Category: Augusta arena

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

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

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