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Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends host the Olympics, and other cautionary tales

access_time personNeil deMause

Last week I teased a big project of mine that would drop this week, and it went live yesterday morning: a 57-page report, commissioned by Los Angeles economic justice advocacy group Strategic Action for a Just Economy, on whether L.A. can or should be trying to extricate itself from its hosting obligations for the 2028 Summer Olympics — something some local critics have suggested, especially in the wake of the city’s wildfire crisis and budget crisis and  immigration enforcement occupying force crisis. You can probably get a pretty good sense of the report’s findings from its title, “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t,” but if you want slightly more details, here’s the nut graf:

While there are numerous unknowns—the history of the Olympics shows that budget questions are never resolved until it’s far too late, a path that L.A. has headed down with its agreements for the 2028 Games as well—the available documentation and history of international event hosting shows: Yes, if Los Angeles officials, or voters, decided to withdraw from hosting the Olympics, they could do so. This would come at the risk of potentially billions of dollars in damages from a breach-of-contract lawsuit and losses from expenses already undertaken. However, continuing as host also comes with a potential risk of losses that, if history is any guide, could similarly amount to billions of dollars.

The report also contains a wealth of information about Olympic financial history, including other locales’ attempts to back out of hosting major international sporting events for fiscal reasons (the Denver 1976 Winter Olympics that never happened, plus the 2026 Commonwealth Games that the Australian state of Victoria bailed on in 2023 amid concerns about snowballing costs), as well as mention of my new favorite Olympic factoid: that time they held a Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan and nobody knows how much it cost because the local organizing committee literally set fire to its financial records. It’s all here, dig in if you’re in the mood for a long, enraging read — or if not, you can instead read the excellent summaries in Torched (which includes a quote from me on this week’s revelations about L.A. Olympics chief Casey Wasserman’s history with Jeffrey Epstein) and LAist.

And now that that’s off my plate, I have plenty of time for stadium and arena bullet points, and good thing, too, because this week brought craploads of them:

  • The Wyandotte County Commission followed suit with its neighbors in the city of Olathe and voted 7-3 to approve devoting local sales and hotel tax revenue to pay off part of the state’s $2.775 billion in bonds for a new Kansas City Chiefs stadium and surrounding development. The county, to be clear, gets absolutely nothing out of kicking in its own funding (total price tag still TBD), given that the state has indicated it will go ahead with the stadium deal regardless. Kansas City, Kansas mayor and county commission chair Christal Wilson, who didn’t vote because no ties needed to be broken, wrote on Facebook that she thinks kicking in county money is warranted because it gets the county “a seat at the table” — okay, though it’s questionable whether getting to sit at the table is worth having to split the check.
  • Indiana state Rep. Earl Harris Jr. on his bill to create a sports authority to build a Chicago Bears stadium in northwest Indiana with money from (feigns coughing fit until you go away): “Indiana does sports things like this very well. When you look at the Pacers, the Colts, the Speedway, we’re very good at figuring out a good financial plan that does not hurt the taxpayer.” Um, about that…
  • Will the Portland Trail Blazers move if the city and county decline to spend $600 million on upgrades to their arena? It’s an “urgent race against time” and “the clock continues to tick,” writes The Oregonian, citing a deadline of … huh, seems like they didn’t mention any deadline, must have run out of room. (Though there was room for “Are you ready for the Nashville or Kansas City Trail Blazers?” to cite two cities that are not particularly shopping around for NBA teams.)
  • Tampa sports radio host JP Peterson insists that spending upwards of $2 billion on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium is warranted because it “will produce millions in tax revenue and bring major events, Super Bowls, National Championship games, World Baseball Classic, MLB All-Star games” — [citation needed], my man. Also, I can save you some time: Even if a new baseball stadium does bring in millions in tax revenue, from hosting, uh, football games, when it costs hundreds of millions a year in tax expenditures, maybe that’s … not good?
  • Speaking of the Rays, fresh Rays vaportecture! I’m sticking with my comment from yesterday: Glad to see the Rays acknowledge that even after a future stadium is built, fans still won’t buy jerseys with player names because they know they’ll be sold off as soon as they reach arbitration.
  • And if you want still more Rays commentary from me, I spoke with both WMNF radio and Tampa Bay 28 TV about the ongoing dispute this week; the former is much longer, the latter offers a view of what I have on my living room walls, pick your poison.
  • Just in time for the Super Bowl (what time does it start again?), here’s a Top 40 list of things the NFL demands from Super Bowl host cities. It’s impossible to pick just one favorite, but equally impossible to beat “three championship-level 18-hole golf courses and two top-quality bowling alleys, free of charge.”
  • Plans to build an Indy Eleven a soccer stadium for a new MLS team on Indianapolis’s former heliport are on hold because something about not rewarding a city that “continues to thumb its nose” at ICE; the FAA will soon be weighing in on the matter.
  • Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has met with NBA commissioner Adam Silver, though not in the sense of actually meeting meeting like in person, and “offered to be helpful in bringing back the Sonics” as an NBA expansion team. Seattle already has a practically brand new arena, though by the time the NBA is ready to expand it could be pushing 10 years old, is that too soon to ask for upgrades?
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says Spurs owner Michael Dell donating $6 billion to Donald Trump’s “Trump accounts” savings plan “really pissed me off” because “if you can give $6 billion for these accounts, you could have paid for your own arena.” But then Dell wouldn’t have those billions he saved by getting taxpayers to build his arena! Sounds like somebody doesn’t understand what the whole point of being a billionaire is. (Hint: It’s getting billions of dollars, not spending it.)
  • And finally on the Rays front, Frank Nockels of Land O’ Lakes, Florida asks: “If we pay for half of the Rays’ new stadium, can we get free tickets?” Ian Betteridge has some bad news, Frank.
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Hillsborough County considers raiding infrastructure fund to give $1.15B to Rays

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Hillsborough County Commission set to meet to discuss plans for a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium yesterday, on Tuesday Rob Manfred showed up in Tampa to meet with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and generally do Rob Manfred things. “Baseball belongs in Tampa Bay. Baseball can succeed in Tampa Bay,” DeSantis told reporters, while Manfred took on the more difficult jobs of trying to impose a sense of urgency in a stadium battle that’s been going on for decades, saying, “We’re at a point in the history of the club that something needs to get done.” DeSantis also said that he would be “looking to help” fund new Hillsborough College buildings on one portion of its Dale Mabry campus with state money, so the rest of the site can be handed over to the Rays.

As for how the public’s expected $1.15 billion share of the $2.3 billion stadium would be paid for, DeSantis didn’t breathe a word. So when the county commission sat down to discuss the plan yesterday, they had some questions. In particular, commissioners wondered if it would be kosher to use money from the county Community Investment Tax — a half-cent sales tax surcharge first approved back in 1996 — for a Rays stadium, given that when the CIT was renewed in 2024 two years before its initially planned expiration, it was designated “to fund infrastructure for transportation and public works, public safety, public facilities, public utilities and public schools” and the commission specifically promised that it wouldn’t be used for new sports facilities:

“We promised everyone on the public record that the CIT numbers would be ineligible,” [Commissioner Joshua] Wostal said. “We have not even began to collect that tax, and here is a suggestion that we already deceive the taxpayers that we made a promise to no less than two years ago.”

Commissioner Chris Boles echoed the concern.

“When voters approved the CIT, the discussion language primarily focused on maintaining the existing facilities, strengthening public safety and supporting core infrastructure,” said Boles, who was not on the board at the time. “And that, I believe, intent still matters today.”

Both Wostal and Boles stressed that they still might vote for a stadium deal, and indeed the commission voted unanimously to move ahead with negotiations with Rays ownership. But with Commissioner Ken Hagan already declaring that “this agreement does not happen without the CIT,” it looks like the first negotiations will be among county commissioners about whether it’s okay for a county without a ton of tax revenue streams to scrounge up $1.15 billion by first raiding the infrastructure and schools budget.

The Tampa Sports Authority, meanwhile, also met this week to discuss the Rays plans, and revealed that it will eventually release two, let’s call them “reports”, by their favorite consultants Skanska and AECOM — one on whether the $2.3 billion stadium will actually cost $2.3 billion, the other reviewing the Rays’ own economic projections for the project. (The AECOM report is expected to be ready by April 1, the Skanska one will be sometime later.) Board member Andy Scaglione also asked if anyone had appraised the value of the Dale Mabry campus (nope) and how much money was available in hotel tax funds for tourism spending that could go toward a stadium ($11-12 million, which won’t go far toward that $1.15 billion nut).

There’s still a lot to be worked out here, in other words, and while there’s no real deadline, presumably Rays owner Patrick Zalupski wants to get everything settled while his pal/$250,000 campaign PAC donation recipient DeSantis is still in his last year in office. Resolving a decades-old stadium demand by having a county with limited tax resources fund the biggest MLB subsidy in history will be no easy needle to thread, but you can bet that everyone involved is busy warming up their needle-threading fingers.

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Friday roundup: Chiefs stadium deal still not finalized, Royals even less so

access_time personNeil deMause

Pressed for time here on a bunch of projects (I’ll be able to reveal more about one next Thursday or Friday), so let’s take a brief spin through the rest of this week’s news:

  • Wyandotte County will hold a public hearing sometime in the next three weeks to help decide whether to put some amount of city and county sales taxes into a Kansas City Chiefs stadium that would be built somewhere in the county. Meanwhile. legislators from both parties are criticizing the deal as “tax giveaways for billionaires.” The Chiefs deal isn’t falling apart or anything, but it does still have a lot of t’s to cross and i’s to dot before Clark Hunt can cash his $4 billion check.
  • Clay County officials said three weeks ago that they were no longer talking with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman about building him a new stadium, and now the county commission has announced that the deadline has passed for putting a stadium measure on the April ballot. Royals stadium sites are truly falling like dominoes (I don’t think that’s actually how that metaphor works, but sure, close enough).
  • It’s been almost four years since the Los Angeles Angels‘ sweetheart stadium land deal was torpedoed by an FBI fraud and bribery investigation into then-Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu, which means it’s about time for city officials to start bringing up the prospect of a new stadium land deal. Councilmember Natalie Meeks, who proposed the agenda item, seems open to ideas — selling the parking lots around the stadium for quick cash, leasing it out for development for slow cash, turning it into open space — and any proposal will also have to deal with the state’s Surplus Land Act, which requires that any sale of public land prioritize affordable housing. City officials say they haven’t talked with Angels owner Arte Moreno about any of this, which will probably be necessary, only hopefully this time with fewer federal investigations.
  • ICE is going to be present at the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, and Batman will not stand for it.
  • The owner of a dead mall in Phoenix wants to get one of those “theme park districts” to divert tax money to a new domed women’s soccer stadium. Tasmania says hold my beer.

 

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Friday roundup: Trail Blazers, Lightning owners join Devils in asking states to fund their arena upgrades because reasons

access_time personNeil deMause

The way this week has gone, you can be forgiven if you just want to avoid the news entirely. If you’ve come here to be cheered up by some less depressing news … that’s never a good idea, but there are maybe some amusing bits, and nobody has gotten killed (so far), so I guess those are pluses!

Feel free to try to find the glass half full in these items:

  • The Portland Trail Blazers owners are about to ask that Oregon hand over all state income taxes paid by home and road players and staff to help fund a $600 million renovation of their 30-year-old arena. (The cost is estimated at $20 million a year, which if salaries rise enough could easily end up amounting to $600 million worth of future taxes.) The Oregonian notes: “Team employees, notably players who earn millions, have been paying into the state’s general fund for decades, dating back to the franchise’s founding in 1970. Will lawmakers have the stomach to divert those funds from essential services to rebuild an arena that is home to a team that will soon be owned by a Texas billionaire?” Then it says that “the income tax dollars the general fund would lose in this proposal will vanish anyway if the Blazers relocate,” which, no they wouldn’t, not if Portlanders spent their basketball ticket dollars elsewhere locally, which the numbers show is what would mostly happen. Securing approval of the tax money before Tom Dundon (the aforementioned billionaire) officially steps in as owner, one source told the Oregonian, “guarantees the Blazers’ future,” though they didn’t say what kind of lease extension Dundon would agree to in exchange, so it’s always possible it would only guarantee the Blazers’ future until it’s time to ask for more tax money again.
  • Hillsborough County is discussing paying for $250 million in renovations to the Tampa Bay Lightning‘s arena in exchange for a six-year lease extension until 2043, which has some Tampa Sports Authority officials worried the Buccaneers and Rays owners may make similar demands if the arena project is approved. Also that would be $41.7 million per year of lease extension, which would be close to the record for most expensive ever.
  • New Jersey’s proposed $300 million Devils arena subsidy only has a few days left of the legislative session for approval, and “some lawmakers,” per New Jersey Digest, have “raised concerns” that rushing a major tax break through in a lame-deck session with a lame-duck governor might not be the best of ideas. Not that state legislatures don’t do it all the time, but not the best of ideas does check out if you’re a fan of transparency and due diligence and all the other democracy things that are out of fashion right now.
  • Kansas officials want to make clear that the state could still build a Kansas City Royals stadium, just not with STAR bonds since the deadline for those expired at the end of 2025, so they’re just for the Chiefs and for Barbie/Hot Wheels theme parks. And the state doesn’t really have many other good revenue sources, says house speaker Dan Hawkins: “It would be tough to use those and develop enough money to really support a stadium, and so, I just can’t see that happening.”
  • The Ohio judge who issued a 14-day temporary restraining order against the use of unclaimed private funds to pay $600 million toward a new Cleveland Browns stadium has extended it indefinitely while he hears arguments on whether to issue a permanent injunction.
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Royals suitors dropping like flies, Kansas Chiefs stadium still faces bond questions

access_time personNeil deMause

If Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman was hoping that the Chiefs announcing a move across the border to the state of Kansas in exchange for around $4 billion in subsidies would spark a bidding war for his own team, well, not so much, it appears. Kansas house speaker Dan Hawkins declared this week that the December 31 deadline for the Royals to pursue state-backed STAR bonds was set in stone, and the offer is now off the table. (Though with the legislature set to consider expanded STAR bonds beyond 2026, it’s always possible to put it back on the table.) On the Missouri side of the border, meanwhile, potential Royals suitors are getting cold feet as well:

On Wednesday, Clay County Commissioner Jason Withington said that he was done negotiating with the team.

“Like Kansas, I’m done negotiating with the Kansas City Royals,” he wrote on Facebook….

“As the August deadline approached, we were then told they wanted to move to the April 2026 ballot at the earliest. Tomorrow was the deadline we gave the team to meet that timeline. They’ve now told us they aren’t ready for that either. At some point, you stop negotiating–and start being honest about what’s actually happening.”

One would think that this leaves Sherman with only the option of Jackson County and downtown Kansas City, Missouri, which should put local officials there in the driver’s seat to limit taxpayer subsidies, especially after Jackson County voters made their feelings clear in April 2024. Or one would hope, anyway — after all, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt didn’t have anyone else offering him $4 billion before Kansas put its deal on the table, but that didn’t stop that state from seizing the winner’s curse with both hands.

Yet Hunt may still have a chance to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. The city of Kansas City, Kansas and Wyandotte County still must sign off on the deal, and Mayor Christal Watson and other local officials are concerned that kicking in city and county sales taxes — as the state wants them to do to keep its costs to a dull roar — could force local governments to raise property taxes to compensate. And there are still questions about whether even the proposed giant 330-square-mile stadium sales tax increment district can generate enough funds to pay off the STAR bonds, or at least to convince bondholders that the bonds are safe. And that, University of Chicago bond expert Justin Marlowe tells the Kansas City Star, could lead the state to go back on its “no new taxes” pledge:

“Do we default on the bonds and hope that the bondholders are willing to take a haircut, which they won’t be. Which they never are,” Marlowe said. “If it goes to court and there needs to be some sort of negotiated settlement, it’s fair to say that at some point, everyone will look to the state to provide some kind of relief to prevent the Chiefs from leaving, to prevent this otherwise potentially successful development from failing before it has a chance to succeed.”

The discussions over how to draw the STAR bond district should be interesting indeed … or would be, if Kansas didn’t have a special state law allowing talks to be conducted in secret, only making a plan public once it’s been finalized. State officials won’t even reveal what non-disclosure agreements they’ve signed regarding the Chiefs deal, citing that same confidentiality clause that was approved as part of the expanded sports STAR bonds package in 2024 — refusing to disclose what you can’t disclose is some next-level stonewalling, excellent work, Kansas state obfuscatorians.

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Friday roundup: The year that stadium subsidies went completely nuts

access_time personNeil deMause

One year ago today, this site ran an item headlined “Was the Carolina Panthers’ $650m renovation deal really the worst of 2024? An investimagation,” in response to the Center for Economic Accountability declaring Charlotte the winner of that dubious distinction. The conclusion: The Panthers deal was bad, but there were plenty of other contenders, like St. Petersburg’s attempt (eventually rejected) to give over $1 billion to the owners of the Tampa Bay Rays, the Washington Capitals and Wizards owner landing $515 million from D.C., plus non-sports megadeals for everything from an Eli Lilly drug plant in Indiana to expansion of film and TV production tax credits.

All that seems like a million years ago. The year 2025 will be remembered for lots of things, but one is that it was the year where stadium subsidies blew way past the billion-dollar mark, with Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris landing a stadium-plus deal worth at least $6.6 billion in cash, land, and tax breaks, then Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt following that up with a preliminary agreement for around $4 billion in goodies for a stadium development in Kansas. Otherwise notable events of the past year like the state of Ohio gifting Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam $600 million (or more) to move from one part of the state to another and even San Antonio providing $1.3 billion for a new San Antonio Spurs arena project — easily an NBA record — feel like chump change by comparison.

And that’s the bigger concern here: While in a sane world, elected officials would sit down and figure out how much the presence of a sports team is worth compared to having money for public services, or at least how much they need to offer to outbid other prospective host cities, if any, in this timeline it’s more about what the next guy down the road has established as the going rate. It’s impossible to say, for example, how the Chicago Bears owners’ perpetual game of footsie with both Chicago and every suburb within driving distance will turn out, or if Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman will replicate the Chiefs’ tax windfall — but when owners can point to previous deals and argue that giving 99 years of free rent or all future sales tax increases from a 300-square-mile area is just the cost of doing business, it makes it easier for state, county, and city officials to say “sure, I guess, do we at least get a luxury box?”

And on that note, let’s wrap up the final news from 2025, and the early returns from 2026:

  • Kansas state senate president Ty Masterson said the “worst case scenario” for a Chiefs stadium is “nobody buys the bonds, the bonds don’t get sold, the project doesn’t happen,” but it seems far more likely that if nobody is interested in buying the bonds, the state would make its sales tax increment district even bigger than 300 square miles, which seems like it would be considerably worse. Or the state could have to sell bonds at an interest rate of as high as 8.5% to lure bond buyers, which would definitely be worse. Let only your imagination be your limit, Ty!
  • Count newly elected Kansas City, Kansas mayor Christal Watson, who is also CEO of Wyandotte County (counties got CEOs?), among those eager to look the Chiefs stadium deal in the mouth: “If the numbers aren’t there for us to maintain the services that are needed for the community, then we’ve got to reevaluate and renegotiate,” said Watson this week. It ain’t over until it’s over!
  • Meanwhile, Kansas speaker of the house Dan Hawkins says with the clock turning over to 2026, “time’s up” for the Royals to use STAR bonds that were approved last year. Though technically the legislature can still change its mind and approve new bonds until the end of June — if it can find some bits of eastern Kansas that aren’t already part of the Chiefs stadium tax district — this seems like a good opportunity for Missouri officials to recognize that they’re the only bidder for the Royals and drive a hard bargain, though vowing to do an end run around voters doesn’t seem like a great start.
  • The Minnesota Timberwolves owners are still dreaming of a new arena that will feature augmented reality, and Wild owner Craig Leipold wants to make sure he’s in line for arena upgrades too, because “in order to survive in the NHL” you “need to be in a really good building,” and his building is a whole 25 years old and the team is only turning $68 million a year in profits, this is clearly St. Paul’s problem to fix.
  • San Antonio mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says she’s not done trying to renegotiate that Spurs deal, on the grounds that “non-binding means non-binding.” She likely needs a majority of the city council to back her up there — San Antonio has a weak-mayor form of government — but props to her for knowing how to read a dictionary.
  • The New England Revolution owners reached an agreement this week to pay Boston $48 million over 15 years to compensate for traffic and transit problems caused by a planned new stadium in Everett, as well as $90 million over 20 years in parks and transit upgrades in Everett. With team owners the Kraft family covering the $500 million stadium construction cost, I’m tempted to say this is actually a pretty fair deal and a sign that at least some local politicians can still drive a hard bargain, though it’s equally like that this is mostly a sign that nobody in the U.S. cares as much about MLS as about the other football.
  • Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts is set to be torn down and replaced next year, which will come as a sad note to anyone who read Foul Ball, Jim Bouton’s book on how he helped temporarily save the old ballpark 20 years ago.
  • There’s another interview with me up about the Chiefs deal, which you can listen to here — there doesn’t appear to be a way to link to particular timestamps in a YouTube short, but enjoy the whole thing anyway, it may be the last thing on the platform that’s not AI-generated!
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Chiefs stadium subsidy hits $4.1B, could siphon off taxes from 293-square-mile swath of Kansas

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a whirlwind couple of days since Monday’s announcement that the state of Kansas was offering Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt billions of dollars in cash and tax breaks to move across the border from Missouri, and more details are still only now becoming clear. Catching up on the latest:

  • After I guesstimated that the total public cost of the deal for Kansas taxpayers would be $3 billion or so — up to $2.775 billion in state-backed STAR bonds to build an up-to-$4.4 billion stadium-and-other-development complex, plus an unknown amount of property tax breaks — sports economist Geoffrey Propheter jumped in with some more fine-grained math:
    The number we want to focus on is the “PV” (for present value) column; the “nominal” column is for payments added up over years, which would be like figuring out the cost of your house by adding up all your mortgage payments over time. Still, Propheter has the total cost to state taxpayers at more than $4.1 billion, including:

    • More than $3.1 billion in payments on the STAR bonds. As Propheter notes above, “cap is not what is owed to bondholders but what the state commits to project”; in other words, while the amount of money going to the Chiefs is capped at $2.775 billion, the state still needs to provide for bondholder profits, bank fees, and the like, so Kansas ends up spending more than Hunt gets.
    • $497 million in property tax breaks thanks to the state taking possession of the land, a number that I’m willing to take as gospel given that Propheter literally wrote the book on this stuff.
    • $444 million in future maintenance on the stadium. In my calculations yesterday, I dismissed this as being covered by the Chiefs’ $7 million a year rent payments, but those won’t come close to paying off $444 million in present value. Plus, as Propheter noted to me in an email, rent payments could legitimately be seen as, you know, rent payments — if the state of Kansas is choosing to spend those on stadium upkeep, that’s its choice, but it doesn’t make it less of a subsidy.
  • Also yesterday, I noted that paying off almost $3 billion in bonds solely with state sales and liquor taxes from in and around a Chiefs stadium could be a tough lift, and quipped that “if all else fails, they could just expand the stadium tax district until it stretches all the way to Topeka.” I should really learn not to make jokes, because it turns out there’s a draft stadium district in the stadium agreement, and it looks like this:
    That’s a bit bigger than just the stadium and its immediate surroundings — it would cover 293 square miles, cannibalizing sales and liquor taxes from an enormous chunk of the northeast corner of the state. This handily puts the lie to Gov. Laura Kelly’s claim that the stadium “requires no new funds from the current state budget,” since sales and liquor taxes from those 293 square miles currently go to the state budget, and replacing them is 100% going to require new funds. And that mammoth stadium district is still just a preliminary estimate: Because STAR bonds can only by law be paid off with taxes from within the district, Kansas will eventually have to draw a big enough district to make bond buyers confident that the proceeds can pay off the state’s stadium debt — meaning Topekans might still wait to hold on to their wallets, just in case.
  • I also noted yesterday that the current public price tag estimate was made “without even knowing if Hunt plans on seeking any city or county money,” and indeed, the Chiefs owner appears to have designs on that as well: The Kansas Commerce Department website declares that county and city officials “will now have the opportunity to approve an ordinance to pledge local incremental general sales tax within the STAR bond project area to the project.” Lucky them! It at least looks like any city and county sales taxes would just go to help pay off the $3.1 billion in STAR bond costs already planned, in which case it wouldn’t raise the total public cost any, just shift it between the state and local governmental bodies, but I’m kind of afraid to assume anything now, for fear of conjuring my worst fears into reality.

All this has led one sports business writer to call the proposed Chiefs agreement “the most lopsided stadium deal in NFL history,” thanks to the public taking on the vast majority of the costs while team owners keep 100% of the revenues. That may be pushing it — the $6.6 billion Washington Commanders deal is still the benchmark for governmental malpractice here — but however you slice it, the Chiefs deal is real lopsided. Given all the glee from Kansas state officials at having pulled this off, it’s probably too much to hope that cooler heads will prevail, but after seeing Tampa Bay Rays and Anaheim Angels and Philadelphia 76ers deals collapse after they were seemingly set in stone, anything can still happen.

Meanwhile, let’s give the closing words to Propheter, who from the looks of my RSS feed has spent the last 24 hours doing nothing but talking to reporters:

“I just can’t believe, in my lifetime, we went from a couple $100 million stadiums to billions and no one caring,” he said. “When I say ‘no one caring,’ that’s hyperbole — lots of people care — but lawmakers in no way, shape or form pausing to think: ‘We can’t find something else to do with billions of dollars? It has to be for this?'”
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Friday roundup: Chiefs to ramp up Kansas saber-rattling, Bears’ Indiana move threat gets cool reception in Illinois

access_time personNeil deMause

Are people still flipping out about Chicago Bears management acknowledging that Indiana is next door to Illinois and they could try to build a stadium there if they wanted? Yep. Does that mostly come down to “fans in Indiana would be happy with a shorter drive and those in Chicago would be unhappy with a longer one”? Yep.

We’ll get back to the Bears in a sec, but first the latest in a more advanced cross-state NFL team location battle:

  • A Kansas legislator says the state’s Legislative Coordinating Council, a joint committee of leaders of the state house and senate, is set to meet on Monday to discuss a proposed agreement between the state and the Chiefs on a new stadium, though the state commerce department cautions that “no final agreement has been reached.” The Missouri Independent says the committee could start the process of approving state-backed STAR bonds at its Monday meeting, though the state already approved those in concept last year, and it doesn’t seem possible to actually sell specific bonds without a specific agreement in place, so not clear on what could actually get decided on Monday. Mostly, this seems to be a way for the legislature to declare that Chiefs owner Clark Hunt has met the required end-of-2025 deadline to be eligible for the bonds — as has Royals owner John Sherman, apparently, despite no concrete stadium plans at all, given that committee chair Ty Masterson’s office said he believes the Royals have met the deadline by being “fully committed” to Kansas. Some sort of announcement of a Chiefs deal on Monday seems likely, but it’s also likely that a lot of details will still need to be worked out, so let’s hold off on the “Chiefs are moving to Kansas” headlines for the — never mind, too late.
  • Back in Illinois, state officials are taking talk of a Bears stadium in Indiana in stride, with State Rep. Kam Buckner (district includes Soldier Field, is opposed to stadium subsidies) calling the team’s move threat “very predictable” and saying “in negotiations, what you do is you create leverage by saying you have more options,” while State Rep. Mary Beth Canty (has sponsored a bill to allow for stadium subsidies in Arlington Heights) asked that the Bears “engage with the General Assembly in good faith, without threats.” State Sen. Bill Cunningham, meanwhile, called giving the Bears a property tax break (but not necessarily all the infrastructure money team execs are asking for) “a good starting point” because it would only be local, not state, tax money, but said “we have more important things to tackle first.” It certainly sounds like the Bears owners can get something out of Illinois, even it not everything they’re demanding; dropping an Indiana move threat may help them get on the legislative agenda, which may be all they want, but there’s still a whole lot of haggling to go.
  • Cleveland’s Gateway sports authority is facing an estimated $150 million in imminent repair costs for the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, plus another $261 million over the next decade, and has no money on hand to pay for these costs and no plans for how to raise it. Not great! The city and county cover capital repairs while the teams cover maintenance, so there’s still the possibility of haggling over which is which. The government taking on all capital repairs during the teams’ 2004 lease renegotiations still seems like a terrible idea, and Gateway just defaulting on this and daring the teams to break their leases (which expire in 2034 and 2036 anyway) early seems like a reasonable consideration compared to throwing $400 million in good money after bad, but nobody’s talking about that just yet.
  • The Dodger Stadium gondola project refuses to die, year after year after year. “NBC Los Angeles reports that during the meeting, project supporters waved signs reading ‘Build the gondola’ while opponents held signs saying ‘Stop the gondola’,” can’t we come to some sort of compromise?
  • Inter Miami‘s new stadium is finally set to open next spring, but the promised accompanying public park space won’t be ready yet, seen that one before.
  • And then there’s Germany, where when a pro women’s soccer team needs a bigger stadium, the team owners buy the one that a recently relegated men’s team is no longer using plays in. It was built way back in 1992, can you imagine how outdated the Getränkehalters must be?
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Building Royals stadium in Kansas could cost state 3,500 T-Mobile workers

access_time personNeil deMause

T-Mobile announced yesterday that it will move its 3,500 workers from its Aspiria Campus office in Overland Park if the Kansas City Royals are allowed to build a stadium next door, saying the site “cannot accommodate both our workforce and a stadium.”

While the phone company said it hopes to stay “preferably within the city and state,” this does throw a new wrench into the idea that luring the Royals across the border to Kansas would represent an economic boon for the state. There were already plenty of good questions about whether that would be true, but this adds new ones, especially if T-Mobile seeks some kind of taxpayer incentives to stay in Kansas at a new site.

All this is happening against the backdrop of Kansas officials having set a December 31 deadline for Royals owner John Sherman to negotiate, or at least propose, a new stadium in their state if he wants to cash in on several hundred million dollars in state tax money that was approved a year and a half ago. (The money is technically on the table until next June, but Kansas legislators have warned they won’t consider any stadium deals after the end of 2025.) There’s been talk for a few weeks now that Sherman was about to announce a stadium proposal for the Aspiria site, which may still happen, but the T-Mobile announcement isn’t going to help — especially not on top of Johnson County residents already organizing to stop any stadium construction based on traffic concerns.

No Kansas officials have responded publicly yet to the T-Mobile announcement, and Royals execs continue to stress that they’re looking at all options, in both Kansas and Missouri. At this point, any particular stadium site has to be viewed as part leverage play — not just how much Sherman would get from it, but how much he could get from other local governments by waving it in their faces as a threat. That’s not likely to be resolved by the end of the money, making the December 31 date pretty much moot; it’ll still be interesting to see what Kansas legislators do once their self-imposed deadline arrives and all they get are some renderings of fireworks.

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Spurs arena subsidy could reach $1.3B, setting new NBA record for taxpayer money

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the standard items in the stadium campaign playbook is “moving the goalposts” — setting a target for public funding, then once you get it, asking for more on top. It’s a tactic that goes back well before the sports subsidy boom of the last 40 years, at least to New York highway czar Robert Moses, whose go-to move was to use all his available funds to launch a contruction project, then go back to the government for more because what good is half a bridge?

San Antonio Spurs Peter Holt is proving to be a master goalpost-mover, piecing together a series of different taxpayer funding asks while hoping no one will do the math to see what it adds up to:

  • In August, he got the San Antonio city council to approve funneling $489 million worth of future property and sales taxes to a new arena as part of his “Project Marvel” downtown development.
  • In November, he spent at least $7 million on a successful referendum campaign to win $311 million in future Bexar County hotel and car rental taxes to be used for the arena project. (Note: I’ve been reporting that this is $311 million paid out over 30 years, which would only cover about $150 million in current arena costs, because that’s what much of the reporting has said; other reporting and some documents, however, imply that the county would pony up $311 million now, and pay it off with significantly more money over time. The ballot language itself, frustratingly, doesn’t say which it is. I’m continuing to research this, please drop a line if you can provide any concrete confirmation.)
  • Next up, he has another proposed ballot measure set for a vote next May, this time to sell city bonds to provide $250 million in road upgrades so that people can actually get to the arena that they are paying to help build with both their city and county taxes. (This would only be the “first phase” of the traffic work; somewhere, Robert Moses is smiling.)

The only risk of going back to the well so many times is that eventually, people may catch on that you’re starting to talk about real money. And that may be happening to Holt, as the San Antonio Express-News is hinting that San Antonio voters may not like being seen as a bottomless well:

Those improvements — including highway ramps, intersection work and new parking spaces — will likely eat up a sizable chunk of the bond program that will go to San Antonio voters. That means less money for neighborhood projects, which could make the bond a harder sell to voters who already weren’t on board with the downtown arena plan.

(The May vote also would only be for city residents, which could be significant as the November vote was pushed over the top by some wealthy suburban districts.)

The San Antonio Current went into more detail on all this last week, reporting that UT-San Antonio political science professor Jon Taylor thinks that voters could be turned off not just by being asked for repeated bond issues for the arena project, but by a potentially worsening economy:

“One of the biggest problems they face is that we do not know how bad this economy is going to get between now and May,” Taylor said. “How are you going to be able to sell voters on a half-billion-dollar bond proposal that will raise taxes or cost the city money in the face of likely city budget deficits? Will the mayor be on board with it?”…

“The things that get hit first [in a recession] are tourism and conventions,” Taylor said. “So, the prospects of getting a bond passed and convincing people that in a recessionary economy this is a good thing to do — instead of being more prudent with taxpayer money — is a hard sell and an uphill climb.”

If you noticed that Taylor said “half-billion-dollar bond proposal,” that wasn’t a typo: Next May’s ballot measure may actually be for $500 million, as the San Antonio Water System’s chilling plant may need to be relocated to make way for a new hotel that would be part of the project. That would bring the total public subsidy to somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.3 billion, or almost exactly what the arena itself will cost to build. That would also be by far the largest arena subsidy in history, all to replace a venue that is the 11th-newest in the NBA, in a city already dealing with staffing cuts to balance its budget. That indeed sounds like a hard sell — Holt should probably dig under the sofa cushions now for a few million dollars to spend on campaign ads next spring, just in case.

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