Category: economic impact studies

Clown study claims Philadelphia can too support two arenas, no really it’ll be great honest

access_time personNeil deMause

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker released the city’s studies of a new 76ers arena on the edge of Chinatown yesterday, including an economic impact report by everybody’s favorite LOLconsultants, CSL. And what does that study, confusingly dated “July 2024” which it hasn’t been for a while now, say?

KEY TAKEAWAY: CSL estimates the Philadelphia CBSA, with the presence of a second major league arena, could host 53 ANNUAL INCREMENTAL TICKETED EVENTS and generate approximately 613,000 ATTENDEES.

So if Philadelphia had two arenas instead of one, it would get an additional 53 non-Sixers and –Flyers events (35 concerts, 15 “family shows,” and 3 other sporting events) compared to what it does now. CSL calculated this by looking at the average number of events hosted by arenas in cities with one venue vs. those in cities with two — which seemingly doesn’t account for the fact that cities with more arenas tend to be larger, and so should expect to host more events anyway. It would make more sense to look at how many more events, if any, Philly had back when it had two arenas, before the Spectrum was torn down and turned into a parking lot because the Flyers owners figured it would be more lucrative that way, but LOLconsultants.

(The report did look at the increase in events in New York City and Dallas-Fort Worth when new arenas were built, but the New York City area has more than triple the population of Philadelphia, so maybe isn’t the best comparable.)

CSL goes on to estimate that all these new vaporconcerts would generate an additional $11.9 million in annual tax revenue for the city, $4.3 million for the local school district, and $6 million a year for the state. Divided by 613,000 annual attendees, that comes to $36 in taxes per ticket buyer, which seems like an awful lot, but it’s hard to argue with math like — well, the report doesn’t actually show its math, but surely it must have used some kind of math.

Contrast all this with a study commissioned by Comcast Spectacor, the Flyers owners, which concluded that “there isn’t sufficient content to support two buildings” and “no comparable markets have two arenas in the same city,” and that a new arena would only result in 8 to 12 new events in Philadelphia. That study also didn’t show its math — or maybe it did, but the study summary page links to an expired WeTransfer download, so we’ll never know — and obviously the Flyers owners have an incentive to claim that a new competing arena to theirs is a bad idea for the city. But then, CSL is owned by Legends Entertainment, a joint venture of the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees, so really it’s just competing conflicts of interest all the way down.

Parker’s administration also released a community impact analysis by a passel of consultants — BJH Advisors and Sojourner Consulting in partnership with Urban Partners, AKRF, Drs. Susannah Laramee Kidd and Laureen Hom, and Creative Development Partners, if you were wondering — that studied both the proposed Philly arena site and the neighborhood impact of new arenas in Brooklyn, Sacramento, and Washington, D.C., and its findings are quite a bit less rosy:

Although the project will not lead to direct housing displacement, there is evidence for increased indirect displacement of small businesses and low- and fixed- income individuals through gentrification and loss of cultural identity in Chinatown if the 76 Place were built…

One out of five small businesses in Chinatown are positioned to experience positive net economic benefit from the Arena. These businesses are mainly in the entertainment, food, and hotel sectors.

Half of the small businesses in Chinatown are not positioned to benefit from the Arena and may experience negative impacts. Most of these businesses are in the financial and professional services, healthcare, supermarket/grocery, and wholesale sectors.

Tl;dr: Chinatown is already facing gentrification pressures, and an arena on its doorstep would only make this worse.

The math used to arrive at these numbers is a little hard to follow as well, but at least it’s included — and based on “focus groups, interviews, and in Chinatown, three types of surveys (travel surveys, street intercept surveys, and small business surveys), business inventory, property tax analysis, and a historical literature review,” which is maybe a little better than “we looked at other cities with two arenas and they seem happy.”

The news coverage so far appears to be giving equal weight to both reports (plus design and traffic analyses), even the outlets that don’t know the mayor’s name, so that’s something. Though ultimately the fate of the arena plan is likely to come down to the local councilmember, Mark Squilla, who says he’s “comfortable making that decision” and has hedged like crazy about where he’ll come down on it. Maybe the public feedback form responses will sway him? Probably not, that’s not usually how local politics works, but it can’t hurt to try.

UPDATE: College of the Holy Cross sports economist Victor Matheson chimes in (in an email to a mutual connection, reprinted by their permission)

1. Including NYC and LA into comparisons with Philly for event utilization is complete economic malpractice. These are metro areas that are 2 to 3 times as large as Philly and have the population base to demand 2-3 times as many concerts. In addition, the arenas are serving much more geographically diverse locations. The proposed Philly arenas are like 6-7 miles apart, maybe 20 minutes even in traffic. The Forum and Honda center in LA are about 60 miles apart and Prudential Center in Newark is about 50 miles from UBS Arena on Long Island and both are way over an hour separated during normal traffic conditions. Any suggestion that a 2nd Philly arena will generate business like additional arenas in those two places is absurd. 

2.  There are other multiple sport arenas in DC, Toronto, Boston (and LA) that have more events than Philly, so that arena isn’t even at capacity now. If it isn’t at capacity now, why would one project a huge increase in events?

3. When comparing cities with multiple arenas, one should be looking at the smaller of the two arenas in comparable size cities to see the incremental impact. So, Phoenix, a similar sized city has an arena with 48 events like Philly and their second venue has 23 events. Minneapolis/St. Paul have one with 37 and a second with 27. A new arena is likely to add more like 25 new events, not 53 as projected. And you are not likely to add lots more high-demand events, because they already come. The new events you will get are the lower-tier events that are currently crowded out by the big events.

4. New events coming to Philly doesn’t mean more tax revenue for Philly. It means more money for out-of-state artists on tour and more tax revenue collected at the venue, but it means less revenue for other activities in the Philadelphia area. Concerts and entertainment tours are terrible in terms of leakages as local consumers put money in the pockets of out-of-state entertainers and not in the pockets of local small businesses.

And University of Colorado-Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter adds:

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Friday roundup: How fast is the A’s Vegas stadium going nowhere, and other questions

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week down! Have you been enjoying the Olympics so far? Did you even remember the Olympics were happening, other than to make sure you weren’t going anywhere near Paris during them? I, for one, cannot wait for the 2028 flag football competition.

Meanwhile, here’s what’s been happening:

  • Until now Oakland A’s owner John Fisher’s lack of any options for funding a Las Vegas stadium has just been widespread conjecture, but now a research note by JMP Securities analyst Mitch Germain confirms it: “The Oakland A’s new stadium currently remains in a holding pattern. The last piece of the puzzle was private financing obtained by the owner for the remaining cost of the stadium. Chatter suggests this may have hit a roadblock.” Oh wait, “chatter” could just mean Germain is reading the same conjecture? We can upgrade it to extremely widespread conjecture, at least.
  • Oakland has officially signed a deal to sell its half of the Oakland Coliseum site to the African American Sports & Entertainment Group for $105 million, paid out between now and June 2026. If AASEG fails to make the payments, then … that part didn’t make it into the San Francisco Chronicle story, it’s okay, they had bigger fish to fry.
  • The Massachusetts legislature adjourned this week without rezoning industrial land in Everett for a new New England Revolution stadium, and team owner Robert Kraft said he’s “deeply disappointed,” then threw some passive-aggressive shade by adding, “Massachusetts’ political landscape is one of the only places where creating opportunities in environmental justice communities and rehabilitation is dictated by the needs and bargaining of political leaders with outside influences.” Outside influences, eh? Were they … agitators?
  • Cleveland councilmembers want the Cleveland Browns to keep playing in Cleveland, not so sure about the whole “giving them hundreds of millions of dollars” thing, film at 11.
  • There are two competing proposals to put a sales tax increase back on the ballot to raise money for a Kansas City Chiefs stadiums, and the Jackson County legislature just voted down the one for a 0.125% hike over 25 years but is still working on the one for a 0.375% hike for 40 years.
  • Chicago Bears president/CEO Kevin Warren says he still prefers a new stadium on the Chicago lakefront that would come with billions of dollars in public money, but if that doesn’t work, Arlington Heights is nice, too.
  • Turns out someone did do a more robust analysis than the one by the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office of the number of hotel room stays attributable to Philadelphia Phillies fans, and the finding was “not statistically significant.” I know Springer books are pricey, but the fiscal office really couldn’t afford $180?
  • The Atlanta Braves owners’ decision to build their stadium in the middle of the woods in the suburbs has prompted much debate, but until now it didn’t have its own Tracey Ullman parody song.
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Friday roundup: Olympics remain world’s greatest money suck, TB Times self-extorts for Bucs stadium, Rays $1B deal nears final approval

access_time personNeil deMause

This has been a long, busy week for a lot of reasons, so let me just thank those of you who re-upped your FoS memberships (your swag will be in the mail shortly!) and get straight to the news, of which there is a ton, because the stadium game doesn’t stop just because it’s summer or there’s other stuff vying for our attention:

  • The Paris Olympics start tonight, and how’s that going? You say France is spending $3-5 billion on the Games in exchange for “uncertain” benefits, tourists are staying away because they don’t want to deal with all the Olympic disruptions and local museums and such are set to lose a ton of money, and Paris is forcibly relocating homeless people to make the city seem more attractive? Good, good, that’s what the Olympics are traditionally all about.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners aren’t asking for a new stadium, but that won’t stop the Tampa Bay Times from noting that the stadium is “aging” (aren’t we all, every day) and wondering if the Glazer family will want renovations or a whole new one. “Even after repeated requests from the [Tampa] Sports Authority for information, the Buccaneers have still not provided us with any renovation plans,” Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan told the paper, while Tampa spokesperson Adam Smith said the Bucs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to.” But the Bucs’ lease runs out in 2028, and all the other kids are getting new and renovated stadiums, so Times sports reporter Rick Stroud still spends 2700 words speculating on what a new or renovated stadium could look like and how it would be paid for, it’s always a time saver when your marks take the initiative to extort themselves.
  • Also in Tampa Bay, two Pinellas County commissioners are asking questions about the Rays stadium deal in advance of a Tuesday final vote, questions like “How much will this actually cost taxpayers?” (more than $1 billion, by best estimates) and “Will the public have to put in even more money to make sure affordable housing is built?” Unfortunately, it only takes four of seven commissioners to pass the deal, so there’s no guarantee the dissenters will get answers to their questions before Tuesday, though county officials said they’d ask.
  • Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf and the owners of the Blackhawks are planning a $7 billion mixed-use project around the United Center, no details provided on whether this would involve public money or tax breaks or anything, they didn’t mention it in their press release so it probably isn’t important.
  • The Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office did a study of the economic impact of the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates stadiums, both of which were built with public money, but unfortunately even though it spelled out that it was calculating spending by both “fans whose main reason for travel is a Phillies game and casual fans who attend games because they happen to be visiting the region,” the final numbers just added up all spending in and around the stadiums and assumed it wouldn’t happen without them, very disappointing.
  • Not telling the Nevada Independent how to do its job, but if you’re going to roll with the headline “How Bally’s buyout might affect resort plans for A’s Vegas stadium site,” you might maybe want to include something about how it will affect that, you know?
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is laying off half the team’s non-baseball staff so he can make Sacramento River Cats employees do two jobs at once, this has been your weekly John Fisher Sucks post.
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Friday roundup: St. Pete gives initial okay to Rays’ record $1.6B stadium subsidy, final vote set for July

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, everybody — we’ve made it to the end of another week again, which seems to keep taking longer and longer, I blame the Moon.

And on to the news briefs, starting with a not-so-brief to cover what would get its own item if this were any other day of the week:

  • The St. Petersburg city council took its first vote on the proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium project yesterday — St. Pete is one of those cities where the council has to vote on things twice, just to be sure — and as expected, it narrowly passed, with five out of eight councilmembers in favor. The official city expense is $212.5 million in property-tax kickbacks on the stadium site plus $130 million in infrastructure spending, but this leaves out a ton of hidden subsidies that Rays owner Stuart Sternberg would be getting:
    • About $300 million (present value) in future tax money from Pinellas County
    • $320 million worth of future property-tax reductions from the city and county
    • $700 million worth of land in exchange for payments worth just $80 million, making for a $620 million public gift

    That comes to a public subsidy of roughly $1.6 billion, which would shatter the Tennessee Titans‘ record of $1.26 billion, at least until the next stadium project comes along. There’s still a final council vote to be taken on July 11, before which the city still needs to provide final documents — a local Sierra Club organizer called the process a “runaway train,” while Southern Poverty Law Center lawyers asked the city to “reconsider this rushed and chaotic timeline” — but the writing does seem to be on the wall. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said, “I think they’ve done a phenomenal job in Tampa Bay, competing, and I think enhanced revenue streams just provides flexibility that can only make things better,” which I think means he’s happy, my universal translator doesn’t do Manfredese.

  • A consulting report for Washington, D.C. estimates that a new Commanders stadium in the district could create $1.26 billion in “yearly economic output,” and while I haven’t read the full document yet, economist J.C. Bradbury has the best response anyway: “I fear going into the details grants some legitimacy to the idea that there is some debate over the economic impact of stadiums. If the consultants feel the decades of economic research on the subject is in error, they are free to submit their challenges to peer review.” (The city also commissioned a second report on how to finance said stadium, but has no plans to release it, so you know it’s got to be juicy — fire off the FOIA requests!)
  • Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles spoke yesterday about why she thinks a $650 million Carolina Panthers stadium renovation subsidy in exchange for just a 15-year lease extension would be good deal despite Charlotte residents apparently thinking otherwise, and one thing she said was: “This is an investment in our future. That’s why is strongly support what we’re doing with Tepper Sports. Yes, I wish we had the ability to do this on our own. But we have to partner with Tepper Sports and our hospitality industry.” We wish we could pay for the whole stadium renovation, but sadly we have to let the team owner who would benefit from it chip in is certainly a choice, let’s just say that.
  • MLB is apparently requiring all teams’ new nonrelocation agreements to allow playoffs games at a neutral site, and Athletics stadium czar Dave Kaval says that’d be great for Las Vegas, which could be in line to host a neutral-site World Series if baseball ever decides to do like the NFL does with the Super Bowl. Given that it’s going to take decades for every team’s nonrelocation agreement to expire and be rewritten, and that Las Vegas could be uninhabitable by then, that’s maybe not the most convincing argument, but Kavals gonna Kaval, especially when he needs to distract from the mess that is the team’s Vegas stadium plans.
  • R.J. Anderson wrote a super-long look at the public ownership model for pro sports teams for CBS Sports this week, and while I have some quibbles — in particular, it tends to conflate community ownership by fans (the Green Bay Packers, German soccer teams) with public ownerships by municipalities (several Canadian Football League teams and minor-league baseball teams) — it’s a good, in-depth overview. Whether either fan ownership or public ownership would necessarily put an end to stadium subsidy demands is an open question: The Packers did demand money to upgrade Lambeau Field, and sports leagues have leaned on municipally owned teams to build new stadiums. But as Anderson notes, at least fans and municipal officials have other priorities than just squeezing every last penny of profit out of teams, so there would be some benefits like cheaper tickets and fewer move threats, which would at least be a start.
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Panthers’ economic impact claims would require each fan to spend an extra $1000 per game

access_time personNeil deMause

What’s a good way to distract people from the huge dollar figure that you’re asking the public to deliver to you for your stadium renovations? Throw out an even huger number, and call that “benefits”:

Panthers stadium renovations could generate $22 billion economic impact

If you’re even a semi-regular reader of this site, you’re probably already rolling your eyes: Economic consulting reports are usually just PR documents designed to make made-up numbers seem legit, and “economic impact” in particular is a largely meaningless term that can reflect people handing each other money with no benefit to the local economy. But sure, let’s check out these impact figures and see where they come from.

According to a slideshow on the city of Charlotte’s website, the current Carolina Panthers stadium generates $1.1 billion a year in economic impact (money changing hands) and $54.3 million in fiscal impact (actual taxes paid). The very fine print there reads “Source: Economic Impact Report created by Dr. Tom H. Regan, Department of Sport and Entertainment Management, University of South Carolina.” Regan, a trip to LinkedIn tells us, has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting, and an educational doctorate in sport administration, none of which especially qualifies him to determine, for example, how much money spent at Panthers games would still be spent at other Charlotte-area events if the football team ceased to exist.

That $22 billion figure for additional impact from a renovated stadium — and $1 billion in actual taxes generated — isn’t actually in the city report, but just in a city statement quoted by WBTV. So we don’t know if it was calculated by Regan or just pulled out of city officials’ butts. We can, however, figure out what it would take to make those numbers real:

  • Panthers owner David Tepper is agreeing to stay in town for an additional 20 years (or maybe 15 if he decides to pay to leave early, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt here), meaning to get to $1 billion, the stadium renovations would have to generate an additional $50 million in tax revenues a year.
  • The renovated stadium wouldn’t change the stadium’s capacity, so the additional tax money would have to be generated by the same number of fans that are currently attending Panthers games.
  • Likewise, the Panthers’ payroll and the number of hotel stays wouldn’t go up just because there would be new bars for body-horror cloned fans to go to, so all of the new tax revenues would have to come from additional in-game spending.
  • The Panthers draw about 600,000 fans a year to home games. That comes to $83 in additional taxes per fan per game.
  • The Charlotte sales tax rate is 7.25%. So to generate $83 in sales taxes, each fan at each game would have to spend an additional $1149.

There might be a couple of other tax revenue streams to take into consideration, plus things like multiplier effects — it’s hard to say without seeing the actual report, if the actual report even shows its math — but suffice to say that the only way for renovations to an existing stadium for an existing team to have the kind of impact Charlotte city officials are claiming would be for ticket and concessions prices to go up astronomically. And even then, you’d have to account for how much those Panthers fans cut back on their spending on other things after dropping thousands of dollars just to go to a football game.

I just wrote all that without checking in on Economist Twitter, let’s see what it has to say about these claims:

Yep, that about covers it. I’m sure the North Carolina news media will correct its errors tomorrow and hahaha, no, that never happens. But we can pretend it will, and if there’s one thing this whole situation proves, it’s that if you pretend hard enough, you can have it called news — now just let me fire up Powerpoint…

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Friday roundup: More vague Royals threats, Coyotes trying every trick in book at once, plus: stadium theme song challenge!

access_time personNeil deMause

Not gonna lie, this week has been a lot, what with Kansas City and environs voting down a Royals and Chiefs tax subsidy proposal and the Oakland A’s announcing a temporary move to Sacramento, requiring eight full posts in four days. (If you want to show your appreciation, or just your sympathy, you know where to find the tip jar.) I’m tempted to let you all go a day early, but then what would we do with all the other news that happened this week and got short shrift? Let’s take it one bullet point at a time and see how it goes:

  • Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman’s wife, Marny Sherman, for some reason got to be the one to make move threats in the wake of Tuesday’s “no” vote on a $500 million sales tax surcharge for the Royals and Chiefs, posting on Facebook that “neither team will work with Jackson County again.” Presumably she means to imply that the teams will either look to neighboring Clay County or the neighboring state of Kansas — she concluded her post, “We will be lucky if both teams wind up in Kansas. At least still in the area!” — though neither has a stadium funding plan in place right now, which is a big part of why the team owners were focusing on Jackson County. Meanwhile, Missouri state Sen. Bill Eigel — yes, the flamethrower guy — says, “I know of no path in the Missouri Senate where we’re going to do any public funding of sports stadiums” and “I think that would be resisted vociferously and extensively,” and while Eigel doesn’t have a leadership position, I’m not sure I’d want to risk finding out what he means by “resist extensively.”
  • Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is dead set on winning an auction for public land on which to build a new arena, and also is looking for someone who wants to buy the team, and also is threatening to move the team somewhere if he doesn’t get the land. Plus, the Arizona Republic reports that “team leadership is also likely to seek a special taxing arrangement to help finance construction” if it does win the land bid. Alex Meruelo is also a lot — maybe he might want to consider having one less pregnancy?
  • Marc Normandin has taken on the question of why other MLB owners are content to let John Fisher have the A’s spend three years playing in a minor-league stadium and then potentially move them to baseball’s smallest market while continuing to rake in revenue-sharing checks, and concluded that other owners are not content at all, but they’re also not going to do anything about it: “Owners are probably just happy that the Fisher saga is nearly at an end, and that this potentially opens up the path for them to split expansion fees once the A’s are fully settled in somewhere new in a new park, and hey, in the meantime, one fewer suitor on free agency means prices get to come down.”
  • More on the Sacramento River Cats stadium that is supposed to host the A’s the next three years, via SFGate:  [River Cats broadcaster Bill] Laskey mentioned that the press amenities are dreadfully lacking, with only two total broadcast booths — one for each radio team — and, in Laskey’s estimation, space for four to eight people in the press box. When the occasional River Cats game was televised, Laskey told SFGATE the TV crew would take over one of the booths, forcing a radio broadcaster to call the game outside under a canopy, even in the blistering Sacramento sun.”
  • Philadelphia’s Civic Design Review committee called 76ers owner Josh Harris’s plan to build an arena on the downtown Gallery mall site “undercooked” and a continuation of the bad public planning that led to the failed mall in the first place, with one member saying, “We need to think about the real giveback here and whether we should build this thing.” The committee is only advisory, but coupled with the fact that city agencies are now months overdue producing studies of the arena project that would allow a city council vote, all the trash talking only adds to the project’s distinct lack of momentum.
  • Why should St. Petersburg-area taxpayers spend around $1.5 billion on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium to revitalize the area around the current stadium when it could just build all the other stuff like housing and museums and skip the expensive part? That’s the question being asked by Tampa Bay Times opinion editor Graham Brink, before acknowledging that there are intangible benefits to having a sports team: “When the team wins, the city feels a sense of collective pride. What’s that worth?” That’s actually been studied, and the answer is: Not as much as you might think.
  • I had to head back home after one day of last week’s sports economics conference and so sadly missed taking in a Baltimore Orioles game with the assembled economists, but fortunately the Baltimore Banner has the recap.
  • This interview with Good Jobs First director Greg LeRoy took place before the Alexandria, Virginia arena plan for the Washington Capitals and Wizards got a fork stuck in it, but it’s a great reminder of both how dubious the economic arguments were for the deal (MuniCap, the consultant that came up with $75 parking fees to justify the arena, is “not a company known for saying no, let’s put it that way,” says LeRoy) and how dumb it is that team owners refuse to release details of their own numbers on the grounds it’s “proprietary” information.
  • And this interview with me by Debtwire took place right after the Kansas City stadium tax vote, but we covered a lot of ground regarding other cities’ stadium and arena shenanigans as well. If only we had had a theme song…
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Alexandria releases Caps/Wizards arena impact report that shows none of its math

access_time personNeil deMause

The city of Alexandria followed up the previous week’s news dump of projected costs of a proposed Washington Capitals and Wizards arena by releasing a summary economic impact report of the project’s projected benefits, on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, which is the news-dumpiest of news dump times. Fortunately — or unfortunately, as we will see — the report from consultants HR&A Advisors is only seven pages long, and the economic impact numbers are restricted to the final two pages, so we can cut to the chase pretty quickly and see:

So that’s a projected impact of — wait, why have I blacked out all the numbers? Because there is absolutely nothing included about how the figures were arrived at, beyond a mention of being “based on proprietary Monumental Sports & Entertainment operations information,” the fact that it uses the not-highly-regarded IMPLAN impact-crunching tool, and that it applies a rather high multiplier of 2.6. So if we’re going to follow Alan Snel’s principle of not amplifying economic impact claim figures unless the consultants show their work, suffice to say that there are a lot of zeroes at the end, and the numbers in front of them don’t matter because they’re probably made up.

And if you’re wondering if “made up” is overstating it, actual economist J.C. Bradbury has even stronger words:

There are a lot of elements to the battle over sports venue subsidies, but an increasingly large one is about who’s entitled to their own facts. We’re way past “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those to own one“; at this point, you don’t even need to own the press, just the people who write the press releases, and hope that reporters are gullible enough — or overworked enough — not to care or to notice.

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Friday roundup: A modest economic impact reporting proposal, plus two, three, many vaporstadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

I was out sick yesterday, but fortunately nothing incredibly stupid happened with the $1.5 billion Virginia arena subsidy plan for the Washington Capitals and Wizards for the first time all week, so my services weren’t needed. (Other than the whole thing remaining incredibly stupid, but that’ll still be true today, and next week, and next month, and…)

Other things, though, kept happening, and my Decemberween gift to you is to present them all, neatly wrapped and suitable for pointing and laughing:

  • Veteran sports business reporter Alan Snel’s LVSportsBiz.com has announced a new policy of not reporting economic impact claims without also including how the numbers were calculated, and while that may sound like a simple matter of reporting out all the details, it becomes much funnier when you realize that this means Snel just isn’t going to report any numbers that don’t show their math. On a Las Vegas Raiders announcement of the economic impact of their team, Snel reported that he’s waiting on Raiders officials to grant “an interview about how the economic impact number was determined before we publish that number”; about a similar UFC impact report, he wrote that “LVSportsBiz.com will publish these numbers when UFC and Applied Analysis explain how they determined these economic figures.” I truly hope this will lead to stories like “A’s Claim New Stadium Will Create Some Damn Number of Jobs, So Far As We Know They Pulled It Out of Their Ass,” which honestly would be some of the most accurate reporting out there.
  • And speaking of goofy economic impact numbers: A new roof for Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, which already cost $1 billion in 1976 loonies, may or may not cost $750 million, but if it does it’s okay, says Quebec Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx, because then Taylor Swift might say “Joli toit!” and play five nights there and bring $350 million in spending that totally would be from out-of-towners who would all fly to Montreal because Taylor Swift never plays near them. [citation needed]
  • Not saying that a stadium district project called “Project Smoke” sounds like a grift, but when the guy presenting it is a Nashville pediatrician who pled guilty to billing fraud and people at the meeting were reportedly saying, “Have you Googled this guy? Can you believe this?”, it’s definitely not a good thing. Though it could make a good Avengers 5 plot to replace the one about Kang now that Jonathan Majors has been fired.
  • “Baltimore is not on the verge of landing a pro outdoor soccer team,” begins a Baltimore Sun article about the Maryland Stadium Authority commissioning a site study for a stadium for this team that, it bears repeating, does not exist and likely will not exist soon. The study cost $50,000, which is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but is maybe around $50,000 more than needs to be spent identifying places to build a stadium that likely won’t ever be built.
  • The Jackson County legislature on Monday put off a decision on whether to put a sales-tax increase for Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium projects on the April 2024 ballot, then the measure’s sponsor, county chair DaRon McGee, introduced a “corrected measure” that would specify that the sales tax wouldn’t take effect until the teams negotiated 40-year leases, agreed to community benefits agreements, and chose an acceptable site. We’ll see if that makes county executive Frank White hate it any less, but it is at least better than voting to collect a giant pile of money for the local sports teams and then negotiate the details later, we’ve seen how that works out.
  • Philadelphia’s law department has now denied more than 100 public records requests for information about the proposed 76ers arena, which is a lot! Activist and journalist Faye Anderson said one of her few requests was approved shows that city officials and other involved parties have been meeting weekly for more than a year on the project, but she can’t get any information about what they’ve been talking about. “What were they saying behind closed doors?” she asked. “What were they saying when they thought those conversations, those records, would never see the light of day?” An appeal has been filed with the state Office of Open Records, so we may find out next month, or later, or never.
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Friday roundup: Royals and Chiefs subsidy compromise rumors, Rays name fight looming, plus more gondolamania!

access_time personNeil deMause

It must be Hanukkah, because there’s miraculously already more than a week’s worth of stadium news! (Don’t think about it too hard, just go with it.)

  • Both Kansas City Chiefs president Mark Donovan and Royals president of business operations Brooks Sherman met with Jackson County executive Frank White this week, presumably to discuss putting a referendum on the ballot in April for a sales-tax surcharge extension to fund new or renovated stadiums for the two teams. Fox4 reports that “a source close to the situation” says the team owners might be willing to give up park levy money and insurance coverage they get from the county currently — the insurance money, you may recall, is what had the county figuring a new Royals stadium alone could cost more than $1 billion in present value costs, so this could potentially trim the subsidy demand to more like $500-700 million, which is better without actually being good. More unconfirmed rumors as events warrant.
  • Tampa Bay Rays president Brian Auld has announced that the Rays have no intention of changing their name to St. Petersburg Rays after moving from St. Petersburg to next door in St. Petersburg. The St. Petersburg city council is set to vote next week on a requirement that the team do so in exchange for getting at least $600 million in city money for a new stadium; Auld had previously warned that “Serious people recognize that putting this entire project at risk over a 25-year-old name of our organization is probably not something worth doing,” which sounds like a threat to me, plus a personal attack by calling councilmembers unserious, it would definitely be disallowed if Auld had tried to post it here in comments.
  • Not only is the Los Angeles Dodgers stadium gondola dream not dead, but it has a new price tag: $385-500 million. Plus another $8-10 million a year to operate it. The environmental impact report that gave the new projections says the money could be covered by private bond financing (which isn’t actually a way of covering anything, just a way of borrowing), sponsorships (uh, sure), naming rights (uh, suuuuuure) and fares (though trips to and from Dodgers games, which are most of the point of the thing, are supposed to be free). The report acknowledged that there’s suspicion that the whole gondola scheme is just an excuse to develop the parking lots around the stadium — which former Dodger owner Frank McCourt, who is behind the gondola idea, still owns — but says there’s no proof of McCourt’s plans to proceed with “a larger, more grandiose project in the future,” so just try not to think about that, and focus on the glory that is gondola.
  • Add the Soldier Field parking lot to the list of potential stadium sites Chicago Bears ownership is considering. No indication of whether or how that would work any better than building on the current stadium site, but at this point the team is just kicking tires on any site it can to hope one comes with a huge pile of public cash, which hasn’t worked so far, but they only need to find one sucker to be successful, so can’t fault them for trying. (Except for 100% faulting them for extracting public money for private profit, that’s the whole point of this site, haven’t you been paying attention?)
  • So it turns out it’s the state of Maryland that wants to separate the Baltimore Orioles‘ new lease from its new development agreement, that makes more sense than the other way around. It sounds like the whole issue is more about lack of time to get the documents finalized before next season starts than the state actually looking for some kind of leverage to negotiate a better deal; the O’s may go to a month-to-month lease in the meantime, the better to keep everyone on tenterhooks until they get all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted on their
  • Plans for a new NYC F.C. stadium in Queens cleared a community board vote after the city agreed to build a new police precinct there, which was apparently the board’s main demand. Still unclear: Who will pay for hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure costs and whether the team will get hundreds of millions of dollars in property tax breaks, maybe if we’re lucky we’ll find out before the city council grants final approval in the spring, but don’t count on it.
  • Jon Styf at The Center Square wrote a report on economic impact consulting reports for sports venues and interviewed both J.C. Bradbury (who called them “fantasy reports”) and me (who called them an attempt to “put across B.S. as fact”). He left out my explanation of the clear plastic binder effect, but you can’t have everything.
  • A high school football team that had to play all its games on the road because first its home field was destroyed to make way for a new New York Yankees stadium and then the replacement field that opened years later fell apart and was left unplayable has won the state championship! I can’t actually tell if this story is supposed to be heartwarming or scandalous, let’s go with both.
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Friday roundup: It was the best of summers for team owners demanding stadiums, it was the worst of summers for the rest of us

access_time personNeil deMause

The calendar on my screen says it’s September, which means we made it through another summer. (Not technically until the equinox on September 23, I guess, but if Labor Day weekend doesn’t mark the end of summer, I don’t want to be a part of your arbitrary seasonal delineation scheme.) And quite a summer it was, kicking off with Oakland A’s owner John Fisher fighting for (and getting) $600 million in public money for a new stadium in Las Vegas, then proceeding with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman ramping up talk about a new $2 billion stadium project either in downtown K.C. or in the next county over, the mayor of Oklahoma City saying the Thunder need a new arena because their 22-year-old one “will keep getting older,” the San Antonio Spurs owners exploring a new arena to replace the one that they just had renovated for them a few years back, many anonymous people claiming that the Milwaukee Brewers will move somewhere without $400 million in publicly funded upgrades to their 22-year-old stadium, and of course the great New York City cricket stadium fiasco, which just gets more fiascoey by the day.  Plus the Chicago Bears are still shopping themselves around to every possible Chicago suburb, the Arizona Coyotes owners are doing the same with every town in the Phoenix area, and the mayor of San Francisco wants to build a soccer stadium without even knowing for what soccer team for some reason.

There are a bunch of possible reasons why we’re seeing this flurry of new sports subsidy demands: lots of stadiums built in the ’90s getting to a point where team owners aren’t embarrassed to ask for new ones, flush state budgets and the promise of federal infrastructure spending getting owners salivating, a rush particularly in MLB to secure new stadium deals before expansion maybe takes some cities off the potential move threat table. Or, you know, this is just the sort of hellscape we’re doomed to live in after our government decided to give all the money to the rich people and then let them spend it on buying elections. Either way, this site’s work clearly isn’t going to be done for a while yet, so I better get started on some fresh tchotchkes to keep you all interested in helping to support it.

And if you prefer news items to tchotchkes, we got you covered there too:

  • Lease extension talks between the state of Maryland and Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos might still be going nowhere fast, but Gov. Wes Moore (pictured here wearing an Orioles uniform and here doing it again, because that’s how he rolls) says he’s confident of “being able to not just get the lease done, but also making sure that getting the lease done includes all the other lenses that I think are going to be important in this long-term deal.” “Lenses” here apparently means a plan to redevelop the area around Camden Yards, which Moore painted as a win-win for the city and state, and surely not just a giveaway of $300 million in state money plus public land to Angelos so that he can profit from the redevelopment, heaven forfend.
  • Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno is still trying to get the city of Anaheim to pay him $5 million for costs associated with “processing the illegal cash sale of Angel Stadium,” as the Voice of OC puts it. That’s pretty ballsy, but keep in mind this is a guy who’s also trying to get out of paying MLB luxury tax by cutting all the players he just traded for in July and hoping someone else signs them, not to mention tried to push through an illegal stadium land purchase to begin with, so ballsy is pretty much par for his course.
  • Two New York City council committees have voted to give Madison Square Garden just a five-year extension on its operating permit, half the length of its previous permit and infinitely smaller than the perpetual permit that the owner of the Knicks and Rangers was seeking. While this could raise hopes of seeing the city’s Padlock Unit chain up the arena gates, more likely it’s just the council kicking the can down the road again; especially since, as the New York Times notes in classic Timesian we’re-not-saying-we’re-just-saying style, “the Dolan family has shown itself adept at bending the will of the government to advance its own interests, particularly when the various branches of government are not on the same page.”
  • The kerfuffle over the Philadelphia 76ers owners’ terrible “community info sessions” on their new Chinatown arena plans continues, with the first public Zoom meeting held in Mandarin criticized as “garbled” and lacking proper translation; no word yet on how this Tuesday’s meeting in Cantonese went.
  • The Charlotte Observer sent questionnaires to city council candidates asking how much the city should be contributing to upgrades on the Carolina Panthers‘ stadium, and if “any answer would be premature” is the kind of response you were hoping for, then you will be very pleased by the efficacy of candidate questionnaires. (To be fair, it is kind of dumb to ask about how much should be spent without taking into consideration things like whether the team owners would pay additional rent, say; to also be fair to the Observer, it really does sound like the candidates mostly used this argument as an excuse to duck the question entirely.)
  • Construction has finally begun on Inter Miami‘s cursed new permanent stadium! Or at least “earthwork and site work” has begun, according to a team press release, jeez, Miami Herald, you couldn’t even be bothered to drive over and confirm it? The stadium is now scheduled to open sometime in 2025, but we’ve been hearing similar predictions for, good lord, has it been five years already? At this rate Lionel Messi’s kids are more likely to play at a new Inter Miami stadium than he is.
  • If you thought what Congress needed was a Historic Stadium Caucus to work on ways to upgrade older college football stadiums, including possibly with federal infrastructure money, U.S. Rep. Garret Graves has some great news for you.
  • The promised housing construction that was supposed to be built as part of the Brooklyn Nets arena is set to miss a May 2025 deadline, and New York state is considering greasing the skids by restoring a tax break that expired last year, because of course it is.
  • There might be worse ways to frame a story about how the owners of the San Antonio Missions are trying to get city money for a new minor-league baseball stadium and city officials haven’t been returning their phone calls until the next day than “Missions can’t get to first base on downtown baseball stadium,” but between the what’s the holdup with approving subsidies? and the terrible baseball play on words, it’s hard to imagine one.
  • The company that owns the Boston Red Sox is buying the company that owns the TV rights to Pittsburgh Pirates games, which Marc Normandin points out means that going forward it’ll be easier for the Red Sox to outspend the Pirates if the Pirates make more TV money. Normandin calls this “just a weird sentence to type”; me, I’m reminded of syndicate ball, which was a fun time.
  • What do “Spring training season brought $418M to state’s economy in 2023” and “Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour has a huge economic impact” have in common? If you guessed “They’re both as big a load of BS as that time people insisted LeBron James leaving the Cavs destroyed Cleveland’s economy,” you’re a winner!
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