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Spurs owner wins vote to unlock $889m in arena subsidies after outspending opposition 32-to-1

access_time personNeil deMause

Voters in Bexar County, Texas approved two measures yesterday to raise hotel and car rental taxes and use the proceeds to help build a new San Antonio Spurs arena and renovate their old one to be a year-round stock show and rodeo venue. Though early polling last month had showed Proposition B trailing 46-40%, the arena measure squeaked through by a 53-47% margin after the pro-arena campaign pumped at least $7 million, almost all of it from Spurs owner Peter Holt, into campaign ads urging voters to “keep the Spurs in San Antonio, baby,” while the opposition campaign had spent only $219,000 at last count.

Of the proceeds from the new tax hike, $311 million will go to the Spurs for their new arena, and $192 million to redo the old one for the rodeo. In both cases, though, that’s money paid out over the next 30 years — meaning the $311 million will only be enough to pay off about $150 million of Holt’s arena expenses in the present day. The passage of the ballot measure, though, also unlocks a pile of other public funding: In August the San Antonio city council approved spending $489 million in sales and property tax proceeds toward the arena, contingent on yesterday’s county vote, bringing Holt’s total thus far to $639 million; there’s also a proposal for the city to spend $225-250 million on traffic upgrades around the new arena site, which if approved next spring will raise the overall public subsidy to as much as $889 million.

That is starting to get to where, as they say, you’re talking about real money — especially for building an arena to replace one that is only 23 years old and was just renovated 10 years ago. But by threatening that the team would leave (for somewhere unspecified) if public funds weren’t approved, as well as hammering on the idea that taxes on hotels and car rentals and the arena itself aren’t really tax money because reasons, Holt successfully convinced a slim majority of county residents that this arena will bring the promised redevelopment riches that the last one promised and failed to. As a prize, he will now get a $1.3 billion arena by putting down only about $500 million of his own money, and he can presumably expect to recoup some of that through things like the sale of naming rights and jacking up ticket prices, while the city and state will have to cover their share without any cut of arena revenues.

This is pretty much how democracy works in America right now: The public gets to vote on things, occasionally, but other times their elected representatives vote without consulting them, and in either case rich dudes who want tax subsidies get to spend millions of dollars on lobbyists and campaign ads in order to win hundreds of millions in return. I’ve been saying for 27 years now that Field of Schemes is actually a book about the need for campaign finance reform, and it just becomes more true with each passing year. Though at least the Spurs’ terrifying mascot is happy now — our system of governance works fine for those who own it.

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Sportswriters alarmed as Bears again do not get $1B in tax money toward new stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

The Illinois legislature adjourned Friday without approving any Chicago Bears stadium bills, and people be reacting:

  • Phil Rogers, writing as a Forbes “contributor,” reports that “the wait goes on as the team tries to find the necessary funding for needed infrastructure upgrades and assurances on property taxes.” Inserting both “necessary” and “needed” is piling on the sports owner perspective a little thick, but probably on brand for a guy who once co-wrote a book with Bud Selig.
  • Gene Chamberlain, the Bears correspondent at Rogers’ old workplace, Sports Illustrated, complains that the the McCaskey family is only “looking for a frozen tax rate which has already been negotiated with surrounding taxing bodies, and about $855 million for infrastructure,” but Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker “falsely depicted the Bears as attempting to get the stadium built by public funds,” because infrastructure isn’t a stadium and tax breaks on a stadium aren’t … wait, let me start over.
  • Bloomberg News calls it a Bears “fumble,” because you know how non-sports news outlets especially always love the sports puns. Bloomberg also describes the Bears as “stuck with an outdated stadium and fans longing for a new football coliseum,” which 1) Soldier Field may be unloved, but it was just completely rebuilt in 2002 which isn’t all that long ago and 2) fans don’t especially seem to be longing for what the Bears owners want to build.
  • The Chicago Sun-Times reports that “Bears sources” say the team could start looking at stadium sites outside Cook County, writing that “numerous suburbs have courted the team,” though notably not by offering any of the money that the McCaskeys want. Also said Chicago suburbs are all in Illinois, which is the state whose legislature just declined to approve that billion dollars or so in tax money, so this may not be as promising an option as you think, Sun-Times.

So anyhoo, the McCaskeys did not succeed in getting around a billion dollars from the state of Illinois, will continue to seek ways to get around a billion dollars from the state of Illinois, stop the presses. This is pretty much the exact same set of stories that ran back in June when the state legislature adjourned then without giving the Bears owners a wad of cash. At least this time around the Sun-Times didn’t describe the session as expiring “without the Chicago Bears breaking the line of scrimmage in Springfield” after the failure of legislation that “could’ve thrown the team a block in their rush to the former Arlington International Racecourse” and Bears lobbyists being “left on the Capitol sideline” — though the paper’s headline did say that the owners’ last-minute offer of $25 million “doesn’t move ball forward in Springfield for new stadium,” it’s a sickness, I tell you.

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Worcester stadium red ink shows dangers of hoping to cover taxpayer costs with housing magic beans

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s now been more than seven years since the Pawtucket Red Sox owners cut a deal to get $105 million in public cash to move to a new stadium in Worcester, sparking a throwdown between economists Andrew Zimbalist (a paid team consultant), who said it w0uld all work out great, and Victor Matheson and a whole bunch of others (not collecting any consulting checks), who warned that building a stadium in order to spark economic gains from new housing next door was a bad gamble. As of last year, city tax revenues were falling short because the promised new development was lagging — so how are things going now?

A report from the city auditor to the City Council states that the Polar Park Ballpark District Improvement Financing fund has an anticipated deficit of $390,000 for the current fiscal year, and that by the end of the year will owe the city’s general fund over $2 million.

Not great, especially after the Worcester city auditor promised specifically that this would never happen! Also not great: Though Worcester Chief Financial Officer Timothy J. McGourthy said he expected the tax fund would eventually have enough revenue to cover the city’s stadium costs (including $40 million in overruns), that’s just regular taxes that any development would pay — meaning if the ballpark-adjacent housing ends up cannibalizing construction that would have taken place anyway, it’s not really a net gain. That’s something that Matheson, who teaches at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, warned about seven years ago, along with the fact that planning on a housing windfall didn’t take into account the added city costs of supporting new residents: The price tag for providing schools for even a few dozen new kids would quickly eat up any new tax revenues. In that case, even if the ballpark district fund eventually shows a profit — CFO McGourthy swears it will, someday — it will be canceled out by new losses in the city schools budget.

The Worcester city council was all set to discuss the WooSox ballpark situation at its Tuesday meeting this week, but scrapped the agenda item at the last second. Residents still turned out to testify on the subject, though, including Nicole Apostola, who had previously petitioned the council to at the very least provide more transparency about what Worcester taxpayers would be on the hook for. Apostola made clear that she would still like some questions answered, namely:

“One, why has no one been held responsible for the horrible contracts this city has been saddled with? Two, why has there never been a reckoning for the misconstruction of the doors at the park that prevent certain events from being held there? Three, why has the city not been able to take advantage of any of the revenue-generating days we were supposed to have? And most importantly, number four, exactly which services are being cut so we can subsidize multimillionaires?”

Oh, yes, the doors, we should probably talk about the doors. Three years ago, after Worcester’s new stadium had been open for two years, people started noticing that the promised flood of concerts had turned out to be, actually zero concerts. It turned out that the reason was Worcester had copied Fenway Park’s feature where the only direct access to the field is a large roll-up door in center field — and that door was built 12 feet high, whereas concert production trucks are 13 feet high. If only there could have been some way of knowing!

So LOLWorcester, sure. But this also should serve as a warning to other cities where sports projects are promising to pay back their costs with tax revenue from new surrounding development (cough San Antonio cough) that, first, there’s no guarantee the new housing will get built on time, and second, taxes on new development aren’t a free windfall, they’re needed to pay off the new costs that come with new development. After all the cautionary tales so far (cough Brooklyn Nets cough), you’d think people would have caught on by now, but yeah, nope, editorial boards are still writing how special sports district taxing zones would “shield residents from bearing the cost of development.” Shout louder, not-on-team-payroll economists, it’s hard for newsmakers to hear you with their fingers wedged so deeply in their ears.

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Cleveland mayor okays Browns’ Brook Park move in exchange for $80m in future payments

access_time personNeil deMause

After fighting tooth and nail to derail the Cleveland Browns owners’ attempts to move to a new stadium in nearby Brook Park, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb abruptly called a truce yesterday, agreeing to stand down from all lawsuits and support the team’s move in exchange for $100 million in team payments spread over the next 30 years:

  • $25 million in cash by December 1.
  • $30 million in demolition costs for the Browns’ current lakefront stadium, to be paid once the Browns relocate in 2029 or so.
  • $5 million a year from 2029 to 2033.
  • $2 million a year for “community benefits” projects from 2030 through 2039.

In exchange for all of the above payments — actually worth closer to $80 million in present value, since some of the money won’t arrive for another 15 years — the city would withdrew its two lawsuits against the Browns’ move, one charging team owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam with violating the Modell Law barring teams from moving if they received public funds, the other with violating their lease provisions by negotiating a move.

On first glance, this isn’t a terrible deal for Cleveland: Even $80 million is still real money, and it’s far from certain whether Cleveland would have been able to extract a better settlement in court. Meanwhile, the Browns stadium would become Brook Park’s problem — and the state’s, of course — while Browns fans could still go watch the team just a short drive away. And while the city would lose a sliver of tax revenue on Browns spending that would no longer be subject to Cleveland taxes, it would also regain control of lakefront land that could be used for something more productive than a football stadium that’s dark 355 days a year.

The deal still needs signoff from the city council, whose members have questions: Councilmember Kris Harsh asked whether $30 million would be enough to cover the stadium demolition, Michael Polensek demanded a spreadsheet showing present value of the future payments, and Brian Kazy attacked the idea of cutting a deal with the Haslams at all, telling Bibb, “You have lied with the dogs, and now you have fleas.” (Technically, he’s lain with the dogs, but only because English is stupid.) Council president Blaine Griffin declared himself “disappointed” by the agreement, and said he and other lawmakers are exploring their “legal obligations.”

Meanwhile, there’s still Dennis Kucinich’s Modell Law suit out there, so even if Bibb gets the city council on board, it’s not entirely clear sailing for the Haslams. Still, they can probably focus more of their attention now on figuring out how to get more city and county money as well as $70 million in state money for transit upgrades — though yesterday’s settlement announcement also notes that the Browns and Cleveland will “collaborate on a new road network” to serve both the stadium and the nearby airport, without specifying who’d be footing the bill for that. Looks like I have questions, too!

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Friday roundup: Spurs owner wants arena subsidies so he can be “scrappy,” A’s owner gets closer to unlocking county stadium cash

access_time personNeil deMause

Some weeks, when all the work of this website feels like an endless repetition of the same stories over and over and over again, I try to remind myself that while the general shape of the stadium swindle has remained the same over the last 30 years — boy meets stadium dream, boy uses standard playbook to demand that someone else to pay for stadium dream, elected officials cough up the dough to boy — there have been some discoveries and innovations along the way: The Casino Night Fallacy. The grift that keeps on giving. The kitchen sink gambit. Reusable entourage. Sure, it would be nice for whatever showrunner is in charge of this accursed timeline to quit reusing the same plotlines — helicopter registration fraud was a surprise season-ending twist, but that was three years ago already — but if nothing else we’re getting a deeper understanding of the intricacies of how sports billionaires funnel taxpayer money into their own pockets, and who can put a price on that? Other than the literal price of “billions of dollars of tax money a year,” obviously, but enlightenment doesn’t come cheap.

Also, no one has taken away our god-given right to point and laugh (yet), so may as well enjoy it. And on that note, here’s some fresh meat for your inner Nelson Muntz:

  • San Antonio’s KSAT-TV asked Spurs owner Peter Holt why he can’t just pay for his own arena his damn self, and Holt said “it’s a great question” and San Antonio’s small market size has “pushed us to be scrappy” and “the underdog” and “we want to continue [our] partnership with the county and the city” and the arena project will use “visitor taxes that have no impact on our local citizens” and “there’s no extra fees.” That’s neither really an answer nor exactly true, but Holt is already off and not-answering whether the team would potentially move without a new arena: “You know, we’re not focused on this election not passing. I mean, I think our belief has always been, whether it’s on the court or off the court, we have excellence and we have winning in our DNA. And so we’re confident and optimistic that this will pass, and that’s our plan.” It’s easy to be confident when you’re spending $2 million on ad campaigns to convince voters to go your way, but just in case, may as well employ the “You don’t want to find out what’ll happen if you make Dad mad” strategy as well.
  • The Clark County Commission officially approved the Athletics‘ ballpark development agreement for Las Vegas(ish), which is mostly notable because it allows A’s owner John Fisher to finally tap into $380 million in public funds that was approved way back in June 2023. Or at least Fisher can get the money once he sets a guaranteed maximum price for the stadium and spend $100 million out of his own pocket first, maybe that’s what all the concrete pillars are about? Would Fisher really shell out $100 million of his own money in order to get $380 million in public money in hopes all that will somehow unlock another $1 billion or so of somebody else’s money? He’s done dumber things before, don’t put it past him!
  • Interim Jackson County Executive Kay Barnes says she doesn’t see herself as “taking on any kind of strong initiative” on major issues during her short time back in office, but that’s not stopping her from saying she wants to see stadium projects for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals move forward, she’s not made of stone, people.
  • The St. Petersburg city council is looking at ending the city’s Community Redevelopment Area (i.e., a TIF that kicks back property taxes to developers) for the Historic Gas Plant District now that the Tampa Bay Rays aren’t using it for a stadium development, probably. “I was very hesitant to do this,” said council chair Copley Gerdes. “More and more, I’m becoming open to it.” What’s next, hugging?
  • A couple of big-market MLB teams might be showing openness to increased revenue sharing to make MLB TV deals more like the NFL’s, which would reduce budget disparities between rich and even-richer teams but also make it easier for teams to threaten to move from big markets to smaller ones like in the NFL. Color me skeptical — big-market team owners have never willingly given up revenue before, and this could all just be openness to new kinds of TV deals while still trying to preserve the biggest slice for themselves, but we’ll see where things go once negotiations for the next collective bargaining agreement begin in earnest after next season.
  • Yes, the latest owner of the Ottawa Senators is still hoping to build a new arena at LeBreton Flats and still hoping for a taxpayer “investment” to help him along, let’s all check back in another decade or so and see if anything has changed.
  • Camden Yards’ public owners won’t get any money from the Los Angeles Rams renting out the stadium for practice before their game in London, just like they didn’t get any money when Paul McCartney played there, who needs money when you have a pro baseball team whose owner wants money more than you do?
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Detroit could levy tax on tickets and not give that money to team owners, stop the presses

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the basic concepts that economists and budget experts like to try to point out about sports funding deals is that taxes are fungible — that is, if you don’t use them on a stadium or arena, you can use them to pay for something else. So if your city is, oh, I dunno, proposing to funnel off hundreds of millions of dollars in stadium sales taxes and car rental and hotel taxes on the grounds that those are “tourism-related,” it’s important to remember that once you give that money to the owner of the local sports team, you can’t use it for anything else.

Which brings us to Detroit, where local politicians and budget watch groups are looking at a common means of funding sports venues — a ticket tax — but for a very different use:

A new Citizens Research Council of Michigan study found an admissions tax on Detroit sports and entertainment venues could raise between $14 million and $47 million annually, depending on the tax rate. … The extra revenue could offset a property tax cut between 1.7 and 5.7 mills.

Detroit is one of only a handful of cities without a ticket tax, notes the report, and there’s a reason for that: The city used to impose a 10% tax on tickets at Joe Louis Arena when the Red Wings played there, but that was eliminated as part of the deal giving team owners the Ilitch family a new arena plus $261.5 milion in state and city funds to build it, plus $400 million in subsidies for development around the arena, plus another $783 million for in subsidies for more development when the first development didn’t happen, plus possibly another billion dollars more. Clawing back $47 million a year from a new 10% ticket tax wouldn’t make Detroit taxpayers whole on all the tax money they’ve pumped into sports projects (including those for the Tigers and Lions) over the years, but it would at least be a start.

All the ticket tax talk is being spurred by a mayoral race between council president Mary Sheffield, who favors one, and pastor Solomon Kinloch Jr., whose position appears to be that it’s a bad idea because Sheffield came up with it. (Both Sheffield and Kinloch, incidentally, have expressed enthusiasm for continuing to hand out tax breaks in order to promote development.) It does at least look like there’s nothing in the teams’ leases that would block such a tax — Bridge Detroit reports that if the state legislature passed a law allowing cities to impose them, then the city council enacted an ordinance, then a majority of Detroit voters approved it, it could happen.

The report does also raise the issue of whether it’s fair to create higher ticket prices in order to fund city priorities, but doesn’t appear to have examined whether in other cities that have ticket taxes, team owners have largely ended up eating the cost because they’re already charging the most that the market will bear, as economists project that they should. I did some initial asking around and found that while it’s really hard to calculate the effects — if a new stadium opens with a new ticket tax and prices soar, who’s to say if it’s the fault of the tax or of all the shiny new cupholders? — the best study of this appears to be by Stefan Szymanski of Soccernomics fame: He looked at what happened when to soccer ticket prices when the United Kingdom added a 10% VAT sales tax in 1973, and found that around 25% of the cost was passed through to ticket buyers.

More research needed, clearly, but this supports the general idea that ticket taxes mostly hit the wallets of sports team owners, unlike other taxes that can be passed along more fully to regular consumers. Whether ticket taxes should be used for property tax relief is another question, but at least we can dispense with the idea that this would be charging sports fans to bail out property owners — it would mostly be charging sports team owners to do so. Michigan and Detroit legislators and voters, take note.

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Explaining the explainer on the San Antonio Spurs arena funding plan

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s fair to say that media coverage so far of San Antonio Spurs owner Peter Holt’s plans for a new arena district paid for partly by taxpayer money hasn’t been very good: The San Antonio Express-News has advocated against letting the public vote on how public money will be used, while News4SanAntonio had a reporter point to a chart showing how tax money would be used on the project and say “this doesn’t come from your tax money.” Meanwhile, local news outlets keep beating the drum to threaten that the Spurs could move without a new arena, even while acknowledging that Holt doesn’t have any great options to move to.

Against that backdrop, it’s nice to see a local news outlet, the nonprofit San Antonio Report, attempting an analysis of how the money would work for the Spurs deal. How’d they do? Let’s take a look:

Soon voters will be asked to weigh in on a portion of the NBA arena’s public funding, $311 million in county venue tax dollars, on the Nov. 4 ballot.

Another $489 million is expected to come from the city, which says it can spend the money without a public vote. And the remaining $500 million-plus would be paid for by the Spurs’ ownership.

That’s basically right, though it’s worth noting that the $311 million in county tax money would arrive over three decades, so it would only cover about half that in up-front arena expenses. Present value matters!

Unlike the city, which is using tax reinvestments, Bexar County’s taxing entities will enjoy the growth in taxable value from both the East Side developments and the new downtown sports and entertainment district — money that’s needed for a budget that relies heavily on new growth.

This is a mouthful, and it’s mostly wrong or at best misleading. So let’s unpack it bit by bit:

One part of those city “tax reinvestments” would actually come from a Project Finance Zone, a Texas-specific subsidy where state sales taxes are in and around a redevelopment area are siphoned off to help pay for the development itself. Since this is money that would otherwise go to the state treasury, one could see it as free money for the city — though, obviously, San Antonio residents are also Texas residents, so draining the state budget to help pay for a new Spurs arena isn’t exactly a free lunch.

Another part is from a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, which is just a TIF, redirecting any increase in city property taxes in the redeveloped area back to the developer. And as the Report reports, that’s not free money either: “New housing and development within the zone requires city resources, like police and fire, but the growth in property tax revenue is being directed toward special projects within the zone, instead of boosting the general fund for the entire city.” Translation: The new Project Marvel development that would include an arena would come with lots of new city costs, but the taxes that would normally pay for those added costs will instead go back to Holt to pay for building the arena.

The county money, meanwhile, would come from an existing car rental tax and an increase in hotel taxes, neither of which have much to do with a new arena — it’s unlikely Spurs fans will rent more hotel rooms or cars just because they’ve bought tickets to a sparklier home court — but which are revenue streams the county has available and if you squint they kind of have to do with “tourism,” so they’re getting thrown into the pot. Or will assuming that Bexar County voters approve them on election day in November, which no one appears to have done any polling on of late, but earlier this year support was deemed “tepid.”

And on top of all this, there’s the possibility of a city “infrastructure bond” — to be voted on separately, likely next spring — to provide $220-250 million toward new bridges and highway ramps to support the arena project. (The Report’s explainer doesn’t explain where the money to pay off the bonds would come from.)

So that’s more than $750 million worth of tax money going to the Spurs owner, in exchange for getting a big new downtown development and relief from any fears that Holt will move the team to Greensboro. Is that, like, a good deal? A bad deal? Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?

Here’s the entire cast of characters quoted by the paper in its attempts to explain the situation:

  • Rena Oden, an “activist with the COPS/Metro group that opposes the program”
  • Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, who wants to “do everything I can to keep the Spurs in town”
  • Pro-arena councilmember Marina Alderete Gavito
  • Houston Chronicle business columnist Chris Tomlinson, who is concerned the promised increased tax revenues may never arrive
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, who wants an independent analysis of the project
  • City of San Antonio Chief Financial Officer Ben Gorzell, who says the arena plan is “predicated on not using existing city resources or funds”
  • John W. Diamond, a tax and finance expert at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, who fails to really explain the infrastructure bond beyond calling it “the whole process on steroids”
  • Councilmember Teri Castillo, who doesn’t want to see money diverted from the city’s general fund

That certainly checks all the boxes of citing both proponents and critics, though it’s worth noting that most of the quotes are recycled from past public statements, so the Report’s reporters didn’t spend much time picking up the phone for this one. And they absolutely didn’t call any of the people who would be the most useful: sports economists or local budget analysts who could discuss what return on investment, if any, San Antonio and Bexar County can expect to get from $750 million in Spurs arena subsidies. Bothsidesing may make your news outlet look “neutral,” but what readers need going into public ballots is information on what exactly they’ll be voting on and how it will affect what government money they’ll have available. Without that, it’s all too easy to see this as a simple referendum on whether the Spurs leave town — which it very much isn’t, but if Holt gets to play it that way without ever having to threaten to leave, it’ll be a win-win for the Caterpillar dealership magnate.

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Dumb reasons to build a stadium with public money just got even dumber

access_time personNeil deMause

Way back in the early days of this site, I used to do an annual “dumbest reasons of the year for building a stadium,” which I eventually stopped doing because they were all just variations on the same theme: the team will move without one, it will bring economic riches to your city, etc. But I may have to revive the tradition for 2025 if things keep going like they are this week, because hoo baby.

First up, we have this from Sports Illustrated, or at least from “Tennessee Titans on SI,” the rebranded FanNation network of blogs that aren’t really SI articles but look like them if you aren’t paying close attention:

The Tennessee Titans are opening a new and improved Nissan Stadium opening in 2027, which will feature a retractable roof.

The new stadium will help the city of Nashville’s chances at hosting a Super Bowl in the near future. … [Titans president and CEO Burke] Nihill believes hosting a Super Bowl will elevate the Titans as a franchise.

“Why not us? In terms of taking a place on the Mount Rushmore of NFL franchises and cities? I mean, you think about what our current reality has been up until now, which is an aging building built pretty basically, surrounded by parking lots, to that future where I think a lot of the energy of our city, especially for locals, will be right out our front door, and we’ll have a lot of ability to play into that,” Nihill said via Freeze.

“If the football team is sustainably great, which I believe it will be, and we do all of these things right? We’re a completely different organization than we are today.”

Like, what even? Yes, new stadiums get Super Bowls, sometimes, at least once before going back to the back of the line. The usual argument for wanting a Super Bowl is that it is a huge boon to the local economy, which is very much is not, but at least we’re used to hearing that.

But the idea that “taking a place on the Mount Rushmore of NFL franchises” — which would be a pretty damn big Mount Rushmore, with 17 cities on it — would make the Titans “a completely different organization” … that’s breaking new ground in stupid. The Nihill quote turns out to be from a longer interview by A to Z Sports, a company whose founding mission was essentially “talk radio, but made entirely of internet, that should go well,” and the Titans CEO wasn’t even talking about Super Bowls so much as how “we’re going to activate that thing like crazy with movie nights in the park and yoga and farmers markets and little concerts” — but honestly the word salad is so intense that I can see where the On SI writer could have gotten lost, though he might have wondered at what kind of sense it was supposed to make. (Ha ha, no, that’s not what he’s paid to do, if he’s paid at all.

Moving on to San Antonio, where the Express-News has been beating the drum for Spurs owner Peter Holt’s Project Marvel development project for a while now, and today the paper’s editorial board takes on the question of whether city residents should get to vote on spending $489 million in tax money on the arena project, and comes to a novel conclusion:

This would be a city election, likely in May 2026, on dedicating $489 million toward the $1.3 billion project.

It would follow a November election in which Bexar County voters will decide whether to increase the county’s hotel occupancy tax and maintain its car rental tax to dedicate $311 million toward the arena, which is proposed to be built on site of the Institute of Texan Cultures at Hemisfair.

To be clear, the city’s contribution is contingent on this vote. If voters reject the county funds, they are rejecting the entire project, city funds included. For this reason, we don’t see a need for a second vote on the same issue.

It’s far cleaner to simply have a vote and let the chips fall where they may. Let the voters decide and then let the world spin.

First off: No, the “entire project” doesn’t die if the $311 million in county funds (really more like $150 million in present value) is rejected; Holt could still take his $489 million in city funds and try to supplement it with some other funding source. But more to the point: Express-News editorial board, you do know that Bexar County (2.2 million people) and San Antonio (1.5 million people) are two distinct places, right? So just because voters in the county but outside the city vote for (or against) using county money on the arena project doesn’t mean that voters in the city will do the same with city money — it’s why they have separate elections for county and city positions, and don’t just let the county judge appoint the San Antonio mayor on the grounds that that’s “far cleaner.”

In both of these cases, the arguments being made are less reasons than pretexts — the Titans CEO wants a stadium so he can make more money on it, not to be on some “Mount Rushmore” of Super Bowl hosts, and the Express-News wants no arena vote because it really wants an arena for some damn reason, and waiting till next May and then letting voters have their say would be subjecting the Spurs owner’s desires to the whims of democracy, and we can’t have that. And hey look, there’s a headline in the San Antonio Business Journal about how San Antonio needs to build an arena for the Spurs because the Seattle Supersonics moved to Oklahoma City, though it’s paywalled and not available on either Wayback or archive.ph, so I can’t determine what exactly its case is. It’s going to be a competitive race this year for Dumbest Reason to Build a Stadium, so get your dumb reasons in now!

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Friday roundup: San Antonio okays $489m arena subsidy to prove “love” for Spurs, plus: invasion of the soccer zombies

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: As expected, the San Antonio city council voted yesterday to move ahead with plans to give $489 million in tax revenues to Spurs owner Peter Holt to use toward a new arena. The actual council action was two votes: One to reject Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’s proposal to pause arena talks until an independent economic review could be conducted, and one to allow the city manager to “complete negotiations and execute a nonbinding Term Sheet,” notwithstanding that a term sheet already exists — it’s unclear what the city manager is authorized to negotiate going forward from here, not to mention exactly what the council has actually committed itself to given that the term sheet is nonbinding. Councilmember Edward Mungia said that “we still have the ability to get out of this deal at any point before other project deals are signed,” but didn’t specify if the council would have to vote to withdraw from the deal or still needs to vote on a binding agreement or what.

Jones, who votes as a member of the city council because San Antonio has that kind of city government, voted against the arena subsidy, as did councilmembers Teri Castillo, Ric Galvan, and Leo Castillo-Anguiano. Mungia and the “more business-friendly” councilmembers, as the San Antonio Report put it, voted in favor: Sukh Kaur, Marc Whyte, Marina Aldrete Gavito, Misty Spears, Ivalis Meza Gonzalez, and Phyllis Viagran. As Viagran explained her vote: “You either trust this team … or you don’t. I’ve heard so many people say, ‘We all love the Spurs.’ … But do you really?”

There’s still some possibility of an independent economic analysis down the road, or more hearings to see if public support for the project is still as “tepid” as it was earlier this year. (Jones is also pushing for a public referendum on the city’s spending next spring, but we’ve seen how her proposals go over with the business-friendly councilmembers.) And, of course, Bexar County voters can still throw a wrench into things in November if they vote down the ballot measure that would give Holt around $150 million worth of county tax money on top of the city funds. Regardless, in the first round of the Project Marvel arena battle, the San Antonio council has spoken, and its verdict is “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like half a billion dollars in public money so you can boost your sports team’s profits.”

Who else is loving who this week and how? Never thought you’d ask:

  • Like everyone else, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around MLB’s new set of TV deals that are supposed to be finalized soon, with Apple out and Peacock in and ESPN in on some things but out on others. As far as what it will mean for teams’ media revenues — and, by association, how footloose teams can be about moving into smaller media markets to seek more lucrative stadium deals — it sounds like teams’ cuts of media revenue won’t change much, it’ll just be that ESPN will increasingly be the ones selling the right to watch games, and they’ll be making you pay for an ESPN subscription on top of an MLB.tv subscription to do it. Only 17 years until the last World Series, get your baseball-watching in now!
  • Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula bought his $100 million superyacht in 2021, the year before he got $1 billion in state and county tax money for a new stadium, but people aren’t any less unamused at the juxtaposition. One wonders if this might even have become an issue in New York state legislative hearings on the stadium subsidy, if there had been any.
  • Manchester United seeking public money for their planned stadium project isn’t new news, but it did just get the attention of the Guardian, which called the team’s plan to seek hundreds of millions of pounds to clear land for the stadium a “sinister US tactic.” Which is fitting, given that Man U is owned by sinister Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners the Glazer family, though maybe not for much longer.
  • What would happen if a minor pro sports team — say, the Pittsburgh Riverhounds of the USL Championship — wanted to issue renderings of their proposed stadium expansion (to be “paid for with public and private funding, although details have not been provided“) but couldn’t afford the Pro version of Microsoft Stadium Wizard? We have the answer, and it is a hellscape of identical featureless soccer zombies, please enjoy your nightmares:
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Browns stadium denied construction permit because Cleveland officials say it could interfere with air traffic

access_time personNeil deMause

The Cleveland Browns owners’ plan for a stadium in Brook Park already survived a battle between the legislature and governor over how $600 million in state money would be raised, and is still facing additional challenges including a potential class action suit over using unclaimed property funds, another city suit over the team violating its lease by negotiating a move, plus the fact that the plan relies on another $600 million in city and county money that hasn’t yet been identified. But on Friday, the Ohio Department of Transportation added a new, unexpected wrinkle when it denied the team’s request for a construction permit, because the stadium would be so tall that planes could crash into it:

“Although the structure was given clearance from the FAA, ODOT deferred to the Cleveland Airport System’s determination that the structure would impact the airspace of the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport,” ODOT explained in a statement released on Friday evening. “The deferral to local airport authorities is standard for all development proposals considered by ODOT that are over height but received clearance from the FAA.”

The Browns stadium being subject to a potential veto from the Cleveland Airport System, which is run by the city of Cleveland, whose officials very much do not want the Browns to move to Brook Park, would be quite the turn of events. Cleveland port control director Bryant Francis has apparently been raising objections with both ODOT and the FAA since March, and an ODOT spokesperson said yesterday that “If an airport has any objections to a permit due to safety concerns, it has generally been ODOT’s practice to deny the permit based on the airport’s concerns,” and then get the two sides to sit down and work out a compromise.

How serious is the crashy-planes thing, and is this just Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb using every lever he can to stall the project? Browns execs certainly implied that it’s just a pretext, noting that the FAA had approved the stadium plans even though the building would exceed federal height standards, because it wouldn’t significantly interfere with flight paths. The last time something like this went to court, after Phoenix sued neighboring Tempe for a planned Arizona Coyotes arena development near its airport that it said would be too tall, the whole thing ended up moot when Tempe voters rejected the arena proposal at the ballot box, so that doesn’t tell us much in terms of legal precedent.

None of which may matter: Browns owner Jimmy Haslam can still file an appeal with ODOT by the end of the month, and if that fails he can still reduce the stadium in height (difficult, since it’s already going to have a field 80 feet below ground level) or move it farther away from the airport (possibly less difficult), so this isn’t necessarily a permanent roadblock. It is more gamesmanship, though, and could force Haslam to wait to open his new stadium until 2030, which would require extending their lease at their current stadium in Cleveland for a year, which could lead to even more gamesmanship. All’s fair in love and stadium leverage, so don’t expect any of these legal battles to calm down anytime soon.

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Field of Schemes