Category: minor-league soccer

Friday roundup: Reading the fine print on stadium and arena deals is a lost art

access_time personNeil deMause

A note to all of you Field of Schemes supporters who signed up to receive the daily posts in email — I’ve been made aware of a glitch that may have been keeping some new members from getting the emails. This should now be fixed, but if you think you should be receiving emails but still aren’t, please contact me; if you think you shouldn’t be receiving emails but are, then really contact me. (And if you’re not receiving emails because you haven’t become a monthly patron but would like to, just sign up!)

And with that business out of the way, let’s move on to the real excitement: the week’s leftover stadium and arena news!

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Friday roundup: K.C. area officials debate throwing more tax money at Chiefs and Royals, as does San Antonio for Spurs, etc. etc.

access_time personNeil deMause

Six posts already in the first four days of the week, and still there’s more news that didn’t make the cut? Legislative season is brutal, man — I can’t wait for it to be over so we can get back to things like wondering if St. Petersburg is going to finish fixing the Tampa Bay Rays stadium roof by next season. (Probably maybe, apparently! There’s one item off the list already!)

And on with the show:

  • Kansas City, Missouri Mayor Quinton Lucas says he thinks he could fund the rest of a Royals stadium without having to go to voters to approve a new sales tax hike, by using “a different set of tools and entities, so much like you’ve seen the discussion in Kansas” — so that would involve kicking back existing sales taxes, presumably, instead of extending a sales tax surcharge? Meanwhile, Clay County Presiding Commissioner Jerry Nolte says if the Royals choose to build a stadium there, the county might hold a vote on a sales tax hike. None of this is going to get resolved by the end of the month, the time by which Kansas’s offer of state sales tax money for Royals and Chiefs stadiums expire; the Kansas legislature could vote to extend that deadline, but it looks like Kansas officials may be tired of being the teams’ spare-tyre lover: Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins says he doesn’t want to do that: “We gave them a year to get it done, and in a year, you know, they kind of keep messing around, going back and forth, and you extend it, and that’s what they’ll do. You know, the pressure is off. Then it could take another year and come back again.”
  • Bexar County voters could be asked to cast ballots in November on a 0.25% hotel and car-rental tax hike to raise about $175 million for a new San Antonio Spurs arena. This would only be one of many public revenue streams used to pay for it, presumably — the arena is expected to cost between $1.3 billion and $1.5 billion and Spurs owner Peter Holt won’t commit to how much he would chip in, just keep those subsidies coming until Holt says “stop,” thanks.
  • A 16-page slide deck from April on proposals for a new Cincinnati Bengals stadium lease has been revealed through a public records request, and some of the items include: $308 million in county spending on stadium upgrades from an existing escrow account, in exchange for the Bengals owners extending their lease through 2031; maybe a lease extension through 2036 if the county kicks in another $300 million by 2028; the Bengals paying $1 million a year rent either for the next five years (what the team wants) or for the rest of the lease (the county’s proposal); and a Bengals request to get half the tax revenue the city of Cincinnati gets from “stadium operations” to help cover stadium maintenance. And what about the question of extending that state-of-the-art clause requiring the county to build holographic replay systems if they’re ever invented, anything? No mention of that, really? Not that it matters, as this slide deck is two months old and there’s still a ton of haggling to go, but would have been nice to at least include one slide on it, just saying.
  • The Ohio Capital Journal describes the current debate over a Cleveland Browns stadium as state legislators and Gov. Mike DeWine “disagree[ing] on how to pay for it. Gov. Mike DeWine proposed increasing the taxes on gambling and Ohio House lawmakers favored issuing state bonds,” and no, Ohio Capital Journal, “issuing bonds” is not a way to pay for something, any more than taking out a mortgage is a way to pay for a house, it’s just a way to finance something but you still have to pay for it later, go back five spaces and lose a turn to think about what you have written.
  • The Connecticut state legislative session may have ended without passage of $127 million for a minor-league soccer stadium (plus other stuff) in Bridgeport, but the legislature did pass approval for Bridgeport to set up a TIF district to redirect its own tax revenues to pay for up to $190 million in development costs. This’ll surely go just great, remember how well the Bluefish worked out? Connecticut United is set to begin play in MLS Next Pro next season, probably not Bridgeport but somewhere.
  • This week was so hectic that I never got around t0 reporting on Marc Normandin’s excellent Baseball Prospectus essay from Monday about how Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s agreement to sell the team somewhere between 2029 and the time the sun burns out is timed to increase the savvy negotiator‘s leverage, since 2029 is when the team’s current lease expires, plus prospective buyer Justin Ishbia is a minority owner of the Nashville S.C. MLS team, and hint, hint, Nashville. The 89-year-old Reinsdorf seems determined to go to the grave leaving some juicy leverage for his son, or at least to cement his legacy as the most hardball extortionist of all time, guess you have to make your own fun when you realize you can’t take it with you.
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Friday roundup: Bengals reno plan called “PR stunt,” plus the return of the Rays two-stadium plan

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to everyone who generously donated (and in some cases more than generously, you know who you are) to the Field of Schemes spring supporter drive — I have a whole lot of fridge magnets to send out! But first, there’s a weekly news roundup to get to:

  • That Hamilton County agreement to spend $80.5 million on Cincinnati Bengals stadium upgrades and repairs in exchange for no lease agreement at all turns out to be not so popular with the Hamilton County Commission, where commissioner Alicia “hugging the zero down” Reece called it “a PR stunt” because there’s no new lease while commission president Denise Driehaus countered (?) that “No one at that meeting ever said this was related to the final lease.” The county commission only has three members and the third, Stephanie Summerow Dumas, didn’t show up to yesterday’s meeting, so it’s hard to say what this means for the stadium proposal’s ultimate fate.
  • Hey, what if the Tampa Bay Rays built two stadiums, asks Tampa Bay Times opinion editor Graham Brink, one outdoors and one a refurbished Tropicana Field? Would that be cheaper or better? Probably not? Too bad, I already wrote the op-ed, and anyway this is just “back of the napkin” stuff. (Or envelope, which actually has two distinct sides. NAPKINS GOT BACKS!)
  • WAMU-FM reports that “a source familiar with [Washington Commanders stadium] talks” says funding “will likely involve the city borrowing against new tax revenues expected to be generated by any new development,” i.e., tax increment financing. The station cites a 2020 study claiming that D.C. has turned a profit on average on TIF districts — on first look it appears that the study’s authors guesstimated that development would still happen in the districts without the TIF but would take longer, which is probably a reasonable assumption but could create huge swings in the revenue numbers depending on what you mean by “longer.” I have emails out to a couple of TIF experts, I’ll update here if they have anything instructive to add.*
  • Former Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial director Brent Larkin says the Cleveland Browns stadium plans should be submitted to a public referendum, arguing that Ohio voters usually approve sports subsidy referendums anyway, so where’s the harm? Oh, and also it would be “a wildly generous gift to billionaire professional sports team owners at the same time those same elected officials are cutting aid to schools, food banks, libraries and programs for poor kids.” But anyway, it’ll probably win, so let the voters feel like they’re having a say, that’s democracy!
  • St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch has issued a proposal for redeveloping the waterfront that would include demolishing Al Lang Stadium, the old spring training ballpark that is currently home to the Tampa Bay Rowdies USL team. City councilmembers don’t sound too enthused about this, but also Welch’s managing director of city development said the Rowdies owners are “involved and they’re aware” of the plan, so maybe there’s a new soccer stadium proposal in the works? Worth keeping an eye on, if nothing else.
  • A group of downtown Kansas City businesses put up a giant sign with a giant QR code asking that a Royals stadium be built downtown. Chair of the Downtown Council of Kansas City: Gibb Kerr, managing director of the K.C. office of Cushman and Wakefield, a major developer, who surely would not be in position to profit from a downtown stadium, the Kansas City Star would certainly tell us if it were.
  • Work has begun at the proposed Las Vegas A’s stadium site on making it even flatter, this is what passes for progress these days.
  • Los Angeles Dodgers ticket prices are going up, and so is their payroll, and Forbes “contributor” Dan Schlossberg (author of “41 books and more than 25,000 articles about baseball”) concludes that the payroll must be driving up the ticket prices — sorry, Dan, that’s not how it works, there’s a book you might want to read if you have time between writing them.
  • Economist Joe Cortright has done his own analysis of the Portland baseball stadium income tax diversion proposal that I estimated could leave Oregon taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole and determined that the total hole would be more than $600 million.
  • I was on WOSU’s “All Sides with Amy Juravich” on Wednesday to discuss the Browns and Bengals situations, and you can listen to it here. For those who are wondering: Yes, Andy Zimbalist and I did run into each other on the Zoom call as my segment ended and his began, and no, there were no punches thrown.
  • You can buy a piece of the shredded Tropicana Field roof at Tampa Bay Rays games for $15, with the money going to a Rays charity, and doesn’t the city own the roof remnants, shouldn’t the money be going to the general fund? Anyway, if anyone in the Tampa area has been looking for a National Hairball Awareness Day present for me, hint, hint!

*UPDATE: Eight minutes after I hit publish on this post, sports economist and tax expert Geoffrey Propheter replied to my question about the D.C. TIF study. Propheter said it “falls short of academic standards for economic policy analysis” because it doesn’t try to analyze how tax revenue from TIF developments compares to comparable plots of land, but rather just compares actual developments to hypothetical ones that would (according to the study’s assumptions) see different kinds of development take place. He concludes: “I don’t understand how anyone would use this study to justify a TIF for a Commanders stadium.”

And while I was writing the above, Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First (disclosure: I’m doing some paid work for them, not on the subject of stadiums or TIFs) chimed in to note that D.C. TIF districts like the one for Gallery Place have had to be expanded to siphon off sales taxes from other nearby neighborhoods in order to break even.

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Friday roundup: Oregon okays $800m in MLB stadium spending because “transformative”

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a minute since I’ve issued an appeal for new supporters for this site, so: If you aren’t already a supporter of this site, please consider becoming one! There are both monthly and one-time options, and in addition to subscriber benefits like receiving all the stadium and arena news in your email inbox and getting whatever tchotchkes I come up with next, you ensure the piece of mind that comes from knowing you’re helping to keep this site going into its 28th year, which just began this month! Shedding light on the sports subsidy game in any way that affects actual policy turns out to be harder than even a professional cynic like myself thought — for all the reasons this site covers every day — but if we can all just keep it up for another 28 years, I think we might finally start getting somewhere.

As always, thanks to everyone who is contributing now or has contributed in the past — it not only lets me pay the ever-increasing costs of hosting this site and enables me to spend time writing it without going broke, it’s heartening to know that people think this issue is important enough to devote your hard-earned dollars to. Or maybe you just like pointing and laughing at billionaire failsons, that works, too. I hope to be able to keep this site going until it’s no longer necessary, at which point you’re all invited to the victory party, if any of us are still mobile enough by then to dance.

And with that cheery thought, here’s your weekly dose of ways everything still mostly sucks now:

  • The Oregon state senate voted 24-5 to approve $800 million in public bonds toward building a Major League Baseball stadium, just as soon as Portland gets a Major League Baseball team. Senators say the project will pay for itself by using money from player income taxes (it won’t) and that it will be a “forward-thinking, transformative opportunity” and “a showcase of what is beautiful, central, core to our constituents of Portland,” which is giving money to ex-Nike execs so they can have their own private sports team, I guess? Please enjoy your requisite J.C. Bradbury Simpsons meme, it’s well earned.
  • What do Washington, D.C. councilmembers think of the news that their mayor is on the brink of agreeing to spend $850 million toward a Commanders stadium at a time when the district budget is just red ink up to its eyeballs? “Is this really going to cost us close to a billion dollars?” asked council chair Phil Mendelson, while economic development committee chair Kenyon McDuffie called it a “once in a lifetime opportunity” before being asked how the city could afford it and replying, “I haven’t seen the details.” It’s okay, all the other kids are doing it!
  • Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman says he does not support the Cincinnati Bengals owners’ request for $350 million in state money toward stadium renovations, and wants to hold out for a deal where taxpayers “can actually make money” like … the Cleveland Browns deal? I’m getting kind of tired of linking to my explanation of the Casino Night Fallacy, but seeing as this seems to be some sort of mass delusion that state legislators are signing up for, maybe it can’t be explained enough.
  • The Kansas City Chiefs and Royals owners are still kicking tires on potential stadium sites, yep, that’s excuse enough for a news story, nothing else journalists should be spending their time covering, probably. Local business leaders say it’s important, anyway, and if we didn’t have a free and independent press taking its editorial directives from the local chamber of commerce, where would this country be?
  • Modesto, California is trying to build a stadium to get a soccer franchise. Of all the 2025 things that you never expected we would be living through, that’s one of the 2025iest.
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Friday roundup: Bengals want $350m in stadium money from Ohio, A’s still insist Vegas stadium is happening for real

access_time personNeil deMause

The spring legislative season is always exhausting, but at least we’re already up to … April 11, is that all that it is? At least we can hope that all the team owners lining up for stadium and arena money have already gotten their bills submitted, though plenty of subsidy demands have emerged this late or later: Today is in fact the second anniversary of the Maryland legislature approving $1.2 billion in public money for renovations for the Baltimore Orioles and Ravens (a number that would eventually grow to an unlimited number depending on how much in taxes comes in) essentially without warning, so it wouldn’t be that much of a shock to see a surprise demand emerge from out of nowhere.

And speak of the devil:

  • Hamilton County and Cincinnati Bengals owners the Brown family have declared that if the state of Ohio is set on giving $600 million in tax money to the Cleveland Browns for a new stadium, it should also give $350 million to the Bengals for renovations. The entire renovation plan would cost $830 million and would include a new scoreboard, suite upgrades, new roof canopy, new seating, and improved walkways, escalators, and elevators — which sounds like a lot for that work, honestly, unless the suite bathrooms would be getting diamond-encrusted faucets — and would presumably include county money as well, though officials didn’t specify how much. “Our lease ends before theirs,” griped Hamilton County commissioner Stephanie Summerow Dumas. “Just wondering why is there so much focus on the Browns.” (Hmm, can’t possibly imagine why.) No word on whether the Bengals owners would tear up that insane state-of-the-art clause in their lease as part of the deal, you would think that would be important to ask, I’m looking at you, Cincinnati Enquirer.
  • Newly appointed West Sacramento Athletics president Marc Badain has declared that the team is still on track for a June groundbreaking for its Las Vegas stadium, blaming “skeptics” and “negativity” for the idea that John Fisher may not be able to find $1.15 billion in construction costs on top of the $600 million he’s set to get from the state of Nevada. “There’s a lot of people that make a living out of questioning the success of sports venues and what they actually do for a community,” said Badain, and while on the one hand I feel seen, I do question his description of this as “making a living,” as well as questioning whether a groundbreaking actually means you’re going to build a stadium given that just about anyone with a few shovels can hold one — whoops, there I go with the skepticism again, Badain sure has me pegged!
  • The Denver city council has some skeptics about spending $70 million for land and infrastructure for a NWSL stadium, with councilmember Sarah Parady saying, “We are facing the collapse of global financial markets. … I think we’re gonna be sitting here in a year [and] we will have paid in our amount of money from our incredibly scarce dollars that we are going to need for so many fundamental needs in the city.” Also concerning is the estimated additional $80 million in property taxes the city would be giving up by agreeing to buy and own the land under the stadium, according to  University of Colorado-Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter, who is not only a local but also the expert in calculating such things.
  • Just a few months after $900 million in tax money was approved for upgrades to the Utah Jazz and Utah Hockey Club‘s Delta Center and the Salt Palace convention center, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s office abruptly expanded the project’s TIF district last Friday to also redirect taxes from two luxury hotels, an apartment tower, and parking facilities on an adjacent block, providing an additional $59 million in tax money kicked back to the developer, according to Propheter. (That developer would be Jazz and Hockey Club owner Ryan Smith — quelle coincidence!) Then on Tuesday the Salt Lake City council unanimously approved creating the embiggened tax district, with councilmember Victoria Petro bemoaning that “we had no options” but adding that “there is no decimal point here that has been taken with anything less than the gravest consideration,” assuming the gravest consideration can be applied in just two work days.
  • “Salt Lake Bees’ new stadium in Daybreak expected to bring economic impacts, growth to local businesses” was the headline on Utah’s ABC4 website on Tuesday, and if you’re wondering “expected by whom?” and your guess was the owner of a single local coffee shop, you’re a winner!
  • Bridgeport, Connecticut now has an idea for how to pay for a $75 million minor-league soccer stadium, and it’s a TIF district, surprise, surprise. Also the full cost would now be $100 million, and would involve additional state money as well, but who can put a price on being one of the umpteen million cities to have a team in one of the nation’s two warring sets of soccer leagues?
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Friday roundup: Angels owner could be skimping on stadium repairs, St. Pete may send Rays owner a bill for their wasted stadium time

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, did you hear the one about the time that then-New York governor and now-New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo gave two of Elon Musk’s cousins $750 million in public money to open a solar-panel factory that ended up not making any solar panels but just re-sold another company’s solar panels for twice as much per watt as the national average? Me neither until recently — consider it bonus topical content.

Meanwhile, back in the now:

  • Anaheim city officials have no idea how much maintenance work is needed at city-owned Angel Stadium because the Los Angeles Angels‘ lease doesn’t require them to tell the city about repair needs, but it could be “hundreds of millions of dollars” worth, according to state auditors. They suggested either asking Angels owner Arte Moreno if the city can do occasional inspections or maybe seeking a court order. It’s important because Moreno is on the hook for certain maintenance costs, while others would fall on the city; the Angels owner recently said, “I’m not going to put $200 or $300 million into a stadium that a city owns without any of their participation. Maybe we’ll get a new mayor and council that wants us to stay,” which is not exactly a commitment to live up to his lease obligations.
  • Pinellas County is considering sending Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg a bill for county time and money spent on the St. Petersburg stadium deal Sternberg ultimately backed out of, and St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch said the idea “has merit” and he may do the same. “Yeah, why not?” remarked county commission chair Brian Scott, who was previously for the stadium deal. “When we find out what that is, we’ll send them an invoice.”
  • Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine still wants to raise sports gambling taxes to raise $600 million toward a Cleveland Browns stadium (and more toward other future stadiums), but the state legislature still prefers its omni-TIF idea to do the same, and DeWine hasn’t said he’ll veto the legislature’s plan. As for the idea of just not giving Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam $600 million to move from one part of the state to another, no one (besides state house Democrats, but who cares about them) seems to be interested in that, way to go, Ohio.
  • Bexar County, the city of San Antonio, and the Spurs owners have signed a nonbinding agreement not to use county property taxes to fund a new $1.5 billion basketball arena, instead relying on hotel and car rental taxes, which, uh, was the plan all along? Could this nonbinding agreement just be a way to get headlines like “Bexar County agrees not to use property taxes to fund new Spurs arena”? Surely elected officials would not be that cynical!
  • Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman says he has “multiple [stadium] opportunities on both sides of the state line,” because of course he does, he wants to be a savvy negotiator, after all.
  • The USL is expanding to compete directly with MLS and adopting promotion and relegation even, and you know what that means: lots of new stadiums! Modesto, California gets one, and Rogers, Arkansas gets one, and Albany, New York gets one, and by “gets one” I mean of course “gets to help pay for one,” that’s just the price of doing business in a world where there are now two leagues that could be forced to compete for the right to play in markets, hmm.
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Friday roundup: Browns officially demand $1.2B in tax money, DC and San Antonio residents call out public cost of sports plans

access_time personNeil deMause

And how’s your city’s week going? That good, huh? It’s going around.

I would share more Bluesky snark with you, but there’s stadium news to be gotten to:

  • The Cleveland Browns owners have formally issued their request for funding for a $2.4 billion domed stadium in Brook Park, and it includes $1.2 billion in taxpayer money. (The breakdown is $600 million state, $178 million county, $422 million city, if you’re an Ohioan and are wondering which of your government budgets the money would be coming out of. Also, though it’s being described as “new tax revenue,” it really isn’t; hey there, Casino Night Fallacy!) Team owner Jimmy Haslam is describing this as a “50/50 public and private partnership,” though of course that’s only on the spending end; the chances of taxpayers getting an equal cut of stadium revenues are estimated as ROTFL. At least one of the elected officials being asked for cash was extremely unenthusiastic: Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, who has stated that he’d rather the Browns remain within the city of Cleveland, said, “We have to throw a flag on the play” and “it’s a Hail Mary to throw out numbers that don’t square,” sorry, we’ve reached our maximum daily exposure to football metaphors, we’ll have to pick this up again next week.
  • D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser told a community meeting that she wants to build a Washington Commanders stadium at the RFK Stadium site, and according to WTOP, “When someone asked whether Bowser would commit to not offering a subsidy, she said no.” News reports didn’t describe the crowd reaction to that non-pledge, but given the overall skepticism about a stadium plan expressed at the meeting, we can picture it for ourselves.
  • Speaking of resident reaction, “‘Highly speculative’: Residents bristle at lack of answers on funding for new Spurs arena” is a pretty evocative headline, well done, San Antonio Express-News. And unlike in D.C., in San Antonio massive public scorn matters, because the Spurs arena development plan — which goes by the truly jaw-dropping name Project Marvel — is going to require a public referendum to pass, so the Spurs owners have some bristling to address.
  • The United Soccer League says it’s planning to launch a new top-tier division in 2027 to compete with Major League Soccer, made up of some of its existing second-tier franchises and some new ones, and you know what new soccer teams means: new soccer stadium demands! USL officials talked a lot about how the U.S. needs a system more like Europe, where there are tons of soccer teams in cities large and small, but left out the part about how those teams’ stadiums are typically built without large public subsidies, curious, that.
  • And speaking of soccer stadiums, a clown study by the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis claims that a new soccer stadium in Bridgeport would “generate $3.4 billion in economic output and sustain 1,300 new permanent jobs annually until 2050.” Wait, 1,300 permanent jobs annually? Like, 1,300 jobs one year, then another 1,300 jobs the next? It will not surprise you to learn that the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis is connected with UConn’s business school, not its economics department, though it may surprise you that the report was apparently issued last August but only got reported on by the Hartford Business Journal this Wednesday, slow week in the stenography industry, I guess.
  • You may think you don’t want to read a long profile of College of the Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson in the school’s magazine, but what if I told you he provides scientific tips on which lottery numbers to avoid picking? Matheson also discusses stadium funding (“Let’s just say that I’m fairly happy that I have long-term job security as a critic of spending massive amounts of taxpayer money”) and the fact that he wears a different soccer jersey to class each day, which, yes, requires a lot of soccer jerseys.
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Friday roundup: Hamilton County spends $30m on Bengals parking land, Oakland Coliseum may get second life as soccer venue

access_time personNeil deMause

Note to reporters seeking help with your research into sports economics issues: I’m more than happy to talk with journalists from all over the political spectrum, as the great stadium swindle is, as has been discussed here time and again, one that neither Republicans nor Democrats have a monopoly on. But if you’re asking for my assistance, maybe don’t include a link to a page with a report your site did saying anti-trans legislation is about “banning males from competing on female sports teams” — if you can’t keep at least one foot on the ground of factual accuracy, what you’re doing isn’t journalism.

Speaking of factual accuracy, here’s your weekly news roundup, fact-checked as well as I can do myself while my fact-checking department is, apparently, out on a long lunch or something:

  • Hamilton County may still be negotiating a lease extension with the owners of the Cincinnati Bengals, but that hasn’t stopped the county from spending $30 million to buy a parcel of land next to the Bengals stadium to use as additional parking and green space. “The Bengals have forgiven us for our [game day] payments,” explained Hamilton County Commission president Denise Driehaus. “It’s about $30 million total. That happened to be the asking price for this property. And so, in essence, the Bengals are paying for the property, and the county owns it.” That “in essence” is doing a lot of work there: From what I can tell from this report, it was back in 2018 Bengals management first agreed to hand over the disputed game day payments, which is money the team owners wanted the county to provide to cover operational costs of holding home games, in exchange for parking — though if they were “disputed” it’s not clear that this was ever team money to begin with.
  • Remember how, just last month, the owners of the Oakland Roots and Soul soccer teams said they wanted to build a temporary stadium before maybe eventually moving to a permanent stadium at Howard Terminal? Forget all that, they were just pulling our legs, now they want to remain at the Oakland Coliseum for “a longer stay.” Guess resident opossums are only an existential threat to baseball teams, not soccer teams?
  • Your occasional reminder that when the Los Angeles Dodgers owners do renovations to their stadium, they spend their own money on it. That likely has something to do with the fact that they have some of the highest attendance numbers and highest ticket prices in baseball, so they benefit the most from upgrades — though it does raise the question of whether, if less popular teams are asking to be subsidized for renovations that won’t pay for themselves, if that’s really about needing renovations or just wanting an excuse to ask for taxpayer money.
  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren has upgraded from “steadfast” to “adamant” that his team will break ground on a new stadium in 2025. I do not think that word means what you think it means.
  • The St. Petersburg city council has approved funding for the repair of … Al Lang Stadium! The Tampa Bay Rowdies, who play at Al Lang, are owned by Rays owner Stu Sternberg, so at least St. Pete officials can’t be said to be holding a grudge.
  • The Super Bowl’s coming to New Orleans, everyone get ready to benefit from that cushy NFL spending that will provide … $12/hour jobs to assemble the stage for the $10 million halftime show? Well then.
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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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