Category: minor-league soccer

Friday roundup: NYC approves $780m NYCFC stadium in Queens, still doesn’t know what it’ll cost the public

access_time personNeil deMause

I keep meaning to find a place to mention it, and here is as good as any: sports economists J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad Humphreys have taken up the task of updating Judith Grant Long’s epic database of stadium and arena deals, and the results are online as a CSV file. There are likely still going to be some debates about specific figures — the Buffalo Bills stadium is listed with an $850 million public cost, for example, because that’s what the New York Times said, but that leaves out state and county money set aside for future maintenance and upgrades — but it’s still a hugely useful resource for getting ballpark estimates (sorry) of both total and taxpayer costs. Bookmark it now, or just click the “Data” tab here anytime to find it!

That’s enough about that, let’s get to the news, oh the news, so very much the news:

  • The New York city council approved NYC F.C.‘s plan to build a Queens stadium across the street from the Mets‘ stadium, which is expected to cost $780 million and open in 2027. While construction costs are being covered by the team’s owners, Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner and Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, it’s still unknown exactly how much the city will be giving up in property-tax breaks and discounted rent (the city Independent Budget Office estimated $516 million) or how much the city will be spending on infrastructure for the project (which includes housing and other stuff too, so it’d be tricky to determine exactly how much of infrastructure costs should be charged to the stadium). Ah well, plenty of time to figure that out after the agreements are all signed! Queens councilmember Shekar Krishnan cast the only dissenting vote, declaring, “We are not facing a stadium crisis in this city. We are facing a housing crisis, an inequality crisis and a climate crisis. Now we’re looking at a proposal that gives away public land worth hundreds of millions of dollars in public financing for a commercial soccer stadium. What is the benefit for the people of New York City?” You mean the joy of visiting Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium isn’t enough?
  • Patrick Tuohey of the Show-Me Institute wants to know what happened to the 2022 Populous study of the Kansas City Royals‘ stadium that projected it would cost more to repair than replace, thanks to “concrete cancer,” since it’s been taken down from the KC Ballpark District website. Good news and bad news, Patrick: The report is still there on the Wayback Machine, but it provides no sourcing at all for its figures. It does print them in very large type, though, and how could anything in a 48-point font be wrong?
  • Jackson County legislator Sean Smith polled his constituents about why they voted how they did on the Royals and Chiefs stadium tax surcharge referendum last week, and determined it’s because nobody listened to their concerns and engaged in too much “fear-based campaigning” by threatening the teams would leave. Smith didn’t release any detailed results of his survey, though, so it’s left as an exercise for the reader to imagine what the public’s concerns were, exactly.
  • Adding insult to injury department: Workers for the Oakland A’s weren’t told by team management that the franchise was relocating to Sacramento next year and that they would all be laid off as a result, they saw it on the TV news. “Thank you for ruining our lives,” said one A’s bartender only identified by CBS Sports as Tony. (Also, the layoffs have reportedly already begun, because John Fisher has clearly determined you don’t need concessions workers when you’ve so effectively alienated your fans that no one will come to your games.)
  • The Atlanta Braves claim that a new survey found their stadium-in-the-middle-of-suburban-nowhere ranks 13th out of 30 teams in “walkability,” and we don’t even need to debate whether it’s a dumb survey because it turns out 13th actually means 21st because it turns out the dumb survey people don’t know how to break ties.
  • “Can Minor League Baseball Survive Its Real Estate Problems?” asks the New York Times, but those problems were created by MLB when it bought and contracted the minor leagues and then forced cities to scramble to upgrade stadiums to avoid being left without a chair when the music stopped. Try to keep up, New York Times! Even without a sports department!
  • D.C. United wants to build a stadium for a minor-league affiliate in Baltimore, and the Baltimore Banner article on how “there hasn’t been enough information shared about the project” doesn’t even try to ask how much it would cost or who would pay for it, this has not been a great week for journalism. Here are some tips, guys, start with those!
Share this post:

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!
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Opposition builds (somewhat) to sports subsidy plans in Virginia, Kansas City, elsewhere

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a rough week, what with new stadium demands dropping every couple of hours, half of them from Jerry Reinsdorf. But there have also been signs of new organized opposition from all corners, some of them involving heavy hitters:

  • The Northern Virginia AFL-CIO came out against the proposed Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria after being unable to reach an agreement with the teams and the state on whether a hotel that would be part of the $2 billion project would employ union workers. “If they’re against it, then the arena deal is probably going to have a very difficult time,” remarked Virginia House Speaker Don L. Scott Jr. afterwards, as the arena bill heads for reconciliation talks between the house, which passed it, and the senate, which didn’t even give it a hearing. “If it dies, it dies.”
  • Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas, meanwhile, upped the ante on her opposition to Alexandria arena plans, challenging D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Twitter to “compete by both offering $0 in taxpayer dollars to these teams and let them decide where they want to pay to build their own arena.” (Bowser’s account did not respond, unless this counts.) Former Alexandria mayor Allison Silberberg, who is part of the Coalition to Stop the Potomac Yard Arena campaign, was so pleased that she brought Lucas a cake.
  • After the Kansas City renters’ group KC Tenants came out against the upcoming April 2 referendum to renew Jackson County’s 0.375% sales tax surcharge and give the money to Royals owner John Sherman as part of a potential $1 billion in public money for a new downtown stadium, calling it “$167 per household, per year, all to pay for a playground for the wealthy and for tourists,” a group of city residents have formed the Committee Against New Royals Stadium Taxes to likewise oppose the tax hike. The group has “little to no money in its bank account,” according to the Kansas City Star’s account of campaign manager Tim Smith’s characterization, but it does have a parked domain name and its organizers are members of the extremely active Save Kauffman (Royals) Stadium at Truman Sports Complex Facebook group, which is a recommended follow if you want to see how extremely angry many Kansas City residents, and Royals fans, are about this whole state of affairs.
  • Arthur Acolin, a real estate economics professor at the University of Washington, released a three-page report on the proposed downtown Philadelphia 76ers arena that found that disruptions to existing businesses during construction and operation could cost the city and state between $260 million and $1 billion in lost tax revenues. The math is a little rough — it looks like Acolin just added up all the economic activity in the area of the proposed arena and calculated what would happen if it fell by sample round numbers — but as he writes, “the 76ers have provided nowhere near this level of details nor any of the analysis behind their figures.” It was enough to get the 76ers to respond by calling the report “fatally flawed” and “another attempt by those who oppose the project to obfuscate the truth by pumping out misinformation and half-baked theories instead of engaging in productive dialogue,” in a CBS News article that repeatedly refers to Acolin as “Albert Alcoin,” which should get all their copy editors immediately fired, if they had copy editors, which they probably don’t.
  • Arizona Republic sportswriter Greg Moore wrote a column about Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick’s threat to leave town if he doesn’t get public stadium money that includes the subhead “I don’t like bullies,” and really the rest of the column is just icing on that four-word cake.
  • I brought my mighty rhetorical weight to the airwaves, or at least the internetwaves, by going on the Sox Machine podcast to talk about why giving Reinsdorf $1.7 billion in tax money for a new Chicago White Sox stadium development (since upped to $2 billion) would be crazytown.

So that’s it, then, the tide is finally turning, and maybe soon we can all stop pushing this damn rock back up this damn hill day after day? Hahaha of course not, the forces of vacuuming up money and giving it to rich people so they can have more money (because that’s what makes them rich people) continue unabated:

  • The Utah legislature advanced a bill to hike sales taxes in Salt Lake City by 0.5% to generate $1 billion for an arena for a nonexistent NHL team, with the backing of Mayor Erin Mendenhall. This would be on top of $600 million or more in proposed hotel tax hikes to help pay for a stadium for a nonexistent MLB team. Hockey bill sponsor state Sen. Dan McCay denied that this was giving in to threats by the Jazz ownership that they could move out of the city limits without a new subsidized arena, then added, “you’d hate to see downtown lose the sporting opportunities they have now,” so, yeah.
  • Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson delivered up a fresh bowl of word salad about whether he’ll endorse city money being used for a new White Sox stadium: “As far as public dollars, we haven’t gotten into any of those specifics just yet. But I will say that we’re gonna explore all options. … Everything is on the table here. But again, I want to make sure that there’s a real commitment to public use and public benefit. … There’s no guarantee that they’ll get it from the city. What I’ve said repeatedly is that we need to make sure that our investments have real public benefit and that there has to be a commitment to public use. Those conversations are being had, and there are some promising developments that eventually we’ll be able to talk about out loud.” He has it right here on this list…
  • The new $27 million Rhode Island F.C. soccer stadium in Pawtucket will now cost state taxpayers $132 million over 30 years, because the Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency got a terrible bond rate. State commerce secretary Liz Tanner defended the pricey borrowing by pointing out that even though the state legislature could have just appropriated the money and saved taxpayers a ton of interest payments, “there would’ve been a level of uncertainty without knowing whether the legislature was going to pass those dollars or not,” and we can’t have that, now can we?
  • The Dodger Stadium gondola project — surely you remember the Dodger Stadium gondola project — lurched forward again on Thursday when the Metro Board of Directors signed off on its environmental impact report. The gondola still needs approval from the city of Los Angeles and parks and transit officials, plus to figure out who exactly will pay for its potential $500 million price tag, but if nothing else it lives to gondola another day.
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is reportedly focused on staying in Oakland until a new Las Vegas stadium is open in 2028, and also Sacramento is the frontrunner to be the temporary home of the A’s, this is way too blind-men-and-the-elephant for me, maybe let’s all calm down about the latest rumors you heard, guys.
  • And in non-sports news, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry defended signing a bill to remove the requirement that recipients of state development subsidies report how many jobs they’ll be creating, because “this program is about capital investment. It is not about job creating.” Just gonna sit here and let that roll around in my brain for a while, have a great weekend and see you back here Monday!

 

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Bears set arbitrary stadium deadline, A’s now have three different sets of stadium renderings they won’t show you

access_time personNeil deMause

A reporter asked me this week if I thought there was one particular thing driving the current wave of stadium and arena demands, and I said not really, though there are a few factors influencing it — lots of ’90s stadiums hitting the end of 30-year leases, local governments feeling a little more flush thanks to federal infrastructure and COVID relief money, baseball teams rushing to get deals in place before expansion takes move threat targets out of play. But at the same time, man is the sports subsidy news ever a firehose right now: This site is seeing multiple posts a day right now, and still I feel like I’m leaving more news than ever for the Friday roundups.

Which is all fine and good and I’m happy to do it, it can just be a little exhausting to write. If it’s not too exhausting to read as well, and you want to throw some additional coins in the tip jar to help me shoulder this increased workload, that’s always appreciated. I’m sure things will die down some once we get to the end of various legislative sessions in the spring and early summer, but right now we should all be taking our vitamins to keep our stamina up.

And speaking of the firehose, let’s turn it on and get blasted:

  • Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren says as far as a new stadium goes, “the timeline has to be in 2024,” adding, “Time is money. It takes probably three years once you put a shovel in the ground. ’24 should be the focal point.” Oh hey, it’s our old friend the Two-Minute Warning from the standard stadium playbook! As is de rigueur, Warren did not indicate what would happen if his team didn’t get a new stadium approved in 2024, but given that right now he doesn’t have a lot of viable alternatives, I’d wager that holding his breath until he turns blue is not off the table.
  • And speaking of arbitrary deadlines, St. Petersburg is pushing back a council vote on Tampa Bay Rays stadium funding until May, so there’s enough time for committee meetings first. Rays president Brian Auld warned back in October that “any delay is going to fundamentally alter the entire agreement”; nothing yet from Auld on whether he has a problem with this delay now, but given that it looks like relatively smooth sailing right now for Rays owner Stuart Sternberg to get a potential $1.5 billion in public cash, I’m expecting he won’t complain too much about waiting a few extra weeks for the check to arrive.
  • MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle, who previously said he had seen the mythical Oakland A’s Las Vegas stadium renderings and that they were “spectacular,” now says he’s seen three different versions of where the stadium would go on the current Tropicana resort site, and it’s holding up his plans to renovate his resort across the street until he sees the final design. “I have to believe, in the next 30 to 60 days, we should find out more,” Hornbuckle said; maybe he has to believe it in order to sleep at night, but with the stadium renderings now overdue by two and a half months and counting, we are under no such obligation.
  • The meeting between A’s execs and Oakland officials about a potential short-term lease extension at the Coliseum were “really positive” according to an unnamed team official and “very open and frank” according to Alameda County supervisor David Haubert, who added, “No food fights.” I read somewhere that I can’t find now that the whole thing only lasted about 30 minutes; more meetings are expected, at which there should be plenty of time for food fights.
  • For the many of you expecting Joe Lacob to ride to the rescue and buy the A’s from Fisher and keep them in Oakland, Lacob has an update of sorts: “I’ve not checked in recently. It’s his team. If he decides he wants to sell, he knows who to call, that’s all I’ll say. We might be interested, obviously. We’ve said we were interested in the past. But I don’t think he’s doing that. I think he’s very committed to continue to own the franchise. Looks like he’s committed to Las Vegas. We’re always there. But I’m not calling anybody, it’s his team. I want to stay out of the way. We’ll cross that bridge if it or another team comes available.” Read those tea leaves as you prefer.
  • Jacksonville mayor’s office lead negotiator Mike Weinstein says Mayor Donna Deegan is considering paying the public’s share of $2 billion in Jaguars stadium upgrades by using money in the city’s pension funds, which would be repaid by (scroll, scroll) nope, he didn’t say how, so this is very much the equivalent of explaining how you’ll afford a new purchase to your spouse with “I’ll put it on our credit card.” Note to First Coast News headline writers: This is not what “paying for” means.
  • Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas says her finance and appropriations committee will “absolutely” strip funding for the proposed Alexandria arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals from a 2024 budget bill: “I’m not changing my mind.” We certainly seem headed for a scenario where the state house approves an arena bill while the state senate does not, though there’s still lots of speculation that Senate Democrats are just haggling over their price, possibly for cannabis legalization, an increased minimum wage, more affordable housing, or possibly a pony.
  • An analysis of the Virginia arena deal by the D.C. city council, which obviously isn’t impartial, estimates that it would actually cost taxpayers more than $5 billion counting maintenance and debt service. That’s not entirely fair since a bunch of that money would be paid out in the far future — it’s the old fallacy of calculating how much your house costs by adding up all your mortgage payments over 30 years — but the report does note that the arena plan includes a publicly covered $12 million a year repairs slush fund that would grow at 2% a year, so that’s maybe another $250 million in cost that hasn’t been accounted for by the first $1 billion or so in public money, add it to the list.
  • Another stadium playbook standard is the Home Field Disadvantage, claiming that the old place is just too decrepit ever to stack up with modern buildings, and the Kansas City Royals deployed that one this week, having Populous stadium designer Earl Santee say it’s “just not feasible” and “not realistic” to renovate the team’s current stadium, on account of it having what’s called “concrete cancer.” Oh, really, Earl? This didn’t come up when the Royals stadium was just renovated last decade? Do you have an engineering report to show us, or a price tag on what it would cost to subject Kauffman Stadium to concrete chemotherapy? Hello, Earl, we have followup questions! Earl!
  • Buffalo Bills execs say that their new stadium will have a steeper upper deck that will allow it to bring fans closer to the field, so that, in WGRZ-TV’s words, “fans who sit in the last row of the general concourse will be 54 feet closer to the field than they are at the current stadium.” Yes, that’s how geometry works, and yay for them for applying it — except that the old stadium holds 71,608 fans and the new one will hold only 62,000, so really a lot of the improvement is just from lopping off the farthest 10,000 seats, so not so yay after all.
  • The city of Pawtucket sold $54 million worth of bonds last week to fund a new Rhode Island F.C. stadium, and while that’s a lot for a minor-league soccer stadium and double what taxpayers were supposed to be on the hook for less than a year ago, perhaps most alarming is the news that the bonds were sold at “a yield of 8.24%, equivalent to almost 14% on taxable securities.” Nothing tops off massive public cost overruns like the worst interest rate imaginable, that’s what I always say!
  • I was on the radio in Chicago this week to talk about the new White Sox and Bears stadium proposals, and props to WBBM’s Rick Gregg for leading with my juiciest quote: “I think we went in fairly skeptical, and we came out of our research horrified.” Click the link above to give it a listen, and have a good long weekend for those who celebrate!
Share this post:

OKC approves $30m in tax money for overruns on shapeshifting minor-league soccer stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

The Oklahoma City council voted unanimously yesterday to approve using $30 million in tax money to pay for cost overruns on a new Energy F.C. soccer stadium, which isn’t exactly surprising since the council already discussed doing this two weeks ago. There are several amazing bits, though, that are worthy of note:

  • Amazing quote #1: “In the original plan for this stadium, there was no provision for land or funding for land, and we have a unique opportunity right now,” said Kenton Tsoodle, president of The Alliance for Economic Development of Oklahoma City. I’ve read this five times now, and can’t interpret it as anything other than the initial stadium plan neglected to budget for either land or the actual cost of stadium construction, now the public has the rare opportunity of being allowed to contribute another $30 million, which only really makes sense as an infomercial pitch.
  • Amazing quote #2: “We’re siting the stadium, which had no funding in MAPS, and we’re doing so with a donation, which is much appreciated and we thank the team for that pledge,” said OKC mayor David Holt. Thanking team owners for contributing anything to the cost of their own stadium is fresh rhetorical ground, but then this is the same guy who touted a plan to fund a Thunder arena with a $780 million “sales tax that will not raise taxes,” so words truly mean different things to Holt.
  • Amazing rendering #1:

    Why are they building a soccer stadium with a double deck at the end line, and only a tiny single deck along the side, where fans actually want to sit? Also why is one guy on the white team standing in an offside position way down the pitch, and does it have anything to do with the fact that it seems like three of his teammates have been red carded, leaving the team with only eight players on the pitch? And why does this entire design bear zero resemblance to:
  • Amazing rendering #2:
    This looks a little more like soccer at first glance, but there’s still a lot of weirdness: the number of people (mostly women) who are paying no attention to the match, the four women in identical red floppy hats and green scarves standing in the same row at lower right, the fact that one of the teams pictured on the video board (in black) appears not to be either team playing in the actual game (which features blue vs. white with a diagonal red stripe).

Taken together, this all looks like OKC officials throwing out a whole lot of half-assed justifications and quarter-assed clip art in defense of spending $71 million on a stadium for a minor-league soccer team that hasn’t played in two seasons and only drew 2,200 fans per game the last time it did. Surely once they have a 10,000-seat stadium they’ll fill the place, at least once Holt gets funding approved for his floppy-hat clone army.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: A modest economic impact reporting proposal, plus two, three, many vaporstadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

I was out sick yesterday, but fortunately nothing incredibly stupid happened with the $1.5 billion Virginia arena subsidy plan for the Washington Capitals and Wizards for the first time all week, so my services weren’t needed. (Other than the whole thing remaining incredibly stupid, but that’ll still be true today, and next week, and next month, and…)

Other things, though, kept happening, and my Decemberween gift to you is to present them all, neatly wrapped and suitable for pointing and laughing:

  • Veteran sports business reporter Alan Snel’s LVSportsBiz.com has announced a new policy of not reporting economic impact claims without also including how the numbers were calculated, and while that may sound like a simple matter of reporting out all the details, it becomes much funnier when you realize that this means Snel just isn’t going to report any numbers that don’t show their math. On a Las Vegas Raiders announcement of the economic impact of their team, Snel reported that he’s waiting on Raiders officials to grant “an interview about how the economic impact number was determined before we publish that number”; about a similar UFC impact report, he wrote that “LVSportsBiz.com will publish these numbers when UFC and Applied Analysis explain how they determined these economic figures.” I truly hope this will lead to stories like “A’s Claim New Stadium Will Create Some Damn Number of Jobs, So Far As We Know They Pulled It Out of Their Ass,” which honestly would be some of the most accurate reporting out there.
  • And speaking of goofy economic impact numbers: A new roof for Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, which already cost $1 billion in 1976 loonies, may or may not cost $750 million, but if it does it’s okay, says Quebec Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx, because then Taylor Swift might say “Joli toit!” and play five nights there and bring $350 million in spending that totally would be from out-of-towners who would all fly to Montreal because Taylor Swift never plays near them. [citation needed]
  • Not saying that a stadium district project called “Project Smoke” sounds like a grift, but when the guy presenting it is a Nashville pediatrician who pled guilty to billing fraud and people at the meeting were reportedly saying, “Have you Googled this guy? Can you believe this?”, it’s definitely not a good thing. Though it could make a good Avengers 5 plot to replace the one about Kang now that Jonathan Majors has been fired.
  • “Baltimore is not on the verge of landing a pro outdoor soccer team,” begins a Baltimore Sun article about the Maryland Stadium Authority commissioning a site study for a stadium for this team that, it bears repeating, does not exist and likely will not exist soon. The study cost $50,000, which is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but is maybe around $50,000 more than needs to be spent identifying places to build a stadium that likely won’t ever be built.
  • The Jackson County legislature on Monday put off a decision on whether to put a sales-tax increase for Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium projects on the April 2024 ballot, then the measure’s sponsor, county chair DaRon McGee, introduced a “corrected measure” that would specify that the sales tax wouldn’t take effect until the teams negotiated 40-year leases, agreed to community benefits agreements, and chose an acceptable site. We’ll see if that makes county executive Frank White hate it any less, but it is at least better than voting to collect a giant pile of money for the local sports teams and then negotiate the details later, we’ve seen how that works out.
  • Philadelphia’s law department has now denied more than 100 public records requests for information about the proposed 76ers arena, which is a lot! Activist and journalist Faye Anderson said one of her few requests was approved shows that city officials and other involved parties have been meeting weekly for more than a year on the project, but she can’t get any information about what they’ve been talking about. “What were they saying behind closed doors?” she asked. “What were they saying when they thought those conversations, those records, would never see the light of day?” An appeal has been filed with the state Office of Open Records, so we may find out next month, or later, or never.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: SF mayor really wants to build a stadium for some soccer team, just not sure which one

access_time personNeil deMause

Pressed for time this morning, so let’s dive right in for a quick tour through this week’s remaining news:

Share this post:

Friday roundup: O’s owner still wants land atop $600m in state cash, Chuck Schumer lurves the Bills, plus fresh bonkers Titans renderings

access_time personNeil deMause

And here we arrive again at the end of another programming week. It’s a bit demoralizing that this is the slow season for stadium and arena news — no legislatures in session, lots of people on vacation — and yet the news watch is as busy as ever. I’m a little afraid of what’ll happen in September, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Meanwhile, here’s what else has been happening:

  • Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, while visiting Baltimore Ravens training camp and wearing a Ravens jersey, because that’s how elected officials roll, announced that he and Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos have resumed talks over a lease extension. The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal says the remaining sticking point is that Angelos wants, in addition to $600 million in state renovation money that was already approved, development rights to land around Camden Yards, even though there isn’t really much undeveloped land available. (Which we’ve known since February, really, but it’s nice to get confirmation from The New York Times’ proposed scab sports section.) And Angelos might not get away with it, too, if only because he keeps stepping on rakes.
  • New Tennessee Titans stadium renderings! And it’s a video! Set to a pop cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” for some reason! With children playing jumprope and computer animated people doing rock guitar moves in the concession concourses? USA Today’s Titans Wire, which is no doubt an unbiased source, calls it “just well done overall”; it certainly burns, burns, burns, so the soundtrack was well chosen in that way.
  • U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer tells the Daily News of Batavia that he has told Buffalo Bills co-owner Terry Pegula to call him whenever he needs something, and “every so often they do, about one thing or another,” and also that he has confidence the new Bills stadium will be built despite cost overruns and “it’s got to be built soon because, you know, the existing stadium is old,” and also he was “furious and frantic” when he thought the Bills might move and “did everything I could to keep the Bills in Buffalo.” The Daily News of Batavia does not appear to have asked Schumer if he thought $1 billion in public money was a fair price to pay for this, and Schumer ran unopposed in last year’s Democratic primary, so democracy is just working well all around.
  • The developers behind Pawtucket’s stalled Rhode Island F.C. soccer stadium say they have finally found money to finish the project, and will restart construction “in the near future.” The city and state still need to sign off on resuming the plan.
  • Don’t like the Philadelphia 76ers owners’ plans to build an arena on a failing mall next to the city’s Chinatown? What if they added a 20-story apartment building with 20% of the units “affordable” (no specifics provided on to which income group), or at least pictures of one?
  • Bronx cricket leagues officially hate the proposed temporary T20 World Cup stadium that would displace their public cricket fields for next year. “You know, you don’t want to come into a community and just throw things down their throat,” said Curtis Clarke, president of the New York Masters Cricket Association, who clearly doesn’t have a good handle on what sports leagues very much do want.
  • No, it won’t.
  • I have not yet had time to read Brad Humphreys and Jane Ruseski’s paper that found that flu deaths rise when a city gets a new major-league sports team, but the fact that the NHL saw the largest effect — a 24.6% increase — checks out when you consider that the league plays in indoor arenas during flu season in disproportionately cold parts of North America. Good thing we all learned from the Atalanta superspreader event and put in place protocols to reduce viral spread at sporting events by … no? Well, maybe next pandemic.
Share this post:

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.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Commanders buyers’ $500m tax writeoff, SF soccer stadium surprise, commissioners gonna commissioner

access_time personNeil deMause

Can you believe we got through almost an entire week without talking about the Oakland A’s and their planned Las Vegas stadium and its path through the Nevada legislature? I already miss that crazy cast of characters: For-the-Record Jeremy Aguero, the relentless tweeters of the Nevada Independent, the blue recess screen. Yes, they botched the ending, but we’ll always have the memories.

And we’ll always have the future, where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives. Which will be the next stadium drama to become a breakout hit? You make the call:

  • Josh Harris and his friends will get a potential half-billion-dollar tax writeoff for their $6 billion purchase of the Washington Commanders, and while I don’t totally understand Mike Ozanian’s explanation of how it will work — something about amortizing part of the purchase price as being for “intangible assets” — I hope it has something to do with the Bill Veeck depreciation dodge, because that’s a great story worth revisiting.
  • San Francisco Mayor London Breed, in the middle of answering a question of whether her city is in the midst of an urban “doom loop” (spoiler: it’s not) by saying, “we could even tear down the whole [Westfield Mall] and build a whole new soccer stadium,” which is an interesting idea not least because San Francisco doesn’t have a soccer team in need of a stadium (it has the lower-division San Francisco F.C., but its owners haven’t been pushing for a new home), while nearby San Jose already does. Mayor Breed, I have some followup questions, oh crap, she’s gone already.
  • NHL commissioner Gary Bettman “provided an update” on the Arizona Coyotes’ arena situation yesterday, and it is: “They’re in the process of exploring the alternatives that they have in the Greater Phoenix Area.” Does it actually count as an update when you’re just saying the same thing everyone already knew? Discuss.
  • Time magazine asked MLB commissioner Rob Manfred about why a Las Vegas A’s stadium should get public financing, and the faux-pas-missioner replied, “I have read obviously peoples’ arguments about public financing. There’s an equal number of scholars on the opposite side of that issue,” which, I’m sorry, what? Is this one of those dark matter things, where there are thousands of economists who think that public stadium funding is a good idea, they’re just invisible? Mr. Manfred, I have some followup — oh crap.
  • Nashville journalist Justin Hayes unearthed some emails between the Nashville mayor’s office and the Tennessean over the paper’s coverage of the Titans stadium deal, and they’re a gold mine of showing how the media sausages are made: My favorite bit is where the mayor’s communications chief asks for “two half sentences” to be inserted into an article to counter “the vocal echo-chamber of folks who are reflexively negative,” which it’s fair to say he eventually got and then some.
  • Construction has stopped on Pawtucket’s half-finished Rhode Island F.C. soccer stadium after developers ran out of money, and one can only hope that the city will be left with a ruin half as impressive as Valencia’s.
  • More on U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee’s proposed Moneyball Act, which would apparently require any baseball team that moves more than 25 miles to pay its former host city and state “not less than the State, local and or Tribal tax revenue levied in the ten years prior to the date of relocation,” or else baseball would lose its antitrust exemption. That’s a kind of arbitrary and vaguely defined price to hold over MLB’s head, but arbitrary and vaguely defined is probably good enough for government work that is never, ever going to pass anyway.
  • If you’re really jonesing to hear me go on and on about the A’s again, check out my appearance yesterday on KPFA, which should ease your withdrawal symptoms. I did not provide any updates, but we did cover a lot of ground, including the enduring question of what John Fisher is thinking spending $1 billion to move his team to what would be MLB’s smallest stadium in its smallest TV market.
Share this post: