Category: Tennessee Smokies

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: Jays plan $¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in SkyDome renovations, figure it out yourself, journalism can’t help you

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! I don’t know about you, but for me this was a great week: I got a new coffee mug, and also it’s now almost over! The week, I mean, not the mug. You’re smart, you probably figured that out already.

And now, how’s about some news:

  • The Toronto Blue Jays owners are planning $230 million in renovations to the stadium formerly known as SkyDome but now named for the team’s corporate owners, or maybe it’s $300 million in renovations, what is money, anyway, especially Canadian money? The CBC’s report says that the redo will include saying “goodbye to the nosebleeds,” as the top 500 level deck will be “completely removed and replaced with non-ticketed spaces,” and oh, here’s a rendering with the 500 level still very much visible, hmm. The stadium is owned by the Jays after Ontario built it and took a huge bath on it, so presumably the renovations will be funded by the team, though Jays president Mark Shapiro called this just a “medium-term solution,” so there’ll still be plenty of time to demand a new stadium later, don’t worry.
  • WPRI in Providence breaks down why Pawtucket’s new USL soccer stadium will cost taxpayers $60 milllion and not $45.5 million like its developers claim, which is helpful and all, except when you add up all the numbers it actually looks more like $80 million? ($46.2 million in state tax breaks, $10 million from the city, plus $27 million in additional money redirected from state infrastructure spending — yup, that’d be more than $80 million.) The fog of stadium wars is soupy indeed.
  • If the Philadelphia 76ers owners succeed in building their own Center City arena and no longer renting from the Flyers, “The companies that would benefit are Live Nation and AEG, because they would have two buildings in Philly to play off each other, so the rent expense would go down,” former Spectrum manager Ed Rubinstein tells Venues Now. “That’s the reason why we never wanted another arena built.” This would be the Sixers owners’ problem, on the one hand, but also Philly taxpayers’ problem if the idea of giving the Sixers arena a giant tax break would be to help the local economy when it would only end up shuffling concert spending around from one part of town to another.
  • There are new Tennessee Smokies stadium renderings, and — oh, come on, you’re not even trying! I get that the plans need to be downscaled some because the stadium is over budget, but at least you can afford some clip art fireworks or people playing random sports. Show some self-respect.
  • Somebody dug up this consulting report that everyone’s favorite economist-for-team-hire Andy Zimbalist did on mixed martial arts — okay, sure — and I must report that previous reporting that Zimbalist earns $225 an hour for his services is out of date: His “customary rate,” he wrote in the 2017 document, is actually $850 an hour. And that’s before any surcharges Zimbalist now imposes for supply-chain issues. Please draw your own conclusions as to whether that rate could be an incentive to report the findings that your client is hoping for, or at least look really hard for them.
  • Your occasional reminder that sports team owners don’t have a monopoly on getting billions of dollars in public money for no damn reason: Here’s a report on Kansas giving Panasonic $800 million in subsidies for a battery factory in exchange for a commitment of zero new jobs, and here’s Bernie Sanders talking about how a new bipartisan bill to compete with China on electronics somehow involves giving $76 billion to microchip companies. The New York Times called the latter “a remarkable and rare consensus in a polarized Congress,” which is both true and all too telling about what our elected representatives (and major newspapers) can agree on.
  • “It’s morally corrupt that new arenas for professional teams worth billions of dollars are majorly publicly funded — especially when the tax dollars could be going to other areas in the city in actual need of the money,” writes Norman Transcript sports reporter intern Clemente Almanza of devoting public dollars to a new Oklahoma City Thunder arena like the team’s owners want, “but” — you knew there was a “but” coming — “that comes with the territory of having a franchise. 18 of the 29 NBA arenas are owned by a government multiplicity” — he’s an intern, he can’t be expected to own a dictionary — and “losing the Thunder would cause catastrophic levels of damage that the state would never recover.” Um, you don’t want to recover the damage … hey, Norman Transcript, don’t you have any copy editors? No? I guess “let the intern sit down and keyboard out a column on why a new arena is necessary” is just how journalism goes these days — that coffee mug gets righter and righter every day.
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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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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: 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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Knoxville approves Smokies stadium bonds, this is all over but the shouting about even more tax subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

The Knoxville city council yesterday followed their kin on the Knox County Council in approving $65 million in public bonds for a new downtown Tennessee Smokies stadium, the bulk of which will be repaid by future city and county tax money. The city council vote wasn’t unanimous like the county vote — the final tally was 5-1, with two abstentions — but the measure still passed.

And that, pretty much, is that. This was the last vote by an elected body on the stadium project, as everything from here on will be negotiated between Smokies owner Randy Boyd and the freshly created public sports authority, which is run by a bunch of developers and financiers and the “longtime President of the Knoxville Quarterback Club,” so you know you can totally trust them to look out for the public purse. Boyd is already talking about starting construction in time to have the new stadium open by spring 2024, so barring celestial intervention, it looks like Knoxville just won itself one of the priciest Double-A stadiums in history.

How pricey for taxpayers, exactly, will depend on a bunch of things: I already did a long writeup on the financial numbers in September, so go read that, or settle for the tl;dr version of “not the whole $74.5 million stadium cost, but a hell of a lot more than nothing.” If the key implement in the 21st-century stadium-subsidy-grubbers’ toolbox is impenetrable complexity, Boyd has produced a masterpiece, featuring rent payments and “payments in lieu of taxes” and future sales taxes that may or may not come in and/or cannibalize existing tax revenues, and have your eyes glazed over yet?

And that’s not including one piece still to be voted on by the city and county, which is additional subsidies for the development around the stadium, because what self-respecting wealthy former gubernatorial candidate would build a whole stadium district without, ahem, “incentives” for every piece of it? Given that tax receipts from the rest of the development are supposed to help pay off the stadium bonds, one would think that the council might have wanted to ensure that the whole package was approved at once rather than letting Boyd piecemeal his way to more and more tax kickbacks — but, you know, surprises can be fun, too! Tune back in in a decade or so, when maybe we’ll have a final public cost, or maybe just Boyd demanding more subsidies for a stadium upgrade to keep MLB from vaporizing his team once his ten-year licensing agreement expires in 2031. (Oops, sorry, spoilers!)

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Knox County approves $65m in Smokies stadium bonds after squinting hard enough to pretend it’s not really $65m

access_time personNeil deMause

The approval of $65 million in public bonds for a Tennessee Smokies Double-A baseball stadium continues to steam ahead, with last week’s approval by the local stadium authority followed up by yesterday’s unanimous vote by the Knox County Commission to approve the bonds after nine whole minutes of discussion. Labor groups had been pushing for a delay in the vote to allow for a community benefits agreement to ensure at least local hiring and a living wage for jobs related to the project — Smokies owner Randy Boyd has refused to sign anything, but says not to worry, you can trust him to do right because he’s a local guy — but county commissioner Dasha Lundy explained her vote this way:

“I choose right now to be optimistic. I think it’s a great opportunity for our city and county to do something right. … With that being said, let’s play ball,” she said.

Well, okay, perhaps that’s not so much “explained” as “explained away.” The Knoxville News Sentinel also paraphrases her as expressing that “the project can build wealth, particularly Black wealth,” but doesn’t say if she explained why she believes that, either. Maybe she just trusts Boyd because he’s a local guy?

The News Sentinel also includes this explanation (sorry, I think this word has been totally devalued now) of how the stadium funding will work, which is worth following along with because it’s an excellent example of how team owners can handwave away public costs through the power of advanced mumbling:

The expected debt payment every year is roughly $3.2 million in tax money combined for the city and county.

That is offset by the team’s $1 million rent payment and a payment in lieu of taxes estimated to be roughly $750,000. That brings down the total debt payment to roughly $1.5 million. The sales tax revenues from the ballpark and surrounding retail complex are expected to bring the total to $480,000, which split between the city and the county at $240,000 each a year.

If things go as planned, the $240,000 a year that both Knoxville and Knox County would pay should decrease and the complex would, by year 10, pay for itself.

Things start off well enough: The combined city/county debt payments are indeed expected to be $3.2 million a year, though this is discounting the $13.5 million in state funds that would also go toward the $74.5 million stadium. And Boyd would pay $1 million a year in rent, leaving the city and county on the hook for $2.2 million a year.

All the rest of the money, though — the payments in lieu of taxes (which would normally be regular property tax payments, only Boyd is giving the land to the city so he won’t owe property taxes on it) and the sales tax revenues from the ballpark district — is tax money that would be kicked back to Boyd. “A new minor-league stadium for the local rich guy would cost taxpayers $2.2 million a year, but if we hand over enough tax money it would eventually pay for itself” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but if you keep saying it loud enough, apparently it’s good enough for 21st-century journalism work.

Boyd’s argument is that since this tax money would only be collected at the stadium if the stadium exists, it’s really not tax money at all — which will likely be familiar to longtime FoS readers (or Odd Couple fans) as the Casino Night Principle. And it ignores the fact that any taxpayer could make the same argument for why they should get to pay their taxes and keep them too, and that the whole point of taxes on development is to pay for the added costs of supporting new development with roads and schools and police and fire protection and whatnot — but you know, I already went over this with Amazon, just go read that for a full explanation. Or you can always just “choose to be optimistic,” that usually works out well.

(The Knoxville city council meets tonight at 6 pm to cast its vote on the bonds; you should be able to watch here to see the proceedings. Just be sure to get there before 6:09 pm, or you might miss it.)

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Friday roundup: Trying to make democracy without a responsible media really isn’t going all that well, plus: cardboard stadiums!

access_time personNeil deMause

Things I learned this week: Dogs don’t have eyebrows, but they did evolve special facial muscles so they could look cuter to humans. Synanthropic evolution is weird, and that’s even before getting into how rats in Central Park evolved the ability to metabolize rancid peanuts.

And with that palate cleanser out of the way, on to the stadium and arena news:

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Friday roundup: Sports team owners saying stuff, and the journalists who love to reprint it, Episode #736

access_time personNeil deMause

That wasn’t a swing, was it? It sure didn’t look like a swing to me.

Sorry, right, enough about actual sports, back to the business of sports business:

  • The owners of the new St. Louis City SC MLS team want a new parking garage built next to their new stadium, arguing that the stadium “will have a magnetic quality that draws people to the district 365 days a year,” according to the garage’s lead architect. Team officials already demolished several century-old mixed-use buildings to make way for the garage, which would seem to be a lost opportunity for things like stores and restaurants that might more likely be in use year-round, but far be it from me to argue with an expert in economagnetism.
  • Albuquerque city officials say they won’t decide where to build a New Mexico United USL soccer stadium until voters approve the money for it — which makes total sense, because the cost of a project doesn’t depend at all on what land needs to be acquired, and also no landowner would ever jack up the price of property knowing that the city needs it for an already-approved project. Today is Opposite Day, right?
  • Arash Markazi no longer works for the L.A. Times after being exposed for promoting friends’ projects in his columns and reprinting press releases almost verbatim, but Substack and Twitter don’t care if you’re ethical so long as you get eyeballs, so we have Markazi announcing, unsourced, that “The Oakland Athletics are expected to announce a handful of finalists for a potential $1 billion stadium in Las Vegas after the World Series,” and that getting turned into entire news articles elsewhere. Never mind that A’s exec Dave Kaval already said as much last month, or that “narrows down sites for stadium that nobody has proposed to pay for” isn’t really breaking news anyway, a famous reporter guy said a thing about famous business guys maybe saying a thing, everybody quick post updates at once!
  • Tennessee Smokies owner Randy Boyd says he’ll pay stadium construction workers at least $15.50 an hour but won’t sign anything making that promise enforceable, and won’t promise to pay concessions and other stadium workers anything above the cheapest the labor market will let him get away with. The Knoxville News Sentinel reports that Boyd says since he’s “a longtime community member, a community benefits agreement won’t be necessary,” a sentence that it’s amazing the News Sentinel production staff could type without busting out in visible lolsobs.
  • Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium is in bad shape after the Pawtucket Red Sox left for Worcester and took all the kitchen equipment and office chairs with them. The city is considering whether to rehab the stadium for an indie-league team, but the two that kicked the tires said that at 10,000 seats it’s too big for them; or to redevelop the site for something else, but there are worries it will sink into the swamp.
  • Charlotte officials have noticed that they’re paying city police officers to provide security at Carolina Panthers games instead of having the team hire off-duty officers, because no off-duty officers want to work for the $42-an-hour rate that the team offers. I spent a bunch of time reading local articles to try to figure out if it’s the Panthers or the city or someone else chintzing on security wages, and felt bad that I couldn’t figure it out until I saw a quote from Charlotte’s police chief saying, “Listen Panthers or whoever, enough is enough?” and decided that if he doesn’t know, I shouldn’t be expected to either.
  • Do you really want to read NFL uber-insider Mike Florio speculating about whether the NFL will settle the city of St. Louis’s lawsuit against the league for moving the Rams by offering the city an expansion team? Even though Rams owner Stan Kroenke has promised to cover any losses the league is stuck with, and Florio doesn’t provide any sources at all other than “an acknowledgment in league circles of the possibility”? Probably not, but you’re a grownup, make your own decisions.
  • The Tampa Bay Rays may have been eliminated from the postseason, but that’s not going to stop the Tampa Bay Times editorial board from taking the opportunity to stump for a new stadium on the grounds that, um, let’s see, “far too few people will buy tickets to watch them play at their current stadium” and “the hard work needs to be done now to ensure the team stays in the Tampa Bay area, even if it’s part time.” One could point out that there’s no solid evidence that significantly more people would buy tickets at a new stadium, especially for a team that would disappear to Canada all summer, but the Times also says that “this is not the time to clam up or for grandstanding or unhelpful posturing,” so I guess they wouldn’t want lots of people writing them about this, huh?
  • Did you know that the USL is creating a new women’s soccer league, to be an adjunct to/compete with the NWSL, currently reeling under a sexual harassment scandal that has already brought down its commissioner and forced the relocation of its championship game? I had not, but more women’s pro teams can only be a good thing both in terms of growing the women’s game and providing more teams so that cities don’t have to outbid each other for them, though also more opportunities for teams to demand that cities outbid each other for them, because city officials are pretty much morons when it comes to this stuff.
  • Lots of times sports team owners argue that there’s no way to fund venue construction and repairs without public subsidies, but did they ever consider growing and selling soybeans? On free public land, oh, Canada, you just had to ruin this feel-good story, didn’t you?
  • Tokyo’s Olympic white-elephant stadiums are facing increased maintenance costs because they’re under attack by oysters. That is all.
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