Search Results for: Seattle arena plan relies heavily on TIF subsidies

Bostonians call spending $100m to convert public park for pro soccer “appalling and criminal”

access_time personNeil deMause

The projected public cost of tearing down a public high school soccer stadium and turning it into a home for the women’s soccer team BOS Nation F.C. (which public high school students will get to use when the NWSL team is on the road) has now reached $100 million, out of a total cost of at least $200 million. And lots of Boston residents are hopping mad, as exhibited at 9-hour city council hearing yesterday:

“Boston students deserve a renovated White Stadium – they deserve a public White Stadium, not a private sports and entertainment complex built to enable private profits,” said Jean McGuire, resident of Roxbury and longtime civil rights advocate. “It’s clear that this entire process is being driven by the needs of private investments, not the needs of Boston students. The process has been launched, the state reviews having been conducted, and community members’ concerns about public access and transportation impacts are being ignored, all in a mad rush to next March for White Stadium in order to be a soccer team’s desired opening day.”…

Stevan Kirschbaum, a former BPS bus driver, described the White Stadium plan as “appalling and criminal.”

“We should be chaining ourselves to those trees – this is a criminal rush to judgment.”

And at least one elected official is none too pleased by the soaring price tag:

“We have now said we can come up with $100 million,” [city councillor Erin] Murphy said. “Just like any responsible person, anyone who runs their home budget, at some point you have to say, that’s great but I can’t afford it, so I’m going to have to say no.”

As reported previously, the team owners will “keep the bulk of revenue from matches” aside from 10% of in-stadium ad revenues and 3% of concessions revenues, as well as $400,000 a year in rent and a $1-per-ticket surcharge — the math on which suggests that it would require the average ticket buyer to spend around $1,000 per game on concessions for the city to break even. Boston public school students will get the benefit of a nicer stadium — when they’re allowed to use it — though it’s not clear what benefit they’ll get from such upgrades as a new beer garden.

The parks group the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, which has filed a lawsuit to block the stadium plan, has estimated that a scaled-down high school facility would cost the city just $29 million. Council Ben Weber said of the lawsuit at yesterday’s hearing, “I hear a lot of rhetoric, I don’t hear much about solutions” — maybe proposing a scaled-down stadium isn’t a solution to BOS Nation F.C.’s owner, venture capital CEO and daughter of a Celtics co-owner Jennifer Epstein, but that all depends on how you define the problem.

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Have Chiefs/Royals stadium talks torpedoed K.C. border war “truce”? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

There was a lot going on yesterday, but Kansas City’s NPR station still had time to get out a big think piece — reprinted from local nonprofit news outlet The Beacon — on what the Chiefs and Royals stadium battles mean for the region’s eternal economic border war between Missouri and Kansas. How did KCUR and The Beacon do? Let’s drop in and see:

The two states had for years engaged in a bloodletting competition to lure businesses to their side of the Kansas City region — handing out lucrative incentives to move a corporate headquarters just a few miles across the state line.

These deals brought no new jobs to the region. They sacrificed millions in taxes that could have gone to hire more teachers, pave more roads or invest in public safety. They did nothing to improve the regional economy.

It was, as many called it, a race to the bottom.

So far, so good, though Kansas City is hardly alone in this regard.

Suddenly, that race came to a halt. In 2019, the governors in both states recognized the futility of these battles and agreed to stop the poaching. Since then, most economic development officials in the region say, the truce has worked.

Sort of? The 2019 truce only applied to payroll tax kickbacks, and even then was seen as fragile given that it was “binding” only until one state or the other chose to walk away, as reported at the time by oh hey look it’s KCUR!

A recent study conducted by Brookings Metro underscores why the states shouldn’t waste those resources. The study found that the Kansas City region’s economic output is almost evenly split on both sides of the state line, an anomaly among other multistate regions.

What’s more, the metro’s total GDP significantly boosts each state’s economy. Of Missouri’s total GDP, nearly a fourth comes from the Kansas City metro. Kansas, in turn, gets more than a third of its total from our region.

This is where the article starts to get weird: Kansas and Missouri shouldn’t be throwing public money to lure businesses back and forth across the state line because … the K.C. metro area is evenly split between the two states? Notably, that’s not even what the linked Brookings study says about the K.C. border war, which is the more lucid argument that “both states attempted to move jobs and businesses in the Kansas City metro area to their side of the state line, resulting in zero net new jobs for the region—at taxpayers’ expense.”

But if a place like Wyandotte County has a chance to use incentives to attract a business, why shouldn’t it? In fact, even with the truce, the county and its neighbors across the region still strike deals with businesses in nearby cities and counties.

Uhhhh, because it results in zero net new jobs for the region, at taxpayers’ expense? Also, what happened to “the truce has worked”? Can we get a fact-checker in here?

The difference today, said Greg Kindle, CEO of Wyandotte Economic Development Council, is those businesses are the first to broach the idea of a move. And even then, they aren’t, he said, asking for anything more than what the county typically gives to qualifying businesses.

Consider Mies Family Foods, a family-run business that will be moving from Missouri back to Kansas, where it got its start. Earlier this year, Mies was looking for a larger site and turned to Wyandotte County because that’s where the owners live.

The county offered Mies its standard 50 percent tax abatement. That, coupled with an attractive site near Interstates 70 and 635, was enough to convince Mies to make a $15.6 million investment and bring 51 employees to Kansas. When the abatement ends, the property will generate $200,000 a year in taxes.

“You look at that and say, does that qualify as a border war?” Kindle said. “Well, they had a connection to Kansas and wanted to move.”

Oh, okay, the county is handing out tax breaks to everyone, including companies owned by people who would want to move to your state regardless and are just happy to pocket the cash as a bonus. That’s … better? Kindle seems to be trying to go with “better,” I think?

If you’re wondering why The Beacon chose to ask the head of the local public-private pro-business advocacy group about whether giving public money to local businesses is a good idea, you clearly weren’t the editor of this piece, because that’s the only kind of source heard from here: People quoted include the CEO of K.C.’s regional business marketing arm, the CEO of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, the aforementioned Wyandotte economic development council CEO, a Kansas state official who voted to spend $28 million on the 2026 World Cup even though it’ll be held in Missouri, the CEO of K.C.’s World Cup bid group, and one of the Brookings authors. Any other experts in or critics of interstate bidding wars or the economics thereof didn’t get a call for comment, so we’re left viewing the end (?) of this truce (?) through a lens of “actually, it’s all fine, probably.”

As for the Chiefs and the Royals, though they’re the hook for the headline, they don’t make that much of an appearance in the article itself, though it does note that “on balance, the subsidies offered to major league sports franchises rarely, if ever, deliver that boost.” That’s followed, however, by a digression about how stadium employees would likely live in both states either way — true enough, but kind of beside the point if the whole issue is that paying to move businesses back and forth across state lines is a net zero for the region as a whole — and then this:

And the region, certainly, does not want to lose either the Royals or the Chiefs. [Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Joe] Reardon said that even if one or both teams move to Kansas, the truce will remain because the region will have kept its prized teams.

You heard it here first: Without tax kickbacks, the Chiefs and Royals could move to Greensboro or someplace, according to the head of the organization dedicated to obtaining tax kickbacks for its members. Great journalism, everybody — who needs meddling billionaires when we have reporters who’ve been trained to follow their lead on who is and isn’t worth talking to?

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Friday roundup: City sues Browns over Brook Park vaporstadium, Broncos go all Bears on suburban move threats

access_time personNeil deMause

Weeks keep happening, and we keep making it to the end of them! (Well, most of us.) If you ever need a break from the general state of everything, you might want to check out this other project I’m involved in, where you can immerse yourself in great live music of the recent past to gird yourself for the present. Or just experience whatever exactly this is.

Back now, all musicked up? Good, because there’s some news waiting for you and it’s not going to stay hot forever:

  • As promised, the city of Cleveland officially sued the Cleveland Browns under Ohio’s Art Modell Law this week to force team owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam to offer the team for sale to local owners before trying to move it to the suburb of Brook Park. The Haslams already preemptively sued to block the Modell Law, so now this will be in the hands of the courts, though it’s also in the hands of the state legislature that is being asked for maybe $1.2 billion to help build a Brook Park dome, hey guys, I think I came up with a way to save a bunch on lawyers’ fees!
  • Denver Broncos co-owner Greg Penner said Wednesday that “We haven’t ruled out anything at this point” in terms of a new or renovated stadium to replace or upgrade their 24-year-old one, adding, “We’re still looking at options on the current site, around Denver.” If that sounds suspiciously like “We’re kicking the tires of local governments to see what our leverage is,” congratulations, you’ve passed Chicago Bears 101!
  • Speaking of the Bears, Illinois house speaker Chris Welch said he might consider having the state pay for some infrastructure costs of a new NFL stadium, so long as the team owners build one at the Michael Reese Hospital site that they first rejected before saying they might reconsider. Fox 32 Chicago further reports that “Governor JB Pritzker is open to talks with the Bears regarding the Michael Reese site” (according to “sources); if the Bears execs’ plan is really “keep throwing things at various walls until we see what sticks,” this might be just the opening they’ve been hoping for — now, how to define an entire stadium as “infrastructure”?
  • The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal … I probably shouldn’t even finish this sentence, but in the interest of the completeness: Mr. Bowtie says that Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg needs to find a way to get a stadium built in his current city or else sell the team, and that the situation is “not identical” to the Athletics moving out of Oakland, because Tampa-St. Pete is a large market and the Rays have a stadium offer in hand while the A’s … well, they’re just different, okay? This is probably just Rosenthal going off for his own reasons, but he does spend a bunch of time discussing how MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is taking a “different approach” with the Rays than the A’s, so there’s some chance the consummate baseball insider is sending a message on behalf of MLB leadership, in which case maybe Sternberg will take the hint and stand down from his “Thanks for the billion dollars, what else you got?” gambit.
  • Retiring Miami Mayor Francis Suarez gave a farewell speech in which he stood before the under-construction Inter Miami stadium — as well as an American flag and two John Deere tractors, because Florida — and declared the “the best sports deal in America.” Mmm, maybe not quite that actually, but we have some lovely parting gifts.
  • Remember that time San Diego almost had a floating ballpark? Wait, that was never really going to happen? Shh, it makes a great story.
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Tempe officials called arena opponents “CAVE people” when they thought no one was listening

access_time personNeil deMause

Tempe Mayor Corey Woods and the city council have not been coming out looking good after their failed campaign to give Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo about $500 million in tax breaks for a new arena: After Tempe residents resoundingly voted down the plan, the state attorney general found the city officials had illegally conducted private meetings with a consultant that it paid $32,258 to investigate arena opponents. And now that it’s been ruled those meetings should have been public, recordings of them are subject to public records requests, and the results have really made Woods and the councilmembers not look good:

The Tempe City Council assumed it was protected from prying ears when it went into a closed-door meeting on Dec. 15, 2022. According to the minutes from the meeting, councilmembers needed secrecy to discuss “their personal observations of Tempe residents conveying support” for a new arena for the Arizona Coyotes. What the councilmembers and Mayor Corey Woods actually said was a bit more colorful than that.

According to an audio recording of the meeting, the officials used their shroud of secrecy to disparage arena opponents. Citizens who campaigned against the arena were “cave people,” while arena opposition ringleader Ron Tapscott was a “crazy uncle.”

Further down, the Phoenix New Times reveals it was actually the consultant, Troy Corder of Strategy 48, who called opponents of the plan “folks who just like to yell at each other” and “cave people” — something New Times described as a “belittling acronym,” though it didn’t explain for what. (“Citizens Against Virtually Everything,” presumably.) Still, Vice Mayor Jennifer Adams then responded by saying, “Yes, exactly,” though, so she deserves credit for the phrase as well.

This, apparently, is how elected officials talk when they think no one can hear them. There were two other illegal closed meetings that weren’t recorded — the one that turned up was only recorded because a fill-in clerk wanted a way to check her notes — so unless someone else present decided to take advantage of Arizona’s status as a one-party consent state, we’ll probably just have to imagine what was said there.

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Adam Silver is behind the Sixers-Flyers arena deal, sure, maybe

access_time personNeil deMause

I figured eventually we’d get one of those insider journalism articles about why the Philadelphia 76ers owners switched from a planned Market Street arena of their own to sharing a new building with their current landlords, the Flyers, I didn’t figure that “eventually” would mean two days, but here we are. And the answer — or at least one answer — appears to be “NBA commissioner Adam Silver got his billionaire friends together to have them kiss and make up”:

On the afternoon of Dec. 1, Sixers managing partner and co-owner Josh Harris, who is also managing partner of the NFL Washington Commanders, hosted a group of sports business heavyweights at the football team’s home game against the Tennessee Titans.

The group included two other Sixers co-owners — David Blitzer and David Adelman — as well as NBA commissioner Adam Silver and Comcast chair and CEO Brian L. Roberts…

Silver, who has served as NBA commissioner since 2014, believed that having two competing Philadelphia arena projects in the same timeframe would be detrimental to both the city and the teams, according to the sources.

There’s some logic to this: Silver has an interest in the health of the Sixers, obviously, but his league is also business partners with Comcast, the Flyers owner, which just signed an 11-year broadcast deal with the NBA. Having the two teams each fighting for Philadelphia arena supremacy could only end up with one side or another losing, so by brokering a deal Silver is just shoring up ruling class solidarity and monopoly power.

The question remains, though, why Sixers owner Josh Harris took the bait. He seemed all-in on a Market East arena as recently as last month, so either something changed his mind about that, or that was always a dodge to get Comcast (and Silver, as it turned out) to the negotiating table, or Silver truly has the power to cloud men’s minds. The Philadelphia Inquirer article laying out the commissioner’s role doesn’t include any quotes from Harris other than those from his press conference on Monday, which are PR mush along the lines of “We didn’t really change our mind. Actually, we were really committed to Market East, but … our north star was doing the right thing by Philly.”

The Inquirer article is evasive about its sourcing for the entire chain of events, citing only “sources familiar with the matter,” which could always mean that this story is what somebody wants to push as a narrative more than actual, you know, reality. The closest to a named source it provides is Philadelphia Building and Trades Council leader Ryan Bower, who says Silver “put [the team owners] together” and “I’m sure that that partnership [between the NBA and Comcast] played a lot in this decision that you see now.” This all amounts to intriguing hints, but is far from the deeply investigated timeline that one would really want; maybe once the Athletic has successfully gotten its union recognized, it can devote some time to putting together all the pieces here.

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Joint Sixers-Flyers arena declared “win, win, win, win,” but for who exactly and at what cost?

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Tuesday morning, and here’s what we know about the plans for a joint Philadelphia 76ers–Flyers arena in South Philly:

  • Sixers owners Harris Blitzer and Flyers owners Comcast Spectacor have entered into a “binding agreement” to go halfsies on a new arena to replace the Wells Fargo Center, which Comcast owns (and recently renovated) and Sixers rent. The new arena, which doesn’t yet have an announced price tag, is planned to open in 2031.
  • The two companies will also work together on the “revitalization” of the Market East site near Chinatown that the Sixers had previously targeted for a new arena of their own.
  • Comcast will buy a minority stake in the Sixers, and will get full ownership of the naming rights to the new arena.
  • The Flyers owners will join the Sixers owners in seeking a WNBA team to play in the new arena.
  • Mayor Cherelle Parker called this development a “win, win, win, win for Philadelphia” and a “curveball that none of us saw coming” and “exciting” and “unprecedented” and “a celebration for the city” and said as the city’s “CEO, I don’t have the luxury of wallowing in this 180.”
  • Parker said the city will still spend $20 million on affordable housing initiatives in Chinatown, though it sounds like the $50 million in community benefits promised by Harris as part of his original arena deal is now kaput.

All this still leaves a lot of questions: What will the “revitalization” at Market East look like, and will it still be eligible for the property tax breaks that were approved for the previously planned arena? What will the previously announced arena district in South Philly look like, when will it be built, and will Comcast and Harris seek any tax breaks or public infrastructure money for that? Who’s paying who for what in all these new cross-ownership deals, and how certain is it that any of these new plans will come to fruition? (City councilmember Mark Squilla, who played a key role in approving the now-suddenly-dead Market East arena plan, said when asked how he knows the new arena will actually happen, “I mean, you don’t. I mean, they say their commitment is there, there’s a little trust building that needs to be done.”)

In an editorial late yesterday afternoon, the Philadelphia Inquirer called the last four years spent on the Market East arena plans “a giant waste of time and money for everyone.” That’s not quite true: It was clearly time and money well spent for the Sixers owners, who were able to use the threat of their own arena to get Comcast to the table to work out this new deal. Whether it can now really be a “win, win, win, win” for the city, Sixers, Flyers, and whoever else Parker had in mind is going to depend on a lot of details that are currently unknown; once the excited press conferences die down and we start seeing financial details, we’ll know better who exactly got played here, and for what.

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Sixers abandon Chinatown arena plan, pivot to sharing South Philly venue with Flyers

access_time personNeil deMause

This was not on anybody’s bingo card: Officials with the Philadelphia 76ers revealed to Philadelphia city council members yesterday that they were turning their back on the planned arena adjacent to the city’s Chinatown that they had spent the last four years getting approved. Instead, the Sixers will be throwing in with their hated landlords, the Flyers-owning Comcast, on something at the teams’ current South Philly site, though what exactly and when remains a little unclear this morning:

After the Sixers announced their desire to leave South Philadelphia, Comcast Spectacor began aggressively courting them to stay in the stadium district. As part of their campaign, they revealed an ambitious and sprawling proposal for a $2.5 billion complete redevelopment of the area that would add thousands of apartments, restaurants, and more entertainment options.

And, with an “eventually” that is doing a lot of work:

Ryan Boyer, president of the Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council, told NBC10’s Lauren Mayk that instead, the team plans to demolish Wells Fargo Center and will eventually build a new arena in South Philadelphia for the Sixers and Flyers.

If the plan is for one combined arena in South Philly, this could end up a win-win all around: Philly taxpayers get out of the $96 million to 273 million in property tax breaks the city was planning to give Sixers owners Josh Harris and David Adelman for their new Market East arena, Chinatown residents escape the threat of arena-related redevelopment displacing part of their neighborhood, and the Sixers owners, Comcast, and the city as a whole escapes the likelihood of two competing arenas eventually driving one to shut down from lack of business. (Former Philly mayoral candidate and local power broker Sam Katz had previously said a second competing arena was “never privately financeable,” though it’s worth noting he was consulting for Comcast when he said that.) Major emphasis on “could,” though: One unnamed councilmember told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the Sixers still plan to move ahead with “some of” the Market East development, so there Harris and Adelman could yet end up having his tax breaks and eating them too. And when Comcast first announced plans for that arena district last March, the company hedged on whether it would require public money, which should have everyone on the lookout for an additional city funding ask.

For the moment, though, the only clear loser here is Comcast, which is looking at (maybe) having to demolish and replace an arena that it just spent $300 million on renovating, plus (definitely) going halfsies with its former tenants on ownership in order to keep them from setting up their own shingle. The obvious question is whether Harris and Adelman planned this all along: Was the entire Chinatown arena plan just for leverage to get Comcast to agree to new terms in South Philly? Did they fully intend to move, but were lured back by a sweeter offer from the Flyers owners? Or, as is so often the case, did they push ahead with new arena plans not knowing or caring how it would work out, but figuring that having another option in their pocket could only be to their benefit?

Whichever way, Philadelphia city officials who spent the last four years working with the Sixers owners on what turned out to be just a stalking horse are feeling played, because they were. At-large councilmember Jimmy Harrity has been especially vocal, telling the Inquirer that “I’m so livid right now I don’t even know what to do” and “I feel as though I was used as a pawn”; he told NBC Philadelphia, meanwhile, that “I feel completely bamboozled” and that he’s upset that city schools won’t get the proceeds from new taxes that the arena would bring — which doesn’t make any sense since the tax breaks the Sixers arena would have gotten were going to come out of the schools budget, but cut the man some slack, he’s bamboozled.

Chinatown activists, meanwhile, are ecstatic, saying in a statement that “the nightmare of a Center City Sixers arena will not haunt our city any more” and thanking citizens and elected officials who opposed the deal. In the end, though, it seems like public opposition to the plan was less important than corporate bigfooting — as we saw, for example, when Madison Square Garden’s owners killed the plan for a Manhattan New York Jets stadium, sometimes when elephants fight, the grass ends up being spared.

There are reports that Mayor Cherelle Parker plans to hold a press conference today at 11 am to address the unfolding situation, which hopefully will at least have better production values than her last one. For now, it looks like Philadelphia may have dodged a bullet, but let’s hold off on that assessment until the shooting stops.

 

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Friday roundup: Chiefs hire clown consultants for fan poll, Bears try to conjure stadium money with magic words

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday of another week, and at this writing Los Angeles is still extremely on fire. For a good writeup that also has a sports spending angle, check out yesterday’s excellent article by the excellent Alissa Walker, in her excellent 2028 Olympics newsletter Torched. Her takeaway from the fires darkening her skies: “Here’s what residents should ask themselves when surveying LA’s ashen neighborhoods: if our leaders haven’t yet put together a coherent strategy for something we supposedly want to happen in LA in three years, how can we believe that they’re going to put together a coherent strategy to address the worst-case scenario that confronts us now?”

We don’t always get the life-changing megaevents we should have seen coming that we want, we get the ones we … no, “deserve” isn’t right, either. Maybe: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, and if it’s not too much trouble I would really like to have a word with the playwright.

Meanwhile, in the parts of the country where only our hopes for an equitable, democratic system of government are on fire:

  • Kansas City Chiefs ownership is going to email its fans asking them whether they want a new or renovated stadium, and if that doesn’t already raise all kinds of questions like “How will they make sure it’s scientific?” and “Shouldn’t this be up to all Kansas City area residents, not just those on the Chiefs’ mailing list?”, wait till you see who’s conducting the survey. This is clearly a push poll, yet the K.C. media is reporting it as a way to “decide the stadium debate,” add journalism to the list of things that are on fire.
  •  Chicago Bears chair George McCaskey says “we’re making progress” on a new stadium while team president Kevin Warren says “downtown still remains the focus” but also “we have 326 acres of beautiful land in Arlington Heights” and “I remain steadfast that the goal we have is shovels in the ground in 2025.” Pretty sure that’s not how performative utterances work, but points for trying!
  • The Los Angeles Rams playoff game has been moved to Arizona because of the fires, and Newsweek is upset that the stadium there is named after an insurer that canceled insurance coverage for homes in areas at high fire risk. One would hope that the denial of coverage would discourage people from building (or rebuilding) in fire-prone areas, but the state of California provides insurance if private insurers won’t, and anyway you don’t need insurance if you buy a house with cash rather than taking out a mortgage so it won’t discourage the truly rich; trying to solve societal problems with economic incentives always seems to run into the problem that some people’s incentives are more economic than others’.
  • Cincinnati business and political leaders debated (at the local Rotary Club, of course) where the city should build a new arena, which is a nice way to avoid discussing the $560 million in sales taxes, alcohol/tobacco/cannabis taxes, and rideshare surcharges that it’s currently proposed the city spend on the project. Mayor Aftab Pureval said of the arena, which would be the new home of the Cincinnati Cyclones ECHL team, looks like, and that’s it: “We’ve got to do everything we can not to kick this down the road again, but to come together as a community, have a call to action and decide, ‘Yes, we’re doing it,’ and that needs to happen now.” Or, you know, “No.” “No” is also a decisive action!
  • Ohio state senate president Rob McColley says if the state is going to put $600 million into a new Cleveland Browns stadium, “There would have to be an ability to be paid back.” That’s a reasonable demand for state lawmakers to make, though McColley went on to say “I think there very well could be conversations regarding that going forward, but we’ll see,” which makes it sound less like a requirement than a thing that legislators will maybe ask for but not refuse to do a deal without, doesn’t anybody ever read my articles?
  • The Salt Lake Tribune ran a big article on whether history shows kicking back property taxes to a new Utah baseball stadium would require taxes to be raised elsewhere, and while I will freely admit I lost track of some of the fiscal details when it started talking about “mosquito abatement districts,” the answer is yes, obviously yes, cutting property taxes in one place either causes them to rise elsewhere or for services to be cut, that’s how math works.
  • There are new renderings for the Buffalo Bills stadium that is costing New York taxpayers $1 billion and costing Bills fans a pile of money in PSL fees, and they come with extra fireworks! Also a quote from NFL stadium consultant-for-life Marc Ganis about how the stadium will feature “airiness and interaction” and not for “a sophisticated urban environment where people want to get dressed up and go to the game” but for “fans who take great pride in showing up when it’s snowing,” all of which is a nice way to say “We could have built a roof but that would have been too expensive, you live in Buffalo, deal with it.”
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Texas judge blocks Spurs arena subsidy vote until somebody can explain how much it’ll cost

access_time personNeil deMause

Good news, everyone! Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai says he’s not going to put a tax subsidy for a San Antonio Spurs arena on the May 3 ballot, because nobody knows how much tax money would actually be involved:

State law allows the county to raise the hotel portion of the tax to 2%.

Asked Tuesday if raising the tax was part of the discussion, Sakai said, “Those are all preliminary questions that need to be addressed.”

At least, there won’t be a public vote until November at the earliest, by which time the judge (yes, Texas counties are run by judges, it’s left over from when Texas was its own country) hopes to have those questions answered: “We are moving forward to find the win-win solution in this complex issue that we call the new Spurs arena.”

Finding a “win-win” in funneling an unknown but huge amount of money to the local NBA owner to replace a 22-year-old arena seems like a challenge, especially when one main argument for is “locals bring visitors because of the authenticity,” but sure, okay. The basic principle of “maybe people should know what they’re voting on before they vote” is a good one, so here’s hoping that Sakai actually gets Spurs owner Peter Holt and the city to cough up some financial details before moving ahead with a public ballot measure. If nothing else, it might make those polls Holt has been doing of San Antonio residents on the arena plan more valid if there’s an actual dollar figure involved.

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Arizona official forms “advisory committee” to raise Coyotes from dead

access_time personNeil deMause

The Arizona Coyotes don’t have an arena to play in or an actual NHL franchise or an owner, really, but they have one thing you haven’t got: a friend in Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chair Tom Galvin, who plans to form an “advisory committee” to “explore options” to bring the Coyotes back from the dead:

“I cringed when local politicians took glee in the demise of our hockey team,” Galvin said. “I think of Wayne Gretzky’s quote: ‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.’ So, I’m forming an advisory committee of visionary leaders.”

Local politicians didn’t actually take glee in the demise of the Coyotes, and it was actually Wayne Gretzky’s dad that said that, but whatever! The point is, Galvin is forming an advisory committee, which will have people on it, “smart, credible people who know how to do things the right way” — you know what, let’s just let Galvin keep going on this, he’s on a roll:

Galvin said two big questions need to be answered for hockey to return to the Phoenix metro.

“Who would be the owner? And, where would this building be? It would have to be a world class building,” he said…

Galvin said the situation with the NHL is “different” [from its talks with the Diamondbacks about a potential new stadium]:

“We are not owning a hockey stadium,” he said. “This is about helping promote and convening community leaders to help see how we can get hockey back.”

If you’re a visionary leader who would like to serve on the committee, or maybe have a billion dollars in your pocket and would like to build and own a “hockey stadium,” you can call Galvin’s office at 602-506-7431. He doesn’t actually say he’s interviewing candidates, but it’s pretty clear he needs all the help he can get.

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Field of Schemes