It’s Friday of another week, and at this writing Los Angeles is still extremely on fire. For a good writeup that also has a sports spending angle, check out yesterday’s excellent article by the excellent Alissa Walker, in her excellent 2028 Olympics newsletter Torched. Her takeaway from the fires darkening her skies: “Here’s what residents should ask themselves when surveying LA’s ashen neighborhoods: if our leaders haven’t yet put together a coherent strategy for something we supposedly want to happen in LA in three years, how can we believe that they’re going to put together a coherent strategy to address the worst-case scenario that confronts us now?”
We don’t always get the life-changing megaevents we should have seen coming that we want, we get the ones we … no, “deserve” isn’t right, either. Maybe: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, and if it’s not too much trouble I would really like to have a word with the playwright.
Meanwhile, in the parts of the country where only our hopes for an equitable, democratic system of government are on fire:
- Kansas City Chiefs ownership is going to email its fans asking them whether they want a new or renovated stadium, and if that doesn’t already raise all kinds of questions like “How will they make sure it’s scientific?” and “Shouldn’t this be up to all Kansas City area residents, not just those on the Chiefs’ mailing list?”, wait till you see who’s conducting the survey. This is clearly a push poll, yet the K.C. media is reporting it as a way to “decide the stadium debate,” add journalism to the list of things that are on fire.
- Chicago Bears chair George McCaskey says “we’re making progress” on a new stadium while team president Kevin Warren says “downtown still remains the focus” but also “we have 326 acres of beautiful land in Arlington Heights” and “I remain steadfast that the goal we have is shovels in the ground in 2025.” Pretty sure that’s not how performative utterances work, but points for trying!
- The Los Angeles Rams playoff game has been moved to Arizona because of the fires, and Newsweek is upset that the stadium there is named after an insurer that canceled insurance coverage for homes in areas at high fire risk. One would hope that the denial of coverage would discourage people from building (or rebuilding) in fire-prone areas, but the state of California provides insurance if private insurers won’t, and anyway you don’t need insurance if you buy a house with cash rather than taking out a mortgage so it won’t discourage the truly rich; trying to solve societal problems with economic incentives always seems to run into the problem that some people’s incentives are more economic than others’.
- Cincinnati business and political leaders debated (at the local Rotary Club, of course) where the city should build a new arena, which is a nice way to avoid discussing the $560 million in sales taxes, alcohol/tobacco/cannabis taxes, and rideshare surcharges that it’s currently proposed the city spend on the project. Mayor Aftab Pureval said of the arena, which would be the new home of the Cincinnati Cyclones ECHL team, looks like, and that’s it: “We’ve got to do everything we can not to kick this down the road again, but to come together as a community, have a call to action and decide, ‘Yes, we’re doing it,’ and that needs to happen now.” Or, you know, “No.” “No” is also a decisive action!
- Ohio state senate president Rob McColley says if the state is going to put $600 million into a new Cleveland Browns stadium, “There would have to be an ability to be paid back.” That’s a reasonable demand for state lawmakers to make, though McColley went on to say “I think there very well could be conversations regarding that going forward, but we’ll see,” which makes it sound less like a requirement than a thing that legislators will maybe ask for but not refuse to do a deal without, doesn’t anybody ever read my articles?
- The Salt Lake Tribune ran a big article on whether history shows kicking back property taxes to a new Utah baseball stadium would require taxes to be raised elsewhere, and while I will freely admit I lost track of some of the fiscal details when it started talking about “mosquito abatement districts,” the answer is yes, obviously yes, cutting property taxes in one place either causes them to rise elsewhere or for services to be cut, that’s how math works.
- There are new renderings for the Buffalo Bills stadium that is costing New York taxpayers $1 billion and costing Bills fans a pile of money in PSL fees, and they come with extra fireworks! Also a quote from NFL stadium consultant-for-life Marc Ganis about how the stadium will feature “airiness and interaction” and not for “a sophisticated urban environment where people want to get dressed up and go to the game” but for “fans who take great pride in showing up when it’s snowing,” all of which is a nice way to say “We could have built a roof but that would have been too expensive, you live in Buffalo, deal with it.”