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:
- Albuquerque and Denver and Augusta voters may have all just voted down sports subsidy projects, but that doesn’t mean the people who want to build these things are taking democracy for an answer: New Mexico United owner Peter Trevasani said he’ll see if somebody else wants to build him a new stadium, and New Mexico House speaker Brian Egolf said he’ll see if he can dig up more state money; Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s office says he’ll go “back to the drawing board” to find another way forward with his livestock show arena plans; Augusta city officials say they’ll be back next year with same arena plan and a different way for the public to pay for it. Oh yeah, and forgot to mention that Brownsville, Texas voters also rejected building a $100 million arena; if you guessed that the county’s top official responded with “Hopefully we’ll try it again in May,” you have learned well how this game is played.
- Buffalo is holding public hearings on the location of a new Bills stadium this Saturday through Tuesday, which, given that it’s increasingly unclear why a new stadium is necessary, seems like the wrong thing to be focusing on, but it’s got to make team owners happy that they’ve gotten elected officials arguing about where to build a new building, not whether to do it at all.
- St. Petersburg has a new mayor, and like all the old mayors he’s kicking things off by saying he wants to have a better relationship with Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg, and maybe look at building a stadium on the site of the Rowdies‘ Al Lang Field, a former spring training baseball stadium. The Al Lang site was considered way back in 2007 for a Rays stadium but rejected for a whole bunch of reasons, not least that it’s too small to fit an MLB stadium on, but sure, worth another look, maybe the laws of geometry have changed in the last 14 years.
- The Oakland A’s are surveying fans of their minor-league affiliate in Las Vegas about where they would like to see a new stadium built for the big-league team, and everyone is all excited about what this means about where the new A’s stadium would go, see above re: putting the stadium-location cart before the stadium-funding horse.
- Three former Hawaii governors issued a letter this week urging the state to give up on building a new $350 million college football stadium and instead let the University of Hawaii keep playing its games in a smaller on-campus stadium. Five state lawmakers responded by meeting with the USL to see if they could get a minor-league soccer team to play in the thing. Or maybe pro rugby? Surely a $350 million stadium will be worth it if it brings pro rugby, who can put a price on that?
- Sports team owners love to talk about what a great investment permanent seat licenses are, but less so about how the “permanent” only lasts until the team moves to a new stadium and PSL buyers are left holding worthless pieces of paper. But maybe the Chicago Bears will let fans with PSLs have first dibs on which seats to pay for the right to buy tickets for all over again in a new stadium, that should keep ’em happy, no?
- The Atlanta Braves indeed won the World Series, which you may not have noticed if you were among the many people not watching, and will be holding their victory parade today, starting in downtown Atlanta and then getting on the highway and hightailing it for their new home in the suburbs, which seems all too appropriate.
- In case you’re wondering how things are going for non-sports businesses seeking subsidies in the wake of Amazon’s devastating setback with its demands for a new national headquarters, Amazon got $650 million in tax breaks in 2021 alone, they’re probably not too broken up about it. “I was hopeful public officials would step back and say: ‘We’re in such a difficult situation, we have to stop subsidizing very wealthy companies’,” said Kasia Tarczynska of Good Jobs First, which calculated the $650 million figure. “Unfortunately, it’s the opposite.” Welcome to my last 23 years.