College basketball – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: County might buy Richmond a minor-league ballpark, ticket prices soar at new Crew stadium, plus more athletes giving each other the ‘Rona

October 16, 2020October 16, 2020 Neil deMause

It was a big news week, what with the Anchorage mayor who resigned after being slandered as a pedophile by the anti-masking news anchor he’d been sexting with before she was arrested and fired for beating up her boss/fiance, and the new book about the libertarian town in New Hampshire that was ravaged by bears, and probably something about the election, I dunno, who can remember? So you are forgiven if you missed some of this week’s stadium and arena news, much of which focused on fans breathing all over each other inside them, but not all, not by a longshot:

Chesterfield County, Virginia, has offered to help build a new stadium for the Richmond Flying Squirrels if the city of Richmond agrees in return to help it run Henricus Historical Park, which is apparently a thing like Colonial Williamsburg only way less popular. This doesn’t seem to be a deal that would benefit anyone, except of course for the Flying Squirrels (owner: boxing promoter and minor-league baseball team collector Lou DiBella), who would get a new stadium at city and county expense. Apparently a new baseball stadium “has been on the city’s wish list for nearly two decades,” though, because the old stadium is “deteriorating,” having been built way back in 1985 … wait, doesn’t that mean that two decades ago it was only 15 years old? How fast did it begin deteriorating? Clearly we should have been keeping up with Richmond’s crazy stadium dreams instead of being distracted by its crazy arena dreams.
A Davidson County judge has dismissed one of the lawsuits against construction of Nashville S.C.‘s new stadium, ruling that … oh, come on, “Blake Summers, Content Producer,” you really can’t be bothered to tell us what the ruling says? Here we go, the Tennessean reported on it as well: Judge Ellen Hobbs Lyle ruled that the plaintiffs failed to show that a soccer stadium couldn’t coexist with the state fairgrounds, so blow it out your ear hole. (The Tennessean doesn’t actually use the words “blow it out your ear hole,” but you can tell Lyle was thinking it.) The stadium is already under construction anyway, with the help of something like $75 million in public subsidies; check out these exciting photos of barren pits of dirt!
Columbus Crew tickets in their new stadium will be more than double the price of equivalent seats in their old one, something that should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the history of past new sports venues. This is probably not a sustainable marketing plan for the long run once the honeymoon effect of the new building wears off, but who knows, maybe Columbus soccer fans are willing to pay a 100% premium to enjoy amenities like anti-gravity drink rails.
An Oakland investor group says it’s trying to buy into the Oakland Coliseum property to share it with the A’s and build a new stadium for an NFL expansion team. None of this seems very likely to happen, because an NFL stadium would be probably the least lucrative use of the A’s Coliseum land imaginable, and the NFL probably isn’t expanding anytime soon, and nobody from this group seems to have enough money to meet the NFL’s rule that 30% of each team be controlled by a single owner. But they do have the claim to fame that they would be the first African American–owned NFL team, even putting that right in their name, the African American Sports and Entertainment Group; group chair Ray Bobbitt even said, “We’re the AASEG Oakland but this could be AASEG Memphis, it could be AASEG Cleveland, it could be whatever scenario lends itself to urban centers that can create this economic opportunity.” Urban centers! Economic opportunity! If you deny this group of businessmen the right to own their own football team, you’re keeping inner-city people of color from getting jobs! This is probably unlikely to sway league owners in deciding whether to grant an expansion franchise, but that’s not stopping plenty of would-be owners from trying it, even when they’re not African American themselves.
A June hockey game in Florida — amateur, it appears, given the reported attendance of only one spectator — may be the first documented case of athletes spreading the coronavirus to players on the opposing team, after at least 14 out of 22 players tested positive in the wake of the game. Teams used separate locker rooms, so it sounds like the virus must have been spread while they were out on the ice; players didn’t wear masks, and the CDC concludes that indoor ice rinks are “likely well suited to COVID-19 transmission as an indoor environment where deep breathing occurs, and persons are in close proximity to one another.” The start of the college hockey season has already been delayed indefinitely, but college basketball is set to begin on November 25; this should if nothing else give us lots more data points on how easy it is to contract Covid from opposing players breathing on you indoors at close proximity.
Remember that Florida college football coach who wanted a packed stadium in order to give his team a home-field advantage? His entire team is now quarantined after 21 players tested positive. Ours is a random universe that neither rewards goodness nor punishes wrongdoing, but sometimes it gets it just right regardless.
The NFL is maybe considering a playoff bubble after it worked out okay for other sports, and also maybe not considering a playoff bubble because of the “human, emotional and behavioral health toll of sequestration,” okay then.
It may not have marauding bears, but there’s another weird story unfolding that can best be summed up as “the Buffalo Bills keep waiting for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to come look around their stadium to see if he’ll let fans in.” (Current status: Not yet.) If you’re not a New York resident, this may be initially puzzling — can’t the governor decide what’s safe without going and poking around himself? — but Cuomo loves nothing more than poking around things in person, especially if he gets to wear a hard hat, presumably because it looks more manly than reading CDC reports.
Speaking of poorly thought out sports league virus protocols and misplaced masculinity, Italy’s Serie A soccer league has forced Napoli to forfeit a game after its players didn’t show up following three positive coronavirus tests, on the grounds that their remaining players could have played the game. On the bright side, with public health policies like these, maybe Serie A can be in line for an NFL expansion franchise.

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Friday roundup: Drumming clowns, vaporgondolas, and the XFL rises shambling from its dusty grave

September 18, 2020 Neil deMause

The magnets have shipped! Repeat: The magnets have shipped! If you want to get in on this, act now, or you might have to wait until I make my second trip to the post office.

This was an extra-busy news week, which felt like a bit of a return to normalcy after several months of sports team owners mostly focusing more on getting back on the field than on getting money to pay for new fields. But life can’t be put on hold forever, and by “life” I mean “grubbing for someone else’s cash,” because what is life if not that? (Answers may differ if you are not a sports team owner.)

Here’s a bunch more stuff that happened than what already made FoS this week:

That protest to call for the New York Yankees to pay their fair share of taxes or maybe just bail out local struggling businesses only drew about 10-15 people, according to NJ.com, but also “clowns playing a drum on stilts.” The site’s accompanying video features less than two seconds of drum-playing stilt clowns, and a whole lot of 161st Street BID director Cary Goodman talking about the plight of local businesses, and while I know Cary and he apparently paid for the clowns, I still say that this is a dereliction of journalistic duty.
Along those same lines, the gondola company owned by former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt has reportedly released new renderings of its proposed gondola to Dodger Stadium, but does NBC Los Angeles show us any of them? No, it does not. (I so yearn to see Cab-Hailing Purse Woman cast off her foam finger and hail a gondola.) We do learn that “the gondola system could move up to 5,500 people per hour in each direction, meaning more than 10,000 fans could be transported to Dodger Stadium in the two hours before the start of a game or event,” which seems to misunderstand how people arrive at baseball games, which at Dodger Stadium is mostly all at once in the third inning, and even more misunderstand how people leave baseball games, which is all at once when they’re over, at which point there would suddenly be a two-hour-long line for the gondola. McCourt’s L.A. Aerial Rapid Transit company says it will pay the project’s $125 million cost, but even if true — and you know I’m always skeptical when people ask for public-private partnerships but promise there will be no public money — that doesn’t make this much less of a crazy idea.
The XFL’s Los Angeles Wildcats might have to share their stadium this spring with a college football team, and, wait, didn’t the XFL fold? I swear the XFL folded. Oh, I see now that The Rock bought it, so: In the unlikely event that the XFL gets going again, its L.A. team will have to share digs with a college football team playing in the spring. Honestly having to use a football stadium more than 10 days a year just seems like efficient use of space to me, but sports leagues do get gripey about scheduling, even sports leagues that barely exist.
That Palm Springs arena being built by AEG now won’t be built in Palm Springs after all, but rather nearby Palm Desert, because the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, whose land was going to be used for the project, decided after Covid hit to “reevaluate what was going on just like most other businesses because they had so many other projects,” whatever that means. Given that the Palm Springs police and fire departments said they’d need tens of millions of dollars to provide services for the new arena, I think it’s safe to say that Palm Springs just dodged a bullet here.
The San Francisco 49ers are finally paying rent again to the city of Santa Clara, after initially trying to get out of it because their two exhibition games at home were canceled.
This Athletic article about the attempts in the 1980s and ’90s to save Tiger Stadium is paywalled and is not nearly as comprehensive as the entire chapter about the same subject in Field of Schemes, but it does have some nice quotes from Tiger Stadium Fan Club organizers Frank Rashid and Judy Davids (the latter of whom worked on a renovation plan for the stadium that would have cost a fraction of a new one, a scale model for which I once slept in the same room with when she and her husband/co-designer John put me up at their house during a FoS book tour), so by all means give it a read if you can.
If you’re wondering how $5.6 billion in subsidies for a new high-end residential/office/mall development in Manhattan is working out now that Covid has both residents and offices moving out of Manhattan, I reported on it for Gothamist and discovered the unsurprising answer: really not well at all.
The KFC Yum! Center in Louisville’s naming rights are about to expire, but KFC is talking about signing an extension, so with any luck we have many more years ahead of us to make fun of the name “KFC Yum! Center.”
That’s not how you spell “ESPN,” Minneapolis-St.Paul Business Journal.

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Friday roundup: Rattling sabers for Panthers stadium, leagues large and small seek bailouts, and a very large yacht

May 15, 2020May 15, 2020 Neil deMause

So how’s everyone out there, you know, doing? As the pandemic slowly feels less like a momentary crisis to be weathered and more like a new way of living to be learned (I refuse to say “new normal,” as nothing about this will ever feel normal), it’s tempting to occasionally look up and think about what habits and activities from the before times still make sense; I hope that FoS continues to educate and entertain you in ways that feel useful (or at least usefully distracting) — from all accounts the entire world being turned upside down hasn’t been enough to interrupt sports team owners’ important work of stadium shakedowns, so it’s good if we can keep at least half an eye on it, amid our stress-eating and TV bingewatching.

So get your half an eye ready, because a whole bunch of stuff happened again this week:

There’s a new plot of land open near the Carolina Panthers‘ stadium now that Charlotte Pipe and Foundry is getting $50 million in tax breaks to move to a neighboring county, and billionaire Panthers owner David Tepper should demand a new stadium there because Tepper “has influence and credibility” and the current 24-year-old stadium is “outdated because it lacks the suites the new stadiums offer and because it lacks a dome” and “all great stadiums should be built downtown” and “there’s a price to doing business, and we accept it,” writes Charlotte Observer sports columnist Tom Sorensen, whose Twitter bio calls him “occasionally retired” but apparently he comes out of retirement when there is important reporting like this to be done.
USL Championship team Loudoun United F.C. is asking to defer its stadium rent payments to Loudoun County, Virginia, and instead make them over the next six years, which is for some reason a reasonable ask while New York and Los Angeles residents withholding rent is “alarming.”
And speaking of the spoils going to whoever has the most lobbyists, both Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball have been lobbying Congress for pandemic relief loans, even as the former makes plans to wipe out a good chunk of the latter and/or force a takeover of the minor leagues, because why let a good pandemic pass without taking advantage of the opportunities it affords to consolidate your monopoly power?
Plans for a USL stadium in the East Bay city of Concord have been dropped amid the uncertainty of when and how sports will restart, and so maybe have plans for a CFL stadium in Halifax, though neither one was especially likely to happen pre-Covid, and there’s nothing to stop either from being revived down the road. Also Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg probably isn’t getting twin new stadiums in Montreal and Tampa Bay anytime soon, though given that he has to wait till 2027 to leave St. Petersburg anyway, he can take the time to regroup and work behind the scenes on stadium deals, just like the New York Yankees and Mets did when forced to step away from their new-stadium plans during the post-9/11 slump.
As team owners lay off staff and demand bailout money, Marc Normandin helpfully reminds us that Miami Marlins principal owner Bruce Sherman has a yacht that costs the same as his team’s projected Opening Day payroll.
Louisville’s plans to pay off its arena costs with incremental sales taxes look real bad now that there’s a pandemic and no sales of anything around the arena, but then they looked pretty terrible in the first place.
The German Bundesliga will resume play tomorrow in empty stadiums — with teams set to forfeit games if fans evern show up outside to cheer — and three sports economists want to take the opportunity to point out that home-field advantage pretty much evaporates without fans, because apparently it’s almost entirely about referees subconsciously tilting their rulings in favor of the home team when they get booed by crowds every time a marginal call goes the other way. I’ve seen studies on this before — if I remember right, basketball home-court advantage is mostly about foul calls, and in baseball it’s mostly ball-strike calls — and I actually find it kind of endearing that so much of sports is about fans influencing games by going “Awwwwwww!” en masse, something I’m sure we’ll all miss not just now that fans have disappeared, but also in the longer-term future once game officials are replaced by robots because players are afraid to get breathed on.
Elon Musk successfully bullied Alameda County into allowing him to restart his Tesla factory against the order of health officials, and was aided and abetted by other states’ officials offering to lure his factory away if California was going to be so mean as to require it to obey laws, because of course he was given that Musk’s real genius is in extracting public subsidies, it sure isn’t in reinventing public transportation.
Sports journalism has died after a long illness. Please send expressions of dismay for the future of democracy in lieu of flowers.

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Friday roundup: 49ers stadium squabble, Richmond nixes arena plan (for now), Mets’ $55m taxpayer-funded sofas off-limits to mere minor-leaguers because “status”

February 14, 2020 Neil deMause

A glacier in Antarctica just lost a chunk of ice bigger than Seattle twice the size of Washington, D.C. nearly the size of Atlanta almost as big as Las Vegas a third the size of Dublin, maybe it’s time to quit driving an SUV? Or maybe it’s just time to focus on some more human-scale disasters that involve small groups of people enriching themselves to the detriment of humanity:

The Santa Clara city council voted unanimously to remove the San Francisco 49ers as managers of their stadium for both NFL and non-NFL events, on the grounds that the team owners were siphoning off lease payments that could have gone to the city. The vote is “just symbolic,” however, as the fate of the stadium’s management is already tied up in litigation ever since the council voted to remove the 49ers owners as managers for non-NFL events last year, so we’re not going to see the team forced to negotiate a lease to play home games just yet.
The Richmond city council has killed the city’s $1.5 billion arena district plan dead, only maybe not completely dead given that everyone is just going back to the drawing board to concoct a new deal. The old plan to sink $300 million in tax money into an arena appears dead, though, so that’s something.
The New York Mets have completed $57 million in upgrades to their Florida facility, almost all of it public money, with one of the highlights being a lavish clubhouse that only big-leaguers will be allowed to use during spring training, not minor-leaguers during the regular season, “to give minor leaguers a reminder of the status they’re working to earn.” As Marc Normandin notes in his subscription-only newsletter, “Apparently, the horrific wages, forcing players to pay for their own equipment, not paying them during spring training at all, and having five roommates who all sleep on air mattresses in a small apartment wasn’t enough motivation to be treated more like a person.” Plus the sandwiches and not even being allowed to bring your own lunch! The major-league Mets, though, they get comfy sofas at taxpayer expense, because that’s how American capitalism is meant to be.
Washington NFL owner and full-time supervillain Dan Snyder is apparently using the promise of a new stadium in either Maryland or Virginia to press those states to legalize sports gambling, which sounds reasonable until you remember that whichever state wins the stadium likely “wins” a huge public subsidy tab as well. Maybe Snyder should threaten that he won’t go away unless the state legalizes sports gambling?
Louisville is considering a 10% ticket tax on events at the KFC Yum Center plus a 0.25% restaurant tax surcharge in the entire city, all to pay off the arena’s massive debt load now that the plan to pay for it with a tax increment financing district was such a complete disaster. Friends don’t let friends pay for things with TIFs!
Next Tuesday’s planned groundbreaking for a planned Palm Springs arena — set to be the home of a new minor-league hockey team — was unexpectedly postponed this week, with no explanation. Nobody from either the the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, whose land the arena will be built on, or Oak View Group, which is building it, is commenting at all, so feel free to read the tea leaves however you want.
The Vegas Golden Knights‘ new minor-league affiliate that the team moved from San Antonio will play in the 17-year-old Orleans Arena until a new arena can be built, because who plays willingly in a 17-year-old arena, my god, what will the neighbors think?
Six months to go before the Tokyo Olympics, time for the ceremonial sweeping of the homeless out of sight of cameras!
If that news item about the state of New Jersey paying $20 million a year to NBC to shoot a TV show in the vacant Meadowlands Arena got you wondering how much you the taxpayers spent to subsidize this year’s Oscar-nominated movies, Kasia Tarczynska of Good Jobs First has you covered. If I and my fellow New Yorkers helped pay $9.9 million toward The Joker, shouldn’t we at least get, I dunno, free Netflix?

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Friday roundup: A farewell to Baby Cakes, and other stadium news

September 7, 2018 Neil deMause

It’s hard to believe it’s already been a week since a week ago — but then, looking at all the stadium news packed up like cordwood, it’s actually not:

Five members of the D.C. city council told DCist that they’re opposed to building a new NFL stadium, two are in favor, and six would not comment. If history is any guide, that’s plenty enough votes available to be bought off — er, I mean of course convinced of the economic responsibility of the plan!
The New York Islanders are getting about $400,000 in state construction sales tax breaks for renovating the just-renovated Nassau Coliseum in anticipation of moving there temporarily while a new arena at Belmont Park is completed. Which isn’t a whole lot of money, but still, why, Gov. Cuomo, why?
David Beckham’s Miami MLS ownership group had a big announcement this week to reveal that the team will be called Club Internacional de Futbol Miami (Inter Miami for short), and the Charlotte Observer ran this under the headline “David Beckham’s team named Inter Miami, still lacks stadium.” That’s cold, Charlotte Observer. Fair, but cold.
The Arizona Cardinals signed a new naming-rights deal for their stadium, but they’re not telling anyone how much they’re getting paid for it.
The St. Louis Rams are gone, but a whole lot of lawsuits still remain.
The New Orleans Baby Cakes, proud owner of the most disturbing logo in all of sports, are moving to Wichita next year (New Orleans may get a lower-level minor-league team instead), and the mayor of Wichita is celebrating by tearing down his city’s 85-year-old stadium and building a new one, which will cost between $60 million and $73 million using STAR bonds and tax-increment financing money. “Taxpayers aren’t paying an additional tax of any kind to help build all this,” said Mayor Jeff Longwell, and oh, have we heard this before.
And speaking of TIFs, the operators of the University of Kentucky’s Rupp Arena want a $100 million one to encourage an “entertainment district” near the arena, because that’s worked so well down the road in Louisville.

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Friday roundup: D.C.’s ballpark boom, Rays’ stadium “ingenuity,” and other logical fallacies

July 20, 2018July 22, 2018 Neil deMause

You know how the New York Times now offers The Week in Good News, to remind you that not absolutely everything is awful? This is not that, not at all, though it does include a nice oblique shoutout to this site:

I think at this point just about every reader out there has emailed or tweeted me about this Washington Post article on development around the new Nationals stadium, variously headed “Ballpark Boomtown” or “The promise: Nationals Park would transform the city. Did it?” or “Nationals Park brings growth, worries to Southeast Washington.” The hook is that construction is booming around the new stadium — one former local opponent is even quoted as saying “Nats Park has been a tremendous boon to the region and the city and even to our neighborhood” — so doesn’t this disprove the idea that sports venues don’t create economic growth? The short answer: It’s hard to say from the anecdotal stories in this article, as it could be that the stadium sparked development that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, or it could be that it redirected development that otherwise would have taken place elsewhere in crane-happy D.C. (a point made in the article by economist Dennis Coates, who says, “This is not income growth; it’s redistribution”), or it could be that the Navy Yard would have gotten developed with or without the stadium. I’ve been poring over the big lists of logical fallacies and cognitive biases and haven’t yet found one that exactly describes the tendency to only look at what did happen thanks to a decision and not what would have happened without it; if this doesn’t have a name yet, the Stadium Catalyst Fallacy has a nice ring to it.
The city of Louisville and the state of Kentucky are projected to end up spending more than $1 billion in up-front costs and interest payments on the University of Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center, and while that’s not the best way to determine public costs — really you want to translate future payments into present value, and include not just arena debt service but operating costs and what have you as well, a calculation that this Louisville Courier-Journal article doesn’t attempt — holy crap, one billion dollars is still an acceptable response. (Sports marketer Jim Host, who helped devise the arena plan, has his own response — “If you allowed yourself to be deterred by the negative aspects, nothing would ever get done” — which probably belongs somewhere on that logical fallacy list as well.)
Andrew Barroway, who bought half of the Arizona Coyotes in 2015 for $152.5 million and the other half in 2017 for $120 million, and who has complained that his team “cannot survive” without a new arena because of annual losses that are “not sustainable,” now wants to sell half the team for $250 million. Just think on that one for a while.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred thinks Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg will get a new stadium built, despite not having any idea how to pay for one, thanks to his “creative ability and persuasive ability in terms of getting something done,” while Tampa Bay Times columnist Ernest Hooper says “with ingenuity, solutions can be found” — like how about building school offices into a stadium and selling off school administrative buildings, huh, didja think of that one, smartypants? “There always will be naysayers who dismiss every idea and every project with cynicism,” writes Hooper — hey, it’s the Jim Host Fallacy!
Another Tampa Bay Times columnist, Daniel Ruth, had a far more acerbic take on the Rays’ stadium plans, boggling at the $892 million price tag for what would be MLB’s smallest stadium at a time when “public transportation is barely above the level of rickshaws.” Then he closed with the suggestion that Tampa could build “a museum dedicated to the history of architectural renderings of all the stuff that’s never happened,” called “the Field of Schemes Institute of Higher Chutzpah.” Which is a lovely thought and much appreciated, but shouldn’t it really be the Field of Schemes Center for the Study of Vaportecture?
Finally, huge thanks to everyone who kicked in toward the summer FoS Supporter drive — your generosity toward a site that delivers a daily dose of reminders of the world’s injustice remains a wonder to me. In appreciation, here is a video of my own cat leaping headlong into a seltzer box. Don’t ever say I don’t provide any good news here:

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Louisville NBA expansion owners won’t seek public money, unless maybe they do

May 10, 2018May 10, 2018 Neil deMause

A group led by former Kentucky Colonels great Dan Issel (or at least with Dan Issel as its public face) is pushing to get an NBA expansion team for Louisville, and Issel says it won’t require any taxpayer help:

Issel, who is serving as the president of the “NBA 2 Louisville” initiative, made his comments at the Louisville Forum on Wednesday, stating that “he doesn’t envision” a scenario where public financing would play a role in luring a team to Kentucky.

“We’re not looking for a handout,” said Issel, a basketball Hall of Famer who played for the ABA’s Kentucky Colonels and the NBA’s Denver Nuggets after setting the career scoring record at the University of Kentucky.

That’s promising! As you can tell I think from the part of the Louisville Courier Journal article where it quotes me calling it “promising”! Though also not really all that much to get excited over, as:

The University of Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center (I never get tired of typing that) is only eight years old, and is already getting so heavily subsidized by the city of Louisville that it would be hard (though not impossible) for an NBA team to ask for much more in improvements. And I’m pretty sure that no city has actually been asked to chip in on NBA expansion fees, though there’s a first time for everything.
Issel may be promising not to use (or failing to “envision”) public money for acquiring an NBA team, but Kentucky economic development secretary Terry Gill seems to have a better imagination, telling the Courier Journal: “I think the state and local government, we certainly have a role to play but we should not be burdened with too much of that risk.”

Anyway, there’s no sign that the NBA is expanding anytime soon, or that Louisville will be on the short list to land a team once it does. Maybe that’ll give the KFC Yum! Center time to celebrate its 10th birthday, by which time all concerned will probably decide that it’s time for a new one anyway.

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Handicapping Deadspin’s “Worst Stadium Scam” Vote

November 15, 2017 Neil deMause

Deadspin is holding its second annual Deadspin Awards, and among the categories, you will be excited to know, is Worst Stadium Scam. And it’s set to be a tight race, with these candidates, not all of which are technically from 2017, but let’s not nitpick:

The Raiders robbing Las Vegas

The Flames trying to rob Calgary

The Falcons robbing Atlanta

The Louisville Cardinals robbing Louisville

FC Cincinnati robbing Cincinnati

The Pistons and Red Wings robbing Detroit

Even though these seem mostly selected by which stories were covered by Deadspin in the last year (Nashville SC robbing Nashville didn’t make the cut, nor did the Cavaliers robbing Cleveland), that’s a pretty solid selection. The Raiders and Falcons stand out for the scale of the subsidies — the Raiders will get $750 million in state cash while paying zero rent, while the Falcons will end up getting almost that much over time — and the Falcons have the bonus scamminess of hiding $400 million of their payday in a “waterfall fund” that will keep paying out long after the stadium’s opening. The Flames and FC Cincinnati haven’t been successful in their shakedowns yet, but are notable for trying (and failing) to get a more team-friendly mayor elected in the former case, and for demanding subsidies on the grounds that their owner has never asked for them before so he’s due in the latter. The Red Wings and Pistons are getting about $350 million in public money from a bankrupt city (or from a state that is otherwise starving a bankrupt city, at least), while the Louisville basketball arena deal is just a nightmare without an end.

I’m not going to reveal how I voted, except to say that it was a tough decision, and I won’t be unhappy at all if one of my second choices takes home the prize. Go cast your ballot now, and give extortionate corporate behavior and terrible public policy the shiny trophy it so desperately deserves.

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Louisville refinances arena debt, hopes magic TIF beans work out better this time

September 6, 2017 Neil deMause

As noted briefly last month, Louisville is in the process of refinancing its debt on the KFC Yum! Center, which has been hemorrhaging city money since it was built for the University of Louisville in 2010. Now the numbers are in on how much the city will save in annual debt payments, and it turns out it’ll be paying … wait, more?

Even after refinancing a burdensome debt load, the Louisville Arena Authority would pay more per year to retire new bonds for the KFC Yum! Center than under its current plan, according to a WDRB News analysis of documents made public last week.

Arena officials would be on the hook for annual payments averaging $29.3 million through 2045, compared with $25.8 million under current obligations that end in 2042.

What’s actually going on here is simple: In exchange for lots of big payments soon, Louisville has pushed back a bunch of its payments to 2030 and later, by which time surely that whole “wait for tax receipts from new development around the arena to soar” plan will be working out great! Or, at the very least, the people currently running Louisville will be long since retired. It’s a win-win!

(Tl;dr version: Tax increment financing is for suckers.)

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Friday roundup: Everybody still has lots of dumb stadium ideas, sun keeps rising in east

September 1, 2017September 1, 2017 Neil deMause

And aside from the Cleveland Cavaliers arena subsidy returning from the dead, Mrs. Lincoln, here’s how some of the rest of the week in stadium and arena news went:

Chicago is looking at closing some streets to accommodate DePaul University’s new city-subsidized basketball arena, because of course they are.
The new arena for the Detroit Red Wings and Pistons will have a Kid Rock-themed restaurant, because of course it will.
San Diego mayor Kevin Falconer wants to build a professional lacrosse stadium, even though the owners of the city’s newly created lacrosse franchise say they don’t need one, because of course he does.
Rhode Island state senate president Dominick Ruggerio says he hopes the state legislature will vote on $38 million in public funding for a new Pawtucket Red Sox stadium in November, despite not believing the team has a viable threat to move to Worcester if it doesn’t get what it wants, because “You know what, we’ll get criticized for anything.” And you know, he’s got a point: No matter what elected officials do, there’s somebody somewhere who won’t like it, so might as well do whatever they want, right?
The Las Vegas Raiders’ stadium construction could be delayed because nobody realized until now that they needed Army Corps of Engineers approval to remove a flood culvert. (The Raiders have agreed to pay the $1 million cost, at least.)
Dave Zirin at The Nation has examined how Joel Osteen’s dithering over whether to let Hurricane Harvey evacuees into his megachurch has its roots in the Houston subsidy deal that turned the Rockets‘ old arena into the church in the first place, and I put in a cameo to note that while littering the landscape with redundant current and former sports venues is one way to create a lot of hurricane shelters, it’s probably not a very cost-effective one.
Wells Fargo released a report that “real stadium construction spending” on new sports facilities has “climbed 80 percent over the past five years” to $10 billion per … something. And are they counting money committed, or actual construction money spent, and does this count both private and public funds? I guess we should cut Wells Fargo some slack, they have a lot on their minds these days.

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