Category: New Mexico United

Friday roundup: NYCFC unveils images of Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium, A’s reveal plans to blow a/c at fans’ feet

access_time personNeil deMause

And so we have reached the end of another programming week, one mercifully without Jerry Reinsdorf’s stadium subsidy demands going up yet again. That’s just about the only thing that didn’t happen this week, though, so let’s hit the news recap:

  • NYC F.C.‘s $780 million soccer stadium plan cleared another hurdle this week, getting the okay of the City Planning Commission, the last stop before a final city council vote. It also got some fresh renderings depicting how fans would enter the stadium through a giant cube-shaped entryway (dubbed The Cube, this team has a way with words) that would be covered in a giant video board that display the names of all five New York boroughs, in case you forget where you live. (The stadium is depicted bearing the name Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium, while the entryway in one image says “New York City FC” while in another it’s “Cube Entrance Sponsor,” pick a lane, guys.) Still up in the air: how the affordable housing component would work, where fans will park if Mets owner Steve Cohen refuses to let the soccer team use his parking lots across the street unless he gets a state casino license, and, oh yeah, how the whole thing would be paid for, someone should really look into that.
  • The Oakland A’s “spherical armadillo” stadium in Las Vegas would have “the highest number of suites, clubs and other high-end seating products” relative to size of any MLB stadium, according to Venues Now, which spoke to A’s president Dave Kaval on the subject. In addition to hardly any affordable tickets, Kaval promised that the air-conditioning would blow out from under people’s seats, something that’s used at the Sacramento Kings arena and in some Middle East soccer stadiums, and which the site reported Kaval said he’s “working with Henderson Engineers to find a way to make it work in MLB.” Also a work in progress: The A’s are playing an exhibition game in Las Vegas tonight, and plenty of good seats are still available.
  • The Virginia legislature has officially passed a budget without money for an Alexandria arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals, though Gov. Glenn Youngkin could still try for an amendment or a special session. State senate finance chair Louise Lucas, who has the power to kill budget bills by denying them hearings in her committee, doesn’t seem real amenable to that, though. One Alexandria restaurant owner tells D.C. News Now that he’s upset not because he wants arena traffic for his businesses, but because spending over $1 billion in public money on an arena would “alleviate some of the tax burden from the residents,” somebody’s been reading too many clown documents!
  • Two members of the Jackson County legislature will be holding a public hearing this Monday at 3 pm on the Kansas City Royals‘ $2 billion stadium plan and $1 billion public subsidy plan. While attendance at these things is never representative of the public as a whole — it’s almost guaranteed there will be a throng of construction workers bussed in to cheer the project on, for example — it will at least give us some hint of the public mood as we approach the April 2 deadline for voting on the 0.375% sales-tax surcharge extension that would fund the first chunk of the project. (The Kansas City Star editorial board is a no, at least until Royals owner John Sherman explains more about how the money, lease, and provisions for relocating businesses would work.)
  • The Chicago Bears owners are reportedly “close to” announcing a lakefront stadium in Chicago and are also still haggling with suburban cities over property tax breaks for a stadium there, never take seriously rumors that are spread by team execs themselves, just don’t.
  • Maricopa County and the city of Phoenix are considering a “partnership” to address the Arizona Diamondbacks owners’ stadium demands, which would … do something? Also this was just a letter that the county sent to the city council last August, and the council never replied, guess the Arizona Republic was having a real slow news day.
  • Would a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium increase the team’s attendance? Yes at first, then no after the honeymoon wears off in a few years. This report is not remotely new news, but it comes with lots of stats and charts! Guess the Tampa Bay Times opinion section was having a slow news day.
  • Sure, New York taxpayers are spending over $1 billion on a new Buffalo Bills stadium, but who can put a price on 16-foot-tall bison statues? ESPN reports that “there was some disappointment on social media among fans” that the statues aren’t bigger, since the “World’s Largest Buffalo Monument” in North Dakota is 26 feet tall, that does it, time to tear down the new stadium and build one with state-of-the-art bison.
  • New Mexico United‘s new stadium “costs the city nothing,” according to team president Ron Patel; KOAT-TV checked, and it’s actually nearly $29 million in public money, about half the total cost. Never take seriously cost estimates that are put forward by team execs, just don’t.
  • The Hawaii legislature is set to consider a bill to scrap a $350 million plan to rebuild Aloha Stadium so that the money can be used for wildfire recovery and housing instead. Rep. Gene Ward said he opposes the bill because “it’s not going to get anybody to come to the football games, regardless of how bad you are as a football player,” no, I don’t know what he meant by that either.
  • Finally, back on the A’s front, I was on this week’s Rickeyblog podcast, where we talked about all aspects of the team’s stadium situation, not least why fans in the Vegas stadium renderings are waving the flag of Gaddafi’s Libya and what that could mean for tourism. Give it a listen, you’ve got all weekend!
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Friday roundup: Sixers owners offer to swap one tax break for another, Titans got nearly 80,000% return on their lobbyist spending

access_time personNeil deMause

Hope it’s not brutally hot where you are! Admittedly, this is a pretty idle hope assuming you live on this planet. Maybe it’s a good time to revisit my look at which U.S. sports cities are likeliest to become completely uninhabitable first, and to note that several of them are looking at building new stadiums or arenas that could outlast the cities that would be building them, or at least their ability to maintain their population ranking as parts of the world flood and others dry up.

Or, we could just ignore the flames and keep on with business as usual. It’s what sports team owners do every week, and they’re rich, so it must be working out okay for them, right?

  • The Philadelphia 76ers owners are reportedly offering to scrap their request to continue a tax increment financing deal at their proposed downtown stadium site that would allow them to get breaks on the standard property tax rate and use them to pay for arena construction, and instead give the land to the city and then make payments in lieu of property taxes (PILOTs) that would enable them to pay less than the standard property tax rate — and if that sounds to you like the exact same thing described differently, you’re not the only one. A Sixers spokesperson said this would “generate significant increases in tax revenues,” but wasn’t clear on whether she meant more tax revenues than under the TIF plan or just “tax revenues will go up because ARENA!!!!“, hopefully there’ll be more on this soon.
  • Meanwhile, a key battle in the 76ers arena fight is shaping up to be around City Councilmember Mark Squilla, who represents both the proposed arena site and neighboring Chinatown, and who last fall said he would oppose the plan unless local residents supported it but now says he’ll make his decision based on three team-funded impact studies in the works. “If you do the wrong thing, we will never forget,” said Asian Americans United founder Debbie Wei last Friday. “It will be remembered that, in spite of your promises and the desires of most of the city, you destroyed Chinatown.”
  • Some rich people are richer than others, and the “cash-poor” Tennessee Titans billionaire owners had to sell some of their assets to get money to put into their new stadium. They also spent $1.6 million on lobbyists to convince the state of Tennessee and city of Nashville to give them $1.26 billion in tax money toward the stadium, which is a good reminder that there’s no ROI like the return on buying elected officials.
  • Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller’s office has confirmed that construction on a New Mexico United stadium will begin this winter, though not when this winter, which isn’t really technically confirmation. Keller indicated the stadium will be getting $13.5 million in public money, with the rest coming from the team — how much that will be is also unconfirmed.
  • The Cincinnati Bengals are still working on a new stadium lease, and the Cleveland Browns are still working on a new stadium lease, and in both those cases “new stadium lease” likely means the government paying for lots of stadium upgrades in exchange for the team not threatening to leave, yes the concept of renting is very different when you’re an NFL owner than for most regular tenants.
  • Oakland A’s president/stadium-grubbing czar Dave Kaval is set to teach a sports business management course at Stanford, and you can bet I will alert you at the first report of him crossing paths in the hallways with Roger Noll.
  • “Sacramento shops hope for business boost amid renewed hopes of soccer stadium” reads the headline on a KCRA-TV story that quotes exactly two people endorsing such hopes, one a local pizzeria owner and the other the CEO of Sacramento’s tourism agency, yep, that’s 2023 journalism.
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Plague of minor-league soccer stadium subsidy demands reaches pandemic proportions

access_time personNeil deMause

Oh hey, USL press release about the ill-fated Pawtucket soccer stadium project, which utterly fails to mention either the metastasizing public costs or the fact that Rhode Island voters now oppose funding it by a 44-35% margin. Anything else in there of actual interest?

Tidewater Landing becomes one of five current stadium projects that are under construction in the USL Championship and USL League One, including one for a future USL Championship club in Des Moines, Iowa. There are another 11 stadium projects approved or in development across USL Championship and League One, following clubs such as Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC, Louisville City FC, Monterey Bay F.C., and Chattanooga Red Wolves SC, whose new homes have opened in recent years.

So, five stadiums under construction (or at least having had a groundbreaking, which lets Pawtucket qualify even though funding hasn’t gotten final approval) and 11 others “in development” — that’s rather a lot, even for a league that currently sports 38 teams across two levels in an attempt to take over the U.S. soccer world by sheer volume. The press release doesn’t specify which cities the USL is currently getting or seeking stadiums in, so with the help of the Field of Schemes archives and Reddit, let’s attempt a rundown in rough order of approvalness:

That’s 19 potential projects, though only maybe ten of them could be considered in progress, and for some of those you’d have to squint really hard. John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability, the people behind those excellent stickers, has a Twitter thread about this whole kerfuffle, in which he points out that sports stadiums, thanks to being closed and empty most of the time, have less economic impact than your typical supermarket or chain food store:

If there’s a silver lining to all this, it’s that most of the USL stadium campaigns appear to be spinning their wheels to various degrees. If there’s whatever is the opposite of a silver lining, it’s that none of the potential team owners are giving up, because why stop grabbing for that brass subsidy ring if you can maybe get tens of millions of dollars if you get lucky? Not sure if the USL qualifies as a Ponzi scheme yet, but it’s certainly striving to head in that direction.

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Friday roundup: Nation’s elected officials vow to press ahead with stadium and arena plans, no matter what voters say

access_time personNeil deMause

Looks like we made it through another week! Admittedly, some of us did not make it through another week without electing a new mayor who says things like this, but that’s what you get sometimes with a two-party system.

More post-election fallout, and regardless-of-election fallout, in the bullet points that you know are coming up right after this colon:

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Voters back government spending on Election Day, so long as it’s for anything but stadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

There were a bunch of stadium and arena subsidies up for vote yesterday — let’s see how they did:

None of these outcomes are a huge shock, as the Albuquerque and Denver plans, at least, were polling terribly in the run-up to Election Day. Still, the proponents of the funding measures put a ton of money into backing them, all apparently for nought. (We’ll have to wait for final reports on campaign spending to see if the 100-to-1 rule still holds, where sports subsidy measures only win voter approval if advocates outspend opponents by more than 100-to-1.) But it is at least somewhat notable that bond measures for other things passed with ease, so this isn’t just opposition to government spending overall: As a spokesperson for the Denver neighborhood coalition that opposed the arena said last night, “In a time when housing is scarce for the working class, at a time when health care is inaccessible and inequitable and expensive, at a time when we have one of the worst homeless crises in a century, the city chose to pursue the arena. It was a slap in the face to the people who rejected it.”

It’s probably too much to call this a sea change — there have been lots of sports subsidies that have gone down to defeat at the polls only to be resurrected later, and execs from Augusta’s venues authority have already vowed to find other funding for their arena plans. But it’s still a whole bunch of no’s from voters asked to provide huge sums of tax dollars for minor sports facilities, while saying yes to the government building other stuff, so if you want to take that as data points that people think the business of sports is not the government’s business, you go right ahead and do that.

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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: 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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NM United owner says his stadium subsidy demand isn’t like other cities’, because “so many things”

access_time personNeil deMause

Albuquerque voters go to the polls four weeks from tomorrow to decide on whether to issue $50 million worth of public bonds for a new New Mexico United USL stadium, and there’s lots of coverage attempting to blind-men-and-the-elephant the story:

  • United owner Peter Trevisani said the soccer stadium plan really isn’t about a soccer stadium at all, the Albuquerque Journal reports, but rather “an aspirational project that really can change so many things,” adding that “coming together in this facility is a major step in ensuring that New Mexico United and so many other things yet to come are going to be here in the future.” There are some quotes from stadium subsidy critics (okay, it’s me) that the stadium plan is “basically rolling the dice on a stadium that’s much bigger and more expensive than the USL really can justify. And figuring, ‘Well, if it works out, great. And if it doesn’t work out, we’re not the ones paying for it.’” But Trevisani retorts that his proposal is “a 180” from other cities’ situations, because “the city owns the stadium. New Mexico United is paying rent, sharing some other revenue streams, and I think, more importantly, guaranteeing $10 million to the project before shovel goes into dirt. That’s hard to find across the country.” The city owning the stadium, the team owner putting up less than 15% of the upfront cost plus about 17% more from rent and revenue sharing, and the public being on the hook for the other 68% — let’s make this a fun scavenger hunt for FoS readers to see if you can find anything similar across the country! To make it an extra challenge, try it while blindfolded!
  • New Mexico In Depth talked to some actual sports economists about the potential economic impact of spending public money on a New Mexico United stadium, and got the usual litany of “don’t hold your breath”: Michael Leeds of Temple University said, “The consensus is that any impact of a sports franchise tends to be very, very small in terms of dollars and cents”; Victor Matheson of College of the Holy Cross said a stadium is “not something that’s likely to really be a local neighborhood driver because, again, who’s going to start a sports bar that you can use 25 games a year”; and Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First (not an economist by trade, but has studied this stuff as much as anyone) said there’s little net gain from increased soccer spending because “if people go to the soccer games more, they’ll be going to the movie theater less.”
  • A poll of 793 likely voters by The Paper finds that 59% are opposed to the stadium bonds, with just 23% in support. This is very different from the 50-38% support a United stadium had in a 2019 poll, so either Albuquerquians changed their mind once they heard the $50 million public price tag, they changed their mind once Covid hit and made them prioritize other priorities, or it’s just an artifact of two different phrasings of the question.
  • Some opponents of the stadium funding has started going door-to-door urging people to vote no; “Until everyone in New Mexico has a house, food, healthcare, education, and transportation guaranteed, then we don’t need a stadium,” Bex Hampton, one of the campaigners, told KRQE-TV.

If history is any guide, the outcome of the vote is likely to come down to how much Trevisani is willing to spend on a stadium campaign: It’s been a while since I’ve updated the numbers, but traditionally there’s been a 100-to-1 rule that states that if a team owner outspends opponents by 100-to-1, the ballot measure usually passes, and if they don’t, it usually fails. Whether you believe that Paper poll or not, it’s a fair bet that Trevisani won’t want to leave anything to chance — though given that he’s a mere millionaire and not a billionaire, the usual calculus of “let me spend a few million dollars in order to secure subsidies of many times that” may not apply.

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Friday roundup: NM United owner still wants biggest USL subsidy ever, Bears owners levy gambling gripes, Coyotes arena could make planes crash

access_time personNeil deMause

And now for the news that slipped through the cracks of the week:

I’m going to be traveling next week, so prepare for a possible light posting schedule. Though if past history is any guide, whenever I go on vacation, all kinds of news immediately happens, and I’ll have my laptop with me, so maybe it’ll just be a normal week from your perspective. We’ll all find out together!

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Friday roundup: Frank White (yes, that one) ready to talk money for Royals stadium, Bills vaccine veto threat, and more

access_time personNeil deMause

So! Much! News! This post cannot stop it, it can only hope to contain it:

  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. — yes, that Frank White — say they’re open to talking with Royals officials about a new downtown stadium, which why shouldn’t they, talk is cheap. White said a few years back that he was boycotting the team after they fired him as broadcaster for saying that their sucky players sucked, but now says, “As I have said from day one, we have a responsibility to ensure the county is using the tax dollars entrusted to us by our residents as effectively and efficiently as possible. Part of that responsibility is being open to opportunities to improve the impact our investments are making in the community, including a potential downtown stadium,” so guess he’s over it! We’ll still have to see what “efficiently” means, and if White will be willing to loose his tongue again if Royals owner John Sherman’s financing plan turns out also to suck.
  • The Buffalo Bills stadium campaign has barely gotten started and already has a lot of stupid going on, but the Erie County legislator who is threatening to veto any stadium if the Bills don’t let unvaccinated fans attend games really kicks it over the top — not least because one legislator can’t “veto” anything, especially when the funding the Bills owners are seeking is likely to come from the state, not the county. Leg. Frank Todaro’s bio states that the body-shop owner “has spent his life fixing things that are broken” and “hates waste and is determined to put the Erie County Taxpayer first,” and the hill he has chosen to die on over giving perhaps a billion dollars or so in tax money to the local billionaire sports team owner is whether the billionaire insists on enforcing public health rules, okay then.
  • The leading contenders in the extremely contentious Buffalo mayor’s race, meanwhile, aren’t saying much about the Bills stadium plans because — wait for it — the Bills don’t actually play in the city of Buffalo, and neither candidate wants to spend the money for a stadium in the city, because what part of “perhaps a billion dollars” did you miss?
  • New Mexico United‘s preferred stadium site may be in trouble because part of it would require eminent domain to take from its private owner, and the property owner is claiming in court that the city is getting around this by pretending it’s taking the land for a traffic circle. I mean, a soccer stadium has a circle in the middle, and soccer players are a kind of traffic, and — yeah, this is why I never became a lawyer. Isn’t there somebody the team owners can just pay off to make this problem go away?
  • St. Louis Circuit Judge Christopher McGraugh has rejected a motion by the NFL and Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke to throw out the city and county of St. Louis’ lawsuit seeking about $100 million in damages for moving the team to L.A. in violation of the league’s own relocation rules. The suit, which has been simmering for four frickin’ years since the last time McGraugh refused to dismiss it, will now move to trial in January, but more important, the league and the Rams only have until September 28 to start turning over internal NFL financial documents for discovery, and “each defendant would be fined $1,000 per day after the deadline if they don’t comply” — I can’t tell if that’s $1,000 each per day for the league and Rams or $1,000 a day for each of the league’s 32 owners, but either way, this should be some fun coming up as the league tries to figure out how to keep its secret books secret.
  • The Knoxville-Knox County Planning Commission has approved rezoning for a new Tennessee Smokies stadium, which isn’t at all the same as the city and county approving $61 million in public money to build the thing, which hasn’t happened yet. But still, it’s a hurdle, so please mark that off as cleared if you’re scoring at home.
  • There’s even more news, but I can get to it next week, it’s not going anywhere. Happy weekend, everybody!
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