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Goodell says Bears stadium “process is going on,” offers no details where it’ll end up

access_time personNeil deMause

Chicago Bears execs presented the NFL with a stadium update yesterday, and what did they say, commissioner Roger Goodell?

“There was a specific update on the Bears on the two sites that are viable in the Bears’ mind,” he said. “That process is going on.”…

“I’ve spoken to the governor [of Illinois] recently and there’s a focus on getting something done, and there will be two viable options for the Bears to choose from,” he said.

That is definitely a specific update on … something. The two sites Bears owner George McCaskey is considering, in Arlington Heights, Illinois and Hammond, Indiana, will continue to be two sites that are options! Options the Bears can choose from!

Back in the world of actual news reporting, there’s still no indication of what if anything the state senate and house will pass in terms of the megaprojects tax break bill that Bears officials want before agreeing to an Arlington Heights stadium. The Illinois legislative session wraps up next week, and it seems likely that something will pass, but there’s no telling whether it’ll be the same something that McCaskey wants — let alone the additional subsidies the Bears owner wants as well.

With that in mind, Goodell’s statement seems like an attempt at momentum building, or at least momentum not destroying: The stadium talks are going according to plan, all will work out, there’s definitely nothing that’s a crisis or anything. It’s very possible that no one really knows what the Illinois legislature will do, and that also no one knows what Bears ownership will do if they don’t get everything they’ve demanded — up and move to Indiana, or take what they can get in Illinois? Past stadium games of chicken have gone both ways, it’s tough to predict unless you live in George McCaskey’s brain, assuming even he’s decided at this point. Leverage is hard!

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Rays advocates call $2B Tampa stadium subsidy deal “city building,” critics call it “pie in the sky”

access_time personNeil deMause

The Hillsborough County commission and Tampa city council look set to vote tomorrow and Thursday, respectively, on a nonbinding MOU for a Tampa Bay Rays stadium project requiring about $976 million in city and county tax dollars plus $839 million in property tax breaks and at least $250 million in free land for the stadium site, coming to just over $2 billion in subsidies for a stadium that will cost $2.3 billion. Let’s hear what some of the main players have to say for themselves:

  • Tampa council chair Alan Clendenin wrote an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times declaring that this one will be different, because unlike when Tampa gave money to the Buccaneers owners for an NFL stadium and the New York Yankees owners for a spring training facility and the Lightning owners for an NHL arena, this is “an expansion of that successful public-private model to an entirely new level” and “a city building deal” that will “create tens of thousands of jobs and generate new tax revenues that can help improve parks, roads, infrastructure and future transit opportunities” [citation extremely needed].
  • Rays CEO Ken Babby got a column worth of softball questions from Florida Politics (with “assistance from AI,” okay then), which he used to assert that the stadium district will generate “$55.5 billion in economic impact” (as reported previously, this is a largely meaningless number based entirely on assuming the team’s projections are correct), that “there will be no new taxes to fund this project” (only true if Tampa and Hillsborough County don’t have to raise taxes to fill in the resulting budget holes, which LOL) and that it would be “the largest private investment by a sports team in Florida history” (also the largely public investment in a privately controlled sports stadium in Florida history, but who’s counting?). Babby also got his own TB Times op-ed space, alongside Hillsborough College president Ken Atwater, to assert: “This is not merely a ballpark project. This is the definition of transformation” (but in which sense of the noun?).
  • County commissioner Joshua Wostal, also speaking to Florida Politics, said of the new MOU, “if anything, it may have gotten worse,” and that the increase in county Community Investment Tax spending from $272 million to $360 million would eat up more than half of the tax’s revenue between 2027 and 2030, with the result that “we’re going to have to delay a significant amount of projects.”
  • Tampa council member Charlie Miranda told Florida Politics that the new MOU is “all about pie in the sky and that everything is going to work out. Well, that’s not the way I do business.”
  • Tampa Mayor Jane Castor assured residents in her weekly newsletter that the nonbinding MOU is “less like a contract and more like a handshake with a witness,” so all good to agree to it and then figure out what it actually means later.
  • UPDATE: Late addition to the TB Times op-ed section this morning: Five former local elected officials say current elected officials should “just say no”: “The owners of the Rays need to be in the Tampa Bay market much more than we need them to stay. So, elected officials, call their bluff.”

It seems likely — though by no means certain — that the county and city will okay the nonbinding MOU this week. After that, it’ll be up to the state legislature to decide if that’s enough local skin in the game for Florida to hand over state land and funds, or if it will wait until there’s a binding MOU. And after that, it’ll be up to the city and county to turn that handshake into a contract — something that could go more smoothly once the project gets state approval and seems like a fait accompli, or could run into even more opposition if, I dunno, Tampa Bay gets hit by another hurricane, say. But don’t worry, that probably won’t happen unless … oh. Oh. Maybe don’t place your prediction market bets on a new Rays stadium just yet, at least until you see the fall water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Blazers owner says he’s not threatening to move team to Nashville, Austin, Kalamazoo, or Greensboro, media ignores him

access_time personNeil deMause

Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon gave a long podcast interview on Friday in which he mostly talked about how he’s not a cheapskate, he just genuinely thought towels were a cooler giveaway than t-shirts because that’s how he thought it worked at hockey games. But he also said this:

“When I bought the Hurricanes, all I heard — because I was from Texas — we were going to move the team to Houston. Moving a team is difficult. We didn’t move the Hurricanes. We ended up getting a deal done. We went through the same thing in Portland. Before I even bought the team, I had an agreement with the city and the state. We had an agreement in principle. They’ve already approved half of it. Assuming that all gets done, then this is a non-story. For me, it’s never been really a thing. We didn’t buy the team to move it. We bought the Portland Trail Blazers.”

That’s news, you would think? Maybe not big news — Dundon is not outright promising not to move the team if he doesn’t get his entire $600 million demand in public funding for arena upgrades, he’s just saying “assuming all this gets done” then he won’t move — but still, it’s useful information about where the Blazers’ owner’s head and/or leverage play is at. But aside from one article on the basketball news site HoopsHype, it didn’t even make a single headline, and the Oregonian appears to be the only other publication that even reported on it, way at the end of an article.

Contrast that with Oregonian columnist Bill Oram’s statement last week that “losing this team, be it to Nashville, Austin or Kalamazoo, is not some hollow threat by a greedy billionaire.” Despite the fact that Oram appears to have pulled those city names out of his butt — or in Kalamazoo’s case, whatever part of his brain stores “cities with funny names” — it spawned a flood of press coverage, including a much-reprinted Sportsnaut piece on how “a new rumor suggests” the team could end up in Austin, and one on Michigan news site MLive on how Oram’s mention of Kalamazoo sparked “buzz across social platforms and Southwest Michigan.” (MLive declared that such a move wasn’t “likely,” but that “It’s a reminder that no city is too small to dream big for a day,” which, sure, so long as Kalamazoo accepts that eventually it’s going to have to wake up and realize it’s only in the 43rd largest U.S. TV market.)

The fact of the matter is that the possibility of the Blazers trying to move if Dundon doesn’t get his $600 million in arena money is a threat, yes, but a very vague one, in the “don’t make me come in there” category of things people threaten while hoping they don’t have to decide whether they’re just bluffing. Portland is a bit larger than Nashville, and its arena is only one year older — and Nashville likely doesn’t have the stomach to give an NBA owner major renovation money right after coughing up $1.2 billion for a stadium for the Tennessee Titans. An attempt to move to Austin would likely have the San Antonio Spurs owners up in arms, and other cities have other problems. It’s still conceivable that Dundon would try to move if he doesn’t get any arena money out of Portland; it’s also very possible that, if push came to shove, he’d settle for less than the full $600 million. It’s elected officials’ job to try to find the cheapest price point possible, which some at least seem to be trying to do — and the media’s to report on the whole game of chicken honestly, even if “Are the Blazers moving to Kalamazoo?” makes for better clickbait.

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Friday roundup: Rays execs propose “squishy” MOU to unlock stadium vote; Bears tax hike proponent crushed in reelection bid

access_time personNeil deMause

Now that the Tampa Bay Rays stadium push has been pushed back to beyond the end of this legislative session, maybe we can get on with looking at some of the week’s news from other cities. Though wait: Could the Rays actually be on the verge of agreeing to an actual MOU with the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County, which might be voted on as early as next week? Or maybe: Is this just a vague outline of an agreement, not even looked at yet by actual city councilmembers or county commissioners, meant to convince the state legislature that it should move ahead with its own Rays funding? But what about: OLEICAT?

Okay, fine: There is a draft MOU, and it is this. Its very first word is “NON-BINDING,” and it changes some stuff around from the last proposed MOU. Instead of this public funding plan from the city and county:

  • $272 million from the county’s Community Investment Tax 0.5% sales tax surcharge that was passed by voters after promises it wouldn’t be used for stadiums
  • $268 million from county hotel taxes
  • $132 million from county cash reserves
  • $30 million from the county disaster relief funds
  • $224 million from the city of Tampa via the Drew Park TIF district
  • $74 million from reply hazy, ask again later

It would now be this:

  • $360 million from the county Community Investment Tax
  • $263 million from county hotel taxes
  • $40 million from more county hotel taxes
  • $30 million from county stormwater infrastructure funds
  • $100 million from the city of Tampa via the Drew Park TIF district
  • $80 million from the city Community Investment Tax
  • $103 million in county money from reply hazy, ask again later

The first set of numbers totaled $1 billion and the second one is $976 million, meaning the total public cost has gone down very slightly! Rays owner Patrick Zalupski would still keep all revenues from the county-owned stadium; he appears to have dropped his demand for a $10/year rent for now, with the MOU only saying that a lease agreement with the county will be negotiated at a later date.

Rays CEO Ken Babby issued a statement boasting that the new MOU “protects all public funding currently allocated for police, fire, emergency management or response functions,” which is true inasmuch as it doesn’t dip into those particular budget pockets, but not true inasmuch as city and county governments with $975 million less in overall tax money than it would otherwise will find it harder to fund those things.

The new MOU was negotiated with city and county staff, not legislators, so this still has to get voted on by the Tampa city council and Hillsborough County commission — and then, since it’s nonbinding, presumably voted on again at some later date once all those blank spaces in the budget are filled in. (Tampa council chair Alan Clendenin described this MOU as “on the squishy side.”) In the meantime, this stopgap measure is intended to convince the state legislature to move ahead with approving its share of the deal while Zalupski’s buddy Ron DeSantis is still governor. It’s all a lot of balls to keep in the air, but if it all works out, the Rays’ stadium plan could at least live to fight another day.

Okay, now the rest of the news:

  • Add another casualty to the list of elected officials who have been voted out of office and/or shot in the butt for their support of taxpayer-funded sports subsidies: Porter County council president Andy Vasquez got stomped in his Republican primary to stand for reelection, and one reason may be that he supported a 1% county food and beverage tax surcharge for a Bears stadium in Hammond, whereas his opponent opposed it. (Hammond is in Lake County, not in Porter County, but the Bears are seeking tax money from both.) The counties aren’t set to vote on the tax subsidies until after a deal is struck to bring the Bears to Indiana, which seems like it would be the dumbest kind of throwing good money after bad possible, but hey, all the kids are doing it!
  • In tax subsidy news on the other side of the Illinois-Indiana Bears border war: Amanda Kass of Good Jobs First, who earlier this week worried that the Illinois megaprojects bill that the Chicago Bears owners want so they can get up to $2 billion in tax breaks on an Arlington Heights stadium would turn the state’s property tax base into “swiss cheese,” has penned an analysis of the bill along with Kristan Wong Karinen of Good Jobs First and Rita Jefferson of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy for Crain’s Chicago Business and concluded that it would result in “a direct property tax cut for corporations that other residents will pay for.” And since any projects costing at least $100 million would be eligible for the tax breaks, it would be down to individual municipalities to decide — which is especially worrying, they write, given that “billionaire developers come to the table with sophisticated financial models and experienced attorneys. Communities don’t.”
  • The Missouri legislature snuck $80 million into this year’s state budget for “wastewater, stormwater, and water infrastructure,” and some legislators are concerned it could be a stealth attempt to set aside money for a Kansas City Royals stadium project. “This is the stuff that makes me sick,” said state senator Maggie Nurrenbern, who noted that other programs received budget cuts even as this potential stadium slush fund was created.
  • “Vancouver city council could approve a deal by July with a potential ownership group in pursuit of a Major League Baseball team,” reports Business in Vancouver, before further reporting that “so far, no ownership group has publicly shown an interest.” But if some billionaire shows up wanting to get an MLB expansion franchise, and if they can come up with a way of building a stadium, and if MLB actually decides to expand, then Vancouver is willing to get in line along with Sacramento and anyone else.
  • No, the Atlanta Braves Battery project really doesn’t turn a profit for Cobb County, that’s not how math works.
  • Buffalo Bills fans have noticed that the new stadium they’re paying for with their state and county tax money so that team owners can make more money is charging more money for tickets, and now they’re unhappy.
  • The New York/New Jersey World Cup host committee has rented school buses to provide 18,000 rides to this summer’s soccer matches for only $20, providing a relief to fans but potentially undercutting New Jersey’s attempts to recoup its World Cup expenses by gouging on train fares. New York state taxpayers will be footing $6 million of the bus cost, courtesy of Gov. Kathy Hochul.
  • What do you get when you combine AI slop with clickbait vaportecture? The nightmare fuel that is “Ballparks Reimagined: If Every MLB Team Built a Stadium From Its Soul,” which is if anything even slightly more horrifying than the YouTube version three years ago.
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Florida senate won’t act on Rays stadium until city and county do, could raiding higher-ed fund be next?

access_time personNeil deMause

If Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski’s Plan B now that the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County won’t vote on stadium subsidies by the end of this legislative session is to go get state money first and figure out the rest later, uh, he may need a Plan C:

Sen. Ed Hooper, a Clearwater Republican who leads the Senate budget committee, told reporters that he didn’t think the state should be assigning any money to the effort until local governments reach agreements with the Rays.

“The locals, Hillsborough County and the city, there seems to be some heartburn at the request,” Hooper said Tuesday. “And until they resolve that, I don’t think the state needs to be involved.”

So, would the city and county signing nonbinding memorandums of understanding be enough to get Hooper and other state senators to free up the state funds? Would the Tampa council and Hillsborough County commission even go for that by June 1? And then what would it take to make the nonbinding bind?

Today’s brief Tampa Bay Times report doesn’t go into that level of detail, but Florida Politics hints that the state money could still come via a side door, citing the old “sources familiar with the situation” — which could be anyone from top legislative leaders to the reporter at the next desk — as saying that “the funding will probably still come, most likely through the Public Education Capital Outlay report that is part of the budgeting process.” That would imply using state higher education capital funds to pay for the state’s share of the Rays project on the grounds that it’s really a project about improving Hillsborough College by cramming it into a corner of campus to move it out of the baseball team’s way; this sounds potentially even more controversial than siphoning off disaster relief money to spend on a stadium, but I guess the legislative heart wants what the legislative heart wants, heartburn be damned.

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DC considers new bus line to get Commanders fans to games, could push public cost back over $7B

access_time personNeil deMause

When the Washington Commanders‘ record-shattering stadium deal that could end up costing D.C. $6.6 billion or more in cash, land, and tax breaks was approved last summer, one of the many unanswered questions was how to get 65,000 people in and out of the former RFK Stadium site on game days. The district’s Metro transit agency now has a preliminary plan, and it looks like Commanders fans should get ready to take the bus:

Metro is recommending a new bus rapid transit line, called the Gold Line, with dedicated lanes along H Street NW and Benning Road NE to connect the stadium to Union Station. That would include setting aside and even painting red bus lanes to keep buses moving and out of traffic. A new transit center near the stadium would serve as a hub to handle large crowds and connect riders.

Bus rapid transit isn’t a terrible idea: Many cities are turning to it as a cheap way to get all the benefits of light rail — a dedicated right-of-way, fast travel times, quick boarding and unboarding — without having to spend big on installing train tracks. The Metro study estimates that even just adding an extra subway station by the Commanders stadium would cost $1 billion, and wouldn’t do much to add capacity since it would just dump football fans onto the same trains that they can currently board at the nearby Stadium-Armory station. (Though it would at least allow more throughput of train travelers; the Stadium-Armory station can only handle 14,000 people an hour, so if half the fans at Commanders games took the Metro, some could end up waiting two hours just to board a train.)

Metro’s BRT plan promises service “as frequent as” every three minutes (which at 100 passengers per bus could clear out 2,000 fans an hour, not enough to put much of a dent in the crowds streaming out of games) and “fast 12-15 mph speeds,” which isn’t actually very fast. (Metro trains average 33 mph and max out at 75 mph.) The report doesn’t provide a price tag for all this, but does cite “a $600 million Transportation Improvement Fund that is currently unfunded but could be funded over 30 years to support transit-related improvements to the campus.” Looks like the total public cost of the Commanders stadium is likely back over $7 billion — at least, unless the team figures out a way to build even more translucent parking garages.

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Portland council president says he won’t be “held hostage” to Blazers arena deal, sports columnist insists he will too

access_time personNeil deMause

I don’t want to make too big a deal about this trend of elected officials taking their time before voting on sports subsidy deals — looking stadium and arena demands in the mouth is literally doing their minimum job — but add Portland, Oregon to Tampa and the state of Illinois as local governments doing their minimum job this legislative season:

City and county lawmakers are pumping the brakes, saying it’s better to take the time to get it right than to sign away huge sums of public money under pressure from Portland’s professional basketball franchise, which has called the Rose City home since 1970.

“We’re not going to be held hostage, we’re not going to sign a bad deal,” Portland Council President Jamie Dunphy told The Oregonian/OregonLive, echoing a position expressed by many of his colleagues. “We’re not going to be a blank check for an out-of town billionaire. We are going to support our team and our local economy in the way that needs to get done. But we’re not doing it at all costs.”

Trail Blazers owner/big bad Tom Dundon has already won approval of $365 million in state funding for upgrades to his 31-year-old arena, but is seeking another $235 million in city and county money to make it an even $600 million. A Multnomah County spokesperson said that county commissioners will spend “the next several months” negotiating their part in any arena deal, while city council president Dunphy said “the City Council is going to take as much time as it needs because getting this right matters.”

Right now, reports the Oregonian, local officials appear to be debating less whether to send Dundon the nine-figure check he desires and more which account to charge it to: Portland Mayor Keith Wilson’s proposal to use a city clean energy fund to pay for basketball arena zhuzhing has been especially contentious. But the council is also seeking a more taxpayer-friendly lease, possibly including the city getting a cut of arena naming rights, which in the unlikely case Dundon agreed to it would help defray the public’s costs.

Blazers execs, meanwhile, have continued their saber-rattling about moving the team if arena funding isn’t approved ASAP, though still without saying the words “move the team” out loud. (Team president Dewayne Hankins, in a tour de force of non-threat threat verbiage, declared, “The Trail Blazers have been deeply connected to Portland for more than 50 years and remain committed to this community. The fact remains: if city and county leaders can’t get a deal done, the Blazers’ lease at Moda Center will expire in 2030.”) And while city councilor Angelita Morillo called this “a massive bluff, and I think that we need to call them on that bluff,” Oregonian sports columnist Bill Oram, who had written in February that Dundon would move the Blazers without a deal, wrote essentially the same column again on Sunday, declaring:

The only thing that matters for the Trail Blazers this summer — really, truly, actually matters — is whether Portland’s politicians figure out that losing this team, be it to Nashville, Austin or Kalamazoo, is not some hollow threat by a greedy billionaire.

Kalamazoo, you’ve been mentioned on the telly! (Sorry, Greensboro, your time will come.)

Oram liked this point so much that wrote pretty much the same column yet again yesterday, this time listing Nashville, Austin, Kansas City, San Diego, Vancouver, Mexico City, and Raleigh as potential relocation targets. He also insisted that economic studies showing that public sports subsidies are a waste of money are irrelevant because what Portland is facing is “completely without precedent,” then snapped back at economist J.C. Bradbury for pointing out that Oram is literally doing the title of Bradbury upcoming stadium book “This One Will Be Different.”

Is any of this going to end with Portland forcing Dundon to provide a significantly better deal for taxpayers? Probably not — officials are also seeking concessions like promises to use union labor and a community benefits agreement, which are more likely to pass because they wouldn’t cost Blazers ownership much money. But this is where we are with sports subsidies, 40 years in from when they first became an essential part of the sports business model: Even being allowed to ask for the public to get anything in return for their gift of tax money to a billionaire owner is seen in some circles as tantamount to running your team out of town on a rail. All this is continuing to take longer than we thought.

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Bears stadium tax break could cost Illinois billions more in other development subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

Two weeks after megaprojects property tax break bill lead sponsor Bill Cunningham said that the Illinois state senate was “going to take our time with this” and “getting it right is more important than getting it done quickly,” the senate is continuing to (tries to think of football metaphor) run down the clock (nailed it!):

The legislation has stalled in the Senate over concerns about whether its property tax relief provisions are meaningful for area school districts and residents.

“One of the subject areas we’re spending time on is the property tax relief element. There are some details there that we’re working through and that work will go on through next week,” state Sen. Bill Cunningham, a Chicago Democrat involved in stadium-related negotiations with the Bears, said Thursday.

“Property tax relief” here means, you will recall, taking half of the payments in lieu of property tax the Bears and other developers would make instead of property tax payments — at a vastly reduced rate — and putting them in a fund to provide property tax rebates to regular people. Since this money would be getting diverted from the local taxing district, which could then be forced to raise property taxes to cover the difference, it’s a pretty dumb example of robbing Peter to pay Paul; it would also only provide an estimated $1.29 per homeowner, which is leaving legislators unenthused. (Cunningham said the senate is “seeing if there’s a way we can boost that number, or if we can better target the property tax relief to make it more meaningful,” which sounds suspiciously like “we’re hoping to find a math where numbers add up different.”)

A bigger concern than how to slice off a piece of tax-break pie that’s bigger than the entire pie, meanwhile, is whether subsidizing a Bears stadium would create of cascade of tax breaks for other future projects as well. Under the megaprojects bill, notes Good Jobs First research director Amanda Kass, any project costing at least $100 million to build would be eligible to pay reduced PILOTs:

The use of tax increment financing, or TIF, across Illinois has already poked holes in the property tax base by tucking away billions into special funds that can only be spent within certain geographic boundaries.

“Creating this program is going to poke even more holes in that Swiss cheese,” Kass said, noting the legislation also limits how much local governments can tap into growing property values and pays relatively little back for property tax relief.

How much would those budget holes cost Illinois? There’s no way to say, because we have no idea how many $100 million-plus projects would tap the megaprojects benefit, or how big a tax break each would receive. If the Bears project in Arlington Heights could hit $2 billion in tax breaks, then it’s pretty reasonable to worry that the total megaprojects bill cost to taxpayers could end up in the billions of dollars, or even the tens of billions.

(And before someone raises this point: Yes, these would be projects built on properties not currently generating a lot of tax revenue, so government receipts wouldn’t actually go down by that amount. But costs of providing roads and schools and police and fire services, etc., would go up, and there would be less new tax money coming in to pay for it. Plus, if these are projects that developers would have chosen to build somewhere in the state anyway, but are happily taking a huge tax break for if offered, then that is indeed money it’s costing Illinois taxpayers. For more on this, see: Madison, Oscar.)

There is a hard deadline for the senate to decide on a megaprojects bill — it is set to adjourn on May 31, and still needs to work out a bunch of other stuff before then including an entire state budget — though if it doesn’t act, or doesn’t act in a way that makes Bears execs happy, it’ll be up to team leaders to decide whether they really want to move to Indiana, or if they’d rather take more time to hash out something in Illinois. The Tampa Bay Rays blinked, maybe it’ll be a trend, only one way to find out!

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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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