The story of the $45 million Pawtucket minor-league soccer stadium seeking upwards of $70 million in tax breaks and the story that the United Soccer League is seeking to leverage Trump’s Opportunity Zone tax-break districts for more stadiums just had a baby, and it is this:
Fortuitous Partners Brett Johnson and Berke Bakay announced that they are looking to do developments in Baltimore, Cleveland, and other cities around the country…
Johnson during the interview said that Fortuitous Partners is also looking at Baltimore, MD; Cleveland, OH; and other cities for their opportunity zone driven sports complex model.
Opportunity zones, as I’ve written before, sound simple but get fiendishly complex in their details. On the surface, they’re just like other tax-subsidized districts like “enterprise zones” and “empowerment zones,” where developers get a tax break for building in “disadvantaged” areas, which is theoretically supposed to help the disadvantaged residents. (A report by Good Jobs First notes that the results of those earlier subsidy zones have been “not encouraging,” with little in the way of new economic activity and even less in the way of new jobs for locals.)
But the tax break that an opportunity zone earns a developer is a weird one: You get exempted from paying capital gains tax, but only on businesses that are owned by a “qualified opportunity fund,” meaning developers (or soccer teams) would likely need to set up a new shell corporation to own whatever it was they wanted to dodge taxes on. How that works, and what the IRS will let investors get away with, is still being figured out — the Trump administration implemented opportunity zones without really figuring out first how they would work, which is kind of turning into its brand — but clearly these Fortuitous folks think they know how to do it, or at least are trying to get dibs on lots of opportunity zone land for soccer stadiums and then will figure out the details later. Baltimore and Cleveland journalists, you might want to get on this, if there are any of you left.