Category: Richmond Flying Squirrels

Friday roundup: St. Pete council says loud parts quiet on Rays stadium, A’s Vegas plans get even murkier

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week has run its course, but before we get to the remaining news tidbits, we have one new news item to attend to:

The St. Petersburg city council took up its discussion of a Tampa Bay Rays stadium project yesterday, and team execs led by releasing a pile of new renderings, no doubt figuring correctly that even if they don’t show much more than the old renderings — we still don’t see the inside of the stadium, for one thing — they’d still dominate the news coverage. Rays execs still had to answer questions at the council “workshop,” though, and questions there sure were, including about guarantees that affordable housing will be built, why the city should be on the hook for $142 million in infrastructure costs, whether the community benefits agreement could provide more community benefits, and whether the projected tax revenues to pay for the whole mess depend on monkeys flying out of J.C. Bradbury’s butt.

Nobody on the council appears to have asked the “$1.5 billion in public subsidies, really?” question, though. Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano, who’s staked out a position as a critical-but-not-too-critical advocate for the deal, called this “refreshing” because “no one attacked it as a nonsensical corporate giveaway.” (Karla Correa of the St. Pete Tenant Union did say “We desperately need public housing, we don’t need more of these public, private partnerships” and “we should not be giving away upwards of a billion dollars of our taxpayer’s dollars,” but she said it at a protest outside the council hearing, so she doesn’t count, I guess.) One of the more critical councilmembers, Richie Floyd, when asked if there were enough votes on the council to kill the deal, said “no,” so it sounds like the council debate will mostly be nibbling around the edges; there’ll be another workshop session next month, which may shed more light on the likely endgame.

Okay, now the news tidbits:

  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher may have selected the site of the old Tropicana hotel for a new Las Vegas stadium, but it turns out he and landowner Bally’s still don’t know which part of the site the stadium would go on, and NBC Sports has the explanation: “because the project’s master plan has yet to be completed.” That’s, uh, not actually an explanation, it’s just saying the same thing a different way? Anyway, add “Where exactly will it go?” to “How will it fit?” and “Who will pay for it?” and “Will the public money approved so far get overturned by referendum or lawsuit?” on the list of unanswered questions about the soon-to-be officially cityless Athletics franchise’s future stadium plans.
  • Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens says he’s against giving $600 million in state money toward $1.2 billion in public funding for a $2.4 billion Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, because “we don’t have $600 million to give” and “it’s really easy to not support it when you don’t have it.” Then Stephens said he would prefer to raise the money by selling bonds, which suggests he either isn’t really against it or doesn’t understand that bonds have to be repaid somehow — apply Hanlon’s Razor as you see fit.
  • DaRon McGee, the Jackson County legislator who introduced the sales tax hike plan to funnel $500 million or so to the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs for stadium projects before it was trounced in a public vote, turns out to have asked the Royals’ stadium front man and team owner John Sherman’s personal assistant for box seats to a game in the run-up to negotiations. McGee says it’s all cool, he paid for the tickets now that somebody noticed, get off his case, okay?
  • The Richmond city council voted to issue $170 million in bonds to build a new stadium for the Double-A Flying Squirrels, to be repaid by hotel and restaurant tax surcharges in the stadium district. The plan was immediately met by a lawsuit from local attorney Paul Goldman saying the bonds should have gone to a voter referendum; Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney dismissed Goldman as a “gadfly,” which is at least better than the time Goldman successfully sued to block a casino project and got called “a white Jew with a background of Judas,” so, progress?
  • Albany and New York state officials are talking about building a $75 million minor-league soccer stadium as part of a $300 million downtown redevelopment, to be paid for by “still unknown.” Gov. Kathy Hochul is involved in the talks, though, so we can probably guess what direction this is headed.
  • The Atlantic ran an overview this week of the state of stadium subsidies, and while I could nitpick a couple of things — crediting Camden Yards for the new-stadium boom leaves out the earlier formative effects of Toronto’s Skydome and Chicago’s New Comiskey Park, and shutting off the supply of federally tax-exempt bonds wouldn’t really be the most effective way to eliminate the problem — but I get quoted saying, “Teams need a place to play, and if local governments told them to pay a fair rent or go pound sand, owners would have little choice but to go along,” so I wholeheartedly endorse it.
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Friday roundup: Titans inch closer to $1.26B in public cash, O’s looking to replicate Braves’ ballpark district somehow?

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to the end of another week, wherein I have bookmarked an article on why we never have enough time but haven’t found time to read it. I want to consider whether this qualifies as real irony or the Alanis kind, but I apparently don’t have time for that either, so it will have to be left as an exercise for readers — today’s comments should be fun!

And now, on to more things we didn’t have time for this week:

  • The Metro Nashville council passed a bill on Tuesday to issue $760 million in bonds for a Tennessee Titans stadium — part of a larger $1.26 billion public commitment for a $2 billion stadium— even though nobody knows exactly where the money would come from to pay off the costs. This is one of those things where the council has to vote multiple times on the same thing, though, so the real final approval vote is set for April 4, by which time maybe some of those questions will be answered, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. “I don’t even think we should be going through the farce of the first reading on a bill this massive with this big of a price tag when we have an administration that didn’t answer our most basic questions and give us the information that we needed,” said councilmember Ginny Welsch, one of 10 councilmembers to vote against the bill, which is more than the eight who voted against a similar proposal back in December but there are 40 members on the council total, hence the recommendation against breath-holding.
  • Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is preparing for lease extension talks with the owners of the Baltimore Orioles by visiting the Atlanta Braves‘ stadium district, which Maryland Stadium Authority chair Craig Thompson noted “is looked at and admired by some as a model.” Sure, okay, but it was also built on completely vacant land in the suburbs, while Camden Yards is in the middle of the city and surrounded by existing buildings, including a historic warehouse that was turned into an Orioles mall that is also looked at by some as a model, where are you going with this, guys?
  • The Richmond Flying Squirrels‘ stadium is getting $3.5 million in city-funded upgrades even though it’s set to be replaced by a new one soon because MLB threatened to annihilate the team otherwise, as MLB does. “Richmond is just on fire right now and we’re really, really excited,” said Flying Squirrels COO Todd “Parney” Parnell, which, too soon, Parney.
  • Hey, remember when Virginia “won” the race to host Amazon’s new second headquarters by offering up $750 million in subsidies? How’s that going? Oh.
  • Haven’t had enough bullet points yet? Please enjoy this list of bullet points about the many ways corporate subsidies in New Jersey are messed up! My favorite is how the state Economic Development Authority gets more money for its own budget the more tax breaks it hands out, what’s yours?
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Friday roundup: The only thing crumbling faster than the Saddledome roof is American journalism

access_time personNeil deMause

And so we come to the end of another week, one where I’ve been reading a lot about bears and consensual cannibalism. (But not among the bears. Bears are above considering such things, presumably.) But anyway, you want to hear about more pleasant things, like, uhhh, the terrible state of journalism in 2022? Maybe I should consider adding some more bears to these posts.

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Friday roundup: Buffalo wants to change Earth’s orbit for Bills, plus when is a USL stadium vote not a vote?

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, look, it’s Friday again! I realize that I sometimes tell me about my week, but I seldom ask about yours. How’ve you been? Anything interesting going on? What’s that, you’ve already abandoned this paragraph and have skipped ahead to the bullet points where all the real news is? A reasonable response, I completely understand, let me now do the same—

  • Lots going on in the Buffalo Bills stadium campaign, for certain values of “going on”: On Tuesday, six members of the nine-member Buffalo Common Council passed a resolution calling for “strong consideration” to be given to locating a stadium in Buffalo instead of at the current site in suburban Orchard Park, complete with renderings showing the sun setting in the northwest; residents of the Old First Ward, one site being maybe considered for a Buffalo stadium, told WGRZ that they wouldn’t welcome an NFL stadium as a neighbor; and the Erie County Legislature voted to require at least three public hearings before any stadium deal is approved. Since the real question remains “Who the hell is going to pay for this thing, and how much?”, the rest is all pretty much just distraction right now, but at least we’re starting to see who’s lining up to fight about what once there’s something to fight about.
  • A supporter of New Mexico United‘s $68 million USL stadium plan has filed an ethics complaint against the opponent group Stop the Stadium, saying the group needs to register as a political action committee because it’s spent more than $250 on flyers opposing the plan. The real news, meanwhile, comes way down in the last paragraph of the Albuquerque Journal article, which reveals that a pro-stadium PAC funded entirely by New Mexico United owner Peter Trevisani has already banked $840,000 toward mail and TV ads — if the 100-to-1 rule holds, that probably bodes well for the stadium vote’s success, which would be a great return on investment for Trevisani, spending $840,000 to get $46 million in taxpayer cash.
  • Also about that New Mexico United stadium vote: The Journal reports that because the stadium bonds would be paid off with sales and use tax revenues and not property tax revenues, it’s actually just an advisory vote; the paper also notes that the wording of the ballot measure is confusing, since at one point it refers to “gross receipts tax revenue bonds” (sales tax money) and at another to “general obligation bonds” (property tax money), but since the vote isn’t binding anyway, what’s a little contradictory wording among friends?
  • Richmond wants to build a new stadium for the Flying Squirrels and is seeking developers to create a stadium-anchored “entertainment destination” district, which will hopefully “minimize public investment and risk and maximize private investment,” yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it. The Flying Squirrels are threatening to leave town in 2025 without a new stadium, not because they want to, mind you, but because MLB is forcing teams to upgrade their stadiums as part of its takeover of the minor leagues, I warned you this would happen, didn’t I?
  • Along the same lines, the Eugene Emeralds say they need a new stadium by 2024 or else MLB will vaporize them. No price tag or location yet, take hostages first, figure out your demands later.
  • The owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox are seeking to develop 53 acres of city-owned land near the teams’ spring-training site in Glendale, and if you’re wondering why the teams get to develop city-owned land, it’s all part of the deal where Glendale spent $150 million on a new stadium complex to lure the teams back in 2007. It’s kind of starting to make sense that Glendale city officials’ new policy toward sports teams is not to let the door hit them on the way out.
  • Not Tempe, though, which is planning a $50 million renovation ($40.9 million of it paid for by the city) to the Los Angeles Angels‘ spring-training stadium, to “improve the fan experience by adding shade” and “modernize the food court and the restrooms,” which haven’t been modernized since way back in 2005. Good ol’ Tempe, bet the Coyotes will be very happy there.
  • That Tampa Bay Times editorial stumping for a new Rays stadium surely has nothing to do with one of the developers leading the push for a stadium has loaned the paper $15 million, right? Surely a coincidence, not anything that would require a printed disclosure!
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Friday roundup: Jacksonville council holds screaming match about Jaguars subsidy, Braves to charge county for fixing anything that wouldn’t fall out of stadium if you turned it over, plus Texas cricket wars!

access_time personNeil deMause

I admit, there are some Fridays where I wake up and realize I have to do a news roundup and it just feels like a chore after a long week, and, reader, this was one of those Fridays. But then I looked in my inbox and there was a new Ruthie Baron “This Week In Scams” post for the first time in months, and now I am re-energized for the day ahead! Also despondent about how the fossil fuel industry is trying to catfish us all into thinking global warming isn’t real, but that’s the complex mix of emotions I have come to rely on “This Week In Scams” for.

And speaking of complex mixes of emotions, let’s get to this week’s remaining sports stadium and arena news:

  • Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry on complaints that Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s $200 million development subsidy deal is being rushed through the city council: “What does that mean, it’s rushed? What does that mean? We are following the process we follow as a city. The administration has put forth legislation that includes the development of Lot J. The City Council will take their time and do their work. And then they’ll ultimately have to press a green button or a red button — a yes or a no.” Now I really want to know if the Jacksonville city council actually votes by pushing a green or red button, and if so what they do if a city councilmember has red-green color blindness, and oh hey, what happened at yesterday’s council hearing? “Finger-pointing, name-calling and what some members say was a big embarrassment for government”? Excellent, keep up the good work.
  • The Atlanta Braves owners have tapped their first $800,000 from their $70 million stadium repair fund, half of which is to be paid for by Cobb County, to pay for … okay, this Marietta Daily Journal article doesn’t say much about what it will pay for, except that one item is a new fence, and there was dispute over whether a fence counted as a repair (which the fund can be used for) or an improvement (which the team is supposed to cover). It also notes: “Mike Plant, president & CEO of Braves Development Company, described capital maintenance costs in 2013 by using the example of taking a building and turning it upside down. The items that would fall out of the building represent general maintenance, which is the responsibility of the Braves, while the items that do not fall out, such as pipes, elevators and concrete, fall under capital maintenance.” This raises all kinds of questions: Would elevators really not fall out of a stadium if you turned it upside down? What if furniture, for example, fell off the floor but landed on an interior ceiling? Would you have to shake the stadium first to see what was loose and just stuck on something? So many questions.
  • The Grand Prairie city council has approved spending $1.5 million to turn the defunct Texas AirHogs baseball stadium into a pro cricket stadium, which the Dallas Morning News reports “could cement North Texas as a top U.S. market for professional cricket.” (If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of nearby Allen, Texas, which thought about building a cricket stadium a couple of years ago but then thought better of it.) I went to a pro cricket match in the U.S. once, years ago, and there were maybe 100 people in the stands, and later the league apparently folded when none of the players showed up for a game, but surely this will go much better than that.
  • Angel City F.C. has announced it will be playing games at Banc of California Stadium, which made me look up first what league Angel City F.C. is in (an expansion team in the National Women’s Soccer League) and then what stadium named itself after Banc of California (the Los Angeles F.C. stadium that opened in 2018, I’m pretty sure at no public expense but you never know for sure with these things, and which is not supposed to be called Banc of California Stadium anymore since Banc of California bailed on its naming-rights contract in June) and then why Banc of California insists on spelling “Banc” that way (unclear, but if it was an attempt to put a clean new rebranding on the bank after its creation in a 2013 merger, that maybe didn’t go so well). So now, burdened with this knowledge, I feel obligated to share it — if nothing else, I suppose, it’s a nice little microcosm of life in the early Anthropocene, which may be of interest to future scholars if the cockroaches and microalgae can figure out how to read blogs.
  • The Richmond Times-Dispatch says that even if the Richmond Flying Squirrels get eliminated in baseball’s current round of minor-league defenestration, “Major League Baseball’s risk is our gain” if the city builds a new stadium that … something about “a multiuse strategy”? The editorial seems to come down to “Okay, the team may get vaporized, but we still want a new stadium, so full speed ahead!”, which is refreshing honesty, at least, maybe?
  • When I noted yesterday that the USL hands out new soccer franchises like candy, I neglected to mention that a lot of that candy quickly melts on the dashboard and disappears, so thanks to Tim Sullivan of the Louisville Courier Journal for recounting all the USL franchises that have folded over the years.
  • Six East Coast Hockey League teams are choosing to sit out the current season, and that’s bad news for Reading, home of the Reading Royals, according to Reading Downtown Improvement District chief Chuck Broad, who tells WFMZ-TV, “There is lots of spin-off, economic development, from a hockey game for restaurants and other businesses.” Yeah, probably not, and especially not during a time when hardly anyone would be eating at restaurants anyway because they’re germ-filled death traps, but why not give the local development director a platform to insist otherwise, he seems like a nice guy, right?
  • In related news, the mayor of Henderson, Nevada, says the new Henderson Silver Knights arena she’s helping build with at least $30 million in tax money is “a gamechanger” for downtown Henderson because “it’s nice to have locations where events can happen in our community.” This after she wrote a column for the Las Vegas Sun saying how great it will be for locals to be able to “attend a variety of events that create the vibrancy for which our city is known” — a vibrancy that apparently Henderson was able to pull off despite not having any locations where events can happen, because that’s just the kind of place Henderson is.
  • In also related news, the vice president of sales and marketing at New Beginnings Window and Door says that the Hudson Valley Renegades becoming a New York Yankees farm team could be great for his business (which, again, is selling windows and doors) because “the eyeballs are going to be there” for advertising his windows and doors to people driving up from New York City who might want to pick up some windows and doors to take home with them, okay, I have no idea what he’s talking about, seriously, can’t anybody at any remaining extant newspapers ask a followup question?
  • And in all-too-related news, here’s an entire WTSP article about the new hotel Tampa will have ready for February’s Super Bowl that never even mentions the possibility that nobody will be able to stay in hotels for the Super Bowl because Covid is rampaging across the state. Journalism had a good run.
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Friday roundup: County might buy Richmond a minor-league ballpark, ticket prices soar at new Crew stadium, plus more athletes giving each other the ‘Rona

access_time personNeil deMause

It was a big news week, what with the Anchorage mayor who resigned after being slandered as a pedophile by the anti-masking news anchor he’d been sexting with before she was arrested and fired for beating up her boss/fiance, and the new book about the libertarian town in New Hampshire that was ravaged by bears, and probably something about the election, I dunno, who can remember? So you are forgiven if you missed some of this week’s stadium and arena news, much of which focused on fans breathing all over each other inside them, but not all, not by a longshot:

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