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Chiefs seek ideas for Kansas dome, Missouri gov counters with roof offer of his own (cost TBD)

access_time personNeil deMause

Ugggh, I really did not want to have to write a whole item on Kansas City Chiefs execs issuing a request for proposals for Kansas stadium designs and “negotiating for land near the Kansas Speedway” because we already knew they were playing footsie with Kansas, this isn’t really news. If there were indications that this meant team owner Clark Hunt is more serious about moving across the state line, sure, that would be worthy of note; but since ginning up a move threat looks pretty exactly like planning a move, and in fact team owners don’t really have to decide which they’re doing at the outset, we’re still on the “play off neighboring states against each other” square of the game board.

But when no news gets an actual response, that’s when it bubbles up out of the quantum field and turns into news, and we have now reached that point:

As the Kansas City Chiefs weigh whether to play future games in a renovated Arrowhead Stadium or a proposed dome in Kansas, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe on Tuesday floated a potential mixture of the two concepts aimed at keeping the team in his state….

“There’s some interesting architectural improvements to make to Arrowhead that could be conducive to an all-weather protective environment without being a full dome,” Kehoe told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “I would say, look at some of the structures that are in Europe that may have some sort of fabric device that goes over it.”

Yes, many soccer stadiums in Europe have fabric roofs! So does the Los Angeles Rams stadium, and it’s even freestanding without touching the seating bowl, so probably an even better comparable for what you’re considering, Gov. Kehoe. And putting a retractable roof over the stadium was actually proposed way back in 1968 when it was first designed, this really is quite the day for non-news news.

The catch, obviously, is that adding a roof over the Chiefs’ current stadium could be quite spendy. (Kehoe said nothing about a price tag or how it would be paid for.) The closest anyone has gotten to talking about real dollars and cents this week was the Kansas Reflector, which checked in with economist J.C. Bradbury — whose eagerly awaited new book “This One Will be Different: False Promises and Fiscal Realities of Publicly Funded Stadiums” will be out in 2026 — about whether a new stadium would pay off for the public, and you can practically hear his exasperated sighs between the lines:

“If you went and called a doctor for a study on the dangers of smoking, you wouldn’t be able to find a doctor who would say smoking is good for you, right?” Bradbury said. “If you would ask economists about the economic benefits of stadiums, you probably couldn’t find an economist who would say that they’re beneficial. But no one wants to listen to economists on that.”

But, J.C., the Kansas Reflector wanted to listen to you! And gave the story the hard-hitting headline “Chiefs weigh stadium in Kansas, but economist doubts economic gains” … okay, maybe the paper could have chosen a stronger word than “doubts.” Give it another decade, and maybe we can get the media up to “questions” or even “mistrusts”!

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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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Cleveland mayor wants new taxes to fund Cavs, Guardians upgrades to avoid using old taxes to do so

access_time personNeil deMause

This week’s candidate for weirdest headline, from yesterday at Cleveland.com:

Bibb to Cavs and Guardians: No more bailouts until there’s a new game plan to fund stadium repairs

So once the Cavaliers and Guardians owners agree to a new way to fund stadium repairs, then Mayor Justin Bibb will agree to bailouts? Wha? Let’s read further:

Bibb told reporters at a recent news conference that he wants to create a special financing district that could collect small fees on parking, dining and entertainment in the Gateway District. The mayor said it’s a “practical, pragmatic” way to generate revenue to help maintain Progressive Field and Rocket Arena.

“Fees” on parking, dining, and entertainment are more commonly known as “sales tax surcharges,” and applying these to the entirety of the Gateway District — which includes not just the Cavs arena and Guardians stadium, but a bunch of malls and restaurants and other attractions — would represent additional tax money that locals and tourists alike would have to pay toward maintaining and upgrading the teams’ venues. That’s in one way better than the city having to scrounge around every couple of years for more cash to spend on upkeep, but in another way worse in that the city would be implementing a new tax to funnel upgrade money to the team owners ad infinitum, presumably even after the expiration of the current leases (2034 for the Cavs, 2036 for the Guardians) during which the city took over major capital repairs for the teams in exchange for them agreeing to stay put a few more years.

If the Cavs and Guardians aren’t ready to pursue new revenue streams, Bibb said City Hall won’t approve another bailout.

“I made it clear to the teams,” Bibb said. “I’m not tapping the general revenue fund until we look at these other concepts.”

“Take my tax money or I won’t give you any more tax money” is a novel approach, I’ll grant you that. Bibb says using surcharges in a New Community Authority, or NCA, would “shift the cost of stadium repairs away from residents and toward visitors who attend games and dine nearby,” but 1) residents go to see Cavs and Guardians games, that’s exactly who Cavs and Guardians fans are, and 2) even if this were all tourist money, it’s still tax money that the city could choose to collect and keep, but would instead be turning over to the team owners. (Cleveland currently has a similar taxing district on the lakefront, but that’s designated for building public spaces, at least, not for upgrades to privately controlled sports venues.)

One weird twist about Ohio NCAs is that property owners have to opt in to them, so it’s entirely possible all the landholders whose restaurants and malls would get newly tax-surcharged could tell the city to pound sand and there would be no new revenue at all. (The stadium and arena are co-owned by the city and the county; it’s an interesting question if the Cavs and Guardians, as tenants, could opt out of being taxed to fund their own upgrades.) Cleveland.com theorizes that “business owners would support it because the Cavs and Guardians drive foot traffic that keeps the Gateway District lively,” but that presupposes that 1) business owners will assume the Cavs and Guardians will leave without new taxes, despite those leases being in place for another decade and 2) they think game-day foot traffic is valuable enough to be worth getting saddled with as much as a 5% tax hike.

All this is coming to a head because the cigarette and alcohol taxes that were originally used to pay for the Gateway venues and later extended to pay for upgrades are coming up short of what the teams want, and local voters are currently so steamed by the Browns moving to suburban Brook Park that they may not approve a renewal of those taxes anyway. Mayor Bibb is also famously steamed about the Browns moving, or at least was until Browns owner Jimmy Haslam agreed to make $80 million worth of payments to his city, but he’s stuck with those leases for the near future, and would rather raise taxes just in the sports district than on all of Cleveland.

Even if it’s public money either way, you can kind of see where Bibb is coming from. Or you could point out that the whole Gateway complex was pitched as economic development that would pay for itself but instead is requiring ever-higher levels of public subsidies, and there’s a time to stop throwing good money after bad. At this point it would probably require breaching the teams’ leases and letting them walk if they want, but since neither has any great immediate options for relocation (Brook Park isn’t going to build two stadiums) and they can walk in another 9-to-11 years anyway, there’s an argument to be made for calling their bluff now and seeing what their owners do once the subsidy faucet is shut off.

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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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Spurs owner pours $6.5m into campaign to win Tuesday’s arena subsidy vote

access_time personNeil deMause

Early voting is underway for San Antonio Spurs owner Peter Holt’s ballot measure to get $311 million in Bexar County tax money over 30 years (about $150 million in present value) as part of a $750 million public funding deal, and here’s what’s happening:

Guessing at what will happen when the polls close is always fun, and with surveys showing county voters slightly opposed to the arena funding measures, and being outspent by only a 32:1 ratio often being enough to defeat a sports subsidy measure, it’s fair to say that Holt is going to need all of that $6.5 million to spend on last-minute campaign ads. Not that a defeat on Tuesday would be final: As Wolff observed, there’s nothing stopping Holt from coming back with a slightly different plan — he could even do so the very next year, lots of other team owners have! His arena is just 23 years old and was just renovated 10 years ago, you’d think he’d be in no rush, but billionaires gonna billionaire, it’s how they got to be billionaires in the first place.

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Chiefs owner still mulling all stadium options, seeking to increase $750m public price tag

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City Chiefs executives have been pretty quiet about their stadium plans since June, when they asked for and got a one-year extension on Kansas’s offer of sales tax subsidies. Yesterday, though, team president Mark Donovan broke the silence to reveal a bit about the Chiefs’ plans, which are not to decide on any plans just yet:

Donovan said his team met again last week with Populous, the Kansas City-based international architectural firm tasked with designing the option of a renovated GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. They provided another set of renderings for that possible project.

The other possibility: The Chiefs this week will enact a six-week process seeking applicants to design a possible new closed-roof stadium in Kansas….

“That’s one of the things this opportunity creates — we can look at the best in the world, not just the NFL, in terms of venues,” Donovan said. “That’s one of the reasons to go to a competitive bid — to see what we can do.”

So the Chiefs could renovate their current stadium, or could build a new one somewhere in Kansas, the design of which will be chosen over the next six weeks, even if the location will remain TBD. They’ll only consider renovating, though, if next April Jackson County voters approve the same sales tax hike that they rejected for funding Chiefs and Royals stadiums in April 2024. Meanwhile, while the Kansas subsidy offer is good through next June, Kansas legislators have said they won’t consider any stadium proposal that doesn’t arrive by the end of this December — though they also said that about this June, and then granted an extension anyway, so we’ll see.

The Chiefs, at this point, are the dog that’s caught half the car: They have that Kansas STAR bond offer in hand — which is projected to be worth $700 million or more, if the stadium project can generate enough sales tax revenues to kick back that much to the team — plus a $750 million approved in June by the state of Missouri. But with a potential stadium price tag of $3 billion, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt is continuing to shop around for county and possibly city subsidies as well, because why not? It does make one wonder if the Chiefs really need a new or renovated stadium if the only way to make one profitable is to get taxpayers to cover more than $1 billion of the costs, but that’s apparently not the kind of thing asked in polite newspaper articles these days.

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San Jose offers Sharks $357m to renovate arena, after which they’ll tear it down and build a new one

access_time personNeil deMause

The city of San Jose and Sharks owner Hasso Plattner have agreed to a new lease in which the city would spend $325 million on an upgrade of the team’s arena, in exchange for which the Sharks would keep playing there until 2051.

I know what you all want to know: Is this, you know, bad? The current Sharks lease expired this year, though the team has a series of one-year options for extending it. If we treat this as a 26-year lease extension, though, that’s $12.5 million in taxpayer money per additional year of the Sharks sticking around, which is a bargain compared to some other much pricier deals. But the devil is always in the details with sports leases, so let’s dig into the city memo and see what it spells out:

  • The commitment by the Sharks to stay in San Jose through 2051 isn’t actually quite that: The new lease establishes penalties for leaving early, but these will only equal the city’s outstanding debt on the renovations — meaning an equally accurate reading is “New Sharks lease will allow team to move in the 2040s by paying small buyout.”
  • On top of the $325 million for renovations, he city will put in another $32 million for future “ongoing capital repairs.” (Plattner will match the $32 million, but will only put in $100 million toward the initial renovations.)
  • The renovations are needed, according to the memo, to bring the 32-year-old arena into compliance with “NHL standards.” (One example given: The visiting clubhouse is on the opposite side of the ice from the visiting bench, so the coaching staff has to walk across the ice to get to it.) But it doesn’t appear that an upgraded arena will come with upgraded rent payments — in fact, under the old lease the team owners were expected to pay $4 million a year into a capital reserve fund (they don’t appear to have been paying anything to the actual city treasury), whereas now that figure will fall initially to $500,000 a year before rising eventually to $2 million a year.
  • As the city and team have agreed that even a renovated arena will no longer be usable after 2051 (because reasons), there will be a new deadline of September 1, 2027, by which time the city and team will conclude “identifying a Future Arena Location and executing an Arena District Agreement” for the next arena to replace the just-upgraded one.

The memo is largely a PR document — it includes a section on how “reinvesting in the SAP Center is about more than bricks and mortar — it’s about honoring a civic legacy, supporting the next generation of athletes and artists, and reaffirming our place as a destination for world-class entertainment” — so we’ll need to see the actual lease language before attempting to assess how much this will cost San Jose residents in total. But “$357 million plus we reduce your rent plus the year after next we start planning for a whole new arenat” is already heading in a pretty spendy direction.

It’s definitely a proposal ripe for further analysis, so it’s a good thing the San Jose City Council isn’t planning to vote on the deal until — uhhhh, next Tuesday? Six business days, to decide on committing San Jose to rebuilding one arena and committing to build a whole new one, sure, that seems like plenty.

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County sets November ballot on first $150m of Spurs arena subsidies, way more to follow

access_time personNeil deMause

Residents of Bexar County, Texas, will go to the polls in November to vote on raising taxes on hotels and car rentals to help fund a new San Antonio Spurs arena, after county commissioners voted 4-1 to put it on the ballot.

Because we can’t have nonconfusing things, the ballot measure will come in two parts:

The first asks if voters are willing to spend $191.8 million for upgrades and expansions to county facilities on the East Side, including the Frost Bank Center, the Freeman Coliseum and the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo Grounds.

The second question will ask whether to use the remaining funds — up to $311 million — to help fund a new downtown arena for the Spurs.

So if one wins and not the other, will the taxes only be raised partway? Will they still both go up, but the money will only be spent on one of the two uses? San Antonio Express-News? KENS-TV? Anyone?

The tax hike would only raise $311 million for the Spurs over 30 years, so it would only cover about $150 million of up-front arena costs. But not to worry — team owner Peter Holt is also looking for about $500 million in city money from existing hotel and business taxes, and hasn’t ruled out additional asks toward the arena or the larger Project Marvel, which would include a convention center expansion and new hotel and Alamodome upgrades and other stuff, and is expected to cost more than $3 billion in total, of which Holt would commit to putting in about $1 billion. None of those additional subsidies are expected to require public votes.

And how does Holt, who unlike most of his fellow NBA owners is not a billionaire but a mere hundredmilllionaire, justify asking for all this public money for his private sports venture?

“For context, of the 30 NBA teams, the 14 smallest-market teams all have publicly funded arenas. The average is 70% public funds. … The most recent, Oklahoma City, is 95% funded by public funds,” Holt said.

Ah, “all the other kids are doing it.” A classic!

Holt was notably quiet about the Convention, Sports & Leisure consulting report that projected the development could be worth $18.7 billion to the city, possibly because word was starting to get out that the report was, well, let’s call it crap:

The forecast is “jaw-droppingly vacuous” and doesn’t include market, cost or risk analyses, said Susan Strawn, a member of “No! Project Marvel” and former District 1 City Council candidate.

CSL provided no explanation of the data underlying its assumptions and no study of alternative uses for the public funding that’s expected to flow into the district, she said during a press conference Monday outside the Alamodome.

And FoS convention center correspondent (and University of Texas at San Antonio professor) Heywood Sanders adds:

In 2003, CSL forecast that an expansion of Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Center would boost hotel room night generation from an annual average of 503,000 to 786,000. In 2024, the expanded facility generated 411,315 hotel room nights. It’s never even come close to that 503,000 number again.

Other projections by the consulting firm have also missed the mark.

There’s still a long way to go before all the boxes are checked for this project, and San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones has been strongly critical of it, saying Holt should be asked to kick in a share of team revenues. Still, that won’t stop Holt from trying to lock in his first tranche of subsidies in November, before asking for his next few hundred million. Keep that up long enough, and pretty soon you’re talking real money!

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Friday roundup: The world is increasingly an ocean of stadium disinformation slop, and sea levels are rising

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another exhausting news week, so if you need a pick-me-up, please enjoy some videos of how I spent last weekend. Sometimes we all need a musical reminder to hang on to your humanity.

Once you’re sufficiently fortified, here’s what else happened this week in the world of sports stadium and arena shakedowns:

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Kansas helpfully provides December stadium deadline for Chiefs and Royals to threaten Missouri with

access_time personNeil deMause

We all know by now that “a savvy negotiator creates leverage” is the basis for pretty much all sports team move threats: Whether an owner is seriously considering relocating or not, they’d be foolish not to at least kick the tires on another city or state in hopes of lighting a fire under local elected officials to fund a new or renovated stadium to “keep the team in town.”

What this leverage-making ends up looking like in practice is a long game of chicken, where two (or more!) sides issue ultimatums, hoping that those across the table will be afraid of seeing what happens if they don’t meet them. And while sports team owners aren’t always good at this, all evidence is that elected officials are much, much worse.

Which brings us to the meeting of the Kansas state legislature that took place yesterday to address the state’s year-old measure offering $1.4 billion-plus worth of future state tax money to the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals if they moved across the border from Missouri. The STAR bond offer came with an expiration date: June 30, 2025, by which time the team owners needed to decide if they were taking the money or not — as Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins said last month, “We gave them a year to get it done, and in a year, you know, they kind of keep messing around, going back and forth, and you extend it, and that’s what they’ll do. You know, the pressure is off. Then it could take another year and come back again.”

Would Kansas legislators stick to their guns? Do you even need to ask?

Kansas lawmakers voted to extend the deadline for the state’s STAR Bonds, giving the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals more time to work out stadium deals.

The offer expired June 30, but the Legislative Coordinating Council met Monday to discuss an extension.

The committee unanimously voted to extend the deadline, meaning the offer is technically good for another year, which was the only extension option in the bill language.

Cue the pressure being off! Though not entirely off: The Legislative Coordinating Council, a group of eight legislators who meet to do legislature stuff when the rest of the legislature is off at the beach, approved a provision introduced by Hawkins that says the council won’t consider any stadium plans that arrive after December 31, 2025. Unless, you know, they change their minds again and decide they need another extension to ensure the ball crosses the goal line.

Again, all this gamesmanship is common, but it always seems to end up working out in favor of the teams. Take the then-Florida Marlins, whose owner Jeff Loria made an annual habit of threatening that this was the last chance for local officials to provide him with stadium funding — then when legislators declined to do so, he’d be back the next year asking again. Yet Loria still ended up getting everything he wanted, while repeatedly calling owners’ bluffs never seems to make elected officials realize that they can start reducing their offers, not increasing them.

Hawkins no doubt meant that December 31 deadline to be pressure on Chiefs owner Clark Hunt and Royals owner John Sherman to pick a damn state already, but we’ve already seen how deadlines function in this stadium war: The last deadline of June 30 was used by the team owners to get Missouri legislators to rush to approve $1.5 billion in state subsidies for the teams, lest they accept Kansas’s offer. With both Hunt and Sherman now seeking even more money on top of that from city and county governments, is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that “Approve more taxpayer money by December 31 or else” will be the message in Missouri — even if Hunt and Sherman are nowhere near ready to pull the trigger on an “or else,” not when they can keep the bidding war going?

Tl;dr: In an extortion racket, deadlines always end up benefiting the extortionists. “If you don’t accept our money, we’ll let you kill the dog” isn’t nearly as effective a threat, for some reason.

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