Author: Neil deMause

Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends host the Olympics, and other cautionary tales

access_time personNeil deMause

Last week I teased a big project of mine that would drop this week, and it went live yesterday morning: a 57-page report, commissioned by Los Angeles economic justice advocacy group Strategic Action for a Just Economy, on whether L.A. can or should be trying to extricate itself from its hosting obligations for the 2028 Summer Olympics — something some local critics have suggested, especially in the wake of the city’s wildfire crisis and budget crisis and  immigration enforcement occupying force crisis. You can probably get a pretty good sense of the report’s findings from its title, “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t,” but if you want slightly more details, here’s the nut graf:

While there are numerous unknowns—the history of the Olympics shows that budget questions are never resolved until it’s far too late, a path that L.A. has headed down with its agreements for the 2028 Games as well—the available documentation and history of international event hosting shows: Yes, if Los Angeles officials, or voters, decided to withdraw from hosting the Olympics, they could do so. This would come at the risk of potentially billions of dollars in damages from a breach-of-contract lawsuit and losses from expenses already undertaken. However, continuing as host also comes with a potential risk of losses that, if history is any guide, could similarly amount to billions of dollars.

The report also contains a wealth of information about Olympic financial history, including other locales’ attempts to back out of hosting major international sporting events for fiscal reasons (the Denver 1976 Winter Olympics that never happened, plus the 2026 Commonwealth Games that the Australian state of Victoria bailed on in 2023 amid concerns about snowballing costs), as well as mention of my new favorite Olympic factoid: that time they held a Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan and nobody knows how much it cost because the local organizing committee literally set fire to its financial records. It’s all here, dig in if you’re in the mood for a long, enraging read — or if not, you can instead read the excellent summaries in Torched (which includes a quote from me on this week’s revelations about L.A. Olympics chief Casey Wasserman’s history with Jeffrey Epstein) and LAist.

And now that that’s off my plate, I have plenty of time for stadium and arena bullet points, and good thing, too, because this week brought craploads of them:

  • The Wyandotte County Commission followed suit with its neighbors in the city of Olathe and voted 7-3 to approve devoting local sales and hotel tax revenue to pay off part of the state’s $2.775 billion in bonds for a new Kansas City Chiefs stadium and surrounding development. The county, to be clear, gets absolutely nothing out of kicking in its own funding (total price tag still TBD), given that the state has indicated it will go ahead with the stadium deal regardless. Kansas City, Kansas mayor and county commission chair Christal Wilson, who didn’t vote because no ties needed to be broken, wrote on Facebook that she thinks kicking in county money is warranted because it gets the county “a seat at the table” — okay, though it’s questionable whether getting to sit at the table is worth having to split the check.
  • Indiana state Rep. Earl Harris Jr. on his bill to create a sports authority to build a Chicago Bears stadium in northwest Indiana with money from (feigns coughing fit until you go away): “Indiana does sports things like this very well. When you look at the Pacers, the Colts, the Speedway, we’re very good at figuring out a good financial plan that does not hurt the taxpayer.” Um, about that…
  • Will the Portland Trail Blazers move if the city and county decline to spend $600 million on upgrades to their arena? It’s an “urgent race against time” and “the clock continues to tick,” writes The Oregonian, citing a deadline of … huh, seems like they didn’t mention any deadline, must have run out of room. (Though there was room for “Are you ready for the Nashville or Kansas City Trail Blazers?” to cite two cities that are not particularly shopping around for NBA teams.)
  • Tampa sports radio host JP Peterson insists that spending upwards of $2 billion on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium is warranted because it “will produce millions in tax revenue and bring major events, Super Bowls, National Championship games, World Baseball Classic, MLB All-Star games” — [citation needed], my man. Also, I can save you some time: Even if a new baseball stadium does bring in millions in tax revenue, from hosting, uh, football games, when it costs hundreds of millions a year in tax expenditures, maybe that’s … not good?
  • Speaking of the Rays, fresh Rays vaportecture! I’m sticking with my comment from yesterday: Glad to see the Rays acknowledge that even after a future stadium is built, fans still won’t buy jerseys with player names because they know they’ll be sold off as soon as they reach arbitration.
  • And if you want still more Rays commentary from me, I spoke with both WMNF radio and Tampa Bay 28 TV about the ongoing dispute this week; the former is much longer, the latter offers a view of what I have on my living room walls, pick your poison.
  • Just in time for the Super Bowl (what time does it start again?), here’s a Top 40 list of things the NFL demands from Super Bowl host cities. It’s impossible to pick just one favorite, but equally impossible to beat “three championship-level 18-hole golf courses and two top-quality bowling alleys, free of charge.”
  • Plans to build an Indy Eleven a soccer stadium for a new MLS team on Indianapolis’s former heliport are on hold because something about not rewarding a city that “continues to thumb its nose” at ICE; the FAA will soon be weighing in on the matter.
  • Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has met with NBA commissioner Adam Silver, though not in the sense of actually meeting meeting like in person, and “offered to be helpful in bringing back the Sonics” as an NBA expansion team. Seattle already has a practically brand new arena, though by the time the NBA is ready to expand it could be pushing 10 years old, is that too soon to ask for upgrades?
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says Spurs owner Michael Dell donating $6 billion to Donald Trump’s “Trump accounts” savings plan “really pissed me off” because “if you can give $6 billion for these accounts, you could have paid for your own arena.” But then Dell wouldn’t have those billions he saved by getting taxpayers to build his arena! Sounds like somebody doesn’t understand what the whole point of being a billionaire is. (Hint: It’s getting billions of dollars, not spending it.)
  • And finally on the Rays front, Frank Nockels of Land O’ Lakes, Florida asks: “If we pay for half of the Rays’ new stadium, can we get free tickets?” Ian Betteridge has some bad news, Frank.
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Hillsborough County considers raiding infrastructure fund to give $1.15B to Rays

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Hillsborough County Commission set to meet to discuss plans for a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium yesterday, on Tuesday Rob Manfred showed up in Tampa to meet with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and generally do Rob Manfred things. “Baseball belongs in Tampa Bay. Baseball can succeed in Tampa Bay,” DeSantis told reporters, while Manfred took on the more difficult jobs of trying to impose a sense of urgency in a stadium battle that’s been going on for decades, saying, “We’re at a point in the history of the club that something needs to get done.” DeSantis also said that he would be “looking to help” fund new Hillsborough College buildings on one portion of its Dale Mabry campus with state money, so the rest of the site can be handed over to the Rays.

As for how the public’s expected $1.15 billion share of the $2.3 billion stadium would be paid for, DeSantis didn’t breathe a word. So when the county commission sat down to discuss the plan yesterday, they had some questions. In particular, commissioners wondered if it would be kosher to use money from the county Community Investment Tax — a half-cent sales tax surcharge first approved back in 1996 — for a Rays stadium, given that when the CIT was renewed in 2024 two years before its initially planned expiration, it was designated “to fund infrastructure for transportation and public works, public safety, public facilities, public utilities and public schools” and the commission specifically promised that it wouldn’t be used for new sports facilities:

“We promised everyone on the public record that the CIT numbers would be ineligible,” [Commissioner Joshua] Wostal said. “We have not even began to collect that tax, and here is a suggestion that we already deceive the taxpayers that we made a promise to no less than two years ago.”

Commissioner Chris Boles echoed the concern.

“When voters approved the CIT, the discussion language primarily focused on maintaining the existing facilities, strengthening public safety and supporting core infrastructure,” said Boles, who was not on the board at the time. “And that, I believe, intent still matters today.”

Both Wostal and Boles stressed that they still might vote for a stadium deal, and indeed the commission voted unanimously to move ahead with negotiations with Rays ownership. But with Commissioner Ken Hagan already declaring that “this agreement does not happen without the CIT,” it looks like the first negotiations will be among county commissioners about whether it’s okay for a county without a ton of tax revenue streams to scrounge up $1.15 billion by first raiding the infrastructure and schools budget.

The Tampa Sports Authority, meanwhile, also met this week to discuss the Rays plans, and revealed that it will eventually release two, let’s call them “reports”, by their favorite consultants Skanska and AECOM — one on whether the $2.3 billion stadium will actually cost $2.3 billion, the other reviewing the Rays’ own economic projections for the project. (The AECOM report is expected to be ready by April 1, the Skanska one will be sometime later.) Board member Andy Scaglione also asked if anyone had appraised the value of the Dale Mabry campus (nope) and how much money was available in hotel tax funds for tourism spending that could go toward a stadium ($11-12 million, which won’t go far toward that $1.15 billion nut).

There’s still a lot to be worked out here, in other words, and while there’s no real deadline, presumably Rays owner Patrick Zalupski wants to get everything settled while his pal/$250,000 campaign PAC donation recipient DeSantis is still in his last year in office. Resolving a decades-old stadium demand by having a county with limited tax resources fund the biggest MLB subsidy in history will be no easy needle to thread, but you can bet that everyone involved is busy warming up their needle-threading fingers.

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Olathe council unanimously approves Chiefs subsidy after just two hours of discussion; Wyandotte County to follow tomorrow

access_time personNeil deMause

Both Wyandotte County, where a new Kansas City Chiefs stadium would be built under a proposal by the state of Kansas, and the city of Olathe, where a Chiefs training facility would go, held hearings yesterday to hear from residents on whether they should kick in local tax money to help the state pay off what could total $4 billion in subsidies for the combined project. Despite only having since Friday to look over the plans, residents turned out in force to speak their minds:

  • In Olathe, the hearing was “standing room only” as “many spoke against the ordinance, while a few spoke in support of the proposal,” according to KSHB, with many wondering if the city will be able to make up for the lost tax revenues and complaining about the rushed timetable for the proposal to give the Chiefs virtually all city taxes from a 165-acre sports district: “I feel this is not a public hearing, this is a presentation of what has already been decided,” said one resident, Pete Marsh. This proved to be foreshadowing, as the city council listened for two hours, then promptly approved the tax district in a unanimous vote.
  • In Wyandotte County, which under its proposal would kick in all of its future sales and hotel taxes from a 200-acre district around a new stadium in Kansas City, Kansas, more than 50 residents testified, many likewise expressing concerns about the cost in lost taxes and the lack of information on the hastily arranged deal: “I think the people need more information,” one speaker said. while another pleaded, “Please, be transparent.” Unlike in Olathe, Wyandotte commissioners said they would put off a vote — for two whole days, with a final decision on the tax district to be made in another hearing tomorrow at 5:30 pm.

To be clear, neither of the new local tax districts would increase the total amount of money going to Chiefs ownership. Rather, city and county tax money would defray some of the state’s costs of paying off $2.775 billion in bonds for the stadium and surrounding development, which otherwise will come from state taxes collected across a mammoth 293-square-mile swath of Wyandotte and Johnson Counties. (This is a different tax district from the Olathe and Wyandotte County tax districts, something one article in particular seems very confused about.) And while some may insist that redirecting all the tax money collected by the county and city in and around the stadium and practice facility for the next 30 years is bonkers, local officials insist that the lunch will be entirely free:

“As I see it, we’re not currently generating any sales tax on this otherwise empty spot of land, there’s really nothing to lose here,” Olathe Councilman Matthew Schoonover said.

Yes, it’s the Casino Night Fallacy again, where any money that is so much as touched by a team is considered to belong to the team, even if it’s tax money that any normal business would pass along to pay for government services. To follow Schoonover’s argument to its logical extreme, no one should ever pay any taxes, because if you didn’t exist, the government wouldn’t collect anything — try telling the IRS that “I should owe no income taxes this year, because if I had quit my job I wouldn’t have earned any income” and see how far that gets you, but when you’re a sports billionaire, suddenly this is standard business practice.

Instead of Schoonover’s “What if nothing were built?” thought experiment, let’s consider this in terms of two other hypotheticals:

  • What if the city and county held on to the land and it were used for something else? Once the Chiefs tax districts are carved out of local budgets, that land and any money it could generate is gone forever. Losing the opportunity to make future tax revenues off a parcel of land may be a bit more abstract than losing tax dollars that are currently being collected, but it’s just as much of a cost to local taxpayers.
  • What if spending in the Chiefs tax districts gets cannibalized from elsewhere in the local area? If somebody builds a restaurant across from a Chiefs stadium and the only people who eat there are fans who otherwise would have spent their money across the border in Missouri, that’s indeed a net positive; if anybody eats there who would otherwise be eating somewhere else in the county, though, that’s money coming directly out of local government’s existing budget, no future hypotheticals needed.

Or looked at yet another way: Chiefs owner Clark Hunt wants to get the benefit of intercepting all the taxes paid in and around his team facilities and spending it on himself, while all costs associated with any new development — roads, police and fire protection, any schools needed to educate the kids of new residents in a mixed-use district — will fall entirely on city and county taxpayers.

Exactly how much city and county tax money is at stake here? We don’t know, as neither Olathe nor Wyandotte County appears to have tried to calculate the total tax expenditure during the four whole days legislators had to think about it. Wyandotte commissioners promised more information at tomorrow’s meeting; hopefully residents will have time to read it before the commission votes to rubber-stamp the deal.

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Rays owner now demanding $2.25B in public stadium spending, land, and tax breaks

access_time personNeil deMause

We finally have a price tag on how much Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski wants in spending by Hillsborough County to help build a $2.3 billion stadium in Tampa:

A notice for the meeting says the Rays would pay at least half the cost of a stadium. The rest could come from tourist bed taxes or increases in property taxes collected from the surrounding area after a stadium is built.

So if Zalupski is asking for the county to cover half the cost of building a $2.3 billion stadium, that’s $1.15 billion. (Whether county hotel tax receipts plus increased property tax proceeds would be enough to raise $1.15 billion is a question no one appears to have asked yet, though I suppose they could always just make the stadium tax district the size of the entire county, as one does. WUSF also suggests several other funding options that could be on the table, including a Community Development District and hotel and car rental tax surcharges.) The cost of providing state-owned land has previously been estimated to be at minimum $250 million, plus the Rays would duck out of $839 million worth of future property taxes and parcel fees over the course of their 99-year lease. Add it all up, and you’re at something like $2.25 billion in taxpayer subsidies that Zalupski is requesting, which would be by far the biggest public spend on a stadium deal in MLB history.

Or, if you’re the Tampa Bay Times, you go with this glass-half-full headline:

Rays tell Hillsborough they’ll cover at least 50% of Tampa stadium cost

Focusing on the fact that the billionaire who just bought the local sports team plans to cover half the cost of a stadium that he’ll receive all the revenues from, instead of the fact that he’s asking the public to cover the other half, is certainly a choice. (As is describing the team as having “honed in on” Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry campus, which is not the actual phrase, but that’s a separate issue.)

The meeting referenced above is tomorrow’s Hillsborough County commission meeting, which kicks off at 9 a.m. — the official agenda doesn’t actually mention anything about a Rays stadium, though it does helpfully include a link to a giant image of an American flag. With any luck, we’ll get some questions then about why the county should gift Zalupski more than $2 billion just so the baseball team he bought for $1.7 billion can increase in value; maybe we can even hope to get some answers, but we probably shouldn’t push our luck.

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Royals owner threatens to move team to counties that no longer want him

access_time personNeil deMause

What’s a sports team owner to do when his bidding war is running out of bidders? If you’re Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman, you just keep on pretending you have bidders anyway. Reports KMBC-TV:

Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman said the team is still exploring stadium options on both sides of the state line.

Sherman made the comments at a “Royals Rally” at Kauffman Stadium Saturday.

He said the team is focused on finding a place to develop a mixed-use site for year-round entertainment.

Sherman also said Clay County is still in play to be the home of the Royals.

Okay, sure, cool. Sherman can also still be “exploring” stadium options in Greensboro or the middle of Central Park or Antarctica, that doesn’t actually help if those places aren’t exploring giving him money as well. Unless, of course, he thinks that making this kind of statement will result in headlines about how his Royals could still move to Kansas and so Kansas City, Missouri needs to step up with subsidies … oh. Oh.

Just straight-up lying about whether you have other stadium offers is pretty shameless, but hey, it’s worked before. Though none of those involved Kansas City in any way, so (checks notes) … oh. Oh. In that case, give Sherman his Nobel Prize for Chutzpah right now, nobody’s going to top that this year.

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Chiefs practice field in Olathe would break new ground in siphoning off city tax money

access_time personNeil deMause

Two local Kansas governments will be holding public hearings tomorrow on possible subsidies for a new Kansas City Chiefs stadium to defray the state’s possibly insurmountable costs. Wyandotte County holds its first public hearing at 5:30 pm, and the city of Olathe in neighboring Johnson County, where a Chiefs practice field would be built, will follow at 6 pm. Olathe apparently plans to vote on stadium funding at its meeting, and accordingly has published its plan, which is a doozy:

  • The legislation would create a 165-acre tax district around the new facility for diverting city taxes.
  • Within that area, all city sales tax revenues, the city’s share of county sales tax revenues, and 7% of the 9% city hotel tax — except for any money already pledged to paying off other projects — would be redirected to the Chiefs to cover the team’s development costs.

Economist J.C. Bradbury weighed in over the weekend to call this “bonkers,” and it indeed would break new ground in siphoning off tax money for a stadium: Olathe wouldn’t be just giving up increased tax revenues like in a TIF, but all sales and hotel tax revenues within the tax district, for the next 30 years. (At least the tax district is smaller than the state’s incredible 293 square miles, but that’s a low bar for comparison.) The likely practice field site is currently undeveloped, at least, so Olathe wouldn’t be losing much in existing taxes; unless, of course, a Chiefs development lures away businesses that would otherwise locate elsewhere in Olathe and moves them to the tax-subsidy district, which is pretty likely.

Meanwhile, economist Geoffrey Propheter chimes in to note that rezoning the practice field site as exempt from property taxes would cost the city about $37 million in present value of lost future tax revenue. No one has yet attempted to calculate how much Olathe would give up in future sales and hotel tax money.

At this point, the best-case scenario for Olathe might be that it turns out no one wants to open a ton of hotels and restaurants and other businesses around a practice field that’s only open to the public a handful of days a year, and there’s not so much local tax revenue to lose. Or the city council could just say, “We get all the hassle of hosting a Chiefs practice field but the Chiefs keep all the tax money? No thanks.” We’ll find out tomorrow night.

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Friday roundup: Chiefs stadium deal still not finalized, Royals even less so

access_time personNeil deMause

Pressed for time here on a bunch of projects (I’ll be able to reveal more about one next Thursday or Friday), so let’s take a brief spin through the rest of this week’s news:

  • Wyandotte County will hold a public hearing sometime in the next three weeks to help decide whether to put some amount of city and county sales taxes into a Kansas City Chiefs stadium that would be built somewhere in the county. Meanwhile. legislators from both parties are criticizing the deal as “tax giveaways for billionaires.” The Chiefs deal isn’t falling apart or anything, but it does still have a lot of t’s to cross and i’s to dot before Clark Hunt can cash his $4 billion check.
  • Clay County officials said three weeks ago that they were no longer talking with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman about building him a new stadium, and now the county commission has announced that the deadline has passed for putting a stadium measure on the April ballot. Royals stadium sites are truly falling like dominoes (I don’t think that’s actually how that metaphor works, but sure, close enough).
  • It’s been almost four years since the Los Angeles Angels‘ sweetheart stadium land deal was torpedoed by an FBI fraud and bribery investigation into then-Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu, which means it’s about time for city officials to start bringing up the prospect of a new stadium land deal. Councilmember Natalie Meeks, who proposed the agenda item, seems open to ideas — selling the parking lots around the stadium for quick cash, leasing it out for development for slow cash, turning it into open space — and any proposal will also have to deal with the state’s Surplus Land Act, which requires that any sale of public land prioritize affordable housing. City officials say they haven’t talked with Angels owner Arte Moreno about any of this, which will probably be necessary, only hopefully this time with fewer federal investigations.
  • ICE is going to be present at the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, and Batman will not stand for it.
  • The owner of a dead mall in Phoenix wants to get one of those “theme park districts” to divert tax money to a new domed women’s soccer stadium. Tasmania says hold my beer.

 

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Indiana senate passes bill to create stadium authority for Bears, still mum on how much or what tax money to provide

access_time personNeil deMause

The Indiana senate yesterday overwhelmingly passed its bill to create a sports authority for a potential Chicago Bears stadium, and let’s see how the local news media handled it:

WNDU-TV: “Indiana Senate passes Chicago Bears stadium funding bill“

Bzzzzt, nope! The sports authority bill contains no funding at all, though it does describe a bunch of potential funding sources, including “local excise taxes,” which include both vehicle fees and taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, as well as food and beverage and hotel taxes. The state legislature will presumably still have to vote to direct any taxes to the Bears, as well as figure out which taxes to use, which could easily set up a Kansas-style “How big a stadium district and how much of the taxes get counted as ‘new’?” dilemma.

Indianapolis Star: “Indiana Senate approves bill to finance NFL stadium with eye on Chicago Bears“

Not a whole lot better, even if technically “finance” is more accurate than “funding,” since “How will you finance your home purchase?” can be truthfully answered “By taking out a 30-year mortgage” even if the answer to “How will you fund paying off that mortgage?” is “Sell blood plasma, ig?”

Indiana Capital Chronicle: “Indiana’s bid for the Chicago Bears gains momentum with Senate vote“

Getting warmer, if only because “momentum” is such a nebulous term that putting it in a headline becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the main measure of momentum is whether it results in headlines about your newfound momentum. The ICC article has more details than the others, at least, including Indiana state senate sponsor Ryan Mishler acknowledging that the bill “just creates the framework” and that “a lot of other details will need to be added,” yeah, no kidding.

None of this quite rises to the level of a competing bid, but it does allow Bears execs to wave an Indiana move threat under Illinois officials’ noses, where it already looks to be having an impact. In fact, a non-offer could be better for the Bears than a real offer, because this way they can use it as leverage for whatever they want from Illinois, rather than Illinois elected officials being able to go, “Okay, what Indiana offered you, plus $1.” Nebulousness is the father of leverage, as Jerry Reinsdorf probably never said, but should have.

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Rays stadium cost set at $2.3B, public share still TBD

access_time personNeil deMause

The proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium at Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry Campus in Tampa may not have a design or a funding plan, but it does now have a price tag: $2.3 billion, according to Tampa Sports Authority CEO Eric Hart. And that’s just the stadium itself, before the cost of a planned surrounding mixed-use development, or the cost of relocating college facilities to one corner of the campus to make room for the stadium district, or the cost of acquiring the land from the state in the first place (assuming Rays owner Patrick Zalupski plans on paying anything for that, which only he and his lame-duck pal Gov. Ron DeSantis know).

As for where the money for all this would come from, Rays CEO Ken Babby made clear that a bunch of it would be on taxpayers’ tab:

“We need a great public/private partnership where the community, whether it be the county or the city or both, the state, all come together to build something really special here for Tampa Bay. That’s how we’re thinking about it.”

Fox13’s Evan Axelbank has a little more on possible revenue sources: The Rays owners, he said, are “considering a host of options, including community redevelopment funds, hotel taxes, car rental fees and the creation of special taxing districts that would take money from the development itself.” (Note to Evan: A special taxing district doesn’t really take the money from the development itself.) There would also be the value of getting to use all that state land — somewhere between $250 million and $1.7 billion, according to economist Geoffrey Propheter — plus getting out of paying property taxes for 99 years and parcel fees, which he just guesstimated at $839 million in present value. Total public price tag: Who the hell knows, but “way over $1 billion” seems a fair bet.

Tampa and Hillsborough County elected officials, who would have to sign off on any stadium subsidies, are so far saying all the right things about how any plan has “gotta be good for taxpayers, it can’t just be good for [the Rays],” but there’s still a long ways to go. After Hart added that the Rays would provide an economic analysis of the stadium project, the sports authority voted unanimously Tuesday to recommend that the city and county conduct their own study. Hart again:

“That’s why you’re seeing me doing economic analysis, because I think that would give better answers to be able to answer all your questions,” Hart said. “So right now, I would tell you that there’s ingredients, but there’s no soup. So it might be premature for us to say they’re at a point or not. There’s nothing like that at that level.”

I’m not sure there’s even ingredients yet, really, but it’s your metaphor, go with it. One thing’s for sure: Whatever the mystery soup ends up having in it, it’s likely to be really, really expensive.

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Missouri state rep claims KC mayor attempting $500m end run around voters on Royals stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Amid increasing talk that Missouri officials are readying a stadium offer to Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman despite all the other bidders having dropped out, state representative Mike Jones dropped this on Facebook yesterday:

I have recently learned that Mayor Quinton Lucas is seeking to direct approximately $500 million in Kansas City taxpayer funds through the KC Port Authority for the Kansas City Royals. This proposal would move forward without a public vote, and efforts are being made to keep the plan out of public view.

No sourcing at all from Jones, and Mayor Lucas immediately denied he had any such designs on sneaking through public money without a public vote, promising that he would put any stadium funding plan before the city council for approval. That didn’t satisfy Jones, however, who said he’ll introduce legislation to require a public referendum — of voters, not just councilmembers — before any state expenditure of more than $100 million on a sports facility.

Requiring a public ballot isn’t a death knell to stadium plans: They’re still approved by voters a little over half the time. But that’s still a way lower winning percentage than they have in legislative bodies — and given how things went at the polls the last time Sherman tried to get state tax money, the question of who gets to decide on any Royals subsidies is likely to be a big deal in any Kansas City stadium talks. If nothing else, Jones going public about the risk of an end run around public oversight puts public oversight squarely into the discourse, and that can never be a bad thing for the remaining fans of democracy.

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