Category: Louisville arena

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

access_time personNeil 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

access_time personNeil 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:

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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”

access_time personNeil 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:

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

access_time personNeil 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

access_time personNeil 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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

access_time personNeil 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

access_time personNeil 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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Montreal stadium used for refugees from U.S., isn’t this a scene in “Handmaid’s Tale”?

access_time personNeil deMause

Lightning round!

  • Boise is all in a tizzy over plans to build a minor-league soccer stadium, because it would get a property-tax exemption. This is the kind of subsidy that people don’t usually notice unless they’re the mayor of Minneapolis, so good on Boise.
  • We finally have a due date for proposals for developing land near Belmont Park that the New York Islanders owners have targeted for a possible new arena: September 30. Tune back in then, and maybe we’ll see what they have in mind, and how they hope to pay for it.
  • Louisville is moving ahead with plans to refinance its debt on its disastrous arena deal. This won’t help a ton — the arena deal will still be a disaster — but even stanching the flow of red ink slightly is something, I suppose.
  • El Paso is involved in a court case over whether they’re allowed to hold sporting events at their new arena, because the bonds it used can’t be used for “sports facilities” and — know what, just read about it yourself, it’s too insane to describe in detail here.
  • The mayor of St. Petersburg is “intrigued” by the idea of building a new soccer stadium on the site of Tropicana Field if the Rays move out, something he apparently neglected to discuss with the local would-be MLS team owner first.
  • Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula is still refusing to demand a new stadium, despite the NFL really wanting him to.
  • Montreal’s Olympic Stadium is now being used as a temporary shelter for asylum seekers fleeing Trump’s America. There are undoubtedly many, many jokes to be made here — that’s what the comment section is for, so have fun!
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Louisville arena bleeding even more public money than before, could go bankrupt

access_time personNeil deMause

When we checked in on Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center three years ago, the University of Louisville was turning an annual $26.9 million profit on the arena, while the city of Louisville was losing $9.8 million a year. According to two researchers who testified before a state legislative committee last week, that’s changed now — in that the city is doing much, much worse:

Louisville entrepreneur Denis Frankenberger and J. Bruce Miller, senior partner in J. Bruce Miller Law Group of Louisville, told the Kentucky General Assembly’s joint Capital Projects and Bond Oversight Committee on Tuesday that the center lost more than $17 million in 2015 and is losing $1.4 million a month…

[Frankenberger] cited an initial [tax increment financing] revenue stream projected at about $4.5 million the facility opened actually came in at about $615,000. A second-year TIF revenue projection of $6.6 million came in at about $2.1 million…

“The University of Louisville makes $20 million a year on events,” Frankenberger told the committee. “It’s a taxpayer scam.”

A bit of context here: When the city built the arena for the state university for $339 million in 2010, the bonds were supposed to be paid off roughly evenly from city general fund money, luxury suites and arena advertising, and cash from that TIF district (i.e., any increased property taxes collected in the area right around the arena). The university, meanwhile, would collect almost all other revenues from the arena. With the TIF revenue falling short, the city now needs to come up with another way to pay off its share of the bonds (about $13 million a year) plus operating costs, or else let the place go bankrupt.

The good news is that this is mostly just a bookkeeping problem: The city vastly overestimated its future TIF revenue, so now needs to dip into one of its other pockets if it wants to keep up with its arena bond payments. The bad news is that this was going to be city money either way — since even according to the city’s own figures the TIF district was just cannibalizing property taxes that otherwise would have been paid elsewhere in the city, taxpayers were going to be on the hook for more than $200 million worth of bonds regardless. So now it’s just a question of how else to pay off the debt.

State legislators are now demanding that the city renegotiate its lease with the U of L, which sounds great except it’s not clear the city has any leverage to do so, which could result in the university saying, “Yeah, tough break about those TIFs, but we have a contract.” This was a horrible, horrible deal for Louisville residents in the first place, and the TIF shortfall is making that more obvious. But unless the threat of arena bankruptcy somehow gets the U of L to the bargaining table, it’s hard to see how this is much more than posturing.

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Louisville Yum! Center to allow bringing guns to shows, will still ban pointy umbrellas

access_time personNeil deMause

If you’ve been jonesing to see Kid Rock’s New Year’s Eve Bash at Louisville’s Yum! Center but didn’t know what to do with your handgun during the show, there’s good news for you:

The Louisville Arena Authority ended its total ban on firearms and agreed Monday to give promoters and booking agents of events at the KFC Yum! Center the right to decide whether ticketed visitors can carry firearms into the downtown arena.

The new policy is in line with a new Kentucky law that bans public and “quasi-public” entities from restricting people with weapons permits from bringing their guns into venues. Since promoters aren’t quasi-public, the public authority that runs the Yum! Center has decided to kick the decision over to them, which means you’ll have to ask Kid Rock for permission to come packing to his show — something he’ll probably be okay with.

You will still be prohibited from bringing cameras with detachable lenses or umbrellas “with pointed tips” into the Yum! Center, because somebody could get hurt with those.

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