Category: North Carolina F.C.

St. Pete to Rays: Actually, there’s no deadline for us to fix your stadium roof, read your damn lease

access_time personNeil deMause

If you’re wondering what’s going on with repairs to the Tropicana Field roof, Tampa Bay Rays execs are waiting on the city of St. Petersburg to tell them when work will begin. Team co-president Matt Silverman wrote to city officials on December 30 declaring that a “partial 2026 season in Tropicana Field would present massive logistical and revenue challenge” and “it is therefore critical that the rebuild start in earnest as soon as possible.” City manager Rob Gerdes has now responded, and it looks like Rays management didn’t read their fine print too clearly:

We look forward to cooperating to attempt to achieve the mutual goal of making Tropicana Field suitable for Major League Baseball games by opening day of the 2026 season. However … the Use Agreement requires the City of St. Petersburg to diligently pursue repairs to Tropicana Field, but it does not establish a deadline for completing those repairs.

It’s true! According to the “force majeure” clause in the Rays’ use agreement, the city only needs to begin repairs within three months of damage that has made the building unplayable, which it has done. There’s no set date for it to finish, though — and the only consequence is that for any amount of time the Rays are homeless, their lease gets extended by an equal amount of time, which is surely no skin off the nose of St. Petersburg.

It’s kind of hilarious that Rays owner Stu Sternberg is falling victim to sloppy wording of a stadium agreement, which is usually city lawyers’ signature move. (To be fair, Sternberg didn’t hire the lawyers who wrote up this use agreement, former Rays owner Vince Naimoli did; still, you’d think he and his execs would have at least read it.) With Sternberg and the city still at loggerheads over whether the Rays owner will accept the offer of $1 billion in public money for a new stadium or demand even more, we’ll likely see more of this brinksmanship in the coming weeks and months and … years? There’s nothing stopping the city from dragging its heels for years, honestly. It’ll almost certainly be resolved before then by either negotiations or lawsuit, but it’s still fun to watch in the meantime.

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Was the Carolina Panthers’ $650m renovation deal really the worst of 2024? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

The Center for Economic Accountability, a friend of this site, announced its annual “Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year” award for 2024 this week, and the winner was the city of Charlotte, for giving $650 million to Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper for renovations of his team’s stadium. CEA said in a press release that “Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium deal stood out from the rest of the competition for a combination of factors that included its high cost, lack of transparency, poor returns, questionable economic justifications and the Panthers ownership’s checkered history with subsidized projects.”

There’s certainly a lot to be said for the Panthers deal as a terrible one: The city of Charlotte put up $650 million out of $800 million for renovations to a 28-year-old stadium it didn’t build and doesn’t own, in exchange for Tepper extending his lease for just 15 years and getting to open “good faith” negotiations for a new stadium as early as 2037. Still, it’s worth looking at some of the other contenders from 2024:

All worthy candidates, even if there can be only one winner. The lesson here isn’t that Charlotte is singularly bone-headed when it comes to handing out public money to local billionaires; it’s that siphoning off public money for private profit is a pandemic with no end in sight, and even the less-bad deals would be scandalous in a saner world.

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Friday roundup: Chiefs want public money if Royals get any, plus what a baseball lockout could mean for MLB stadium talks

access_time personNeil deMause

Eight posts already this week, and now a full slate of Friday roundup news? Remember all the way back on, uh, Wednesday, when people were claiming that the public sports funding era had run its course? Those were good times, I thought maybe I might get to sleep in one day, but clearly that day is not now:

  • The Kansas City Royals owners haven’t even started publicly discussing a new downtown stadium, let alone how to pay for it, but already Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt is saying he’s considering what to do if the Royals leave the suburban sports complex the two teams share. “We’re going to watch as they go through the process, and at some point here in the next year or so, start thinking about what’s next for the Chiefs from a stadium standpoint,” said Hunt, who added that “we’ve had beautiful stadiums open now in Los Angeles and Las Vegas” that include features “I’m sure we’ll want to incorporate into the stadium.” The Kansas City Star added that “if the Royals receive tax dollars for a new downtown stadium … it’s believed the Chiefs would want a piece of the monetary pie,” which makes sense, it’s how the last Kansas City stadium subsidy worked way back in 2019, and the one before that in 2006. Look out, Indianapolis, there could be a new repeat sports subsidy offender in town!
  • MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred is saying the quiet parts loud again, exclaiming of the pending expiration of the players’ union contract on December 1 that “an offseason lockout that moves the process forward is different than a labor dispute that costs games,” which in Manfred-to-English autotranslates as “we’re going to lock the players out now when it doesn’t cost us anything in ticket sales rather than wait for them to strike in the spring when they have more leverage purple monkey dishwasher.” That makes hardball negotiating sense, but you have to wonder what effect a lockout will have on stadium talks in places like Oakland and Cleveland and Tampa Bay and Kansas City, where elected officials could now be debating whether to give hundreds of millions of dollars to a sport that is shut down in a labor dispute. Sports execs really do do the darnedest things.
  • Manfred also said the league’s executive committee has put off an approval request from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg on his split city Montreal-Tampa Bay plan, because of “the press of other business” and that “it’s a complicated topic.” You could read this a bunch of ways — that the other owners think it’s a dumb idea, that Sternberg himself thinks it’s a dumb idea and they’re providing him cover by pretending to consider it so he can keep using it as a threat, or that they’re genuinely too busy discussing such issues as how much tacky stuff to preapply to baseball so that pitchers can grip the ball well but not too well — so take your pick.
  • Augusta voters rejected $240 million in bonds for a new arena on Election Day, so now naturally the Augusta-Richmond County Coliseum Authority is trying to figure out somewhere else to find $240 million that doesn’t require voter approval. “We’re looking at other options,” said authority chair Cedric Johnson, which so far could include $6 million in federal infrastructure money for new roads around an arena; Augusta has also diverted $45,000 from its parks budget to hire a consultant to look for more federal money. I’m telling you, while the Biden infrastructure bill is certainly designed to fund a whole lot of genuine public benefits like keeping bridges from falling down and keeping the power grid from failing, if there’s a a loophole that even part of a stadium or other pet development project can be rammed through, sports owners and their friends in local government are going to find it.
  • After a new $190 million stock show arena was similarly rejected on Election Day, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock says he’s determined to find a way to build one anyway, to fulfill his “commitment to the voters” to … build this thing the voters just said they don’t want? Mayors also do the darnedest things.
  • Chicago alderman George Cardenas says he’ll introduce a bill for the city to buy the Bears and sell shares to fans, a la the Green Bay Packers to keep the team from moving to Arlington Heights, which is a great idea except that the NFL passed new bylaws ruling out any new public or community-owned teams, so much for that then.
  • Developers in Raleigh say they have no “clear pathway” to build a 20,000-seat soccer stadium for North Carolina F.C. and the North Carolina Courage because the city has not shown “a deep interest” in kicking back property taxes to help pay for one. The minute someone offers them a huge pile of public money for a stadium, though, they’re rarin’ to go, because Raleigh “deserves” one, really what are they even waiting for, you know?
  • Staten Island’s new minor-league baseball team that is getting $8 million in public stadium renovations in order for the Atlantic League to bring it into existence will not be called the Pizza Rats after all, but rather the Staten Island FerryHawks, which the team’s website claims is “a fun-loving, baseball-playing superhero that combines the power, toughness and persistence of the Staten Island Ferry and the red tailed and cooper’s hawks that are seen around Staten Island.” I would have considered Googling this and similarly pronounced names before making the announcement, but maybe that’s just me.
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Friday roundup: A’s high-rises too damn tall, Raleigh stadium roof too damn bent, many baseball parks too damn flood-prone

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: If you’re one of FoS’s new Patreon subscribers and missed yesterday’s post about whether the Oakland A’s owners are seriously considering moving to Las Vegas because it didn’t show up in your email, go click there (or here) now to catch up on it. (The automatic email system skipping the day’s early post and only sending out the later one is a bug that I think I’ve developed a workaround for, but we’ll have to wait for the next two-post day to tell for sure.)

And now, on to more news items from this week that you need to catch up on, because I haven’t reported them yet:

  • The Oakland Design Review Committee, which is part of the Oakland Planning Commission, which advises the Oakland city council on development issues, has raised concerns about the A’s proposed Howard Terminal stadium complex because it would include a 600-foot residential tower that would be the tallest building in the city, it would require fans to cross active train tracks to get to games, and it could interfere with the Port of Oakland’s future ability to expand its port operations to enable bigger cargo ships to dock. “I just don’t want anything bad to happen,” committee chair Clark Manus told KTVU regarding the train tracks, which is a reasonable worry, but isn’t this part of what the $855 million in public spending is supposed to go to fix? Did A’s owner John Fisher really request nearly a billion dollars in new roads and other infrastructure and neglect to guarantee that it would eliminate all grade crossings? The team’s proposed term sheet mentions “at-grade and grade-separated rail safety improvements,” but I guess that’s not super-specific, so yeah, let’s make sure if you spend a couple billion dollars on a new stadium district nobody dies in dumb ways.
  • Here are some renderings of a proposed North Carolina F.C and North Carolina Courage soccer stadium in Raleigh that looks like somebody sat on it and bent the roof, I guess that’s how future Raleighites will be able to tell they’re living in the future. After the Raleigh planning commission rejected rezoning for the project — which could include up to $335 million in public money — last December, the city council went ahead and approved it, presumably because the area where it would be built is, according to The Architect’s Newspaper’s report, “sleepy” and “underutilized,” and we can’t have that.
  • Images of the Somerset Patriots‘ stadium underwater after last week’s torrential rains in the Northeast set off a flurry of articles about how climate change will make flooded stadiums a more frequent sight, whether in cities prone to sea level rise (Miami, San Francisco, Washington, San Diego, New York, St. Petersburg) or those along flood-prone rivers (Cincinnati, maybe Pittsburgh?). There’s a big distinction between “occasionally flooded” and “permanently underwater,” obviously — something I tried to address in my Defector article earlier this year, which also raised the issue of cities like Phoenix becoming too hot to live in — but in the meantime let’s all just enjoy this image of two Cincinnati Reds pitchers crossing Crosley Field in a rowboat after a flood in 1937.
  • Is it safe to go to a packed football stadium even if you are vaccinated? Six out of seven public health experts who spoke to Kaiser Health News say no, but says if you do, wear a mask, and also try to get the other 50,000 people to wear masks as well, because that’s what will keep you from catching Delta more than your own personal masking decision. (Also presumably whether you’re in a domed or outdoor stadium, whether you spend time in enclosed areas like restrooms and concessions areas unmasked with other unmasked people, whether vaccinations are required for entry to the game, and other variables, but KHN didn’t really get into all that.)
  • Sports fans are increasingly dropping their cable subscriptions, and the sports industry needs to address this with what kind of plans they offer, says … okay, a guy whose column is called Cord-Cutter Confidential, so maybe not the most unbiased source. Anyway, I gotta go update my credit card for my ESPN+ subscription so I can watch Spanish soccer, I sure hope the sports leagues figure out a new system of charging people to watch sports without cable soon!

 

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Raleigh commission warns $2B soccer plan could displace residents, council may still okay it

access_time personNeil deMause

Plans for a $2 billion office/residential/hotel complex in Raleigh including a $180 million stadium for the USL’s North Carolina F.C. and the NWSL’s North Carolina Courage have been burbling along for more than a year now, as locals expressed concerns about the more than $300 million in city and county tax money that would be required over 30 years and also about encouraging gentrification and whether the city could afford any of this during a pandemic recession budget. Still, Steve Malik, the owner of the two soccer teams, and local developer John Kane got as far as a vote of Raleigh’s Planning Commission last night on rezoning the land, when things when unexpectedly awry, as the commission voted unanimously to deny the rezoning request because, man, I dunno, you try to parse all this:

“I find this whole thing disappointing because there is a general opportunity here for Raleigh, but you can’t do it at the expense of people,” said commissioner Jennifer Lampman.

“Maybe this is a really good thing, but it’s coming before things are in place to guide the growth to ensure that it is equitable. I worry by approving this now we will be signing off on the potential for disproportionally high and adverse transportation, environmental, economic and social impacts and there would primarily be bored by black communities,” said commissioner Nicole H. Bennett

“This rezoning application shows a vicious disregard for equity and fairness,” said commissioner Michele McIntosh.

The upshot — assuming WNCN-TV meant to type “borne,” not “bored” — seems to be that the planning commission is mostly worried that the project would price out residents of southeast Raleigh without consulting them first, a concern that has been raised in the past. And it’s a legit concern: Big development projects absolutely can, if not directly raise property values themselves, serve as a way to market a neighborhood as “revitalized,” which is the kind of thing that deep-pocketed newcomers like to hear, because less-well-heeled residents are unvital if not a little bit scary.

Still, we shouldn’t give short shrift to the concern that spending as much as $335 million in public money (mostly future property tax kickbacks, plus some other public cash) on a project based around a 20,000-seat stadium for one minor-league soccer team and one women’s soccer team — teams that currently average about 4,000 and 6,000 fans per game, respectively — is a little bit nutso. Malik has talked of wanting an MLS-ready stadium for Raleigh, but even though MLS seems determined to put a team in every city in North America, Charlotte is already getting an expansion team in 2022 with the help of public stadium upgrades, so a second North Carolina team probably isn’t going to be a priority anytime soon. (There was discussion earlier this year of downsizing the proposed stadium to 12,000 seats, but WNCN is saying 20,000 seats again, so either the developers are back to their original plan or the station’s proofreaders were asleep at the switch again.)

This whole mess will be dumped in the lap of the Raleigh city council for a public hearing next Tuesday, at which point lawmakers will decide whether to move ahead with the project or just torpedo the whole thing once and for all. Or at least until the developers inevitably return with a new plan, maybe one where they’ve paid to create some local pro-development groups? That’s how the pros do it.

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