Category: Chattanooga Lookouts

Friday roundup: Bears rumors! Titans vaportecture! Coyotes still about to announce something, sometime!

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week in the books! Will “in the books” soon become an anachronism, once there are no more physical books to keep? Or will “books” just become a term for long documents, and future English speakers will wonder why the phrase isn’t “in the spreadsheets”? Has this already happened and I didn’t notice? Gen Z readers, say your piece!

Moving on to the news:

  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren said, “What intrigues me about downtown is I strongly believe Chicago is the finest city in all of the world,” and now everybody thinks this means the Bears would prefer to build a stadium in downtown Chicago rather than it just being a savvy negotiator trying to create leverage for a stadium wherever he can get one paid for by somebody else.
  • Virginia’s billion-dollar-plus subsidy for a Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria may now turn on Metro public transit funding, as Senate majority leader Scott Surovell says “making sure Metro is fully funded is a precondition before we have any kind of dialogue about the arena” while Gov. Glenn Youngkin retorted that he wants to see a Metro business plan first because “they’ve got overhead levels that far exceed any of their benchmarks.” Hey, you know what would help fill Metro’s $750 million budget deficit? Here’s a hint, it rhymes with “bot giving a billion dollars to the local sports team owner,” hth.
  • New Tennessee Titans vaportecture! This time the (imaginary) camera moves but the (pretend) people don’t, so we get a horrorscape of fans frozen in place with their arms flung skywards for all eternity! All except for the rock band that is playing forever to a perpetually frozen audience, and the video boards that show moving replays of a forever-static game, this is the most terrifying Black Mirror episode ever.
  • Former Utah Jazz majority owner (and current minority owner) Gail Miller is buying up land around the site of her proposed baseball stadium for her proposed MLB expansion team, hey at least Salt Lake City has more TV households than Las Vegas.
  • The public cost of the new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium has soared from $80 million to $139 million in the last 17 months, which will be fine so long as an extra $500 million worth of development appears from out of nowhere and pays new taxes that won’t cannibalize existing ones, this is fine.
  • “The Orlando Magic are making millions by selling naming rights to a building the team doesn’t even own,” yup, that’ll happen.
  • “[Arizona] Coyotes on ‘precipice’ of announcing location organization will focus on for new arena,” reports an Arizona Sports headline, then the story itself doesn’t have anyone at all saying the word “precipice” with regard to anything, wut.
  • Baseball stadiums built since the early 1990s have crazy-far upper deck seats, reports Travis Sawchik for The Score, will that change with the latest wave of new buildings? Populous architect Zach Allee says there’s a tradeoff that’s “kind of like a balloon” where “if I say I want to be closer to the field horizontally, it ends up pushing the seats up higher,” which isn’t really how geometry or balloons work, and then Sawchik touts the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium for moving the last row of its upper deck 33 feet closer than the last row in its old stadium, but actually they did this by just removing the last 8,000 seats, this is actually a terrible article, I’m sorry I linked to it.

I’m traveling next week, posts may appear at sporadic and/or unexpected times. Have a good long holiday weekend, or as our Toronto readers know it, Monday.

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Friday roundup: Tennessee, Tennessee, ain’t no place sports team owners hungry for public cash would rather be

access_time personNeil deMause

More stadium news this week from Knoxville and Chattanooga and Nashville, which has had this song stuck in my head all morning. That’s preferable to this one or certainly this one, though, so no complaints.

  • The Chattanooga city council signed off on $80 million in bonds for a new Lookouts minor-league stadium on Tuesday, notwithstanding that economists and even some local political leaders had said it was a terrible idea and 60% of local residents opposed it. The cost will be paid off by $49.8 million in property taxes kicked back from 470 acres around the stadium site, $17.5 million in lease payments from the team, $5 million in kicked-back sales taxes and $3 million in parking fees — assuming all that money comes in as projected, or else Chattanooga taxpayers will be left holding the bag. Also, reports The Center Square, “the property for the stadium, estimated in the announcement to be worth $10 million, will be donated to the stadium authority as part of the deal,” which sounds good until you realize that the stadium authority will now be the proud owners of land it can’t use for anything because it has a private baseball team’s stadium sitting on top of it, and also can’t collect property taxes on it now because it’ll be public property. At least Chattanoogans don’t have to worry about their baseball team moving for 30 years, at least, unless there’s an opt-out clause hidden somewhere in that lease, sorry for being the voice of doom this morning, but it’s why you pay me the big bucks.
  • Construction also started this week on the Tennessee Smokies‘ new $74.5 million stadium in Knoxville, which is likewise getting almost entirely funded by the public. (That whole “threaten to contract teams in order to extort stadium money” thing really is working out great for MLB!) WVLT’s news story on this includes the tidbit: “Both mayors Indya Kincannon and Glenn Jacobs approve the expanded TIF District. They said it’s because of the overall revenue the stadium is expected to bring to the area which is totaled at $480 over 30 years.” Typo or truth in advertising, you make the call!
  • Completing our Tennessee trifecta, here’s a Tennessean article answering “the top five questions” about the new Titans stadium subsidy plan, conducted entirely by quoting the team’s CEO. Oh, does the Tennessean want you to pay them first before you can read the team’s PR statements? Just go read Nashville councilmember Bob Mendes’ rewrites, then, they’re better anyway.
  • Thanks to a clause in the 1998 voter initiative that approved public funding of the Denver Broncos‘ stadium, local governments will be getting a share of the proceeds of the team’s $4.65 billion sale to Walmart heir Rob Walton. The original deal guaranteed a 2% cut of any franchise sale would go to seven Denver-area counties and cities and towns within them; former owners the Bowlen Trust got to subtract $247 million in team debt and $2.4 billion in capital contributions over the years, so the public is left with just a $41 million check. Still, good work by the 1998 government negotiators to get $41 million back on a $289 million public expense just 24 years later, which represents a return on investment of … okay, negative 85.81%, but it is better than nothing, which is what most government negotiators negotiate for, so half a gold star, anyway.
  • Does anybody anywhere even care that the Cincinnati Bengals‘ stadium is now going to be named after some payroll management company? Or that the local phone company has bought the naming rights to a stadium gate? That the Bengals now have a sponsorship deal to have an official canned cocktail? All of these were news articles, for some reason, which also for some reason failed to mention that the county taxpayers who paid for the stadium’s construction won’t see any of the proceeds from all these deals, though one did suggest that they might help fund $500 million in renovations the owners want — history doesn’t actually show that owners having more money makes them more likely to pay for their own stadium costs, but one can dream.
  • Hagerstown, Maryland, is spending $70 million in state money to build a new Hagerstown Suns minor-league baseball stadium, and it will have to spend millions of dollars on land acquisition first. Is that part of the $70 million, or on top of it? Baltimore Sun, anyone there find that out and feel like putting in the article? No? Just an 18-year-old photo of Willie Mays for some reason? Season 5 of The Wire was too kind, in retrospect.
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How to spend tax money on a stadium while pretending it’s not tax money

access_time personNeil deMause

The Tennessee Smokies‘ proposed new stadium is way over budget despite cutting way back on renderings spending, and team owner and local political bigwig Randy Boyd doesn’t want to have to be the one paying the extra costs, lord knows. But the city of Knoxville’s contribution is fixed based on whatever new sales taxes can be generated from the stadium and its surrounding district (plus a few other things, but never mind that right now). What to do? Why, redefine “surrounding” of course:

The Tax Increment Financing district surrounding the publicly-owned multi-use stadium is proposed to expand into the Magnolia Avenue Warehouse District – several blocks beyond what was originally planned…

“The stadium will be a catalyst that creates new economic opportunities in East Knoxville and brings new quality-of-life improvements to nearby families,” Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon said. “It will generate additional investment and create jobs. By expanding the TIF district, those direct benefits to the community can come faster.”

Um, just no. Expanding the tax increment financing district — really a STIF district, since it’s sales taxes that are being siphoned off, not the more usual property taxes that typify a TIF — would just cannibalize more existing city revenues, something that economists have already pointed out will be a problem if spending in the stadium district is just displaced from somewhere else in the city. By taking several more city blocks and kicking back sales taxes from them to Boyd, the city would just be increasing Boyd’s take at the expense of the city treasury — I guess if you consider the stadium a “direct benefit to the community,” then giving Boyd more money to build it faster will speed that up, but I’m pretty sure treating English that way violates the Geneva Convention.

Boyd and Mayor Kincannon don’t even win the Tennessee state prize for most egregious explaining away of added public subsidies, though, because over in Chattanooga, where the Lookouts owners are seeking their own taxpayer-funded stadium, we have this:

City officials are refuting one source and telling News 12 that the size of the Lookouts Stadium tax increment financing district hasn’t ‘grown’ from 120 acres to 470.

It was always that larger size.

This despite a mayoral aide telling the Chattanooga Times Free Press that he and other city officials literally walked around the proposed stadium site, looked at neighboring parcels, and thought, “Why not include those? We said, ‘OK, that will be in the district.'” But you can’t really blame them, they were undoubtedly just trying to bring direct benefits to the community faster, and what better way to do so than to give more tax money to the local sports team owner? It’s like an isosceles triangle!

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Friday roundup: Thunder owner wants 20-year-old arena replaced, Nevadans hate idea of A’s stadium subsidy

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry for the relative paucity of posts this week — I’ve been a little under the weather (not Covid, or so the test strips say), and the stadium news cycle was taking a bit of a summer break, anyway. But things have started picking up again toward the end of the week, and nothing will stop me from my appointed Friday rounds, so away we go:

  • We start off with the latest news, which just broke late yesterday: Oklahoma City Thunder owner Clay Bennett, who is in the middle of spending $115 million in taxpayer money on upgrading his 20-year-old arena with new restaurants and video boards and the like, has put the project on hold because he might just want a whole new arena instead. “Obviously we want a long-term relationship with professional sports in this city,” said Mayor David Holt in yesterday’s State of the City address. “And to do that, you have to have facilities that are current and competitive.” Being built in 2002 doesn’t count as “current” anymore, apparently, even with three rounds of renovations that were costing $214 million total, because the arena doesn’t have enough “room for all the other elements of user experience” that aren’t watching basketball, though isn’t that what adding new adjoining buildings with new restaurants was supposed to be about? Anyway, even with the Thunder signing a new lease extension until 2026, Holt says the city needs to get cracking on a new arena, because “we have non-NBA cities checking our pulse every morning” and “if we want to be a top 20 city, we have to act like it” — he didn’t say whether Bennett would move the Thunder back to Seattle or what if he didn’t get what he wanted, but sometimes the most effective threats are the ones that leave the details to listeners’ imagination.
  • Clark County residents oppose “allocating taxpayer money in the budget for new sports stadiums similar to what was done to fund the Allegiant Stadium for the Las Vegas Raiders” by a 62-17% margin, yup, they’ll do that. Maybe the Oakland A’s aren’t getting a new stadium in Las Vegas so fast after all if their Oakland plans fall through — sure, elected officials can and do ignore the public will all the time, but given that public statements from Nevada officials about luring the A’s with a stadium have been lukewarm at best, this really does start to smell like savvy negotiators seeking leverage.
  • Knoxville’s $74.3 million Tennessee Smokies stadium subsidy may be getting held up as a model compared to the $79.4 million the Chattanooga Lookouts owners are demanding, but it turns out that $74.3 million figure may not be the final one: Rising interest rates and supply chain issues have the price tag soaring to “not yet been determined,” which means that Smokies owner Randy Boyd’s promise not to ask for any additional public funds may go by the wayside. Neither Boyd nor the government entities involved in the stadium have actually signed any of the stadium agreements yet; both sides say they plan to come up with a plan to cover cost overruns by a July 26 meeting of Knoxville’s sports authority, but would it be crazy to suggest that “Getting too rich for our blood, let’s call the whole thing off?” be at least considered as an option?
  • Speaking of the Lookouts, a Hamilton County commissioner wants to adjust the county’s spending plan to have the team owner front the money and the county repay him with tax money instead of having the county cover costs directly, because at least that would protect the public in case tax increment financing revenues fell short. This is not a terrible idea, though “don’t use tax increment financing at all, it’s almost always a terrible idea” might be an even better idea.
  • New Orleans is set to get a new USL franchise, because pretty much every city is, which will play in oh, someplace. No talk yet of how much a theoretical stadium would cost or who would pay for it, plenty of time for that once soccer fever has taken hold beyond the pages of Nola.com.
  • Some Brooklyn elected officials want New York City to impose a $10 million fine on the developers of the Pacific Park project (which used to be called Atlantic Yards, and which originally included the Nets arena though later those two elements were split between two different developers, really you don’t want to know all the details) because they failed to build a contractually promised “urban room” community space — one of the politicians called this a “field of schemes,” which, you know, it’s always nice to be part of the conversation, even if unintentionally.
  • The Portland Trail Blazers owners may or may not be trying to get a new arena to replace its (gasp!) 27-year-old one, but in the meantime they’re getting about a $1.5 million a year property tax discount thanks to a generous reassessment of the value of the old arena after they went to court to demand one, it really does pay to be able to afford the best lawyers.
  • Oh, did I forget to mention that the Chicago Bears owners’ response to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s proposal last week to put a dome on Soldier Field was “Nuh-uh, we only have eyes for Arlington Heights, at least right now?” Well, it was, but that happened all the way back last Friday after last week’s roundup was published — I may just need to place a moratorium on things happening after 9 a.m. on Fridays, don’t make me do it.
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Chattanooga reporter asks pro-stadium officials about $79.4m stadium subsidy, declares “studies are mixed”

access_time personNeil deMause

As noted on Friday, the proposed Chattanooga Lookouts stadium set to receive $79.4 million in public money has gotten more side-eye than the proposed Tennessee Smokies stadium set to receive $65 million in public money, possibly because the Lookouts aren’t owned by this guy. Anyhoo, this weekend the Chattanooga Times Free Press took the opportunity to see what economists thought of the Lookouts plan, and came back with this headline:

Would a new Lookouts stadium pay off for taxpayers? Studies are mixed.

Are they now? One constant in the (good god, really?) 27 years I’ve been following this stadium crap has been that economists are remarkably of one voice on the payoff of sports subsidies, and that voice says you’d be better off throwing your money out of a helicopter. What studies and/or economic experts did the Times Free Press consult, and what did they say?

  • “Just about every researcher and economist that has looked at this issue, both for major and minor league sports, agree that stadiums for a particular sport rarely create enough new economic development and activity to offset the public subsidies that they receive.” —Mandy Pellegrin, policy director for The Sycamore Institute (actually a public policy professor, but at least cites economic studies)
  • “Take whatever number the sports promoter says, take it and move the decimal one place to the left. Divide it by 10, and that’s a pretty good estimate of the actual economic impact.” —Victor Matheson, College of the Holy Cross economist

…and that’s it. No actual studies are cited, and it doesn’t look like reporter Dave Flessner even bothered to read the ones that Pellegrin described. (There are a few good ones here, for starters.) But at least they called, well, hmm, Matheson’s quote is actually from a “report,” which turns out to be an Atlantic article, so maybe Flessner didn’t call any actual economists or read any studies, that’s not great.

But wherefrom that “Studies are mixed” thing in the headline, then? There are some pro-stadium-subsidy voices in the article, and they consist of:

  • Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger, who says “this is about so much more than a stadium” but also “it’s the taxes we get.”
  • Gary Chazen, president of the company that owns the land where the stadium would be build, declares, “You need an iconic gateway catalyst like the stadium to make something like this happen.”
  • A study commissioned by the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce determined that a new stadium would generate $305.1 million in new spending, as determined by, oh no, it’s Conventions, Sports and Leisure International, run!
  • “These ballparks [in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Columbia, South Carolina] are in use constantly with a variety of events and that makes them a major attraction for visitors, residents and businesses,” says Jason Freier, president of Hardball Capital, which, let’s see, is the owner of the minor league baseball teams in Fort Wayne and Columbia — and, oh yes, of the Lookouts themselves.

So, to recap: A story claiming, “Would a new Lookouts stadium pay off for taxpayers? Studies are mixed” actually reports on no studies, and most of the people quoted on whether the stadium would pay off are actually set to benefit personally from the stadium subsidy. Sweet.

Am I being too hard on this poor reporter (in both senses of the term), who probably came into this story having to get up to speed on the issue with no background in … okay, he’s the paper’s business editor and has been a reporter for 35 years, scratch that. But even if this had been written by some underpaid intern who had another nine stories to crank out that day, stories like these are deserving of being called out, because they play a vital role in the sports-media  ecosystem: There’s a huge difference between reporting “studies disagree about whether stadium subsidies pay off” and “economists and politicians disagree about whether stadium subsidies pay off,” and only one of them is actually true.

Before we go, does J.C. Bradbury — not cited in the Times Free Press article, naturally, though he’s looked into the Lookouts stadium deal before — have anything to say about this piece?

Pretty much. That whole “democracy dies in darkness” thing is seeming less like a warning and more like a prophecy.

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Friday roundup: The minor-league stadium shakedown will continue unabated into our glorious future (plus: FIRE!)

access_time personNeil deMause

This was a short week but it felt long to me, though at least nobody interrogated my cat about whether I would be resigning, so there’s that. Anyway, we have a big stack of Other News ahead of us, so let’s dive in:

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Friday roundup: A’s stadium plan gets a win, Maryland’s “pro-stupid” ticket kickbacks, and, oh yeah, the death of democracy

access_time personNeil deMause

Some of you, if you read here back in April about New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s commitment of $1 billion in public money to a new Buffalo Bills stadium and about how New Yorkers of all stripes were overwhelmingly opposed to it, may have wondered if handing over tax money to billionaires would come back to haunt Hochul at election time. Well, the Democratic gubernatorial primary was this week, and: Not so much, as Hochul won in a landslide over challengers Jumaane Williams and Tom Suozzi, who both criticized the stadium deal, if mostly after the fact.

This is one of the big questions about stadium deals: If voters generally don’t like them, why do they keep electing politicians who do? I explored this in my latest article this week for Global Sport Matters, and the answer is money is more powerful than people, mostly:

So why are politicians so quick to kowtow to team owners’ requests, even against the wishes of their own constituents? [Villanova University sociology professor Rick] Eckstein says he thinks they probably fear the loss of campaign funding more than the loss of votes, especially when, with enough campaign funding, you can just run ad campaigns to win those voters back…

The unrelenting pressure on legislators is only heightened by the sports media, which can make a stadium deal seem more important than shown by objective data, whether economic impact figures or polling numbers. “There’s this complete misconception of how popular sports is,” Eckstein says. Nearly half of Americans don’t consider themselves sports fans, he notes — but those who do are more likely to be male and have high incomes. “It’s important to people who happen to have more money, more power, more resources,” he says.

Those damn elected officials, always chasing the next buck! Good thing our system of democracy has checks and balances so that other branches of government can counter those with deep pockets who want to run roughshod over public opinion — er, never mind.

On that sobering note, here’s the rest of the week’s news:

  • The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission voted 23-2 last night to remove Howard Terminal’s designation as a port facility, which opens the door for Oakland A’s owner John Fisher to use it for a stadium-centered development project. This is being called a huge — sorry, HUGE — win for Fisher, and it is in that without it he would have had to give up on his Howard Terminal stadium plans. But it’s also not entirely unexpected, and anyway the commission didn’t actually approve his stadium plans, just approved allowing him to apply for a permit for them, plus he still needs final approval from the city council and for someone to find $360 million under sofa cushions to pay for the rest of the traffic upgrades Fisher wants. Easy-peasy!
  • Hey, remember when the state of Maryland gave the Baltimore Orioles owners (whoever that turns out to be) $4.5 million from the state’s share of Paul McCartney tickets for no good reason? Then you will perhaps enjoy the news that the Maryland Stadium Authority has now given the Baltimore Ravens owner $150,000 from an Arsenal-Everton soccer friendly match for no good reason. Maryland Treasurer Dereck Davis says he’s “seriously considering” asking for legislation that would prohibit the authority from doing this stuff, adding, “There’s a difference between being pro-business and being pro-stupid. And I’m not pro-stupid.”
  • Tennessee already approved state sales tax kickbacks for a new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium, and now it’s time for the Lookouts owners to drop their other planning shoe: the announcement of an $89-94 million stadium that would get $79.4 million in tax money, including both those sales taxes and also a tax-increment financing district to kick back property taxes from the area around the stadium as well. The Lookouts would pay rent starting at $1 million a year plus cover maintenance costs, which team co-owner Jason Freier called “extraordinarily high for a minor league team” and which Mister Math says would still only be a small fraction of his stadium costs, so quit doth protesting too much, hmm?
  • Could the Chicago Bears owners build a minor-league baseball stadium to host “four to six teams of undrafted college players” (read: unpaid player-interns) next to their new Arlington Heights football stadium? Do they really even have the money to build the football stadium? Nobody’s saying, but that won’t stop the Chicago Tribune from speculating wildly, that’s just what journalism is now.
  • A developer in San Antonio is looking to buy land for building a baseball stadium, which would be paid for by … nobody actually knows, nor does anyone know whether this would be for a potential MLB team or for the minor-league Missions, the article just ends there, this is also just what journalism is now. See what Rick Eckstein means?
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Friday roundup: Commanders stadium subsidy dies (for now), Brewers stadium subsidy enters

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday already! Lots to get to, so let’s get to it:

  • The Virginia bill to provide $300 million toward a new Washington Commanders stadium is officially dead, after its state senate sponsor pulled it following comments by team defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio calling last year’s Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol a “dust-up.” A D.C. city councilmember also claims that a majority of that council is opposed to a stadium on the RFK Stadium site, both because they don’t want to end up paying for it “no matter what promises the Commanders make” otherwise and also because of Del Rio’s remarks. This is the kind of dead that you can recover from, mind you — Commanders execs issued a statement saying they’ll continue to work on finding a stadium site, and Sen. Richard Saslaw said in throwing in the towel on his bill that “There were just so many things out there that a lot of people are saying, ‘Saslaw, this thing needs to wait’” — so expect to see this revived in a year or two when either Dan Snyder has finally given up and sold the team, when people have forgotten about Jan. 6 amid the monkeypox pandemic, or when at least Del Rio has been fired either for his loose lips or for being bad at his job.
  • A Milwaukee County supervisor wants to develop part of the Brewers parking lots into an entertainment “Beer District” — like the Bucks’ “Deer District,” get it? — with the resulting increased property taxes kicked back to the team for future stadium improvements. Brewers president of business operations Rick Schlesinger replied: “Could the real estate here be part of a solution? Sure. Do I know what that would look like? No.” That’s clear as mud, then, but it does seem like “develop a bunch of public land and give the proceeds to the Brewers” is on the table, at least, so keep an eye on this one.
  • The Sycamore Institute, a seven-year-old “nonpartisan” think tank that is not to be confused with the think tank of the same name at American University in D.C. that formed four years later but somehow grabbed the better domain name, issued a report this week totaling up $1.8 billion in sports subsidies the state has proposed for the Tennessee Titans, Nashville Predators, Tennessee Smokies, and Chattanooga Lookouts, and concluded that that’s a lot of money and such public spending rarely pays off. There’s not much in the report that’ll be unfamiliar to readers of this site — the report’s conclusion is “When evaluating these proposals, policymakers at all levels of government should carefully consider the potential benefits and costs,” which is about as nonpartisan as you can get — but it has a nice list of footnotes to past research and articles on the topic, including my 2011 essay for The Nation “Why Do Mayors Love Sports Stadiums?“, so it’s worth keeping handy for the next time you need to win a Twitter argument by dumping facts on your opponent. (No, this is not actually how Twitter arguments work, but it’d be nice to live in that world, wouldn’t it?)
  • Kansas City could get a new NBA team, according to … uh, the graphic designer for the Royals? Slow news day, KSHB-TV, or did you just really want the clicks from all the people old enough to miss the Kansas City-Omaha Kings?
  • Saskatoon’s nonprofit events center wants to build a soccer stadium, and is generously offering to put up $2 million, while the owner of an expansion Canadian Premier League franchise would put up another $2 million, so long as local government or (waves arms around vaguely at “the community”) puts up the other $24 million. They’ve also included a bunch of economic impact claims and a rendering of a stadium with no fireworks but weirdly synchronized glowing fountains, so you know they’re serious.
  • Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien is asking Rhode Island for an extra $30 million for a soccer stadium on top of the $46.2 million the state is already providing, on the grounds that “We lost the PawSox because of a lack of leadership. And hopefully we don’t lose this.” Pawtucket doesn’t actually have a soccer team, so it wouldn’t technically be “losing” something it never had in the first place, but it does sound a bit better than “money’s all gone, please send more,” anyway.
  • Hosting World Cup games in Atlanta could bring $500 million in economic benefits, says a study done by a “leading global management consulting firm”; hosting World Cup games in Nashville won’t bring in anywhere close to $700 million like a city tourism agency report claims, say every economist Center Square reporter Jon Styf could find. Guess we’ll all just have to agree to disagree, too bad there’s no way to tell whose numbers are correct by looking at evidence or something!
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Friday roundup: Everybody hates Dan Snyder and his stadium plans, A’s could (maybe) get (some kind of) public money in Vegas

access_time personNeil deMause

Reporting in briefly from a country that blocked Google News, so the news net may let a few things slip through this week:

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Friday roundup: At least your state isn’t giving $1.5B in tax breaks to an electric-car factory (unless you live in Georgia, in which case I’m sorry)

access_time personNeil deMause

We made it through another week! Well, if you’re here reading this, you did, anyway. Let’s celebrate with some mostly depressing news:

  • The Erie County legislature hasn’t voted to spend $250 million on a new Buffalo Bills stadium yet, but deciding how to vote is for suckers, they’ll just be focusing on which $250 million to spend. (If you’re wondering why the linked article says that Erie County plans to somehow save money by adding a quarter-billion dollars in debt, that seems to be because the state is pouring in $160 million toward future operating expenses that the county was on the hook for at the old stadium; I can’t be bothered to try to parse the Buffalo News’ “reporting” this morning, but suffice to say that spending $250 million still costs $250 million in this part of the multiverse, at least.)
  • The Atlanta Journal Constitution is concerned that if more Cobb County areas form their own cities and take hotel tax revenues with them, the county will have less money to pay off its $300 million in Atlanta Braves stadium debt. This feels like mostly a bookkeeping issue to me — if new cities siphon off tax revenues, that’s bad for the county whether they have to pay for a stadium with it or not — but I’ll leave it to the next J.C. Bradbury paper (or tweet) to figure that out.
  • The Arizona Coyotes are officially moving into Arizona State University’s new 5,000-seat arena! Which, yes, was already announced as official back in February, but now it’s officially official. ASU will get to keep parking, naming-rights, and sponsorship revenue, while the Coyotes will get ticket and merchandise sales and a cut of concessions, plus is working on ideas for raising money via “branded content” and “fan activation” and, okay, they’re just making up marketing terms now, let them have their fun.
  • The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission has granted its approval to the new Oakland A’s stadium plan … or maybe just released a staff report recommending that it be approved? It all depends on whether you trust Front Office Sports’ unsourced reporting as far as you can throw it, which I don’t particularly recommend, just look at that shifty acronym!
  • The Chattanooga Lookouts owners are getting a pile of state sales tax money to help pay for their new $86.5 million stadium, so much for the pandemic forcing the team to stay at its 22-year-old stadium for a minute longer.
  • In non-sports news, Georgia is giving $1.5 billion to an electric-car manufacturer to open a plant east of Atlanta, which is a record for a public subsidy for an auto plant. But don’t worry, it’s supposed to create 7,500 jobs, which is only a cost of $200,000 per job, which is a terrible ratio compared to literally pretty much any other thing you could spend public money on, where’s my helicopter?
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