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Friday roundup: Rays blink on June 1 stadium deadline, Illinois residents don’t want to break the bank to keep Bears

access_time personNeil deMause

Time to catch up on what else has been going on this week while we’ve been doing wall-to-wall Tampa Bay Rays coverage. But first, the latest in Tampa Bay Rays news!

  • With elected officials in Tampa still insisting on asking pesky questions about whether giving Rays owner Patrick Zalupski $2.1 billion or more in total stadium subsidies would leave the city and county with a budget shortfall if tax revenues fall short (or even if they’re just diverted from other uses), Rays execs finally blinked: CEO Ken Babby has backed away from his June 1 deadline for a deal, saying the team is now just “focused” on getting a “nonbinding” memorandum of understanding that would send a signal to the state that “the county, the city and the Rays are committed to this partnership.” (Zalupski added that even an MOU by June 1 isn’t absolutely necessary, but he wants one “real soon” thereafter, even if “it’s purely symbolic.”) Translation: Let’s get at least the state part of the deal done before Ron DeSantis leaves office, then we can come back and haggle over financial details for the city’s and county’s portions. It’s not clear if Tampa and Hillsborough County will be able to push for a less spendy MOU — or be willing to reject the plan entirely if they can’t — but score at least one point for elected officials refusing to fall for the two-minute warning.
  • A new poll shows that most Illinois residents oppose throwing a lot of state money at a Chicago Bears stadium to ensure the team doesn’t move to Indiana — or at least, it does if you include the 36.9% who want to allow the team to break their Soldier Field lease and build a new stadium in Illinois without any taxpayer funds, as well as those who want to force the Bears to keep playing there through 2033, are those even real options, this is a weird poll. Other poll findings: Opposition to funding most of a stadium’s cost with public money is consistent across the political spectrum, and Illinois residents outside the immediate Chicago vicinity don’t give a crap where the Bears play, with those in the southern half of the state “downright apathetic.”
  • Meanwhile, it turns out the clause in Illinois’ proposed tax break bill that would add “property tax relief” to any subsidy for a Bears stadium or other “megaprojects” wouldn’t be much relief at all: An average Illinois homeowner would only get $1.29 off their property tax bill as a result. (And that’s even if their overall property tax bill didn’t go up by more than that to cover lost revenues from the megaproject tax break.) The total cost of the megaprojects bill in future tax expenditures has yet to be calculated — and may be uncalculatable, since we don’t know how many future developments would apply or how much of a tax break they’d negotiate with local governments, but that doesn’t mean nobody should give it a try before the Illinois legislature goes ahead and votes on this thing.
  • And also meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is trying to block a potential Bears move to the suburb of Arlington Heights by pressing Chicago-area state legislators to oppose the megaprojects tax break bill. State senate Legislative Black Caucus chair Willie Preston then said he’s on board to oppose it, then said he was misinterpreted, then said he would just like a megaprojeets tax subsidy that would let the Bears stay in Chicago somehow. Illinois Kremlinologists please report to the situation room, stat.
  • New Jersey has cut train fares to World Cup matches from $150 to $105, thanks to what Gov. Mikie Sherrill says are private companies that have “stepped up to lower the costs for ticket holders,” whatever that means exactly. (Sherrill has promised that New Jersey Transit’s $48 million in expected World Cup costs won’t come out of transit riders’ pockets, but the details of who’s donating what in exchange for what here are still very murky.) The price cut will be good for soccer fans, unless it ends up increasing the ticket prices that fans will accept now that they’ll be saving $45 on getting to the game, in which case it will only be good for FIFA.
  • A report by Oxford Economics says that World Cup cities should expect to see only a “modest bump” from fan spending this summer, says report author Barbara Denham, and no measurable impact at all on overall economic activity, noting “there’s a lot of displacement of tourism” as other visitors steer clear of cities that will be mobbed by World Cup fans. And that’s even if, of course, the World Cup mobs don’t steer clear as well: Add Seattle to the list of cities where fans are getting set to show up disguised as empty hotel rooms.
  • Houston Texans owner Cal McNair isn’t saying what kind of stadium renovations he’ll seek in advance of his team’s lease expiring at the end of 2032, but he did say he’s hoping they’ll be “transformative,” which is usually code for “a lot of zeroes after the dollar sign.”
  • A Minnesota legislator wants to apply the same ticket tax paid by Vikings ticket buyers to currently exempt buyers of luxury suites and earmark the proceeds to provide services to youth victims of sex trafficking. Bill opponents, clearly not eager to look like they’re siding with either luxury suite buyers or sex traffickers, have instead objected that she submitted her bill to the wrong committee.
  • Residents of Denver’s historic La Alma-Lincoln Park neighborhood are trying to work out a community benefits agreement with the Broncos owners to keep from being overwhelmed by traffic and displacement if the team builds a new stadium nearby. Community leaders say this will be the first legally binding CBA negotiated by an NFL team with a community group rather than a local government — something they might want to think carefully about, as history shows that it can be a problem if it comes time to enforce a CBA and none of the community group signatories are still around to do it.
  • New Orleans has just seized the lead in the race to be the first major sports city to be abandoned due to climate change.
  • And finally, RIP Gap cofounder Doris Fisher, who will now not be around to see if her middle son spends the family fortune on building a spherical armadillo.
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How many billions of dollars a Rays stadium development would cost taxpayers: an update

access_time personNeil deMause

Everybody likes round numbers. If we have the choice between reading about a stadium that will cost taxpayers $600 million and one that will cost “hundreds of millions,” we know which one we’ll prefer, and for good reason: Specific numbers stick in your head, and you can repeat it to your friends and on the socials, whereas just providing the number of zeroes at the end feels vague and unsatisfying. It’s one reason why so many of us are attracted to LLM chatbots that can give us confident, definitive answers, even if those answers are very often wrong.

On this site, I’m always striving to provide numbers where I can, while acknowledging where we don’t really know for sure. It’s why yesterday, I cited the proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium project as having a minimum taxpayer price tag of $2.1 billion, but noted that it “could” be billions more. That’s a huge range — can we narrow it down any more?

To that end, I spent a chunk of yesterday messaging with Michael Bishop of the Tampa Monitor and University of Colorado Denver economist Geoff Propheter, trying to suss out more of the knotting financial details of the Rays deal. And while there remains a lot we don’t know — spoiler alert, you’re still not getting one nice, satisfying round number at the end of this — we were able to determine more than we knew yesterday:

  • On the central question posed yesterday — will the Rays pay property taxes on their mixed-use “stadium district” — the answer appears to be: yes, but not necessarily 100% of what they’d normally pay. In the city of Tampa’s feedback summary attached to the Rays’ proposed MOU, it’s noted that team owner Patrick Zalupski intends to pay enough in property taxes to cover payments on Community Redevelopment Agency bonds being used for the stadium. If the property taxes fall short, the Rays owner will pay “rent” (scare quores in original) to make up the difference. (Note: These “rent” payments are likely meant to assuage concerns that the city would be selling CRA bonds and counting on the property taxes from potential future development to pay them off; this way, Zalupski covers the bond payments even if he never erects a single building in the stadium district.)
  • The CRA bonds have previously been reported to be for only $224 million, and full property taxes on an $8 billion development should generate a lot more than that. And there’s no guarantee in the MOU that the Rays will make tax payments equal what a private developer would pay on private land, so there could still be tax breaks involved here.
  • The stadium district would be built in the Drew Park CRA — a TIF district, basically, that siphons off increased property taxes and uses them for development costs — so the city would already get no new tax revenues from that area through the expiration of the CRA, currently scheduled for 2034. Rays officials want to extend the CRA through 2056, meaning, yep, additional tax breaks.
  • How big would the additional tax breaks on the Rays’ mixed-use development be? The state-owned land under it would not be taxed; Propheter estimates about $21 million worth of foregone property taxes there, starting in 2034. The real value, though, is in whatever the Rays build on top of the land, and one of the many unknowns about the project is that team execs still haven’t committed to what that would be. Propheter, at least, guesses that any foregone property taxes there would likely be more in the hundreds of millions of dollars than the billions, though without more details about what would be built and when, he can’t be sure.

So where does that leave us? The Rays calling their project “fully taxable,” it appears, is misdirection: They’ll be paying some property taxes, but they’ll be paying them to themselves, to pay off bonds for their own stadium. The good news, such as it is, is that that $224 million worth of future money is already accounted for in the team’s initial $1 billion subsidy ask, so it’s not an additional public cost on top of that. Any property taxes they get to skip out on in addition to the CRA bond payments would indeed be a new cost, likely in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Plus there’s still at least $1.1 billion in free land and tax breaks on the stadium itself — which would be owned outright by the county, and so completely tax-free — to contend with.

All of which is an extremely long but hopefully instructive way of saying that the conclusion of yesterday’s post still stands: Tampa and Hillsborough county officials need to decide whether to commit upwards of $2.1 billion to a project with many unknowns in order to avoid even the possibility of the Rays moving down the road to Orlando, maybe. Given that even $2.1 billion would be easily the most expensive MLB stadium subsidy in history — at least until the next one — that number should be good enough for government work.

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Rays officials won’t say if they’ll demand stadium development tax break that could add billions to public cost

access_time personNeil deMause

The Tampa City Council held the first of two scheduled workshops on a Rays stadium development yesterday, with both councilmembers and members of the general public asking whether a proposed deal isn’t being rushed through too fast before all the details have been spelled out. Whether or not to use money from the Community Investment Tax sales tax surcharge that officials had promised wouldn’t be used for stadiums is one open question, as is whether the CIT would even raise enough money and which sofa cushions to look under if it doesn’t.

Meanwhile, Axios, in one of its trademark fusillades of bullet points, raises yet another known unknown:

  • It’s still unclear how much of the new stadium’s total footprint, including the surrounding mixed-use district, would be subject to property taxes. [Rays CEO Ken] Babby declined to address the question, as it’s still being negotiated.
  • Yes, but: The Rays told the county that they intend for the planned mixed-use district surrounding the stadium to be “fully taxable,” while the stadium would be county-owned and therefore tax-exempt.

Those are two different answers! If the ancillary development around the stadium will be fully taxable, then that’s not still being negotiated; if it’s still being negotiated, we don’t know if it’ll be fully taxable. Furthermore, the college campus where the development would take place is state-owned, so that normally wouldn’t pay property taxes unless there’s a payment in lieu of taxes agreement.* Or maybe Rays execs are willing to allow it to be fully taxable, but only in exchange for some other concession, like the property taxes (or PILOTs) going to fund some part of the development? Totally speculating here, which is all we can do when team officials won’t answer questions directly.

How much of a difference would the Rays paying property taxes on their surrounding development make in terms of total public costs? What exactly team owner Patrick Zalupski would build around the stadium and when is another question team officials won’t answer, but there has been talk of it costing $8 billion. Property tax expert Geoffrey Propheter has already estimated that the cost of a full property tax exemption on a $2.3 billion stadium would be $742 million; while there’s no way to know what the tax valuation of a mixed-use development would be without knowing exactly what uses would be in the mix, it’s reasonable to expect that exempting it from taxes could cost a fair bit more than the stadium tax break, which could get us into the billions.

The total taxpayer shopping list for the Rays stadium-and-other-stuff project, then, now stands at:

  • $750 million in county cash toward ballpark construction
  • $250 million in city cash toward ballpark construction
  • Between $250 million and $1.7 billion worth of free state land
  • $742 million in property tax breaks on the stadium
  • $97 million in foregone parcel fees on the stadium
  • Between $0 and $??? in property tax breaks on the surrounding property, plus possibly other costs of that bigger project, given there’s still no memorandum of understanding covering it

That leaves the total public cost at $2.1 billion, minimum, and possibly billions more, maximum. It’s a ginormous error bar, and a huge pile of tax money either way, so you can see why Tampa and Hillsborough County officials might not want to rush into anything. Though on the other hand:

“People know the cost of everything but the value of nothing,” supporter Christopher Palermo said during public comment, primarily directing his remarks at [councilmember Charlie] Miranda. “If we lose this team, let’s not forget one thing: this is a competition to be the preeminent city in Central Florida. Orlando wants what we’ve got.”

(Palermo, for the record, is a construction and personal injury attorney who once spent $9,000 running ads telling then-Rays owner Stu Sternberg not to move half the team’s games to Montreal, something that turned out to be either a bluff or something that he’d failed to run past the league office.)

There is presumably a value to being the preeminent city in Central Florida — assuming the presence of a baseball team is how that crown is awarded — but is it $2.1 billion, let alone potentially billions more? That’s for Tampa and Hillsborough legislators to determine, and so far they seem content to wait for Zalupski’s side to cough up more info first.

*UPDATE 12:27 pm ET: Florida does have a provision for taxing leased property, though what rate it’s taxed at depends on a whole bunch of factors. (Thanks to Michael Bishop of the Tampa Monitor for pointing out the clauses in the proposed Rays MOU — see the tax memo at the end — governing this.) More to follow, eventually, on what exactly this would mean in terms of the possible value of any tax breaks for the mixed-use development.

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It may officially be time to call the 2026 World Cup an omnishambles

access_time personNeil deMause

The start of the men’s World Cup is now just five weeks away, and we’re getting to the point where it may be time to ask what happens if the world’s richest country holds one of the world’s biggest sporting events and nobody shows up:

With only six weeks to go before the start of the World Cup, hotels at most of the cities hosting the tournament are facing a major problem: Bookings are running far below what they had expected.

For some metro areas such as Kansas City, bookings are running even below what a typical June or July would bring, according to an industry survey released on Monday by the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

Mega-events like the World Cup are always a risky proposition for host nations, which take on tons of added costs in the hopes of raking in spending from international visitors, something that doesn’t generally work out that well. But this year’s tournament, split among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, has been especially disastrous and especially for the U.S., marked by sky-high ticket prices, host cities jacking up train fares by more than 1000% to try to cover their costs (and fans threatening to walk to games along highway shoulders in response), and growing signs that fans from other countries who might normally travel to see their teams are planning to sit this World Cup out amid both soaring prices and fears of harassment by Trump administration immigration agencies.

All this won’t necessarily add up to the spectacle of international soccer teams playing before acres of empty seats: FIFA can always dump unsold tickets by lowering prices, though so far it’s showing no interest in doing so. But it’s looking more and more like a large share of the attendees will be locals, which cuts into any hoped-for economic windfall from hosting the cup, since those people would be spending money in their home towns regardless.

While some of these problems are specific to this particular World Cup — we haven’t even gotten into the issue of soaring airfares in the wake of Trump’s war with Iran — some are more a matter of ongoing FIFA money grubbing and of the high costs of putting on sports mega-events, which is why study after study shows things like the World Cup or the Olympics are not a very good way to create economic growth. In the worst-case scenario, residents of host cities will all skip town during the World Cup to avoid the traffic and transit nightmares (New Yorkers are already being instructed to work from home on match days), while tourists steer clear because of high prices and ICE fears, leading to a situation where nobody will go to the World Cup because it’s too crowded. In the best … it’ll look good on TV, and maybe that’s all anyone cares about?

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Does it really matter which tax money Hillsborough spends on Rays stadium? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

Among the many issues being raised by Hillsborough County officials about Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski’s proposed multibillion-dollar stadium complex deal — which includes not actually knowing what additional development Zalupski actually wants to build atop what’s currently a community college campus and when — is the question of whether it’s kosher to use money from a 0.5% sales tax surcharge approved by voters in 2024 after elected officials specifically promised it wouldn’t be used for stadiums. Worse yet, the initial $467 million in projected tax revenues proposed by Rays-lovin’ county commissioner Ken Hagan turned out to be drastically inflated from reasonable expectations, blowing a $200 million hole in the proposed stadium budget that led to the dog’s breakfast of funding ideas that is currently up for consideration.

The Tampa Bay Times ran through the problems with some of the current stadium funding sources this weekend, including:

  • More than $100 million in rainy day money, “reserves set aside as a cushion against hard times and that largely come from property tax dollars,” would drain funds that Hillsborough County “would likely look to if a hurricane strikes, the economy takes a downturn or state lawmakers roll back property taxes.”
  • $20 million could be diverted from other projects that get scrapped or come in under budget.
  • The county has $24 million in its economic development reserve, $10 million in a building maintenance fund, and $10 million in unallocated 2027 budget dollars, all of which could be used for a stadium.

That’s a lot of numbers and a lot of bureaucratic fund-shuffling, and the Times article spends much of its time focusing on how these proposals would use more money raised by property taxes and less by sales taxes to provide Zalupski’s desired $1 billion in county and city cash for his $2.3 billion stadium. (Free land and tax breaks would likely add another $1 billion or more.) But while it’s fun to point out exactly which funds would be drained — “county to steal from disaster relief money to pay for Rays stadium” is an irresistible headline — it’s also ultimately kind of beside the point.

If there’s one truism about government money, it’s that it’s fungible: If you take money from one place, you can always move money from somewhere else to cover the resulting budget hole. (Yes, sometimes there are particular funds that are earmarked for certain uses — hotel taxes that can only go to pay for tourism promotion are a popular one — but there’s almost always enough wiggle room that a local government can take from one budget line to replenish another.) And as a corollary, there’s no such thing as “leftover money”: Any funds that aren’t needed elsewhere can be used to offset other budget needs or, if you prefer, to keep taxes from being as high they would be otherwise. So unless you’re talking about new taxes that are specifically being imposed to fund a stadium project — which wouldn’t be the case for the Rays deal so far — deciding which pocket the public money is coming from is less important than the fact that Hillsborough County and the city of Tampa would be handing over public funds that it then wouldn’t have available for other uses.

And this isn’t just an academic consideration. Rays officials are hard at work trying to make the case that the issue isn’t whether Zalupski should receive $1 billion in tax money, but rather which $1 billion he should pocket:

“Certain funds and forms of funds are more probable than others, and I think that’s what the public officials are working day and night to figure out, which is: What is the right composition of those ingredients?” said Rays CEO Ken Babby.

“How those ingredients are used, and how much of them, I’m going to leave that for the public officials to comment on,” he said. “But I can tell you there is great appetite and desire from all sides to figure this out.”

This is, fundamentally, misdirection, and the Times isn’t doing anyone any favors by focusing on the budget trees and ignoring the overall subsidy forest. (It’s not as bad as the misdirection in the recent column by the Times’ official Rays stenographer Marc Topkin arguing that a new Rays stadium would lead the team to spend more on winning teams, which isn’t how it’s ever worked for any other team before, but it’s still not great.) Tampa and Hillsborough taxpayers and elected officials would do well to stay focused on how much of the bag the public will be left holding, not to mention what the overall size of the bag will be, something that county commissioner Christine Miller noted is still very much a moving target:

“As of today, we have no facts — we have bits and pieces of what those facts might be,” she said. “The absurd amount of ‘what-ifs’ directed to policymakers before we have a deal to opine on does no one in our community any good.”

It’s almost like voting on a multibillion-dollar stadium development project before knowing all the details isn’t a great idea! Rays team execs continue to try to assure county and city officials that that’s crazy talk and this is totally how responsible business deals are done, and they’d better hurry up and approve or else the team will “evaluate alternatives.” This is the choice county and city officials now face: Agree by the end of this month to pay an unknown amount of money for an undetermined project, or else face an unspecified threat to move the Rays to an unknown locale, maybe. Extortion threats used to be so much simpler in the old days.

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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.
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Illinois senate to “take time” on Bears stadium tax break bill, but will that save taxpayers money or cost them more?

access_time personNeil deMause

Gov. JB Pritzker’s hurry-up offense notwithstanding, Illinois state senate leaders appear to be in no rush to act on the megaprojects tax break bill that Chicago Bears execs say they need by the end of May in order not to follow through on threats to move to Indiana. Even the bill’s lead senate sponsor, Bill Cunningham, said yesterday that “we’re going to take our time with this” and “getting it right is more important than getting it done quickly.” Cunningham didn’t specify what “getting it right” would look like, but he did say he’ll look at the 9% amusement tax surcharge that Bears officials say needs to be removed before they’ll accept an Arlington Heights stadium plan.

A bit about that amusement tax: When I first reported on it Monday, I assumed that it would be a tax on tickets to stadium events, something I noted that economists say would “almost entirely end up coming out of team owners’ pockets.” Further reporting, however, indicates that it would actually be a sales tax surcharge on restaurants, bars, and venues in the surrounding stadium district, not on anything at the stadium itself. (The bill itself describes a “visitor investment surcharge upon all admission and charges from transactions at places of business located within the STAR bond district,” which is actually a different thing from a megaprojects district, but Bears execs are still acting like it would apply to them.)

Why does it matter which particular fan spending gets taxed? As economist J.C. Bradbury explains in his upcoming book on sports subsidy deals “This One Will Be Different,” taxing tickets is effectively the same as raising ticket prices, something that largely ends up coming out of team owners’ pockets because it prevents them from keeping as much of the proceeds for themselves as they would otherwise. Taxing sales in the surrounding area, though, captures lots of spending that may have nothing to do with the stadium itself, and so risks siphoning off tax revenue that could otherwise go to pay for government services.

And at the risk of getting out over my economic skis — this part isn’t from Bradbury — there’s also a significant difference in the way ticket price setting works from how local sports bars choose what to charge for drinks. Ticket sales have virtually no marginal cost: If you sell an extra 10,000 seats, you don’t have to produce more football for those additional fans. (Though you may end up hiring a few more game-day ushers and concession workers.) This means that team owners already set prices at whatever will maximize their ticket revenue, and since the addition of a ticket tax won’t change that price point, they’ll have to eat the ticket tax in order to keep the overall price the same.

Sales of things like meals in a stadium district, meanwhile, do have marginal costs, since you have to pay for ingredients, chefs, servers, and so on. This makes the economic calculus different, since dining establishments might be willing to charge more in total to cover a tax surcharge, even if it means driving away some customers, to keep their margins intact. So unlike a ticket tax, a stadium district sales tax surcharge— though it’s still arguably better than siphoning off revenue from existing taxes, as in a tax increment district — is far less of a soak-the-owners measure.

Anyway, all this may be moot, as it looks like the senate may just strip the amusement tax provision. Cunningham even suggested that it could all be a sort of typo, and that it was really “intended for a downstate STAR bonds project” elsewhere in the bill — which would be a major oopsie by the state house if true, but legislators have done dumber things.

Bears leadership, meanwhile, has remained unspecific about exactly what it wants to see (and not see) in a bill, releasing a statement that said only that “additional amendments are necessary to make the Arlington Heights site feasible for our stadium project.” This almost certainly means removing the amusement tax, and likely adding in state infrastructure spending as well, something that could add close to $1 billion more to a potential $2 billion in “megaproject” property tax breaks. Plus it would make all development projects valued at more than $100 million eligible for tax breaks, potentially costing local Illinois governments billions more in the future. At least the senate is going to take its time figuring this out — though if “take our time” turns out to mostly mean figuring out how to strip any state house amendments that the Bears owners don’t like and adding in new ones that they do, it might not end up being such a good thing for Illinois taxpayers.

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Garber to Vancouver: Sell stadium land to Whitecaps for cheap or we’ll shoot this team, really this time

access_time personNeil deMause

Back in December, amid threats by MLS to move the Vancouver Whitecaps if they didn’t get a new stadium, the city of Vancouver agreed to a memorandum of understanding to open talks on the team owners building one in exchange for getting a cut-rate price on public land. Those talks must not be going well, because MLS owners have now gone and held a committee meeting on moving the Whitecaps, then leaked word about it to The Athletic:

A special committee of Major League Soccer owners met earlier this month to discuss and evaluate the future of the Vancouver Whitecaps, including the possibility of relocation, sources briefed on the conversations told The Athletic.

A move to Las Vegas was the chief option discussed at the meeting, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. MLS has had discussions with a group looking to bring a team to the market, the sources said.

This is slightly off-brand for MLS, which in recent years has largely focused on handing out expansion teams like candy: six new teams in the last six years, 12 in the last 12. (MLS commissioner Don Garber said in 2024 that the latest new team, San Diego F.C., would be “the end of expansion for a period of time until we’re ready to expand again” but then also said “we would strongly consider expanding beyond the 30 teams that we have now” if “there’s a good market for us to expand in and that market makes sense with the right owner and the right stadium plan,” so who the hell knows what if anything he really meant there.) And this, the Athletic reports, could represent a stumbling block to moving the Whitecaps, as MLS owners would want to get a cut of any sale price in lieu of an expansion fee — likely meaning a relocation fee on top of whatever the current Whitecaps owners would get, which would cut into how much cash they would take home from a sale.

Whether a move threat is realistic, though, is almost beside the point if you just want to use it to shake down an existing host city for stadium dollars, which appears to be goal #1 here. Whether it’ll work is unclear: Some panicked Whitecaps fans are already blaming NIMBYs and local government for the team’s presumed imminent demise, while others counter, “that’s not true at all, it’s mainly down to greed.” It’s still unclear how Vancouver elected officials will respond to the Las Vegas threat, not to mention whether MLS owners would actually pull the trigger on a move to an increasingly crowded small sports market if they don’t get what they want; stay tuned.

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Rays execs to county: Vote on stadium now, figure out details later

access_time personNeil deMause

Tampa Bay Rays officials responded Friday to Hillsborough County leaders saying they won’t be able to meet team execs’ June 1 deadline for approving a stadium deal, and the message is: The clock is still ticking.

“We understand the government parties’ concern regarding the timeline for completing the project agreements,” the team’s memo read. “At the same time, maintaining momentum is essential to keeping the project on track to open for the 2029 season, which is critical for the success of the project in Tampa Bay.

“Accordingly, we would like to continue working together toward a May vote on the MOU (Memorandum of Understanding), with the shared goal of completing the definitive agreements as soon as reasonably possible thereafter. Based on in-depth discussions with potential ballpark contractors, we remain confident that the project schedule can be maintained.”

Voting on a stadium deal in May and “completing the definitive agreements” is a bold suggestion, since Hillsborough County and the city of Tampa would essentially be buying a pig in a poke. (Side note: Did you know that “pig in a poke” may come from the same metaphor as “let the cat out of the bag”? I did not until today!) If there’s one principle above all else in negotiating any kind of financial, it’s to never sign anything until everything in the contract is agreed on. Why are Rays officials in such a hurry, anyway?

In a letter to commissioners last week, Rays CEO Ken Babby described the deadline as an essential component that if not met, jeopardizes state funding that the deal is “economically infeasible” without.

Oh, right, they want to get this deal signed off on before Gov. Ron DeSantis leaves office at the end of the year. That would normally be seen as leverage the city and county could use to ask Rays owner Patrick Zalupski to lower his subsidy demands. Instead, Zalupski is doubling down by telling the county: You are running out of time to deliver this money.

There’s been no reply yet from county officials. Next on the negotiating agenda is a Tampa City Council workshop next Tuesday evening at the Tampa Convention Center (UPDATE: now at City Hall, or maybe old City Hall) to discuss its piece of the stadium plan, after which the standoff may well continue. It will then be Zalupski’s turn to escalate, but without any hostages to shoot or any Indiana to threaten to move to, he may have to choose between offering concessions and continuing his game of chicken and hoping city and county officials blink.

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Friday roundup: County tells Rays no stadium approval by June 1, Blazers and Wild get pushback on subsidy demands as well

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to any new readers who are joining us for the first time this week in the wake of all the news craziness about the Kansas City Royals and Chicago Bears stadium deals. It’s Friday, which means it’s time for a speed run through stadium and arena news items that were otherwise overlooked this week. But first, one city has seen developments in its stadium wrangle that deserve attention at a bit more length:

One of the standard ploys in the sports stadium demand playbook is what in Chapter 4 of Field of Schemes we called the “two-minute warning”: Setting a deadline, arbitrary if necessary, and using it to get elected officials scrambling to determine how to fund a new sports venue with public dollars without taking time to think about whether to do so. But playing chicken, obviously, comes with the risk that your opponent won’t blink first, and that’s what appears to be happening to Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski, who has been informed that Hillsborough County will not be meeting his June 1 deadline for signing off on a stadium deal that could total anywhere from $2 billion to a lot more in public costs:

That deadline, the team has said, is necessary not only for the ballpark to open in time for the 2029 Major League Baseball season, but for the deal to be feasible at all.

On Thursday, the county attorney’s office informed the team that meeting such a deadline is improbable, according to a memorandum obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.

A timeline, the memo reads, “cannot be reasonably considered” until all involved parties reach an agreement on the terms. After a preliminary agreement is reached, “it would likely take at least 60-90 days” to negotiate the deal’s development and funding obligations.

That’s perfectly reasonable, given that the county’s memorandum of understanding for the stadium still includes a lot of open questions and there is no MOU yet at all for the rest of the development that Zalupski says he wants to build atop what’s currently Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry campus. But it also messes with Zalupski’s timetable — not just that he wants to open a new stadium by spring 2029 (probably overly optimistic anyway, given that stadiums take three years to build and he’d have to tear down part of the college campus before he could begin construction) but that he desperately wants to get the deal approved this legislative session, before his pal Ron DeSantis is term-limited out of the governor’s office at the end of 2026.

Tampa Bay Rays CEO Ken Babby has already warned the county that “we would have no choice but to evaluate alternatives” if the June 1 deadline isn’t met, but Zalupski’s options are limited there: He’s not likely to be able to negotiate and push through a stadium plan in another city (Orlando has a big sign! Greensboro exists!) by June 1, so he’s going to be left having to work out a deal without the hammer of having Florida’s governor in his corner.

One alternative would be for the Rays owner to walk back some of his demands in Tampa. Leading Rays stadium deal critic county commissioner Joshua Wostal has said he’d consider approving just $268 million in hotel tax money, saying, “Start acting like a serious bidder. The offer is out there.” Of course, $268 million is a whole hell of a lot less than the $1 billion in city and county money that Zalupski wants, but maybe he’d be happy to take his $1 billion or so in state-gifted tax-exempt land and run with it, and give up on shaking down Tampa and Hillsborough County quite so hard? The only way to find out is to ask, and kudos to Hillsborough County officials for seemingly understanding that it’s both their right and their responsibility to haggle, and not being bullied into rushing into a deal.

Anyway, sorry for the Tampa-specific digression, on to the bullet points now:

  • Also in no hurry to rubber-stamp a rushed sports venue deal: The Portland city council, whose members are balking at signing a nondisclosure agreement to engage in Trail Blazers arena funding talks or sign a letter to the NBA supporting an arena deal. “If you want the public to support using public money to remodel a stadium, then you need to make the case to them in public about why using those funds is better than some alternative,” councilmember Mitch Green wrote on Bluesky. Blazers owner and renowned cheapskate Tom Dundon has already landed $365 million in state money toward arena renovations, but it looks like the remaining $235 million in city and county money could be a slightly harder lift.
  • And in yet another pushback to a sports subsidy demand, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has said that while he personally would be fine with giving the Wild $200 million in state money for arena renovations, “it’s going to be a tough lift in a non-budget year to be able to get that done.” Okay, that sounds less like “no” and more like “come talk to us in 2027,” and given that Wild owner’s Craig Leipold’s lease doesn’t expire until 2035 he can afford to wait, but it still counts as a kind of pushback.
  • Kansas News Service has done a deeper dive into Missouri’s potential funding for a new Kansas City Royals stadium at Crown Center, and found that it could be less than advertised: Last year’s Show-Me Sports Investment Act limits state funding to whatever sales and income tax revenue a team paid in the year before a stadium deal is agreed to, and for the Royals at Kauffman Stadium in 2025 that was likely in the $15-17 million range. That would only cover around $250 million in stadium bonds, a fair bit less than the “at least $350 million” to $900 million numbers that have previously been floated. If the state coughs up less, it could bring the public stadium subsidy down to $1.3 billion — unless the city’s $600 million that has yet to be negotiated turns out to be more than $600 million counting things like a repair fund, in which case it’d be more again. It’s becoming ever clearer that this whole thing is barely penciled out, let alone inked, but headline writers gonna headline write.
  • Whenever a sports team owner or elected official points to the Atlanta Braves‘ Battery stadium district as an example of a sports development project paying for itself, I make a point of linking to Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury’s paper on how no it di’n’t. But even academics know that nobody likes to read academic papers, so Bradbury has penned an essay for The Conversation — titled “Sorry, Tampa Bay, mixed‑use districts don’t reverse the dismal economics of sports venues” — that lays out exactly what did and didn’t happen in Cobb County, Georgia: The Braves owners are bringing in an extra $97 million a year from the Battery, while the county is running a loss of about $15 million a year. If it seems crazy that this sea of red ink is being held up as the kind of success story that other cities should emulate, such is the magical power of being a sports team owner in a country where journalism has long since given up fact-checking the press releases of rich dudes.
  • The wandering Athletics just released a new promo video for premium seating at their under-construction-and-they-swear-they’ll-finish-it Las Vegas stadium, and it is a hilarious supercut of what SF Gate describes as “AI-generated scenes of AI-generated people walking through the AI-generated models of what the club sections of the park might look like.” I’m not sure whether my favorite bit is how the AI fans are all wearing what appear to be A’s jerseys with the A’s logo removed or the multiple extreme closeups of wine glasses, but I can agree with Oakland sportswriter Dan Moore’s comment that “when I close my eyes and think ‘baseball’ I literally think the exact opposite of this.” SFGate further reports that they reached out to A’s officials to ask how much if any of this represented what a Vegas A’s stadium might actually look like as opposed to just AI hallucinations, but “an A’s spokesperson initially asked for a deadline extension to respond and then later came back and declined to comment,” LOLAthletics.
  • In less encouraging modern journalism news, WKYC reports “Cavaliers‘ impending playoff run already boosting business for downtown Cleveland bars,” citing precisely one owner of a bar a block from the arena who is “expecting steady traffic throughout the day,” which isn’t the same thing as “already boosting” at all. Bar owners more than one block from the arena were presumably unavailable for comment on whether they anticipated empty barstools while everyone was off watching the Cavs.
  • Friends don’t let friends who are concerned about being constantly surveilled and possibly targeted for being associated with people on New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan’s enemies list go to Madison Square Garden.
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