Hamilton arena – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: The baseball gods are very, very angry

July 24, 2020 Neil deMause

Happy baseball season, everybody! Last night the New York Yankees were leading the Washington Nationals 4-1 when MLB commissioner Rob Manfred came out to explain the new playoff system in which 16 teams will make the postseason and the only advantage you’ll get from winning your division is home-field advantage in empty stadiums, at which point the baseball gods tried to kill Manfred by hurling lightning bolts at him and the game had to be called. This really could not be a more auspicious beginning.

Anyway, stadium and arena news, that’s what you’re here for:

The group fighting against Henderson’s $30 million or maybe $42 million arena subsidy for the Silver Knights minor-league hockey team has thrown in the towel, after a ruling that their petitions to get a revote on the November ballot were invalid, partly because of a printing technicality and partly because Nevada law doesn’t allow ballot initiatives over specific projects. “We are going to re-calibrate and look at what more we can do to help the community and to help the community’s voice be heard,” said John Dalrymple of the Henderson Coalition for Responsible Government, which is pretty much what you say to save face when waving the white flag, but there’s no shame in admitting when you’re outgunned.
The Inglewood city council approved the environmental impact report for the Los Angeles Clippers‘ proposed new arena, which means now the council just has to approve the land deal, but the project seems pretty fast-tracked to go ahead at this point. Just goes to show what wonders buying out the people who said they’d sue you can do!
Hamilton has approved a $500 million plan to redo its arena and convention center and add residential development, and the developer will put up the money and also take over capital expenses on the facilities, and it all sounds great but this is also only the city government’s presentation of it and no more details will be available until “late 2020” when the master agreement is finalized, so keep an eye peeled for dropping shoes.
Italy could start allowing some soccer fans back into stadiums by September, and China is allowing fans at full capacity for the basketball playoffs in August, and South Korea will allow baseball and soccer games at full capacity next month as well, now that Covid surges have been brought largely under control in those nations. In the U.S., meanwhile, some NFL teams think they’re going to have stadiums open at limited capacity by fall, but, yeah, probably not.
The Toronto Blue Jays‘ plan to play home games in Pittsburgh this year after Canada said it wouldn’t let ballplayers to travel there from germy America to play games was turned down by the state of Pennsylvania, which didn’t want more germy Americans either, but Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont says the Hartford Yard Goats stadium is ready to welcome all huddled germ masses yearning to breathe free, presumably because he wants to get something in exchange for all the public money the state is spending on the place, even if it’s just the Hartford skyline as a backdrop during Jays games.
Mikhail Prokhorov will get another 14 days from Nassau County to renegotiate his Nassau Coliseum lease, because the middle of an economic meltdown is no time to be playing hardball about people falling behind on their rent.
Did you know that half of all Coca-Cola sales are at stadiums, movie theaters, and other large entertainment venues? Me neither, and now it feels like public money for sports venues is a hidden subsidy to the sugary drinks industry, too.
Washington’s NFL team will officially be named the Washington Football Team for this season, with players’ numbers on the helmets in place of a logo. Don’t worry, though, there’s still a chance for the team to get renamed after a fictional race of genocidal robots, so this fun may never end.
Seattle’s new NHL team is officially the Kraken, but to they will forever be the Burninators to me.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Nashville SC “disappointed” mayor upset at overruns, Miami paying Super Bowl teams’ hotel bills, and the return of Cab-Hailing Purse Woman

January 31, 2020September 8, 2020 Neil deMause

It’s been a long week and there is apparently some other stuff in the news and also I want to go read the new Deadspin writers’ temporary blog that is not Deadspin, so let’s get straight to this week’s roundup, which is long, because remember what I literally just said about it having been a long week?

Nashville Mayor John Cooper is still holding firm on refusing to allow demolition to begin, citing what he says is a doubling of projected, city infrastructure costs, and both team and league officials are kicking off negotiations by whining at him in public, via a joint press statement that “MLS Commissioner Don Garber made it clear to Mayor Cooper that Major League Soccer would not have awarded Nashville an expansion team without the commitment made by the city to build a soccer stadium at the Fairgrounds” and “the Mayor’s continued refusal to proceed is a deep disappointment to Nashville SC and MLS.” To which Cooper is totally free to say, Yeah, well, you shoulda finalized everything before approving the expansion team, then, you’ve gotta deal with me now. Hardball works for both sides!
The San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs are getting free hotel rooms for the Super Bowl courtesy of Miami taxpayers after, in the words of the Miami Herald, “Miami’s Super Bowl Host Committee recently sent invoices totaling $1 million to the county’s budget office from the J.W. Marriott Marquis hotel downtown and Aventura’s Turnberry resort to cover an NFL requirement for subsidized rooms provided to players earning millions for teams owned by billionaires.” Reminder: The Super Bowl is garbage and football kills people.
Roger Goodell didn’t stop at shaking down Buffalo for a new stadium this week, but tried to shake down Toronto as well, saying that it “certainly could be a great city for an NFL team” but “a stadium up to NFL standards is going to be an important element.” Toronto actually has two football stadium, but one only seats 25,000 and one is omigod over 30 years old, so time for a third stadium if you really want the NFL, which Toronto residents honestly don’t seem to all that badly.
Jacksonville has given the fourth-tier NPSL (barely above semipro) Jacksonville Armada an option on buying city land for a new 10,000-seat stadium, with no details at all on how the stadium would be paid for or how much the Armada owners would pay for the land or what it’s worth, why bother reporting on stuff like that? There is a “sports event manager” saying “at the same time you bring more and more of these sporting events to town, it brings more and more people here,” just drop that in and hit Publish, we’ve got important RV dealer promotions to fluff!
Do you want to have your say about what the new Calgary Flames arena that’s costing the public $250 million or more will look like? Then connect with their “ambassador team” or take their online survey, which involves such things as which “iconic experiences” like Beakerhead or the High Performance Rodeo make you “proud of Calgary.” Then you could win an Entertainment Prize Package! This is what democracy looks like!
The NFL doesn’t just hold one big event in February where human beings bash their heads together until their brain cells die, it has the Pro Bowl too, which it’s currently shopping around to cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas to see, presumably, who will agree to cough up free hotel rooms. Also there’s a new rule that the team that scores doesn’t have to give up the ball! Maybe they should try making Canada and Mexico the end zones, that should get people’s attention.
A Hamilton developer says he can remodel the city’s arena with no tax money involved, and he must be telling the truth because he has a rendering featuring people crossing the street against the light, actually there are no traffic lights or crossing signals at all, this isn’t how “value engineering” is supposed to work!
Atlanta Falcons fans defaulted on $32 million worth of personal seat licenses in 2019, but this is the Falcons owners’ problem since the money comes out of their pockets and anyway they can always try to find new fans to re-sell the PSLs to, ideally once the team doesn’t suck so much anymore. If you are neither a Falcons fan nor a Falcons owner, this mostly matters to you as yet another lesson that sports fans go to watch good sports teams, not new sports stadiums.
The Erie Seawolves owners are hoping their stadium renovations will save their team from getting contracted, and if MLB really does start offering to remove teams from its hit list if they upgrade their stadiums, that would be a much more comprehensible shakedown than the one they’re pursuing so far.
The Kansas City Royals don’t have a downtown stadium plan at all, but that’s not going to stop architecture firms from releasing their own renderings of what one could look like, and omigod it’s the cab-hailing purse lady from Worcester and Halifax!

I absolutely cannot wait for the first stadium report to calculate the projected economic impact of Cab-Hailing Purse Woman. Clearly she’ll go anywhere to see a game of baseball and/or soccerfootball! How can your city possibly turn up its nose at the spending on ride-hailing services she will bring?

UPDATE: Someone just forwarded me another article with more Royals stadium renderings, and OMG that sign:

If you’re having trouble reading it, the side facing the camera reads “HEY CDC KC HAS THE FEVER,” which is apparently a joke about the coronavirus epidemic now threatening to sweep the globe? And the other side, facing the field, reads “TODAY’S MY BIRTHDAY SURPRISE ME WITH A WIN” which is a way too on-the-nose reference to the fact that the Royals have lost more than 100 games the last two years. Forget any innovations in stadium design, I want to hear more about how the Royals can draw more fans by encouraging negging.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: IRS hands sports owners another tax break, A’s accused of skimping on Coliseum land price, Rays could decide this summer on … something

May 3, 2019 Neil deMause

Happy Friday! Here is a fatberg of stadium and arena news to clog up your weekend:

San Jose Mercury News columnist Daniel Borenstein says the Oakland A’s owners could be getting a discount of between $15 million and $65 million on their purchase of half the Oakland Coliseum site from Alameda County, which is hard to tell without opening up the site to other bids, which Alameda County didn’t do. You could also look at comparable land sale prices and try to guess, which shows that the A’s owners’ offer is maybe closer to fair value; it’s not a tremendous subsidy either way, but still oh go ahead, just write us a check for whatever you think is fair is probably not the best way to sell off public assets, yeah.
St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman says he expects to hear by this summer from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg whether Sternberg will seek to build a stadium in St. Pete or across the bay in Tampa. Of course, Sternberg already announced once that he was picking Tampa and then gave up when nobody in Tampa wanted to pay for his $900 million stadium, so what an announcement this summer would exactly mean, other than who Sternberg will next go to hat in hand, remains unclear.
Fred Lindecke, who helped get an ordinance passed in St. Louis in 2002 that requires a voter referendum before spending public sports venues, would like to remind you that the soccer stadium deal approved last December still has to clear that hurdle, not that anybody is talking about it. Since the soccer subsidies would all be tax kickbacks and discounted land, not straight-up cash, I suspect this could be headed for another lawsuit.
Cory Booker and James Lankford have reintroduced their bill to block the use of federal tax-exempt bonds for sports venues, but only Booker got in the headline because Lankford isn’t running for president. (Okay, also it’s from a New Jersey news site, and Booker is from New Jersey.) Meanwhile, the IRS just handed sports team owners an exemption from an obscure provision of the Trump tax law that would have forced them to pay taxes on player trades; now teams can freely trade their employees like chattel without having to worry about taxes that all other business owners have to, thank god that’s resolved.
Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant, for some reason, revealed that “Seattle is having a meeting to try to bring back the Sonics,” but turns out it’s just Chris Hansen meeting with a bunch of his partners and allies from his failed Sodo arena plan, not anyone from city government at all, so everybody please calm down.
The rival soccer team that lost out to David Beckham’s Inter Miami for the Lockhart Stadium site in Fort Lauderdale is now suing to block Beckham’s plans for a temporary stadium and permanent practice facility there, because this is David Beckham so of course they are.
Publicly owned Wayne State University is helping to build a $25 million arena for the Detroit Pistons‘ minor-league affiliate, and Henderson, Nevada could pay half the cost of a $22 million Las Vegas Golden Knights practice facility, and clearly cities will just hand out money if you put “SPORTZ” on the name of your project, even if it will draw pretty much zero new tourists or spending or anything. Which, yeah, I know is the entire premise of this site, but sometimes the craziness of it all just leaps up and smacks you in the face, you know?
The Philadelphia Union owners have hired architects to develop a “master plan” for development around their stadium in Chester, because they promised the city development and there hasn’t been any development and maybe drawing a picture of some development will make it appear, couldn’t hurt, right?
Wannabe Halifax CFL owner Anthony LeBlanc insisted that “we are moving things along, yeah” on getting federal land to build a stadium on, while showing no actual evidence that things are moving along. “The only direction that council has ever given on this is ‘dear staff, please analyze the business case when it comes,’” countered Halifax regional councillor Sam Austin. “Everything else is media swirl.”
Never mind that bill that could have repealed the Austin F.C. stadium’s property tax break, because its sponsor has grandfathered in the stadium and any other property tax breaks that were already approved.
Hamilton, Ontario, could be putting its arena up for sale, if you’re in the market for an arena in Hamilton, Ontario.
And finally, here’s an article by the Sacramento Bee’s Tony Bizjak on how an MLS franchise would be great for Sacramento because MLS offers cheap tickets and a diverse crowd who like public transportation and MILLENNIALS!!!, plus also maybe it could help incubate the next Google, somehow! And will it cost anything or have any other negative impacts? Yes, including $33 million in public subsidies, but Tony Bizjak doesn’t worry about such trivialities. MILLENNIALS, people!!!

Share this post: