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Friday roundup: Rays execs threaten to “evaluate alternatives” if Tampa won’t hand over $1B; could LA revise its Olympics deal?

access_time personNeil deMause

There’s an absolute ton of news to get to today, but first the biggest news of all: The Field of Schemes gift vault is down to only one remaining numbered Vaportecture art print out of the 100 created for site supporters! That means the next person to sign up as either a new Patreon subscriber or new one-time donor gets print #100, and then there are no more! I’m working on a fun new reward or two for those of you who allow this website to happen, but it’ll take a minute for those to be ready — meanwhile, site supporters are still eligible to get any refrigerator magnets you haven’t already received, plus of course my eternal thanks for helping me devote the time each day to this site that, tragically, still has reason to exist after 28 years of this nonsense.

And speaking of nonsense, here’s more of this week’s stadium and arena news:

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County commissioner on Rays owner’s $1B tax ask: “May God have mercy on the soul of anyone that supports this”

access_time personNeil deMause

Tampa Bay Rays execs and Hillsborough County leaders have finally released details of how they would come up with the public’s share of a proposed $2.3 billion stadium, with a breakdown by tax source. The total public expense on construction costs — i.e., not counting tax and land breaks — is now down slightly from $1.15 billion to $1.001 billion, with the money coming from:

Okay, so that’s not entirely complete details, given that the last spending item remains ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but it’s more than we knew before. And the reaction from Tampa-area officials and residents to where the city and county would come up with a billion dollars for Rays billionaire owner Patrick Zalupski has been less than overwhelmingly positive:

  • “At this point I have to rescind all of the positive things I’ve said about the new Rays Ownership,” wrote Hillsborough County commissioner Joshua Wostal on Facebook. “They have have outright lied not only to my face but also the public at multiple meetings. This is them now asking literally for your property taxes. May God have mercy on the soul of anyone that supports this.”
  • “The taxpayers don’t want this,” said one local during a county commission public comment period on Tuesday, while another said, “We were disappointed, but we were not surprised,” saying he’s ready to sue the county if CIT money is used for a Rays stadium. A consultant hired by the county delivered an opinion this week that the CIT money is fair game, but that won’t stop people from trying their luck at lawsuits, as the latter public commenter noted: “Roll the dice, you want to play hard ball, let’s play.”
  • Tampa councilmember Charlie Miranda, who wore black suits, black shirts, and black ties to City Hall for months to mourn “the burial of the taxpayer” after the city paid to build the Buccaneers a new stadium in 1998, is repeating his sartorial choices this year, vowing, “I’ll be wearing black — including black socks and everything — until this is all over.”

Others were less funereal in their responses, with Tampa councilmember Lynn Hurtak saying that maybe Zalupski’s $1 billion ask could be seen as more a starting point for negotiations, not the final deal. “My job is to listen and see what we can do,” Hurtak said. “And if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.” That’s fair, though it’s also fair to ask what “if it works” means — giving Zalupski $1 billion in tax money plus possibly more than $1 billion in tax breaks plus close to $1 billion in free land would work great for the Rays owner, but certainly less so for Tampa residents if they ever want to see that money again.

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Bucs, Cowboys go back to public trough for upgrade money for taxpayer-built stadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the standards of the sports subsidy playbook has been the grift that keeps on giving: Once a team owner gets a new stadium or arena at public expense, their next step is to go back and ask for more money to renovate it once the new car smell is gone. And one big decision is how long is the right amount of time to wait before going back to the taxpayer trough?

One option is to wait until your lease is about to expire, and demand upgrades in order to stick around longer. (The unstated threat is that the team would leave if the subsidies aren’t approved, but it’s far more common that team owners just sign short-term extensions while continuing to negotiate for stadium cash, especially since for many of them the only other option would be to go play in the street.) That’s the approach taken by Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners the Glazer family, who opened Raymond James Stadium 28 years ago at public expense, and now are seeking unspecified city and county money in exchange for extending their lease another five years:

“I can confirm that we met recently with the Tampa Sports Authority, Hillsborough County, and the City of Tampa to discuss developing a long-term plan that supports the stadium’s ability to continue hosting major events which contribute to the success of our region,” Bucs chief operating officer Brian Ford said in a statement to the Tampa Bay Times. “As Raymond James Stadium enters its 29th year, our goal is to ensure it remains a competitive premier sports and entertainment venue for the Tampa Bay community well into the future.”

Ford didn’t say what the Bucs stadium needs to be “competitive” with, though it’s possible that a new Rays stadium in Tampa could compete for hosting concerts, maybe. (The football stadium currently has 11 concerts scheduled for the rest of 2026, including three by BTS and two by Bruno Mars.) Spending tax money to upgrade Tampa’s football stadium so it can compete with a new Tampa baseball stadium built with tax money may seem like an odd way to run a railroad, but this is where we are.

Or maybe you’re Jerry Jones, who opened the publicly funded AT&T Stadium just 17 years ago, and you don’t want to wait a whole 30 years until your lease is expiring. Well, good news, everyone, there’s no rule against just asking for renovation money now:

Arlington’s city council could soon be asking its residents to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade AT&T Stadium for the Dallas Cowboys.

The agenda for next week’s city council meeting includes a proposal to contribute what will be $273 million in upgrades to the stadium.

The Cowboys’ portion will be $750 million.

A $1.023 billion renovation would be more than half again as much as the $650 million it cost to build the stadium in the first place, half of which was approved as public money by Arlington voters. The city’s next $273 million would come from the same taxes as last time, but no public vote would be required, as the last vote allowed city officials to extend the tax surcharges established then into perpetuity and keep on giving the proceeds to Jones. (No explanation has been provided how this will work when the Cowboys’ car rental tax surcharge is already being used to pay off Arlington’s new Texas Rangers stadium.)

One way to evaluate taxpayer-funded stadium renovations is by how many years of lease extension the city would get in exchange — the record for least bang for your buck there is the $43.3 million per year of new lease that the Carolina Panthers got in 2024. The Cowboys would be extending their lease from 2039 to 2055, so a $273 million expense would come to only $17 million per year of lease extension; for a five-year Bucs lease extension, as noted here in February, it would only take about $220 million in Tampa spending to break the record. Does that make Arlington’s plan to upgrade a stadium that was considered so state-of-the-art just 17 years ago that it set off a wave of other NFL teams demanding new or upgraded stadiums less bad by comparison? Discuss.

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What exactly is KC approving for a Royals stadium deal? Some questions and answers

access_time personNeil deMause

The Kansas City city council’s finance committee and city Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners both yesterday approved Mayor Quinton Lucas’s plan to open talks with the Royals on a new downtown stadium, which would involve $600 million in city money and possibly $750 million or more from the state. The full council meets tomorrow to vote on the ordinance, and since a majority of councilmembers are sponsors of the bill, we can be pretty sure how that will go.

After that, though, the stadium plan still has tons of unanswered questions. Some of that is intentional: The ordinance doesn’t actually set a deal for a downtown Royals stadium, it just authorizes the city manager to negotiate one, at which point a whole bunch more approvals will be necessary. But Lucas and the council also appear to be trying to put forward a stadium plan that is both solid and ephemeral, promising that it will keep the Royals in town for decades while providing only the most nebulous of details about how it would do so, and who would pay for what.

Let’s run through some of the more pressing questions, and see what we can come up with for answers:

Where would the $600 million in city money come from?

While the ordinance itself is silent on this matter, Mayor Lucas has been anything but, vowing that “this isn’t money that’s coming from a general fund source somewhere else. Instead, this is money, largely in our contemplation, generated currently at Kauffman Stadium. … If I never go to the ballpark, I’m not paying for this team.”

Money generated currently at Kauffman Stadium goes into the general fund, so portraying taking an equal amount of money and instead giving it to the Royals as not costing non-baseball fans anything is quite the leap of obfuscation. But beyond that, Lucas has floated the idea of creating a tax increment financing district around not just the stadium but potentially the entire Crown Center area to funnel off that $600 million worth of tax revenues — and depending on how big that district is drawn, it could easily capture spending that isn’t by baseball fans, but just by Kansas Citians who happen to be going out to eat or even visiting the aquarium in the general vicinity of a baseball stadium.

What about the state money?

The Kansas City Star cites “preliminary documents” as saying the stadium itself would be 60% publicly funded and 40% privately funded, which for a $1.9 billion stadium would come to $1.14 billion from public sources, leaving the state to cover $540 million. Lucas, though, has said that the state’s Show-Me Sports Investment Act passed last June could cover 50% of the stadium costs, which would come to more like $950 million. That act, however, provides for siphoning off all state taxes collected on spending at the stadium and on income by team employees and using them to pay off stadium costs, so the actual state cost may depend on how much money officials calculate they can find in this pot — assuming, that is, they don’t choose to go the Kansas route and define “at the stadium” as anywhere in one entire corner of the state.

What do Kansas City residents think of the plan?

Yesterday’s council meeting was open to public testimony, and KCUR reports that many citizens “echoed similar concerns that city leaders are undermining their vote against a downtown stadium, and that taxpayers’ money could be better spent on city services like schools, transportation and affordable housing” while “many business leaders and union members spoke in support of the plan, saying it will create more jobs and bring more economic development to the area.” Samples:

  • “When this council decides to put public dollars to tourist attractions and billionaires, they are making a strong and clear statement that the people’s needs do not matter.” —KC Tenants organizer Mellanie Gray
  • “I’ve heard some talk about the risk associated with this, but there’s risk in everything, and sometimes there’s greater risk in doing nothing. When you do nothing, you risk losing a team. When you risk losing a team… I don’t even want to think about the jobs, the businesses that we could lose if we don’t do this today.” —Downtown Council of Kansas City board officer Gib Kerr (also a real estate investor with Cushman & Wakefield, something KCUR didn’t mention)

The Kansas City Star adds: “More than one speaker referenced economic studies that have shown stadiums are not major engines for economic development. Numerous opponents referenced the 2024 vote in which Jackson County residents soundly rejected a stadium tax that would have funded a new stadium in the Crossroads District, a vote that has long plagued city and team officials.” (Yes, “plagued” — the will of the voters can be such a headache, right?)

Will a stadium and surrounding Royals development district fit on the proposed site?

This is an excellent question, and one that neither the council nor the press coverage seems to be talking about. Washington Square Park itself is only five acres, not nearly big enough for a stadium; with the addition of some surrounding buildings and a nearby parking lot, a stadium might barely be squeezed in, though renderings show it as an extremely tight fit with the stadium overhanging an adjacent street. For a stadium district, meanwhile, Sherman would likely have to buy part of all of the surrounding Crown Center, and possibly redevelop part of it for any baseball-adjacent uses he’d seek.

Has Royals owner John Sherman committed to this?

“We look very much forward to the continued process,” Sherman told KCTV. “We’ll continue our work with [city manager] Mario [Vasquez] and his staff toward an agreement as was put forth in the ordinance today.” Translation: No, not really, but he’s happy to listen to offers.

What happens now?

The Star confirms that once the details of a deal are actually hashed out, they “would have to go back before the council at a future date,” according to city staff at yesterday’s council hearing. The city would also need state approval to set up a TIF district, plus the state presumably needs to sign off on Show-Me Sports Investment Act bonds. So even if the city council approves the initial stadium measure tomorrow, there is a lot of time left for elected officials and Kansas City residents alike to ask questions about the Royals plan — which is good, because there are still a ton of answers left to be found.

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AECOM’s economic impact slideshow on Rays stadium is the clowniest of clown documents

access_time personNeil deMause

Only two weeks late, AECOM’s economic impact report on the proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium complex is now public — or at least a kind reader sent it to me so I could post it here, thank you, kind reader! Given AECOM’s past record as a construction consultant that doesn’t really know how to study economic impact, one might have reasonably worried that this would be a half-assed attempt to quantify the impact of spending billions of dollars in public money on a new Rays stadium complex in Tampa, with some major logical holes. In fact, it’s even worse.

Let’s start with the knee-slapper that the Tampa Bay Business Journal identified by reading just the cover letter of the 53-slide presentation. (AECOM doesn’t muck around with “pages,” speaking solely in the language of Powerpoint.) Take it away, TBBJ:

An AECOM study commissioned by the Tampa Sports Authority, obtained by the Tampa Bay Business Journal, reports that the Rays’ plans to redevelop Hillsborough College’s 100-acre campus could have a $75.5 billion economic impact over 30 years.

However, that number is based on assumptions and estimates made by AECOM, as key information like the number of apartments, hotel rooms and size of parking garages from the Major League Baseball team remains missing.

Yup, it’s right there on slide 3: “Site plans for the Stadium District were not provided, leading AECOM to make assumptions regarding the type and intensity of development.” In other words, since Rays execs haven’t actually committed to what aside from a stadium they’ll build atop the state-owned college campus they’re seeking a 99-year lease to — one of the many unknowns that some local elected officials are complaining need to be resolved before they can reasonably vote on the plan — AECOM just invented a stadium district out of its own imagination, and then projected how many billions of dollars people would spend there.

That’s pretty bad, but it’s still not the worst of it. Other highlights of the slide deck:

  • Most of AECOM’s analysis is geared toward estimating “economic impact,” which is a garbage stat: It’s just the result of adding up all the spending that takes place in a certain place, whether that money goes to boost the local economy and jobs or just goes into the pocket of a developer or team owner. (As economist Victor Matheson memorably put it, “Imagine an airplane landing at an airport and everyone gets out and gives each other a million bucks, then gets back on the plane. That’s $200 million in economic activity, but it’s not any benefit to the local economy.”) So it’s not even worth quibbling over AECOM’s numbers here, because they’re meaningless.
  • What is worth quibbling over is “fiscal impact,” because that’s how much new tax revenue Tampa citizens can expect their local governments to see as the result of the Rays stadium project. Or at least, it should be — AECOM, unfortunately, seems to have skipped over the “new” part, simply adding up how much in various taxes (sales, property, hotel) its imagined development would produce, assuming it’s as built-out and popular as it hopes. In particular, there’s no attempt to account for substitution of spending in one place for spending in another — so if locals, say, switch from eating at restaurants elsewhere in Tampa to ones in a ballpark district, it gets counted as all net new tax money when really it’s just moving the same spending around. So, again, any numbers produced here are meaningless.
  • Also not included: any sourcing footnotes or methodology for how AECOM came up with these figures. The report does say it used unspecified “IO models” to make its calculations, which is pretty much a highfalutin way of saying “we plugged a bunch of assumptions into a software package, and these are the numbers it spit out.”

Economist J.C. Bradbury has dubbed consulting reports of this ilk “clown documents,” and this is one of the clowniest of them all, not even worth the paper it isn’t printed on. And speaking of Bradbury, what does he have to say about this?

“I’ve seen the report. As I expected, it’s mostly a pile of useless numbers of dubious origin. It’s pseudo-economic drivel with the analytical rigor of a junior high science project. The author Dillon Gilman appears to have no economics training.

“This reminds me of when someone pretends to be an ASL interpreter, and they get away with it until people who understand sign language point out that it’s just some crazed idiot waving their hands around. But, when it comes to commissioned economic impact reports, no one cares.”

One reason no one cares, presumably, is that the people who commission these reports are looking less for accurate numbers than for believable numbers. Even pseudo-economic drivel serves to invoke the clear plastic binder effect, whereby any numbers at all look better if they’re gussied up in a professional four-color presentation — though honestly AECOM’s is pretty lacking in zhuzh as well, maybe because they were only getting paid what the Tampa Sports Authority could afford, not what an actual sports team owner would shell out for.

Maybe that’s one reason the media impact of the report has been fairly muted: In addition to the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s critique, the Tampa Bay Times issued an article promising “four takeaways” from the AECOM slide deck, though most of these ended up being just “AECOM came up with different numbers than the Rays did.” Or maybe hallucinated is the better word: Much like AI, these economic impact reports specialize in producing definitive answers, even if there’s no reason to believe they’re more accurate than what you’d get from asking the nearest three-year-old to guess. “Rays stadium project to create eleventy squillion dollars in economic impact” would honestly be a more accurate headline, I’ll nominate for a Pulitzer any news organization that dares go with that one.

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KC’s $600m in Royals stadium funding could make end run around public vote

access_time personNeil deMause

In the wake of Thursday’s passage of an ordinance by Mayor Quinton Lucas to give Royals owner John Sherman $600 million in city money toward a new downtown stadium, Kansas City councilmember Johnathan Duncan wants to force the city to let residents hold a public vote on the plan. The city’s charter allows voters to force a public referendum on city ordinances if opponents gather signatures equal to 10% of the number of votes in the most recent election for mayor within 40 days — something Duncan says “wouldn’t be a giant lift” — but there’s also a major catch:

The city’s charter bars citizens from forcing referendum votes on ordinances “with an accelerated effective date or emergency measures,” giving city leaders the ability to stave off a referendum by declaring the ordinance as an emergency or expediting the ordinance’s effective date.

The proposed ordinance introduced by Lucas on Thursday includes an accelerated effective date because it involves “appropriating funds and relating to the design, repair, maintenance or construction of a public improvement.” That language is likely to block any potential referendum push.

And here we are back at why public votes on sports subsidy deals are so much more common on the West Coast: It’s really hard to get a referendum on the ballot in the rest of the country, in part because of those states’ pre-Progressive Era constitutions that provide tons of loopholes for elected officials who don’t want to be subject to the whims of voters. “There’s more ways to finagle your ways around referenda laws [in] other parts of the country,” remarked University of Colorado Denver public affairs professor Geoffrey Propheter in 2022. In 1998, for example, New York city council speaker Peter Vallone tried to put a referendum on the November ballot to block then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s push for a new Yankees stadium in Manhattan, but Giuliani successfully knocked it off the ballot by means of a law that allows the mayor to preempt any ballot measures that year by proposing one of his own on any issue he likes. (That Yankees plan ultimately fizzled, but Giuliani succeeded in laying the groundwork for his successor Michael Bloomberg to approve more than a billion dollars in public money for a new Yankees stadium in the Bronx eight years later.)

Whether you think direct democracy is a good thing or not — and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, from the legacy of California’s Prop 13 to that state’s public initiative industry that increasingly allows those with the deepest pockets to buy ballot measure wins — it’s definitely a stumbling block for sports subsidies, as Propheter has found that the general populace approves those about 58% of the time, vs. 96% of proposals that go to a vote in legislative bodies. An owner like Sherman could certainly pour money into fighting a Royals stadium ballot measure, but it’s historically a lot easier to win over a relative handful of local elected officials.

None of which is to say it’s going to be impossible to force a vote on some piece of the Royals plan, given that so much of it is only vaguely penciled in and could require future votes by city, county, and state legislators, some of which could be more susceptible to gathering signatures to block them. But Sherman appears to have gained momentum among lawmakers since the Chiefs‘ announced move across state lines to Kansas, with fears growing that the Royals could follow suit despite team officials saying three months ago that they had abandoned thoughts of moving to the one Kansas site that had been floated. The public at large may make some dumb decisions and be subject to the influence of big money, but they still have a ways to go to catch up with their elected representatives in those regards.

 

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Friday roundup: Rays stadium demands include federal disaster relief money, $10/year rent while keeping all revenues

access_time personNeil deMause

On top of everything else this week, the Tampa Bay Rays management dropped their draft memorandum of understanding for a Tampa stadium deal, which sheds a little more light on what precisely they’re asking for in terms of public money. I’ve only had a chance to give it a quick read, but so has Noah Pransky of Shadow of the Stadium, so maybe combined we can hit the biggest takeaways:

  • This is just the Rays’ proposed MOU; county officials haven’t reviewed it yet.
  • Rays owner Patrick Zalupski wants it finalized by June 1, so that a stadium can be open by 2029 — probably an impossible timetable, but if it works to create a two-minute warning, sure, why not?
  • The land under the stadium itself, currently owned by the state, will be shifted to the county’s possession — so all of that previously reported between $1.1 billion and $2.5 billion in free land and property tax breaks is still in play.
  • The Rays will lease (or maybe “license”) the stadium for 35 years, for a rent of $10 a year. (No, that’s not a typo: not $10 million, $10.)
  • The stadium itself will cost at least $2.3 billion, with $251 million coming from the city of Tampa (source TBD unless I missed it) and $750 million from Hillsborough County, which will include hotel tax (TDT) money, sales tax surcharge (CIT) money, revenue from an already existing TIF district (Drew Park) around the site, and possibly federal disaster recovery block grant funds. that, notes Pransky, are “generally earmarked to rebuild housing & infrastructure that support low-to-moderate income populations.”
  • Any excess public revenue from all those tax streams will go into a future maintenance fund, so the actual amount of county funding could be much higher, a la the Atlanta Falcons‘ infamous “waterfall fund.”
  • “The Rays Stadium Entity intends to seek additional Public Funding from other available public funding sources,” so the total public subsidy could be even more much higher.
  • The Rays will impose a ticket surcharge, but that money will pay off the team’s portion of costs, not the public’s, so no help there.
  • Likewise, the “Rays Stadium Entity will retain all revenue generated pursuant to the Lease, including but not limited to revenue associated with tickets, parking, suites, signage, advertising, promotional inventory, sponsorships, concessions, merchandise, broadcasting rights, royalties, licensing fees, concession fees and other sources described in the Lease.” So the city and county will get bupkis in stadium revenues to help pay off their share, not even naming rights on a county-owned building.
  • This is all just an MOU for the stadium itself; the surrounding development appears to be waiting for a later date, so no more details on when that would be built, how much it would cost, how much in property tax breaks it would be receiving, or how on earth it could be “100 percent privately financed” but with “tax dollars from the district used to eventually pay off the tab.“

So we’re at a minimum of $2.1 billion in public costs for the entire project, and a maximum of who the hell knows, but numbers like $4 billion or even higher are certainly not out of the realm of possibility. There are certain to be lots of questions from Hillsborough County Commissioners, especially on that CIT sales tax surcharge that voters were promised wouldn’t be used for stadiums (and which residents currently oppose using for a Rays stadium) — in the MOU it’s earmarked for “on-site horizontal infrastructure,” which could mean things like roads and sewers but also building foundations. In fact, County Commissioner Joshua Wostal, who is emerging as one of the louder critics of the deal, has already called attention to a clause saying if the city and county can’t come up with the funds in the MOU, they’ll need to “use best efforts to endeavor to secure alternative financing,” something Wostal said seems to be a “poison pill” intended to “force the commissioners to vote no in what seems to be an intentional killing of the deal.” Or maybe they just hope commissioners will agree to anything, it’s happened before!

More on all that next week, surely. In the meantime, here’s the rest of this week’s news:

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KC mayor readies bill to give Royals $600m plus public park for downtown stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City officials are set to introduce a bill this afternoon to fund a new downtown stadium for the Royals, and while we don’t have the actual bill language, we do have a Kansas City Star report on whatever details sources close to the deal felt it was in their interest to leak, this oughta be good:

The plan is built around a specific location: Washington Square Park.

This is likely to be controversial, as Washington Square Park is a public park, and is also not really big enough to fit a modern stadium on, let alone the ballpark district Royals owner John Sherman is hoping for.

Kansas City would contribute roughly $600 million of the project, according to a copy of the proposal obtained by The Star.

So … $600 million in cash? Would the Royals pay anything for the public land they’d be using? Would they pay property taxes? Rent? A cut of stadium revenues? You’ve read the proposal (or at least a copy of it, what does that even mean in this era of digital documents?), K.C. Star, tell us the details!

Mayor Quinton Lucas is expected to unveil the plan as an ordinance during Thursday afternoon’s City Council meeting at City Hall, he confirmed to The Star. The ordinance authorizes City Manager Mario Vasquez to negotiate and execute a 30-year term sheet, lease, and development agreement with the team to build the new stadium.

This implies that the Kansas City council could be asked to pass the $600 million in public funding before the details of lease and development agreement are worked out, which would be … bad? I’m going with bad.

The planned reveal marks a key step in the drawn-out fight over the Royals, potentially the first domino in a process that, after years of twists and turns, could suddenly roll quickly.

DOMINOES DON’T ROLL

It’s not yet clear whether the Royals will jump at the deal, though Lucas said the proposal is the result of “hours and hours of extensive discussion” with the Royals.

So the ordinance would be passed before the Royals agreed to it? That also sounds bad!

Lucas told The Star that the proposal would also require a vote on Tuesday from Kansas City’s Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners in order to use the park. That board would continue to be the owner of the property, though operations “continues to be some level of discussions,” Lucas said.

Okay, that implies that the Royals would be paying neither for the land nor property taxes, though it’s certainly possible to roll those elements into any deal even on city-owned property, which would be the responsibility of Vasquez to figure out, sounds like.

That process would notably attempt to side-step a public vote on the stadium two years after Jackson County voters soundly defeated an April 2024 proposal for a separate site downtown.

It’s unclear where the $600 million would come from if not from a source that would trigger a public vote, but we’ll see.

How will the stadium project be funded? The ordinance will be introduced just two days after Kansas City officials successfully convinced voters to renew the city’s 1% earnings tax for another five years, a critical vote that loomed over ongoing Royals talks.

Ah, and that tax would be—

Lucas said Tuesday night that revenue from the earnings tax would not be used to cover any stadium costs.

Never mind.

The city will pursue a public-private partnership, with its $600 million contribution earmarked for a project that includes the stadium and team offices, acquisition and demolition of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City building that the company has vacated and a neighboring service road. That portion of the project would be split — with 60% of the funds coming from public entities, such as Kansas City and Missouri, and 40% in private funding, sources said.

So $600 million public (including state money?), $400 million private, except that the stadium would actually cost $1.9 million, plus there’s the surrounding development, “the bulk” of which would be paid for by Sherman (not counting land and tax breaks, obviously). The known unknowns are stacking up fast.

Kansas City, according to the ordinance, intends to pay for its portion of the stadium using a constellation of funds, including bonds, city appropriations and Tax Increment Financing (TIF). The city plans to reimburse itself using proceeds from the bonds, but the ordinance does not include specifics about how that would play out.

BONDS ARE NOT A FUND! Also you can’t reimburse yourself from bonds, you make payments on bonds, they don’t pay you. Come on, guys!

At the state level, the stadium would rely on a sweeping funding package Missouri lawmakers approved last summer in an attempt to keep both the Royals and Chiefs inside state lines. The law allows Missouri to pay for up to 50% of a new stadium for the team, but it’s unclear how much money the state or Jackson County will actually contribute.

This is a breaking news story. Check back for further updates once it is completely broken.

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Rays stadium votes pushed back to May, as questions grow about sales tax surcharge

access_time personNeil deMause

While it’s way too early to say that Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski’s plans for a new stadium on the current cite of Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry Campus are in trouble, the approval process certainly doesn’t seem to be going as smoothly as he might have hoped. The latest news is that city and county votes on spending about $1.15 billion in tax money to help build the $2.3 billion stadium, initially proposed for April 1 and 2 and then for April 15 and 16, are now targeted for May 6 and 7, with a county “workshop” and a public hearing to be held first. And even main Hillsborough County Commission stadium proponent Ken Hagan says that those dates could be pushed back further:

“That’s not finalized, but that is our goal,” he said on WDAE, adding that he has told county staff “that every effort needs to be made to meet that timeline.”

“Time is of the essence,” Hagan said.

Part of the holdup is that there’s nothing yet to actually vote on: Zalupski, the city, and the county are still hashing out a term sheet that will determine who will pay for what, as well as presumably the Rays’ lease terms on the sprawling 130-acre development site. (The cost of providing rent- and property-tax-free land to the project has previously been estimated at between $1.1 billion and $2.5 billion, on top of the public’s share of construction costs.) But questions also remain about using a 0.5% sales tax surcharge called the Community Investment Tax to provide $437 million toward the stadium, given that the 2024 ballot measure that approved the tax hike required it to be used for “infrastructure for transportation and public works, public safety, public facilities, public utilities and public schools,” none of which exactly describes a privately controlled sports stadium. (The previous version of the CIT, passed by voters in 1996, specifically allowed for use on “a community stadium,” which ended up being the Buccaneers‘ new home.)

The CIT is also limited in a couple of ways in how much money it can raise, as Tampa Bay Times columnist John Hill noted yesterday: It only runs for 15 years, and it is capped at committing 70% of future revenues to paying off any bonds. That’s not going to hamstring any stadium spending by itself — the tax brings in around $200 million a year, way more than enough to pay off $437 million in bonds — but it does leave Zalupski angling for a decent-sized cut of a pool of money that also has to pay for roads, bridges, sidewalks, fire services, sewers, and so on. The county previously identified $2.6 billion worth of those projects to be funded by the CIT, which (depending on interest rates and how fast tax receipts increase) could well eat up all the available funds, meaning diverting CIT dollars to a stadium would require cutting back on actual public infrastructure.

Given all this, waiting until early May — or even late May — to vote so that city and county officials can know what the hell they’re voting on is pretty reasonable due diligence. But in a world where team owners and their elected official friends often see taking time to talk about stadium funding before voting on it to be unacceptable, it’s noteworthy that the Tampa city council and Hillsborough County Commission seem to be eager to take their time. Next week’s public workshop and hearing will be interesting not just to see what the Rays reveal about their stadium dreams, but to find what sort of questions councilmembers and commissioners ask, and what those say about their willingness to rubber-stamp what would be one of the biggest sports project subsidies in history.

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And the winner for dumbest stadium-related op-ed of 2026 is…

access_time personNeil deMause

I really didn’t want to dignify this op-ed by Hillsborough County Commissioner Chris Boles arguing that it’s too soon to “declare this [Tampa Bay Rays] deal a home run or a strikeout” with a response, especially given that J.C. Bradbury already provided the perfect one. But taking as a given that this is a dumb opinion piece designed mostly to ward off criticism of a massive public expense for a private stadium by saying, “What if it isn’t, maybe?”, let’s focus on just one section of the word salad:

We live in an era of “hot takes”, where being first to complain is often valued more than being right. But a multi-billion-dollar redevelopment project that could redefine Drew Park and the Dale Mabry Sports Corridor for the next half-century deserves more than a knee-jerk reaction. Let your elected officials and financial analysts do their due diligence, but demand that it be rigorous, transparent and grounded.

Yes, absolutely, let’s demand a rigorous, transparent, and grounded analysis of the full costs of the proposed Rays deal! Perhaps by a property tax expert who is skilled in estimating the future cost of handing over public land and tax breaks, because he used to work for a city government doing just that, and later wrote a whole book about it. And why look, if it isn’t Geoffrey Propheter, who ran the numbers more than two months ago and found that the public costs of land and tax breaks for the Rays project would be between $1.1 billion and $2.5 billion, on top of the $1.15 billion in cash Hillsborough County would be handing over. Boles would like to suggest that the economic benefits of the project could make up for that — he warns against ignoring “the ‘waterfall’ of revenue streams that can, if properly structured, insulate taxpayers from long-term risk” — but coming up with enough money to cover between $2.25 billion and $3.65 billion in public costs would require multiple Niagaras worth of new revenues, something no stadium-anchored mixed-use project in history has ever generated, no matter how properly structured.

And even Boles seems to have recognized that writing an entire op-ed around the idea of “What is money, really?” wasn’t going to go very far, because he’s padded it out with an absolute fusillade of baseball metaphors, each one making less sense than the next:

  • “The crack of the bat is usually a sound of pure optimism, but in the case of the Tampa Bay Rays’ stadium deal, it has triggered a frantic scramble in the bleachers.”
  • “Jumping to conclusions before the final details are inked is a classic ‘foul ball,’ and this commissioner would encourage everyone to return to the dugout”
  • “In this case, the devil is most certainly in the details, and we should all head back to the dugout because, in the end, we are all on the same team.”
  • “Until the final box score is in, let’s keep our eyes on the ball and wait for the full data set to cross the plate.”

I am, frankly, in awe. I can’t wait for more numbers to come in, to see if Boles takes a swing at them and launches them into the bleachers to trigger a frantic — sorry, what’s that you say, the city and county could end up voting on this deal next week? Maybe it’s actually time to get out of the dugout, or Hillsborough County could end up looking at strike three without ever getting into the batter’s box.

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