been little more than tea-leaf reading for close to two years, why stop now?
  • New Houston Texans president Mike Tomon says he doesn’t want a new stadium, just renovations to the old one. The Houston Business Journal reports: “As far as funding potential renovations to NRG Stadium — which, coupled with projects around NRG Park and maintenance, could cost billions of dollars — Tomon said it’s too early in the process to determine what that would look like.” Lobbying strategy still hazy, ask again later.
  • The A’s and Tampa Bay Rays playing in minor-league stadiums this year are “cautionary tales of what happens when big, complicated challenges are met with half-measures and inaction,” writes ESPN’s Jeff Passan, who apparently missed the parts about how the A’s are in Sacramento because they alienated Oakland officials enough to torpedo talks of a lease extension there and the Rays are in Tampa because a hurricane blew their roof off, and neither of those things would be changed even if local officials hadn’t engaged in “inaction,” which they actually didn’t. Friends don’t let friends read Jeff Passan think pieces, is the lesson here.
  • San Antonio’s “Project Marvel” that would include a new Spurs arena, convention center expansion, and other crap has “tepid” 41-36% support, according to a new poll. The plan could be up for a public referendum as soon as this November, so that undecided 23% should start reading up on the details ASAP.
  • The San Jose Giants have agreed to extend their lease from 2027 through 2050 in exchange for $5 million in public stadium upgrades, and I’m going to go out on a limb and call this not that bad — the Single-A team has even agreed to double its rent payments from $20,000 a year to $40,000, which is next to nothing but not completely nothing. It’ll probably come out next week that San Jose has to turn over development rights to 10,000 acres of land or something in addition, but until then I’m filing this under “could have been so much worse.”
  • Someone wrote in to Cincinnati Enquirer sports columnist Jason Williams to ask if Hamilton County residents could have a re-vote on the tax hike that is paying off the Bengals stadium, and Williams replied, not a bad idea, it could be expanded to help fund a new arena, too. Pretty sure that’s not what the letter writer meant, Jason.
  • There’s actual video of actual cranes doing actual work to build Inter Miami‘s new stadium, maybe this thing will actually open eventually, even if the 2026 target date still seems ambitious. Or it could be the latest fake video, for all we know, hard to trust anything coming out of south Florida these days.
Share this post:

Portland baseball booster releases fresh stadium renderings in hopes it’ll get him more tax money

access_time personNeil deMause

Portland Diamond Project, the people who want to bring an MLB team to Oregon, released new renderings yesterday of a 32,000-seat stadium along the Portland waterfront. We’ll get to the pretty pictures in a minute, but first, this:

[Portland Diamond Project CEO] Craig Cheek told a legislative committee Monday morning that Portland could break ground on a Major League Baseball stadium on the south Waterfront as early as 2027 if Portland is awarded a team.

Uh, sure? MLB isn’t likely to pick its expansion cities before 2027 — it still needs to settle the Tampa Bay Rays and Sacramento A’s stadium situations, and then hold a bidding war for both prospective owners and prospective cities. And “breaking ground” is typically just a matter of a bunch of elected officials showing up with hardhats and shovels, so it’s not really a sign of major construction activity. So this is mostly Cheek, an ex-Nike VP who runs the hey-Portland-let’s-put-on-a-baseball-team show, trying to get headlines by issuing checks his butt is never going to have to cover.

As for why Cheek was before a legislative committee, that’s because:

The group appeared in front of the committee to make an appeal to “modernize” Senate Bill 5, the 2003 bill lawmakers passed that would carve out $150 million for a stadium in income taxes paid by a team’s players and executives.

“Modernize,” eh? What’s that mean, exactly?

“We asked legislators to revisit SB5, originally passed in 2003, and update the law to better reflect the current revenue generated by players’ salaries and the rising costs to build a world-class stadium in downtown Portland,” Cheek said. “This would not be a new tax on Oregonians. We look forward to working with the legislature to make Oregon Better with Baseball.”

So, the modernized bill would presumably increase the amount of borrowing Oregon would take on, in anticipation of more state income taxes players would pay given that salaries are higher now than in 2003. Cheek doesn’t appear to have revealed details of how much tax money the project would require, other than saying that the stadium would cost around $2 billion total — and that this wouldn’t really be taxes that would cost Oregonians anything, because player income taxes would be free money the state treasury wouldn’t get otherwise, which is not exactly true.

Anyway, on to the vaportecture, I know you’re all excited to see that:

Daytime fireworks, gotta respect the classics! Also, that indeed appears to be some kind of sliding translucent roof, though whether it’s overlapping panels or some kind of accordion-like structure is hard to tell. Either way, when extended it would still leave large openings on the ends, which should be good to protect fans and players from most rainy weather, but not necessarily be the “365 days a year” experience that Cheek is promising.

Aside from fans displaying a weird affinity for waving flags in the middle of an inning and the only scoreboard being unseeable for fans in the left field corner, not much more to say about this one, so let’s move on to:

More flags! And a whole bunch of extremely het couples of various kinds and bicycle models. Are those people planning to bring their bikes into the stadium? I sure don’t see any bike parking before you have to ascend the steps to the turnstiles. Speaking of which, all those fans in wheelchairs are going to have a heck of a time with those steps, though there does seem to be some sort of ramp (with no railings) that they can use to wind their way up to the entry level, if they dare.

And while I get that showing rendered people mostly from behind avoids the problem of having to show particular faces, having all those fans wear t-shirts with giant Old English P’s on the back does imply some weird things about fashion trends in the year LOL2027.

This is a nice enough view showing the proposed stadium’s setting along the Willamette River, but I mostly appreciate it for its new innovation: daytime spotlights! Those are going to be really impressive, so long as you outfit them with 3.86 x 1026-watt bulbs.

So to recap: An ex-Nike executive wants to build a $2 billion stadium in Portland, Oregon for a team that doesn’t exist with owners that haven’t been identified using money that hasn’t been quantified, but in any case he wants the state legislature to allocate more of it than the last time someone made these promises 22 years ago. The daytime spotlights are probably still the most implausible part of this whole deal, but it’s close.

Share this post:

Trump’s tariffs and budget cuts will make stadiums more unaffordable — but will cities stop funding them?

access_time personNeil deMause

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser still really wants to build a Commanders stadium using an as-yet-undisclosed pile of public money, but she has a little problem: The district is facing a potential $1 billion budget deficit over the next three years. Not that that usually stops cities from pouring money into sports venues — when times are good it’s usually “we can afford this” and when times are bad it’s “we can’t afford not to do this” — but the, uh, disconnect is great enough that even local TV stations are asking questions, literally:

7News On Your side reached out to Bowser and asked her the following questions:

  1. How will this forecast affect talks with the Commanders about a new stadium?
  2. Will Mayor Bowser push the team to take on a larger share of the bill for a new stadium?
  3. Will this forecast lead to more spending cuts or higher taxes for residents?
  4. Will this forecast push the mayor to back away from any new stadium deal requiring the use of taxpayer dollars?

So far the response from Bowser — as well as the D.C. council, which was presented with similar questions — has been crickets.

Anyway, this does complicate Bowser’s plans to lure Josh Harris’s Commanders back to the city with gobs of taxpayer money. And how did D.C. end up in such a huge budget hole, anyway? Funny story:

D.C.’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer, in its new revenue forecast released Friday, estimates the city will bring in $21.6M less this year and an average of $342.1M less over the following three years than its December forecast predicted. The total decline adds up to just over $1B in reduced revenue between now and the end of fiscal year 2028.

The report cites the Trump administration’s recent moves to slash the federal workforce as the primary reason for the declining projections, along with the domino effect that is expected to have on the local economy.

This raises a larger question: What impact will the mayhem that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are committing across the federal government have on stadium and arena construction? We’ve already seen predictions that Trump’s tariffs on both Canada in particular and imported steel and aluminum in general will cause construction prices to soar. Throwing local government budgets into the wood chipper would only compound the problem, as cities and states would be chasing ever-more-expensive stadiums with ever-shrinking treasuries.

And yet! It’s important to remember that one of the things that kicked off the entire stadium-subsidy racket — and, before it, the auto-plant and computer-chip-factory rackets — in the 1980s was Ronald Reagan slashing federal funding to local governments. With no way of creating jobs by spreading around federal dollars, city mayors increasingly turned instead to offering their dwindling supplies of cash to corporations as a way to try to steal jobs from the city down the road, launching the economic war among the states. It didn’t work — raiding your neighbor while they raid you is a zero-sum game — but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming ingrained as the business of local government, and it was all set off by local government having too little cash, not so much that it didn’t know what to do with it.

So, will a Trumpcession tank team owners’ stadium plans? It’s way, way too soon to tell. It’s going to change the entire climate around construction of more or less everything, though, as well as state and local governments’ fiscal plans, so things will be different, if not necessarily better. At the same time, Trump’s tax cuts are making the rich much richer, so you would think that team owners could better afford to pay for stadiums themselves — but, again, this whole scheme isn’t about who can afford them, it’s about how to get someone else to pay for them so owners can keep more money for themselves. Kleptocracies work in mysterious ways.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: D-Backs tax kickback plan rushes ahead despite questions, Utah bill would let a hundred stadiums bloom

access_time personNeil deMause

Springtime is always a busy time for stadium and arena shenanigans, if only because it’s budget season for most states and cities. But still! Buncha bullet points today, is what I’m saying, and expect a lot more next week, and so on and so on until legislators break for the summer or come to their senses, whichever comes first (you know damn well which will come first):

  • An Arizona state legislative analysis says because Diamondbacks players pay $3.5 million a year in state income tax, that would over more than a quarter of the tax kickbacks team execs want for stadium renovations — asked and answered, move to strike. Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, meanwhile, says the state analysis doesn’t look at actual economic data but rather projections like calculating every fan buys two beers (first, assume a spherical fan). No worries, though, the bill still has to go through — oh, welp, looks like it already passed the state house and just needs to clear the senate, and House Democratic Leader Rep. Oscar De Los Santos has expressed “alarm” and said “we should not be rushing through this legislative process,” guess there’s no time to worry like the present.
  • Utah state senator Scott Sandall, figuring one MLB stadium with no team to play in it and no way to pay for it isn’t enough for a growing state, introduced a bill to let Salt Lake City’s stadium district build multiple stadiums as small as 18,000 seats for any sport, “to be proactive, just for the future,” not because he has any particular sports teams in mind that could use an 18,000-seat stadium or anything.
  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas is supporting a new Missouri state bill to raise money for Royals and/or Chiefs stadiums by providing … okay, Lucas didn’t say exactly how much money or from where, and the bill itself isn’t posted on the Missouri senate website yet, but Lucas says it’ll help Kansas City “host FIFA World Cup games,” please nobody tell him that it’s going to be decades before the U.S. gets another World Cup after 2026, I don’t want to spoil his day.
  • The proposed Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park is set to lead to the creation of a new Circle K gas station, maybe, if government bureaucrats don’t get in the way with their red tape about “residents” being “concerned,” can you believe those guys?
  • Phoenix Suns co-owner Justin Ishbia has pulled out of bidding for the Minnesota Twins and is instead upping his minority stake in the Chicago White Sox, which certainly can be read as positioning himself to become majority owner once 89-year-old Jerry Reinsdorf gives up either control or this mortal coil. Whether he would go ahead with with Reinsdorf’s current stadium plans, let alone rebranding the team as the Chicacago White Sox, remains to be seen.
  • The MLB cable empire keeps on crumbling, and at least one small-market owner, the Milwaukee Brewers‘ Mark Attanasio, says he wants a TV revenue sharing model more like the NFL’s where all the money is shared equally. This is worth watching since it would have a major impact on where teams could relocate to (Green Bay would suddenly be a viable MLB market), plus all sort of other things like how long the 2027 baseball lockout is likely to last.
Share this post:

Deal to spend $500m+ in taxpayer money on new Spurs arena moves ahead, judge promises it won’t cost taxpayers

access_time personNeil deMause

Bexar County commissioners took another step toward approving at least half a billion dollars in tax money for a new San Antonio Spurs arena yesterday, voting 4-1 to approve a memorandum of understanding with San Antonio and team owner Peter Holt to start negotiating terms of an arena deal. Or perhaps that should be continue negotiating terms of an arena deal, because the initial framework of a deal is already in place:

The county’s so-called venue tax is made up of two taxes: one on hotel rooms and another on car rentals. It could yield up to $397 million in revenue if the hotel occupancy tax remains at 1.75%, or as much as $449 million if the county asks voters to raise that tax to the maximum of 2%, County Manager David Smith told commissioners early this month….

Aside from the venue tax, the new Spurs arena could be financed with other pots of public dollars, such as revenue from the city’s project financing zone and increases in property taxes within a tax increment reinvestment zone.

The hotel and car rental taxes appear to be headed for a public referendum, possibly in November, otherwise next May. The TIF district and project financing zone (basically a TIF for business and hotel taxes) wouldn’t have to go through a public vote, but would require the approval of the city council or county commission.

The total public outlay from all this is as yet undetermined. (The city is also considering gifting Holt a publicly owned golf course, market value likewise undetermined.) But it’s not stopping proponents of the arena project from saying it’s clearly better than the current situation, where the Spurs are forced to play in an ancient 23-year-old arena that is practically falling to bits, probably:

The county would need to pour about $78 million into improving the Frost Bank Center through 2029, Mike Wooley, co-founder of Venue Solutions Group, told commissioners Tuesday. The venue would require about $245 million worth of improvements over the next 20 years — if it continued hosting an NBA team.

The San Antonio Express-News doesn’t bother to ID Venue Solutions group, so let’s look them up: They were “launched in 2011 by three industry professionals with over 65 years of collective experience in the public assembly facility industry” (names of said professionals not included on the company website) and have done “facility condition analyses” for a bunch of different arenas, though when you click on “view case study” no actual studies are available. So while county judge Peter Sakai and county manager David Smith both said that’s $245 million the public wouldn’t have to spend on arena improvements if they built a new arena, there’s no way to tell how much the public would have to spend on improvements for a new arena, which in 20 years would be almost as old as the one the Spurs owner is desperate to get out of now.

But anyway, spending [insert large number here] dollars of tax money on a new Spurs arena to replace the one that was opened during Season 14 of The Simpsons won’t cost taxpayers anything, promises Sakai, because reasons:

Sakai made clear numerous times that putting this on the backs of County taxpayers is a non starter for him.

“For me to continue to have the county be invested, no homeowner property tax,” he said. “It cannot fall on the seniors. It cannot fall under disabled. It cannot fall on the veterans who are on fixed income. That’s that’s a deal breaker for me.”

Well, that’s okay then! Wherever the money comes from, it won’t take away from money for seniors or the disabled or veterans or adorable puppies, because they’ll have just as much public money at their disposal, from all the magic beans that will come with this deal, once it’s negotiated, for sure. Also, Sakai promises, the current Spurs arena will remain “sustainable and viable for the long term” and won’t “turn into the next Astrodome” — because that always works out well.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Ravens get even more public cash, D.C. United wants somebody to buy them a roof

access_time personNeil deMause

Greetings from New York, where we now have two terrible mayors instead of one! That’s hardly the worst of today’s political news, so instead let us distract ourselves with some (mostly) terrible stadium and arena news:

  • The Baltimore Ravens‘ $434 million stadium renovation project is now a $489 million renovation project, and 64% of the additional cost is set to be covered by state taxpayers. Or, if you’re whatever AI is writing the headlines over at Sports Illustrated, “Ravens Spending Over $50 Million More on Stadium Upgrades,” sure, that’s probably right, no need to read your own story to check.
  • D.C. United‘s owners want to add 10,000 seats and a roof to their (checks) not yet 7-year-old stadium, and “what remains unknown is the potential price tag or whether the team will ask the city for subsidies.” Also the Axios reporter passing this along (from an original source of “two sources,” not even “familiar with the team’s thinking” or anything) calls D.C. United “American soccer royalty,” what ever happened to no more kings?
  • Missouri House Speaker Jonathan Patterson is turning up the heat on Jackson County, saying “time is running out” for “a plan and course of action” for new Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadiums, or else … the teams will kick everything back a year and try again, again? Too many showrunners these days really do substitute overbearing string sections for viable suspense plots.
  • D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser says a Washington Commanders stadium “will be the anchor that attracts other investment–housing, amenities, jobs, and opportunities,” guess somebody doesn’t remember what the late Allen Sanderson said about NFL stadiums and cemeteries.
  • In 2023, the city of Anaheim commissioned a $325,000, two-month study of how to keep the Angels‘ stadium viable for decades to come, and now the study may not be done until 2026 and will cost over $1 million, cool, cool.
  • New Sacramento Republic F.C. vaportecture! And it looks like, uh, a soccer stadium? At least there are some smoke bombs, on both ends of the pitch for some reason, but no fireworks or people holding up scarves dramatically and we can’t even see what ridiculous formation the players are in, I give this a B-minus for entertainment value at best.
Share this post: