And how’s your city’s week going? That good, huh? It’s going around.
I would share more Bluesky snark with you, but there’s stadium news to be gotten to:
- The Cleveland Browns owners have formally issued their request for funding for a $2.4 billion domed stadium in Brook Park, and it includes $1.2 billion in taxpayer money. (The breakdown is $600 million state, $178 million county, $422 million city, if you’re an Ohioan and are wondering which of your government budgets the money would be coming out of. Also, though it’s being described as “new tax revenue,” it really isn’t; hey there, Casino Night Fallacy!) Team owner Jimmy Haslam is describing this as a “50/50 public and private partnership,” though of course that’s only on the spending end; the chances of taxpayers getting an equal cut of stadium revenues are estimated as ROTFL. At least one of the elected officials being asked for cash was extremely unenthusiastic: Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, who has stated that he’d rather the Browns remain within the city of Cleveland, said, “We have to throw a flag on the play” and “it’s a Hail Mary to throw out numbers that don’t square,” sorry, we’ve reached our maximum daily exposure to football metaphors, we’ll have to pick this up again next week.
- D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser told a community meeting that she wants to build a Washington Commanders stadium at the RFK Stadium site, and according to WTOP, “When someone asked whether Bowser would commit to not offering a subsidy, she said no.” News reports didn’t describe the crowd reaction to that non-pledge, but given the overall skepticism about a stadium plan expressed at the meeting, we can picture it for ourselves.
- Speaking of resident reaction, “‘Highly speculative’: Residents bristle at lack of answers on funding for new Spurs arena” is a pretty evocative headline, well done, San Antonio Express-News. And unlike in D.C., in San Antonio massive public scorn matters, because the Spurs arena development plan — which goes by the truly jaw-dropping name Project Marvel — is going to require a public referendum to pass, so the Spurs owners have some bristling to address.
- The United Soccer League says it’s planning to launch a new top-tier division in 2027 to compete with Major League Soccer, made up of some of its existing second-tier franchises and some new ones, and you know what new soccer teams means: new soccer stadium demands! USL officials talked a lot about how the U.S. needs a system more like Europe, where there are tons of soccer teams in cities large and small, but left out the part about how those teams’ stadiums are typically built without large public subsidies, curious, that.
- And speaking of soccer stadiums, a clown study by the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis claims that a new soccer stadium in Bridgeport would “generate $3.4 billion in economic output and sustain 1,300 new permanent jobs annually until 2050.” Wait, 1,300 permanent jobs annually? Like, 1,300 jobs one year, then another 1,300 jobs the next? It will not surprise you to learn that the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis is connected with UConn’s business school, not its economics department, though it may surprise you that the report was apparently issued last August but only got reported on by the Hartford Business Journal this Wednesday, slow week in the stenography industry, I guess.
- You may think you don’t want to read a long profile of College of the Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson in the school’s magazine, but what if I told you he provides scientific tips on which lottery numbers to avoid picking? Matheson also discusses stadium funding (“Let’s just say that I’m fairly happy that I have long-term job security as a critic of spending massive amounts of taxpayer money”) and the fact that he wears a different soccer jersey to class each day, which, yes, requires a lot of soccer jerseys.
