Lots of news this week, starting with the continuing reaction to yesterday’s tragic death of the Tampontreal Ex-Rays:
- While the rejection of his split-city plan by his fellow MLB owners would seem to leave Rays owner Stuart Sternberg in a position to play Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Montreal — and maybe other cities as well like Nashville or Portland — off against each other in a bidding war, he says he intends to focus on Tampa and St. Pete, at least for now, saying during yesterday’s bonkers Zoom press conference, “I’ve never threatened to move the team out of the region. That seems to be 101 in the playbook of getting stadiums and arenas built. It just hasn’t been my way to this point. And people have advised me to do that.” (Yahoo Sports’ Hannah Keyser astutely observes that “telling someone you haven’t threatened them yet — and, indeed, have magnanimously resisted the obvious and apparently advisable temptation to do so — can read a little like a threat.”) Meanwhile, would-be Montreal investor Stephen Bronfman responded like Montreal is out of the running, saying during his own Zoom call, “It’s like a bloody eulogy. I’m just tired. I’m a little upset. We had something so good. We would have proved [to] everyone, we would have made a mark. I think a lot of people in sport would have been listening to us.” Prediction: Sternberg works on getting whatever bidding war going that he can between the two sides of Tampa Bay, since that seems to be what MLB prefers, and if that falters then he can decide which city to start ostentatiously attending hockey games in.
- Speaking of the Oakland A’s, their Howard Terminal stadium environmental impact statement passed a planning commission vote this week, which means the environmental signoff could be headed for a final council vote in February. Of course, there’s still a potential half-billion-dollar budget gap even after the Oakland council gave preliminary approval to $495 million in tax kickbacks, all of which would need to be resolved before a final council vote later this year. Meanwhile, a new poll shows that Oakland residents oppose spending public money on an A’s stadium by 46-37% margin, though given that the maybe-billion-dollars in proposed public money is all for “infrastructure” and not the stadium per se, stadium advocates are claiming that the plan meets this provision anyway. The A’s seem to have backed away from threats to trade all their good young players this winter, which is probably a good idea as it’s tough to build support for public funding for a terrible team, but we could well see this whole threatdown reemerge after the 2022 season, if there is one.
- That lawsuit announced back in March 2020 against the city of Anaheim for selling its stadium land to the Los Angeles Angels without sufficient public meetings is finally underway, with former city manager Chris Zapata and councilmember Jose Moreno filing testimony that the council secretly made the sale decision before holding any public hearings at all. The trial is set to begin on February 14, and man do I hope it will be televised.
- The Buffalo Bills are currently getting about $13 million a year in state money to fund stadium operations under their current lease, while paying only $900,000 a year in rent, according to an Investigative Post report. The Bills lease, which was signed in 1998, is “not much worse than a lot of the other leases out there, but given that the average lease is pretty bad, that’s not really a compliment,” says one stadium blogger whose name you can probably guess even without clicking through to the article.
- The new head of Charlotte’s economic development committee, councilmember Malcolm Graham, said that “Public-private partnership is one that’s obviously going to get a lot of attention over the next 18 to 24 months in terms of some of the things we are working on with some of our local partners,” and indicated that taxpayer money for the Panthers and Hornets could be two of those things. The latest ask from Panthers owner David Tepper was for around $500 million, while Hornets owner Michael Jordan hasn’t put a dollar figure on his request so far that I can tell.
- Las Vegas’ top tourism marketer says that more than half of all Vegas visitors will add an extra visit or stay longer thanks to the presence of the Raiders and Golden Knights, citing … no actual data at all that I can tell? It’s going to be tough in any case to determine economic impact of the new teams given that the pandemic has turned both sports spending and travel spending upside down, but I hope that once we can manage a relatively normal year, the usual economist suspects will do some studies to see if the substitution effect holds for Vegas the same as everywhere else.
- The Single-A Hillsboro Hops want a $60-100 million stadium upgrade, because all the minor-league baseball kids are doing it. No word yet on who would pay for what, but the city of Hillsboro issued an RFP for design and construction work.
- This week’s non-sports-stadium subsidy report: West Virginia is giving $1.7 billion to a steel company for a new plant that will largely employ residents of neighboring Ohio and Kentucky, read all about it.
- A sewage pipe burst at the Los Angeles Rams‘ stadium, time to build a new one!
