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Friday roundup: Nobody in media or politics can math or word right edition

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a while since I’ve thanked everyone who makes this site possible through their generous donations, so: Thanks, everyone, who makes this site possible through your generous donations! I hope you are all still enjoying this journey through the world of sports venue shenanigans, if “enjoy” is the right word for it. Sometimes it feels more like a group therapy sessions for survivors of sports fandom (our own or other people’s or both), but there’s value in that too, right?

I’m going to take the fact that you’ve read this far as a “yes.” Let’s get on with the rest of the week’s news roundup:

  • The Kansas City council approved spending $185 million on expansion of the Current‘s (checks calendar) two-year-old stadium yesterday, something that KMBC described as “$185 million in public financing,” which is absolutely wrong: This would be private debt, but repaid by the city, so private financing but public funding — these things matter. Fox4KC, meanwhile, reported that “the project will be funded by revenue generated by the stadium and surrounding development,” which is also wrong: It will be funded by sales taxes on spending in and around the stadium, most of which probably won’t be new to K.C. at all. This is no way to educate the electorate about stadium economics in advance of a public vote on a Royals stadium next spring, when it will very possibly be too late to matter anyway.
  • Los Angeles County has issued an economic impact report on hosting the 2028 Olympics, far too late to be used to determine how much to spend on the event, but oh well. My eye was immediately caught by the prediction that “the 2028 Games could boost tourist spending by $1 billion above and beyond a typical summer,” a curious conclusion given that actual studies of past Olympics, including Atlanta 1996, Salt Lake City 2002, and London 2012, have found that spending overall doesn’t rise during an Olympics, in large part because locals flee town during the Games. From what I can tell from the county report — turning my laptop sideways to read it because the county doesn’t know how to rotate PDFs properly — consultants HR&A didn’t actually conduct an in-depth spending study, just plugging Olympic visitor numbers into the off-the-shelf IMPLAN software package, because “garbage in, garbage out” is how HR&A rolls.
  • NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly says the league is talking to three different potential Atlanta expansion team ownership groups — because what did that fictitious Einstein guy know, anyway — plus also Austin and maybe Phoenix “with the right location” or maybe expansion “might not happen” at all, Bill Daly clearly got an A in playing hard to get at deputy commissioner school.
  • The Brook Park city council has declared the area around the new Cleveland Browns stadium blighted, which Mayor Edward Orcutt says “gives us the opportunity to be able to maintain this site in the future,” another way of saying “lets us keep spending money on the stadium ad infinitum,” somebody clearly got an A in doubletalk at mayor school.
  • Throw another $60 million on the fire for San Antonio taxpayer spending on a new Spurs arena, this time to acquire land for the project. This brings the public cost total to, you know what, I don’t feel up to mathing today, let’s just call it an even squillion dollars.
  • Residents of Chicago’s Bridgeport’s neighborhood this week protested a proposed Amtrak maintenance facility that could be built there as part of a land swap for a new White Sox stadium, with local alderman Nicole Lee saying, “f the Sox move and we’re left with a 24/7 rail maintenance yard and an empty stadium, we’re done for here.” Team execs, meanwhile, are distancing themselves from minority owner Justin Ishbia’s stadium plan, issuing a statement saying only, “If the site proves viable, it would be added to the locations up for consideration for a new ballpark, along with The 78 and other options.”
  • Judging from my inbox, a lot of you are really excited to see the latest renderings of a new Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers arena, so here, go to town. I’m mostly interested in whether they include fireworks (nope) and how they handle the question of which players’ jerseys fans will be wearing when the place finally opens in 2030 (one part guys currently on the team, one part guys like Charles Barkley, hey remember when he was a Sixer?).
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MLB expansion talk focuses on Salt Lake, other cities with major question marks

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Friday roundup: Vegas stadium board approves Raiders cash after “fastest meeting in the history of $75m giveaways”

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to the end of another programming week, one that was way busier than you’d expect for the dregs of summer. Let’s get through the rest of the week’s news and get you out of here for the long weekend:

  • Also eager to get out of town for the long weekend, apparently: The Las Vegas Stadium Authority, which voted unanimously Wednesday to give $75 million from a “waterfall” reserve fund of hotel tax money to the Raiders, to be used mostly toward a $158 million upgrade of an entry plaza. The authority took this action after just two public comments and none from the authority board members themselves, in what local podcaster Dayvid Figler called “the fastest meeting in the history of $75 million giveaways.” Board chair Steve Hill presented the plan as in response to the “need to keep driving all those great results that Jeremy presented,” referring to Jeremy Aguero, the paid sports team consultant and hotel management degree holder who for some reason gets to do all the economic analyses of sports projects in Nevada. (Hill, of course, is an unregistered sports team lobbyist too, Las Vegas is truly a growth coalition at its finest.)
  • The Kansas City council put off a rezoning vote for a new Royals stadium district again, because they want to wait first to get all the city’s mega-TIF districts finalized first. The council could have waited to figure out how it’s going to pay for its $1.1 billion share of the project before approving the money, but there was democracy afoot, had to nip that in the bud.
  • The Royals deal is still facing not only a potential April public vote — plus a likely lawsuit over whether the city can move ahead regardless of the results since it already approved the Royals deal — but a lawsuit charging that the state money being used for the project was passed illegally; the Missouri state supreme court is currently mulling whether that suit can move forward.
  • Chicago Bears officials are finally getting around to asking fans if they would still buy tickets if the team moved to Indiana, and are they taking the opportunity to sell fans on a “surrounded by restaurants, entertainment, and green space, creating a true gameday destination” with “one of the most robust gameday tailgating environments in the NFL”? You bet they are!
  • New Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski says his new $2.3 billion stadium, built with the aid of $2 billion in public money, will enable him to move the team’s payroll into the top 10 to 15 in MLB, after years at the bottom. That’s never really happened before with past MLB stadiums — there are some lovely charts showing this in J.C. Bradbury’s new book, wait for it — but there’s a first time for everything.
  • Speaking of Bradbury, he has a nice article over at The Conversation analyzing why we’re seeing so many new NFL stadiums being built with public money right now when economists and taxpayers alike think they’re a bad idea. Tl;dr: It’s the leases, stupid (and the stupid leases).
  • The NHL’s attempts to pit Houston and Austin against each other to compete for a expansion franchise have at least started to pay off, with Houston Mayor John Whitmire saying this week that “We’ll definitely be a better location than Austin” and “If you talk to the sports franchises in town, I think they’d tell you we’re great partners.” Still no word on what kind of money Houston (or Austin) might offer toward a new hockey arena, but you know that’s what Gary Bettman is waiting to hear.

 

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New Angels owner plans $2.5B Anaheim stadium, according to nobody at all, apparently

access_time personNeil deMause

Following Tuesday’s announcement of the sale of controlling interest in the Los Angeles Angels to multi-sport team owner Stan Kroenke, Forbes baseball writer Barry Bloom wrote this:

Kroenke intends to build a new $2.5 billion ballpark to replace aging and decaying Angel Stadium, which opened in 1966 and has been refurbished at least twice.

Bloom gave no source at all for this information, which was rapidly repeated across the journotweetosphere. But then, just a few hours later, that sentence disappeared from Bloom’s article entirely; the Wayback Machine was down yesterday so there’s no record there of the original version, but Angels Substack newsletter Beyond the Halo got a screengrab:

Weirdly, there’s no notice on the Forbes site that the article has been revised. (There’s also no correction of Bloom’s spelling of “empresario,” but that’s another issue.) And Bloom’s X posts are still up insisting that Kroenke is building this phantom stadium “in Anaheim” and is “not going to renovate again” because Angel Stadium “has infrastructure problems and needs to be replaced,” again all without citing any sources.

Presumably this, let’s be generous and call it “information,” is all coming from somewhere, whether that’s Kroenke henchmonkeys or somewhere else. (Bloom has a long track record as an access journalist, so much of his reporting needs to be treated as somewhere unknowable on the spectrum between unverified fact and planted PR slop.) The bigger question now becomes: Who wants us to believe that Kroenke has a $2.5 billion Anaheim stadium up his sleeve, and why are they trying to disseminate that information via Forbes — and what changed over several hours yesterday that Forbes had to take down the claim?

As with any handwavy stadium proclamation, there are tons of additional questions, starting with “Who’s going to pay the alleged $2.5 billion?” and “Is Kroenke going to make another go at getting development rights to the city-owned Big A parking lots, state law requiring affordable housing to be prioritized there be damned?” Kroenke, thanks to marrying a Walmart heiress, is rich enough to buy and sell Croesus before breakfast, so he can certainly afford to pay for a stadium himself, as he did for the Los Angeles Rams; he also almost certainly won’t want to if he can find a way to get some public money to help defray his costs. The Athletic reported on Tuesday that Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken said she’s “very hopeful that [Kroenke is] going to want to work with the city to come up with a really innovative development plan that would benefit the residents,” which doesn’t really tell us much of anything, but at least it’s a statement with a name attached that hasn’t been memory holed in the last two days, that’s a start, more actual reporting to follow, one hopes.

UPDATE: Bloom speaks!

I’m sorry for any confusion on this. The paragraph was removed because a spokesperson for Kroenke said the company was not ready to move forward on a new ballpark at this time, but might in the future. That has now been so noted in the third graph of the column for full transparency.

The new note on the article now reads:

09/03/2026 Information about building a new ballpark was removed from this story on Wednesday because a spokesperson for Kroenke said the Angels were not ready to move forward on the project at this time, but might in the future.

Bloom didn’t indicate, in either his X post or the article note, who told him that Kroenke intended to build not just a stadium, but a $2.5 billion stadium in Anaheim, if a Kroenke spokesperson said it wasn’t the case. Curiouser and curiouser…

AND MORE UPDATE: “I stand by my source who’s highly grounded in MLB and never gives me bad info. So I fully expect Kroenke to build a new ballpark in the Anaheim area,” writes Bloom in a followup X post. So this is supposedly someone well placed who knows Kroenke’s plans even though Kroenke denies them, but Bloom can’t tell us who it is, so we just have to trust that everyone here is being honest and not trying to spin things for their own reasons. This is typically the kind of thing that requires writers to confirm with multiple sources before publishing, but maybe Forbes has different standards (and X clearly does).

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Friday roundup: Tampa council approves plan to give $2B in public money to Rays stadium, says it’s not really public money

access_time personNeil deMause

The Tampa city council spent all day meeting yesterday about the Tampa Bay Rays stadium deal, but honestly they could have saved time and just voted first thing in the morning. Public speakers were split in their opinions — public speakers are always split — and as for councilmembers themselves, there was little actual discussion for most of the day, with elected officials mostly talking past each other, knowing that everyone’s vote was already decided going in. The only reason you drop a half-finished bill on legislators’ desks less than a week before the vote is to avoid robust public debate, waiting till you know you have a slim majority then calling a snap vote while you know you have a W. The final vote was 4-3 in favor, same as had been since councilmember Bill Carlson used the leverage of his being a swing vote to win effectively no concessions whatsoever while patting himself on the back for doing so.

(WUSF claimed that the swing vote was councilmember Naya Young, but she’d already voted yes to the deal the first time it came up for a vote, leaving open the question of whether the NPR station doesn’t know what a swing vote is or just can’t remember as far back as March. The Tampa Bay Times, meanwhile, parroted Carlson’s line that Rays owner Patrick Zalupski will “cover” $100 million that previously would have come from city property taxes, even though Zalupski’s loan will still be repaid with city property taxes. This has not been a banner week for Tampa area journalism.)

The closest the council came to open debate was at the tail end of the meeting, whcn councilmembers took turns giving statements. I didn’t listen to all of it, but did hear councilmember Luis Viera claim that two-thirds of the stadium is being privately paid for because it’s “revenues from the project” — notwithstanding that it’s tax revenues that anyone other than Zalupski would be paying to the city treasury if they built such a project, but that instead will be kicked back to pay for the stadium costs; if that’s your criterion, everyone should get to write their yearly IRS checks to themselves, on that grounds that it’s tax money that “wouldn’t exist” without them. Councilmember Lynn Hurtak countered that the deal — what we know of it so far, given the many documents that remain unresolved — would put Tampa taxpayers on the hook for an unknown amount of future upgrade costs and called on councilmembers to “show we’re the smart city”; Carlson and council chair Alan Clendenin (yep, this guy) then mansplained at her to read the stadium funding agreement, something she’d already made plainly clear she had done, in detail.

There’s still a Hillsborough County Commission vote today, and while anything can happen, the council was universally seen as the higher hurdle here. For now, Tampa elected officials just voted to approve at least $180 million in future city property tax money plus $400 million or so in future city property tax breaks plus unknown amounts of future property tax kickbacks for additional upgrades, plus $1.5 billion or more in county and state subsidies, all to build a stadium for a billionaire team owner with no other offers on the table from other cities, after hardly any debate and before all the documents have been finalized. If there’s any upside, it’s that the interminable Rays stadium saga appears to be nearing an end, at least for the next couple of decades until the team’s lease at the new place gets close to running out; the cost is only the most expensive taxpayer stadium subsidy in MLB history.

Will other cities be the smart city? Let’s see how stadium and arena matters are going elsewhere:

  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas’s explanation for spending an extra $7 million a year on bond payments for a Royals stadium is that it’s not just to get around a public vote, it’s also that the more expensive bonds would be easier for the city to default on. With a sales pitch like that, the city may end up having to offer an even higher interest rate than 5.725% to get anyone to buy their stadium bonds.
  • The Beacon News, meanwhile, says that even though Royals owner John Sherman will only be putting up $55 million for a community benefits agreement against $600 million in city funding, that’s fair because tithing one-tenth of your income to private charity is a Christian tradition. That’s not even true, but it wouldn’t make any more sense if it were, just let it go, it’s been a bad week for journalism all around.
  • NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said he has talked to some Illinois legislators about getting a Chicago Bears stadium done in that state. “We want to make sure that Arlington Heights and Illinois have an opportunity, as well as Indiana, to put their best foot forward,” said Goodell, presumably because “The bidding is now open!” would sound too crass.
  • The Alpharetta City Council approved zoning changes that could lead to an NHL arena in Atlanta’s far northern suburbs, if Atlanta’s far northern suburbs got an NHL team, which nobody is predicting will actually happen.
  • There could be a bidding war for the Oakland Arena between arena management titans Legends Global and Oak View Group, though both parties appear to be offering roughly the same amount of money (roughly $100 million), instead competing on which company can provide better “long-term stewardship” for the venue.
  • Sports teams are really expensive when you’re bidding against billionaires, film at 11.
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Fact-checking Tampa councilmember’s “busting myths” video about the Rays stadium proposal

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Tampa city council set to vote today on its share of $2 billion–plus in subsidies for a $2.36 billion Tampa Bay Rays stadium, councilmember Lynn Hurtak has posted a video “busting myths about the Rays stadium proposal.” Let’s see what she came up with:

“I’m a huge baseball fan.”

When she and her husband got married, they skipped a honeymoon so they could use the money on Rays season tickets instead. TRUE.

“Actual peer-reviewed studies by real economists show no tangible impacts of new stadiums on local economic activity. It’s basically the one thing all economists, from Marxists to the Chicago school, agree upon.”

The video includes a screenshot from a February 2026 J.C. Bradbury and Brad Humphreys paper titled “Yes, There is an Economic Consensus That Professional Sports Facilities are Inadvisable Public Investments,” but the same thing was also found by a meta-study of more than 130 studies of sports venue impact by Bradbury, Humphreys, and Dennis Coates, as well as a survey of economists and another survey of economists and talking to economists when they get together to swap papers about sports. TRUE.

“Economist Allen Sanderson said you generate more economic activity by throwing a billion dollars out of a helicopter.”

Sanderson actually didn’t put a price tag on how much money you’d have to throw out of a helicopter to generate more economic activity than building a stadium, but given that he said this as early as 1997 with regard to a Minnesota Twins stadium at a time when stadiums cost a lot less than a billion dollars, he probably would have accepted tossing even fewer moneybags. TRUE ENOUGH.

“Money that could be spent in or around the stadium is money that is currently being spent doing something else in the area.”

Probably not all of stadium spending is cannibalized by spending elsewhere in the area, depending on how you define “area”: In Bradbury’s studies of the new Atlanta Braves stadium in Cobb County recounted in his new book, he found that around one-third of the spending in and around Truist Park was reallocated from elsewhere in the county. And that didn’t include spending reallocated from the rest of the Atlanta metro area, or the state of Georgia as a whole — the larger a circle you draw around an attraction, the more entertainment dollars are just being shuffled around within it. So while Hillsborough County will likely steal some economic activity from Pinellas County if the Rays move across the bay, it’ll still be Florida spending replacing other Florida spending, which isn’t a net plus for Florida taxpayers. MOSTLY TRUE.

“The new stadium has a negligible effect on total tourism numbers.”

Hurtak notes that even the Rays selling out every game would be a drop in the bucket compared to existing Tampa tourism numbers, but there’s an even better case for this argument: Studies of what happens when spring training is canceled because of strikes and lockouts have found that there’s no measurable negative impact on Florida tourism. IF ANYTHING, UNDERSTATING THE MYTH.

“Lots of stadium projects over the past few decades have been mixed-use, and none of them have paid back the taxpayers.”

I can’t confirm “none of them” without a lot more research than I have time for this morning, but there are certainly tons of examples of mixed-use projects that have been seas of red ink for taxpayers. In fact, some of the stadium projects that promise to be the costliest for the public are mixed-use developments, if only because the scale of the subsidies is even larger when team owners receive tax and land breaks on the non-stadium portions as well — as would be the case for the Rays stadium complex in Tampa. PRETTY DARN TRUE.

“A loan is when you give someone money and they promise to pay it back. The Rays have not committed to paying anything back. The current proposal is no different from the previous one, other than that the money being committed from your tax dollars is coming from a different bucket — the same bucket that we currently use to pay for renovating fire stations, fixing police cars, and paving roads.”

Yup. I hadn’t actually realized that Rays stadium proponents were arguing that the city spending $80 million toward a stadium and paying it off by siphoning off property tax revenues was a “loan,” but if so that’s completely bonkers — even Oscar Madison could tell you that. EXTREMELY TRUE.

“Even if you live in Tampa, the majority of your property taxes go to the county, which is poised to spend almost $700 million on this.”

Yup yup. (I actually have it as slightly over $700 million in county money, but it’s possible the county price tag has come down slightly in the latest iteration of the deal.) TRUE.

“The contract puts Tampa taxpayers on the hook for a blank check to pay for any additional costs of stadium renovations and repairs in the future.”

The proposed stadium development and funding agreement isn’t all that clear about how the “waterfall fund” of additional tax moneys to be used for future upgrades would work, and in fact pushes off a lot of the details around this to a future TIF district agreement that hasn’t been negotiated yet, but GENERALLY TRUE.

As a (sometime) professional fact-checker, my overall rating of Hurtak’s six-minute video report is: MORE ACCURATE THAN MOST NEWS ARTICLES BEFORE THEY GO TO A FACT CHECKER. The problems with handing over $2 billion in tax dollars in order to get the Rays to play home games in one part of Tampa Bay rather than another should be self-evident at this point, but if you want proof, Hurtak’s research checks out. Or you could be like councilmember Bill Carlson and declare that he knows “the best economists in the world” and the ones who are against stadiums are probably just “politically biased”; I’d love to fact-check those statements, but Carlson refuses to answer questions about any of his voluminous tweets on the subject, so we’ll have to settle for hopefully watching Hurtak ask him at today’s council hearing, which kicks off at 9 a.m. [EDIT: the Rays agenda item actually starts at 10 a.m., sounds like] and will be viewable online here.

 

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KC to spend extra $7m a year on paying off Royals bonds just to avoid public vote

access_time personNeil deMause

The Beacon ran a long article late last week about the Kansas City Royals stadium proposal that includes a bunch of worthwhile analysis of the deal, including why using taxes from in and around the stadium isn’t really the project “paying for itself.” (“Some ballgame attendees might be going to a Crown Center restaurant instead of a Waldo restaurant that day. That shift in economic activity within Kansas City is a net neutral from a tax revenue perspective.”) But the most interesting part is buried many paragraphs down, in a discussion of the type of bonds the city plans to use to borrow $600 million for stadium costs and why:

Kansas City intends to issue these Royals bonds as “special obligation bonds,” as opposed to revenue bonds or general obligation bonds. That means that the city is essentially promising to pay back a certain amount of money every year…

If the city wanted to get a lower interest rate, it would have needed to take the stadium proposal to a public vote — either for a sales tax as Jackson County did or for general obligation bonds, using property taxes.

The going interest rate for K.C.’s special obligation bonds, reports the Beacon, is 5.725%, compared to 4.25% for general obligation bonds. Applied to a $600 million loan, this means that Kansas City is going to be spending about $7 million a year extra on stadium bond payments in order to avoid a public vote. That’s money that, if it were used to finance other city spending, could cover about $117 million in different public needs, if the city had gone the voter-approval route for the Royals project. But you can’t put a price on not letting the people vote, or rather you can, and that price is $117 million.

In other evading-democracy news, meanwhile, Mayor Quinton Lucas’s rush to get a Royals deal down on paper before anyone could try to force a public vote seems to have run afoul of another small matter: the residents of a 33-story apartment building adjacent to the stadium site who say the project would be infringe on their property rights, and who are now suing to block part of it.

According to the lawsuit filed Monday in the Jackson County Circuit Court, the [San Francisco Tower] condominium’s association is seeking a temporary restraining order and an injunction against three defendants — the city of Kansas City, the Royals and Crown Center — for protections over its longtime easements and property rights.

Some of the property rights include:

  • An approximate 0.835-acre central mechanical plant and maintenance shop;
  • A transformer and primary switchgear rooms;
  • Utility tunnels, including a 24-foot-wide tunnel under Grand Boulevard;
  • A pedestrian bridge;
  • A 400-space parking garage
  • A passage over San Francisco Garden.

The association states that plans for 68-acre ballpark district show the tower surrounded, as well as the stadium approximately 100 feet from the condo’s entrance.

All this building infrastructure is on Crown Center property, but the condo association says it has easements in place guaranteeing it the right to use the property for this stuff. The residents say they’ve been trying to negotiate with Royals execs, the Crown Center, and the city since May, to no avail, and so are seeking a restraining order and injunctions against the part of the project that would infringe on their rights, though they’re not seeking to stop the project overall.

This is all pretty embarrassing for Mayor Quinton Lucas not to have addressed sooner, but then, crossing all his t’s in a timely fashion doesn’t really seem like one of his core strengths. Lucas said yesterday that he “will support all parties in reaching an amicable resolution whether through the Court’s declaration of rights outside the stadium footprint, as sought here, or through alternative dispute resolution.” No word yet on whether an injunction might have any impact on the inevitable lawsuit over whether a public ballot measure will be ruled to come too late to overturn the stadium plan, assuming voters give it a thumbs-down; governance is too important to be left to the masses, which is why we instead leave it to bond financiers and city lawyers, apparently.

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Royals mega-TIF could see Missouri taxpayers covering John Sherman’s entire $1.9B stadium tab

access_time personNeil deMause

Also on Friday, the Kansas City TIF Commission issued its Downtown Stadium TIF Plan, spelling out in a bit more detail — though still far from complete detail — what public money will be going to a new Royals stadium if and when it gets final approval following the city council’s yes vote on Thursday. Having to dig through two separate financial documents in one day seems like it should be an OSHA violation; fortunately, veteran K.C. journalist Dave Helling has done a lot of the summing up already on his Substack, so we can use that as a jumping-off point.

  • Before we get to Helling’s analysis, one technical point: Though the funding plan is described throughout as “tax increment financing,” it’s not a traditional TIF plan, which involves redirecting increased property taxes from in and around a development to help pay the developer’s costs. Since the Royals stadium will already be publicly owned and thus owe no property taxes, what Kansas City is instead looking at is diverting city sales, income, hotel, food and beverage, and other taxes from in and around the stadium district — making this a STIF (sales tax increment financing), or really a mega-TIF.
  • The stadium will cost $2,051,249,065 to build, of which Royals owner John Sherman will provide $911,249,065. This leaves precisely $1.14 billion for the city and state to cover; it was thoughtful of Sherman not to force taxpayers to have to dig around for exact change.
  • As discussed last week, the city will spend $90 million on infrastructure, with no specific funding source spelled out. Another $510 million will come from city mega-TIF tax money, a proposed 1% sales tax hike in a “community improvement district” of undetermined size — though as Helling calculates, all these combined are projected to “yield about $12.7 million annually, not nearly enough to cover yearly payments on a $510 million dollar debt.” (KCTV reports that an additional $128 million would come from raiding other city revenues, including restaurant taxes, gaming revenues, and parking revenues.)
  • The state of Missouri will provide $254 million from the Show Me Sports Investment Act — an amount equal to all state tax revenue already being paid by the Royals — $50 million in tax credits, $35 million in “infrastructure contributions,” and $100 million in transportation spending.
  • That leaves $101 million unaccounted for, which is listed in the TIF Commission spreadsheet as being from “other public sources.” As Helling writes, this “could be Missouri — the state already provides Jackson County $3 million a year for the Truman Complex; perhaps that’s part of where the money is coming from. Or it could be from Jackson County. Or some combination. Or not. It isn’t clear.”
  • None of this counts: property tax breaks, which as previously noted could add half a billion dollars or more to the city’s cost [UPDATE: Geoffrey Propheter projects $325-375 million]; or the steeply discounted rent (just $1 a year) that Sherman would pay; or the cost of giving up all stadium revenues to the city’s billionaire tenant, including naming rights for a building that he wouldn’t own.
  • Helling also mentions “undefined ‘redirections’ of $710.3 million from the ‘stadium impact area’ and another $259.5 million in ‘city funds,’ defined as the restaurant and gaming tax, on-street parking revenues, and revenue from ‘ancillary’ development.” Given that this is only mentioned in a chart showing “downtown stadium revenue projections, I think this isn’t additional public spending, but rather an attempt to make the taxpayer tab look better on the balance sheet by saying, “But the city will get to keep all the money we make from parking meters!” But, like Helling, I’m not 100% confident of anything here.
  • Unlike in Tampa, there’s no “waterfall” fund; the TIF district dissolves once the stadium is paid off. Unless the city decides to extend it, obviously, which is a thing that tends to happen once team owners start sniffing around for additional upgrades down the line.
  • Like the proposed stadium in Tampa, this one could be intentionally on the small side: the minimum number of actual seats is 30,000, with additional standing room. That could come as an unpleasant surprise to Royals fans, who turned out at an average of more than 30,000 a game as recently as 2016, and who have crossed that mark at three home games this year despite a last-place team. Expect higher prices at a new Royals stadium than at 38,000-capacity Kauffman Stadium, especially for big games or when the team doesn’t suck.

With all that in mind, it seems fair to conclude that the total public cost of the Royals deal is much likely to be closer to $2 billion than the reported $1.14 billion — making the $1.9 billion stadium effectively a free gift to Sherman. And, much like the Chiefs deal across state lines in Kansas, it’s a cost that K.C. and Missouri taxpayers can never hope to recoup just from whatever additional spending results from moving the Royals from one part of town to another. This race for most taxpayer-soaking MLB stadium deal to date is going to go down to the wire.

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Latest Rays stadium plan includes “waterfall” fund that could drive public cost past $2B

access_time personNeil deMause

The revised Tampa Bay Rays stadium plan paperwork was released on Friday afternoon, in a classic Friday news dump. The idea behind these is to dominate the discourse just as everyone goes home for the weekend, so that by the time Monday rolls around — in this case, with a city council vote looming on Thursday — it will be too late for anyone to muster significant analysis of 173 pages of extremely convoluted legal language.

With that said, let’s dive in to the documents — a stadium development and funding agreement, a nonrelocation agreement, and a guaranty — and see where things stand.

  • As expected, the main update is councilmember Bill Carlson’s replace-one-city-tax-pool-with-another switcheroo, with $180 million in spending coming entirely from property taxes instead of a mix of property taxes and sales taxes. Though it’s not spelled out in the documents, $100 million of this is being described as a “private placement” of bonds by the Rays — which is true in that the Rays would be selling the bonds, but not in that they would get to pay it off with their own city property tax payments on the surrounding development. So as discussed last week, it still amounts to the same $180 million total city cost, the Casino Night Fallacy notwithstanding.
  • Or maybe more: The funding agreement doesn’t actually specify the exact amount of redirected city property taxes, instead kicking that can down the road to an Increment Interlocal Agreement to be decided by a future City TIF Ordinance, to be passed by December. And it does spell out a “waterfall” account to use excess TIF moneys to pay for future bond costs and “capital repairs, renewals, and replacements of Overall Public Infrastructure Improvements and/or Capital Maintenance and Repairs of Public Project Improvements within the District” — in other words, if there’s additional property tax proceeds after paying off the first $180 million, it can be used for additional future expenses. Total city public cost, then, is TBD, but setting aside future tax receipts for upgrade costs can add up quickly; in the Atlanta Falcons deal, a similar waterfall fund meant that an official $200 million public cost has ballooned to about $700 million.
  • Reporter Shadow of the Stadium notes on X that “🚨Public subsidies go way past $1B,” which is accurate but nothing new: The original plan included $976 million in city and county cash, $839 million in forgone property taxes and parcel fees on the stadium, and at least $250 million worth of free state land, so this was always a $2 billion–plus subsidy. (The total stadium construction cost, meanwhile, now stands at $2.36 billion, according to the latest documents, meaning public cash and tax breaks will cover at least 85% of  Rays owner Patrick Zalupski’s stadium costs.) The waterfall fund could make it even more spendy, though — Shadow calls it a “bottomless” subsidy, and as written at present, that appears to be correct.
  • There is a “first-class stadium facility” clause, but this appears to only require the city and county to build a first-class stadium, not to maintain it as first class. If so, it couldn’t serve as a state-of-the-art out clause that Zalupski could use to demand more money before his lease is up, so that’s a positive, or at least not an additional negative.
  • On the subject of that lease, the team is reporting that it would agree to pay $4 million a year in rent as part of the new plan, which would trim about $60 million off the public’s expense. However, this figure appears nowhere in the new set of documents, so it’s tough to say if it would come with any hidden catches.
  • Nothing to do with funding, but Zalupski has the option to make this the lowest-capacity MLB stadium in existence: Only a minimum of “28,000 fixed spectator seats” is required, with another 2,000 standing room tickets. This would be even fewer seats than the Athletics‘ 33,000-seat stadium under construction in Las Vegas, and the smallest purpose-built MLB stadium since Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis in 1920, looks like. This may be fine for a team that hasn’t averaged 30,000 in attendance since their inaugural season, but it’s also in line with modern strategies for boosting ticket prices via artificial scarcity.

Would this be worse for taxpayers than the Kansas City Royals stadium plan announced last week? It’s tough to say, as there are so many unknowns remaining in both cases. But either would be the most expensive MLB stadium subsidy in history; if they both pass, all that’s left to determine is who’s #1 and who’s #1a.

Tampa stands to be undeniably #1 in one particular form of self-own, though:

At a news conference Friday afternoon, Tampa City Council member Alan Clendenin unbuttoned his dress shirt to reveal a Rays jersey customized with his name.

“I just can’t understate how big this is,” said Clendenin, appearing alongside Tampa Mayor Jane Castor. “We are a major-league city with major-league sports.”

With Carlson on board as a swing vote, it certainly looks like this enormous bigness will pass the Tampa council on Thursday, leaving its fate in the hands of the county commission, which already voted 5-2 to approve a similar deal in May. We could be looking at the first $2 billion MLB stadium subsidy, and somehow it’s going to be for the Tampa Bay Rays — guess Stu Sternberg wasn’t so dumb to turn down a $1 billion offer from St. Petersburg after all, even if it took selling the team to a more politically connected owner to get the extra billion.

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Friday roundup: KC approves $1B+ in Royals stadium subsidies over calls for public vote, independent analysis

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: The Kansas City council voted on a proposed city funding package for a new Royals stadium yesterday, and as expected, it sailed through, with councilmembers voting 11-2 to approve a series of agreements promising $600 million in cash plus at least $500 million in tax breaks toward a new $1.9 billion stadium at Crown Center.

The council vote came amid more protests from members of the labor group Missouri Workers Power, who vowed to move ahead with plans for November ballot measure on the plan, which if it goes against the council’s verdict will likely spark a legal battle over which vote takes precedence. Councilmember Johnathan Duncan, one of the two no votes yesterday, said the council shouldn’t have voted without waiting for independent economic analyses of the plan; Mayor Quinton Lucas retorted that there will soon be a TIF district analysis made available along with other studies, and “if for some reason the third party financial review says, ‘this doesn’t work,’ then these things don’t go forward,” though it’s not clear what council action would be necessary to undo yesterday’s decision.

Kansas City Star columnist David Hudnall summed up the situation before the council vote: “Huge financial questions remain unanswered. Some pages in the agreements are literally blank. … They don’t want us to vote on this stadium, and pushing it through like this is their best chance of making sure the public doesn’t have a say.”

Fran Marion, a fast food worker and Missouri Workers Power leader, said in addition to the proposed ballot measure, “we see how our mayor and council members voted, and we know elections are coming up in April and June, and we will remember what they did today.” That’s absolutely been known to happen, though it’d be cold comfort for Kansas Citians to get revenge on local councilmembers (Lucas is term-limited out in 2027) while still being stuck with a huge public tab, just as it was for residents of Wisconsin and Cobb County and Miami before them.

And in other news of the week:

  • Tampa Mayor Jane Castor now says that a revised Tampa Bay Rays stadium plan could see the city of Tampa fronting $80 million while the Rays ownership would take out a $100 million loan, all of which would be repaid out of future property tax receipts. That would still 100% be replacing city tax money with city tax money, with the Tampa Bay Business Journal acknowledging that there’s “not much” difference between a Community Redevelopment Area district (the old plan) and a Tax Increment Financing district (the new one). Castor promised, “We’re not going to rush into an agreement just for the sake of time,” while also saying that a council vote could come as early as next week despite no one knowing yet exactly how the financing would work.
  • The Federal Railroad Administration has approved two grants totaling $659 million for relocating an Amtrak facility in Chicago, which could clear the way for the 14th Street rail yard to be used by incoming Chicago White Sox owner Justin Ishbia to build a new stadium there. Who would fund that project still remains very much an unknown, but it seems like we’re headed toward finding out.
  • After receiving $750 million in state money for his Las Vegas stadium, Raiders owner Mark Davis is now asking for another $75 million to fund a new entry plaza in advance of hosting the 2029 Super Bowl. The money would come out of a “waterfall” fund set aside for Raiders stadium upgrades from the same hotel tax money that paid for the first $750 million — but that’s still not without its costs in terms of draining funds you might need later for other repair needs, as Cleveland could tell you.
  • “I don’t think the Steelers have any plans of leaving” their 25-year-old stadium, said Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor this week, but “the reality is both stadiums need upgrades” and “I think to compete, we’re gonna have to have those conversations long term with the Steelers and the Pirates.” Left unspecified: What kind of upgrades the stadiums need, who would pay for them, and who O’Connor thinks he’d be “competing” with exactly.
  • Speaking of needs and wants and competition, Boston Celtics owner Bill Chisholm said this week that he doesn’t need a new arena to compete with other teams financially, but “I do think we need to have an arena that is consistent with the quality and the excellence of the Celtics.” Chisholm added, “if we can make it work, we’d love to stay where we are,” all of which sounds very much like gamesmanship with his current landlords, Delaware North, whose owner also owns the Bruins.
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