Category: minor-league soccer

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.
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Friday roundup: Milwaukee County votes no on Brewers subsidy, Coyotes predicted to be moving everywhere and nowhere at once

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy May 26, the last day for stadium legislation to be introduced in the Nevada legislature, unless of course they wait till tomorrow. I’ll be keeping an eye out for any bills popping up, but in the meantime there’s lots of other news to occupy us:

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Friday roundup: More funny numbers on A’s-to-Vegas, Browns stadium renovations, and the economic impact of Peanuts

access_time personNeil deMause

I don’t know what got into this week, but it seems like everything at once suffered rapid unscheduled disassembly: We had Wisconsin elected officials squabbling over which exact $350 million to give to the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, an endless back-and-forth between economic analysts over whether a new Arizona Coyotes arena would be a revenue boon to Tempe or a money pit, a car dealer announcing he was going to build a $2 billion hockey arena on Atlanta’s far northern outskirts for an NHL team that doesn’t exist, Nashville rolling back a rent hike it had just approved for the Tennessee Titans because “competitive potential,” Erie County giving the Buffalo Bills owners total control over their community benefits spending so they could earn a tax break for it, and, last but by no means least, Oakland A’s execs declaring that the team was now fully focused on a new stadium in Las Vegas that would involve more than $500 million in public money, burning (maybe unintentionally?) its bridges in Oakland in the process when Mayor Sheng Thao immediately cut off talks for a new stadium there, declaring, “I am not interested in continuing to play that game.”

With a news week like that, surely nothing else happened of note, right? I wish — then I could have slept in this morning. But events just keep on occurring, so let’s get to the rest of the list before anything else blows up:

  • Speaking of the Las Vegas A’s plans, A’s president/registered Nevada lobbyist Dave Kaval declared that 70% of ticket sales would be expected to be locals, while hired economist (ed. note: not actually an economist) Jeremy Aguero of Applied Analysis said the A’s would draw about 400,000 new visitors to Vegas each year. Let’s see how the math checks out on that: If a new A’s stadium were to hold 35,000 people as planned, that’s a maximum of 2,835,000 attendees a year even if they sell out every game. If 30% of those are out-of-towners, that’s 850,000 people — meaning the A’s would have to produce perpetual sellouts and have half their tourist fans come to Vegas specifically to see baseball for those numbers to make any sense at all. Given that there’s no sign that Florida spring training, to pick one example, brings any measurable number of new visitors, and that Vegas is an even bigger tourist draw already than Florida in March, this might just be a slight overestimate — the first of many in the coming campaign for public stadium funds in Vegas, I’m sure!
  • If the A’s do leave Oakland, the owner of the USL Oakland Roots and USL W Oakland Soul wants to build a temporary soccer stadium in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot. No details on size or cost or funding, but it is projected to last ten years, at which point the Roots and Soul will presumably threaten to move to Las Vegas.
  • Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb says he won’t use “general new fund dollars” for renovations to the Cleveland Browns stadium but rather will “be creative.” Will this mean tax kickbacks that are diverted before they ever hit the general fund, on the Casino Night Principle? Will it mean asking the county and state for money from their general funds instead? Bibb didn’t provide spoilers, but we’ve all seen this movie before.
  • If you were worried that the Memphis Grizzlies owners would really lose state subsidies because Memphis reinstated a state legislator who the state legislature had tried to throw out, nope, the state legislature went and approved the subsidies anyway. How much of the $350 million in state money will go to Grizzlies arena upgrades and how much to the University of Memphis’ stadium will be “released by the city at a later date.”
  • Charlie Brown should’ve demanded a new stadium for his baseball team.
  • And finally, I’m going to be on WPRO radio in Rhode Island tomorrow at noon to discuss none of the above (well, maybe Charlie Brown), but rather the Pawtucket USL stadium plans that are rapidly falling apart. Listen in here, and learn whether I sound energized or half-dead or just Weltschmertzig after a week like this.

 

 

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Pawtucket may nix $124m USL stadium after it turns out money does not in fact grow on trees

access_time personNeil deMause

Some news about the $124 million USL soccer stadium that Pawtucket is putting more than $80 million into after being jilted by its minor-league baseball team when Worcester came calling with plans to build a $160 million stadium that looks like a shipping container: It now may not be built at all. And while you might hope that’s because Rhode Island officials came to their senses that trying to pay off $2.1 million a year in construction debt payments with $565,000 a year in tax revenues was a terrible idea, it’s actually more boring reasons like rising interest rates and the private developer partners turning out not to have the money they said they would have:

City officials are hitting the pause button on issuing $27 million in public bonds to help fund the 10,000-seat stadium, saying uncertain financial conditions have so far prevented them from pulling the trigger.

There is currently no timeline for when the deal will close, city officials said.

“The city’s top priority has always been protecting taxpayers,” Pawtucket spokesperson Grace Voll said in a statement, confirming the initial goal was to issue the bonds by February.

“Given the market challenges of the last year, including a global pandemic, rising interest rates, tighter market conditions, and a looming banking crisis, the state financing and private debt components of the capital stack have not made fiscal sense to close to the date,” she added.

That’s a long list of financial things, so let’s break it down a little. Interest rates are indeed soaring, because the Federal Reserve is trying to bring down the price of eggs by getting more people laid off. A bigger problem, though, appears to be that it turns out twin brothers Grant and Brett Johnson, the private developers who are supposed to put $50 million into the project, don’t actually have $50 million: As of last month they were still pitching potential investors on putting money into the project, and they just missed a deadline for ordering $25 million in steel that was needed to have the stadium open by next spring. (The developers issued a statement saying, “Like any startup venture, this project is in a perpetual investor raise,” which was presumably meant to be reassuring.) The Johnsons also have yet to propose what the project’s housing portion would look like, or how it would be paid for.

The Johnsons have put $25 million of their own money into the project, and have broken ground (which, according to WPRI-TV footage, mostly seems to involve moving lots of gravel around), so there is some momentum for something to get built, anyway. But bigger projects have been left started but unfinished, so one never knows. The traditional fallback, in the U.S. anyway, when private partners run short of cash is for the government to bail them out with even more public money, so it’s encouraging that Rhode Island and Pawtucket seem to be slamming on the brakes — it still won’t make up for all the work that has gone into backing this screwy project in the first place, but at least it’s better than throwing good money after bad.

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Friday roundup: Ravens lease extension would be priciest ever, Royals could be right behind

access_time personNeil deMause

Four full-length posts in three work days already this week, and still there’s more news that got left out! Guess 2023 isn’t going to lack for sports subsidy shenanigans after an eventful 2022, even if the U.S. House spends the entire year trying to figure out how to swear its members in.

While we all wait for noon to tune back in to C-SPAN, some bullet points to keep us occupied:

  • Did I neglect to mention in yesterday’s report on the Baltimore Ravens lease extension that at 15 years in exchange for $600 million in renovation money, the $40 million a year cost makes it the most expensive sports team lease extension in history, blowing past the New Orleans Saints‘ $30 million a year and the Indiana Pacers‘ $24 million a year? To make up for that, you can hear (and watch a slightly blurry) me expound on it at length to WNST’s Nestor Aparicio. (In other Ravens news, my request to the Maryland Stadium Authority for an actual copy of the team’s new lease was met with a reply of “Thank you for contacting the Maryland Stadium Authority. This email acknowledges receipt of your public information act request,” so it may be a while before we get to see that.)
  • The Kansas City Star editorial board, after stumping for a new downtown stadium for the Royals, now warns “there is much we don’t know about the plan.” You mean who would pay for the possibly $1-billion-plus in construction costs that Royals owner John Sherman doesn’t want to cover? Yes, that, but mostly the team needs to vow to stay put for 30 years or else “voters will rightly reject any tax for the ballpark.” That would be, as you know if you didn’t skip past the bullet point just above and can do simple math, one of the priciest lease per-year lease extensions in sports history, but the Star editors are apparently all about defining success downwards.
  • Louisville City F.C. got a bunch of money from the city for a new soccer stadium in 2017, with promises that new development around the stadium would generate enough new property taxes to make it a win-win. You can probably guess how this is going, but in case you’re a rose-colored-glasses wearer who somehow stumbled onto this site, here’s a WDRB article with lots of photos of the stadium surrounded by nothing but empty lots, plus team co-owner Tim Mulloy talking vaguely about how “we’re sitting on a couple of opportunities right now that we’re very excited about.”
  • City leaders in Augusta, Georgia want to build a new arena for concerts (and, I guess, a minor-league hockey or basketball team if the city ever gets one again) and pay for it with a 0.5% sales tax hike, which Mayor Pro-Tem Brandon Garrett says is a great idea because it “takes much of the burden off of property tax owners and puts the burden on sales tax.” That’ll be great news for the 53% of Augusta households that are homeowners, and somewhat less good news for the 100% of Augusta households that pay sales tax; guess Garrett hasn’t learned about tax regressivity during his formative time as a billboard sales manager.

 

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Friday roundup: Half-price books make great holiday presents for elected officials who can’t math

access_time personNeil deMause

For those of you who actually spend your Thanksgiving Fridays reading Field of Schemes, here’s a special bonus: If Rob Neyer’s Facebook page can be believed (and it’s never lied to me before), University of Nebraska Press is having a 50% off sale through the end of the year. That means that by entering the discount code 6HLW22 you can get Field of Schemes the book for just $11.48, or lots of other great sports (and non-sports) books for yourself, your family and friends, or that special city councilmember in your life. Buy now and buy often!

And if you just want the usual free weekly content, there’s plenty of that as well:

  • Nashville held its first of four public hearings on the Tennessee Titans‘ proposed $2.1 billion stadium deal on Monday, with the Tennessean reporting that speakers were about evenly split on whether they were opposed or in favor. (Advocates on both sides called for residents to come out and testify, so it was hardly an unscientific poll.) Also, according to WZTV-TV, Metro Nashville councilmember Courtney Johnston said the team owners still haven’t revealed how much it would cost for the city to maintain the current stadium to the terms of its lease instead of building new, but “it’s time to move forward” and “I’m not going to waste any more energy trying to find out what are we obligated to because we can’t afford it.” Just to be clear: Yes, she’s saying Nashville can’t afford renovation expenses that could be around $350 million, so instead must spend $1.2 billion for a new stadium. And no, cannabis isn’t legal yet in Tennessee, that can’t be the explanation.
  • In related news, let’s enjoy this guy taking to the smoking ruins of Twitter to attack sports economist J.C. Bradbury for critiquing the Titans deal without revealing his “sources of funding” and “the masters you serve that hate all Stadium deals.” Then let’s enjoy that said guy doesn’t mention that his school sports funding nonprofit gets money from the Titans. It’s not irony, it’s the other one.
  • With Pawtucket running short of local tax money to pay for its proposed USL soccer stadium as construction costs rise, local elected officials have come up with a new idea: use federal COVID relief money instead. Dylan Zelazo, the city’s chief of director of administration, told the Pawtucket city council on Tuesday that using American Rescue Plan Act and Community Development Block Grant funds to pay for $10 million in new public costs would allow stadium taxes to instead be used for the money from the stadium taxes can go directly into the city’s general fund to be spent on “relief for taxpayers [or] other city services,” which, uh, couldn’t the federal money have been used for that otherwise? Or been used to pay for other things that the city then wouldn’t have to spend local tax dollars on, which it could then use for tax cuts or city services? Anyway, expect lots more cities to take their federal windfall dollars and pour them into private sports projects so long as the feds don’t pay too close attention to how they spend it, and it sure seems like the feds aren’t keeping too close a watch.
  • Kansas City Chiefs president Mark Donovan says the team hasn’t yet decided how the Royals moving to a new downtown stadium would affect his team’s stadium plans for when their lease expires in 2031, but did say he’ll be “starting work [on stadium plans] in ‘24, if not before,” so there’s something to look forward to.
  • Pat Garofalo has collected a set of dumb headlines about how much the World Cup helps the economies of host cities and the economic evidence that those headlines are dumb so we don’t have to, thanks, Pat!
  • St. Louis area government bodies have agreed on how to split the $790 million from Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke and the NFL for skipping town with the Rams without going through the required league relocation process: The city will get $250 million, the county will get $169 million, the local sports authority will get $70 million, and the convention board will get $30 million. No, you are correct, that’s not $790 million, but it’s what’s left after $275 million in attorney’s fees, file this under “a lot better than nothing.”
  • The former Meadowlands Arena, driven out of business by arena glut in the New York-New Jersey area, has apparently found a second life as a film production studio. That’s encouraging that it can be reused without anyone demanding more public subsidies — or would be if New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy didn’t just provide a huge pile of new tax kickbacks for film production, sigh. Did New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority president Vincent Prieto argue that it’s worth it because the film production “really helps the economy with the local businesses” around an arena literally named for being built in the middle of a swamp? Do you even have to ask?
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NYC to put up $??? in tax breaks, infrastructure money for NYCFC stadium in Queens

access_time personNeil deMause

As has been rumored for weeks now, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the insanely wealthy Abu Dhabians who own NYC F.C. have announced that they’ve reached agreement on a new soccer stadium in the Willets Points section of Queens, near the Mets’ stadium that no one wants to use the corporate name for. (The official announcement comes today — UPDATE: at 11:30 am, streaming here — but apparently the city and team gave the New York Times an exclusive.) The cost: $780 million, which doesn’t include the price of a 250-room hotel and 2,500 units of affordable housing that would come along with it.

As for who’ll pay for it, city and team officials said the construction cost will be covered by the team owners. City officials, according to the New York Times, “said subsidies for this project are largely limited to infrastructure improvements at the site and property tax breaks for the stadium.”

So, that could mean a lot of things. “Infrastructure” has been interpreted in other cities to mean anything from running water and sewer lines to a stadium (things that Willets Point famously doesn’t have) to building transportation and sea-level-rise protection for an entire new neighborhood. As for property tax breaks, exempting a $780 million stadium from property taxes should be worth at least a hundred million right there; if it’s extended to the hotel and housing as well, it could come to quite a tidy sum for the soccer owners.

For now, at least, the project announcement seems to put an end to two things: NYC F.C.’s crazy-ass plan to build a stadium atop a highway ramp in the Bronx, and the wannabe USL team Queensboro F.C.‘s plans to build their own soccer stadium in Willets Point. In fact, it looks like Queensboro F.C. has been put an end to itself: In a stadium announcement preview post on Monday, Front Row Soccer declared that “according to sources, the club is defunct and won’t be competing in the USL Championship.” That would explain why several people have reported to me that the Queensboro F.C. stadium that was supposed to be built at York College by now in fact hasn’t even started construction.

More details today after the official announcement, maybe, if Mayor Adams divulges anything more or reporters ask any probing questions, neither of which is a great bet, but hope springs eternal…

 

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Plague of minor-league soccer stadium subsidy demands reaches pandemic proportions

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

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

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

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Rhode Island reveals Pawtucket soccer TIF would leave taxpayers with ocean of unpaid stadium debt

access_time personNeil deMause

Rhode Island’s plan to replace the departed Pawtucket Red Sox with a USL soccer team has gotten a fair bit of attention for its soaring costs, which led the state to take money intended for surrounding development and spend it on stadium construction instead. But what about the revenue side of things? How sure are state officials that projected tax revenue streams from a tax increment financing district will pay off the public’s $2.1 million in annual construction debt payments?

Welp:

Initially, Commerce also said an economic and financial report put together by a sports stadium consulting firm, CLS, wouldn’t be released without an Access to Public Records Act review. But amid growing criticism last week, state officials reversed course and released the document, which among other details showed for the first time how much state revenue the stadium is projected to generate. (Year one will net $565,000; year 30 will net $1.4 million).

I don’t have my calculator open, but I’m pretty sure $565,000 and $1.4 million are both considerably less than $2.1 million. Meaning that extra money will have to come from somewhere, which WPRI reveals would be:

The shortfall in stadium-specific revenue means officials will need to use existing tax revenue generated in the TIF district to cover the rest of the bond payment for the project. Consultants for Pawtucket officials say that shouldn’t be a problem, since the TIF district currently generates about $6 million in state revenue each year without the stadium.

That’s right: The TIF district, whose entire selling point is that it only uses the tax increment that is attributable (in theory, at least) to the new construction, would also get to use tax revenues that the state is already getting. And a whole lot of tax revenues, given that the TIF district is set to cover an area way, way, larger than just the immediate vicinity of the soccer stadium:

Former state commerce secretary and current state treasurer candidate Stefan Pryor, who promised in 2019 that  the stadium project “will pay for itself,” said in a debate on WPRI that it still might, maybe, if additional phases of development are added — though those would likely require more public subsidies.

There’s still a chance Rhode Island could pull the plug on this whole project depending on who wins the gubernatorial election this fall, which may not be current Gov. Dan McKee, given that he currently has the lowest approval rating of any U.S. governor. Though his leading challengers, Nellie Gorbea and Helena Foulkes, both say they support the project but just want to figure out a different way to pay for it, which, good luck with that. Pete Townshend did warn us.

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Friday roundup: Jays plan $¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in SkyDome renovations, figure it out yourself, journalism can’t help you

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! I don’t know about you, but for me this was a great week: I got a new coffee mug, and also it’s now almost over! The week, I mean, not the mug. You’re smart, you probably figured that out already.

And now, how’s about some news:

  • The Toronto Blue Jays owners are planning $230 million in renovations to the stadium formerly known as SkyDome but now named for the team’s corporate owners, or maybe it’s $300 million in renovations, what is money, anyway, especially Canadian money? The CBC’s report says that the redo will include saying “goodbye to the nosebleeds,” as the top 500 level deck will be “completely removed and replaced with non-ticketed spaces,” and oh, here’s a rendering with the 500 level still very much visible, hmm. The stadium is owned by the Jays after Ontario built it and took a huge bath on it, so presumably the renovations will be funded by the team, though Jays president Mark Shapiro called this just a “medium-term solution,” so there’ll still be plenty of time to demand a new stadium later, don’t worry.
  • WPRI in Providence breaks down why Pawtucket’s new USL soccer stadium will cost taxpayers $60 milllion and not $45.5 million like its developers claim, which is helpful and all, except when you add up all the numbers it actually looks more like $80 million? ($46.2 million in state tax breaks, $10 million from the city, plus $27 million in additional money redirected from state infrastructure spending — yup, that’d be more than $80 million.) The fog of stadium wars is soupy indeed.
  • If the Philadelphia 76ers owners succeed in building their own Center City arena and no longer renting from the Flyers, “The companies that would benefit are Live Nation and AEG, because they would have two buildings in Philly to play off each other, so the rent expense would go down,” former Spectrum manager Ed Rubinstein tells Venues Now. “That’s the reason why we never wanted another arena built.” This would be the Sixers owners’ problem, on the one hand, but also Philly taxpayers’ problem if the idea of giving the Sixers arena a giant tax break would be to help the local economy when it would only end up shuffling concert spending around from one part of town to another.
  • There are new Tennessee Smokies stadium renderings, and — oh, come on, you’re not even trying! I get that the plans need to be downscaled some because the stadium is over budget, but at least you can afford some clip art fireworks or people playing random sports. Show some self-respect.
  • Somebody dug up this consulting report that everyone’s favorite economist-for-team-hire Andy Zimbalist did on mixed martial arts — okay, sure — and I must report that previous reporting that Zimbalist earns $225 an hour for his services is out of date: His “customary rate,” he wrote in the 2017 document, is actually $850 an hour. And that’s before any surcharges Zimbalist now imposes for supply-chain issues. Please draw your own conclusions as to whether that rate could be an incentive to report the findings that your client is hoping for, or at least look really hard for them.
  • Your occasional reminder that sports team owners don’t have a monopoly on getting billions of dollars in public money for no damn reason: Here’s a report on Kansas giving Panasonic $800 million in subsidies for a battery factory in exchange for a commitment of zero new jobs, and here’s Bernie Sanders talking about how a new bipartisan bill to compete with China on electronics somehow involves giving $76 billion to microchip companies. The New York Times called the latter “a remarkable and rare consensus in a polarized Congress,” which is both true and all too telling about what our elected representatives (and major newspapers) can agree on.
  • “It’s morally corrupt that new arenas for professional teams worth billions of dollars are majorly publicly funded — especially when the tax dollars could be going to other areas in the city in actual need of the money,” writes Norman Transcript sports reporter intern Clemente Almanza of devoting public dollars to a new Oklahoma City Thunder arena like the team’s owners want, “but” — you knew there was a “but” coming — “that comes with the territory of having a franchise. 18 of the 29 NBA arenas are owned by a government multiplicity” — he’s an intern, he can’t be expected to own a dictionary — and “losing the Thunder would cause catastrophic levels of damage that the state would never recover.” Um, you don’t want to recover the damage … hey, Norman Transcript, don’t you have any copy editors? No? I guess “let the intern sit down and keyboard out a column on why a new arena is necessary” is just how journalism goes these days — that coffee mug gets righter and righter every day.
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