Category: journalism is dead

Friday roundup: County tells Rays no stadium approval by June 1, Blazers and Wild get pushback on subsidy demands as well

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to any new readers who are joining us for the first time this week in the wake of all the news craziness about the Kansas City Royals and Chicago Bears stadium deals. It’s Friday, which means it’s time for a speed run through stadium and arena news items that were otherwise overlooked this week. But first, one city has seen developments in its stadium wrangle that deserve attention at a bit more length:

One of the standard ploys in the sports stadium demand playbook is what in Chapter 4 of Field of Schemes we called the “two-minute warning”: Setting a deadline, arbitrary if necessary, and using it to get elected officials scrambling to determine how to fund a new sports venue with public dollars without taking time to think about whether to do so. But playing chicken, obviously, comes with the risk that your opponent won’t blink first, and that’s what appears to be happening to Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski, who has been informed that Hillsborough County will not be meeting his June 1 deadline for signing off on a stadium deal that could total anywhere from $2 billion to a lot more in public costs:

That deadline, the team has said, is necessary not only for the ballpark to open in time for the 2029 Major League Baseball season, but for the deal to be feasible at all.

On Thursday, the county attorney’s office informed the team that meeting such a deadline is improbable, according to a memorandum obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.

A timeline, the memo reads, “cannot be reasonably considered” until all involved parties reach an agreement on the terms. After a preliminary agreement is reached, “it would likely take at least 60-90 days” to negotiate the deal’s development and funding obligations.

That’s perfectly reasonable, given that the county’s memorandum of understanding for the stadium still includes a lot of open questions and there is no MOU yet at all for the rest of the development that Zalupski says he wants to build atop what’s currently Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry campus. But it also messes with Zalupski’s timetable — not just that he wants to open a new stadium by spring 2029 (probably overly optimistic anyway, given that stadiums take three years to build and he’d have to tear down part of the college campus before he could begin construction) but that he desperately wants to get the deal approved this legislative session, before his pal Ron DeSantis is term-limited out of the governor’s office at the end of 2026.

Tampa Bay Rays CEO Ken Babby has already warned the county that “we would have no choice but to evaluate alternatives” if the June 1 deadline isn’t met, but Zalupski’s options are limited there: He’s not likely to be able to negotiate and push through a stadium plan in another city (Orlando has a big sign! Greensboro exists!) by June 1, so he’s going to be left having to work out a deal without the hammer of having Florida’s governor in his corner.

One alternative would be for the Rays owner to walk back some of his demands in Tampa. Leading Rays stadium deal critic county commissioner Joshua Wostal has said he’d consider approving just $268 million in hotel tax money, saying, “Start acting like a serious bidder. The offer is out there.” Of course, $268 million is a whole hell of a lot less than the $1 billion in city and county money that Zalupski wants, but maybe he’d be happy to take his $1 billion or so in state-gifted tax-exempt land and run with it, and give up on shaking down Tampa and Hillsborough County quite so hard? The only way to find out is to ask, and kudos to Hillsborough County officials for seemingly understanding that it’s both their right and their responsibility to haggle, and not being bullied into rushing into a deal.

Anyway, sorry for the Tampa-specific digression, on to the bullet points now:

  • Also in no hurry to rubber-stamp a rushed sports venue deal: The Portland city council, whose members are balking at signing a nondisclosure agreement to engage in Trail Blazers arena funding talks or sign a letter to the NBA supporting an arena deal. “If you want the public to support using public money to remodel a stadium, then you need to make the case to them in public about why using those funds is better than some alternative,” councilmember Mitch Green wrote on Bluesky. Blazers owner and renowned cheapskate Tom Dundon has already landed $365 million in state money toward arena renovations, but it looks like the remaining $235 million in city and county money could be a slightly harder lift.
  • And in yet another pushback to a sports subsidy demand, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has said that while he personally would be fine with giving the Wild $200 million in state money for arena renovations, “it’s going to be a tough lift in a non-budget year to be able to get that done.” Okay, that sounds less like “no” and more like “come talk to us in 2027,” and given that Wild owner’s Craig Leipold’s lease doesn’t expire until 2035 he can afford to wait, but it still counts as a kind of pushback.
  • Kansas News Service has done a deeper dive into Missouri’s potential funding for a new Kansas City Royals stadium at Crown Center, and found that it could be less than advertised: Last year’s Show-Me Sports Investment Act limits state funding to whatever sales and income tax revenue a team paid in the year before a stadium deal is agreed to, and for the Royals at Kauffman Stadium in 2025 that was likely in the $15-17 million range. That would only cover around $250 million in stadium bonds, a fair bit less than the “at least $350 million” to $900 million numbers that have previously been floated. If the state coughs up less, it could bring the public stadium subsidy down to $1.3 billion — unless the city’s $600 million that has yet to be negotiated turns out to be more than $600 million counting things like a repair fund, in which case it’d be more again. It’s becoming ever clearer that this whole thing is barely penciled out, let alone inked, but headline writers gonna headline write.
  • Whenever a sports team owner or elected official points to the Atlanta Braves‘ Battery stadium district as an example of a sports development project paying for itself, I make a point of linking to Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury’s paper on how no it di’n’t. But even academics know that nobody likes to read academic papers, so Bradbury has penned an essay for The Conversation — titled “Sorry, Tampa Bay, mixed‑use districts don’t reverse the dismal economics of sports venues” — that lays out exactly what did and didn’t happen in Cobb County, Georgia: The Braves owners are bringing in an extra $97 million a year from the Battery, while the county is running a loss of about $15 million a year. If it seems crazy that this sea of red ink is being held up as the kind of success story that other cities should emulate, such is the magical power of being a sports team owner in a country where journalism has long since given up fact-checking the press releases of rich dudes.
  • The wandering Athletics just released a new promo video for premium seating at their under-construction-and-they-swear-they’ll-finish-it Las Vegas stadium, and it is a hilarious supercut of what SF Gate describes as “AI-generated scenes of AI-generated people walking through the AI-generated models of what the club sections of the park might look like.” I’m not sure whether my favorite bit is how the AI fans are all wearing what appear to be A’s jerseys with the A’s logo removed or the multiple extreme closeups of wine glasses, but I can agree with Oakland sportswriter Dan Moore’s comment that “when I close my eyes and think ‘baseball’ I literally think the exact opposite of this.” SFGate further reports that they reached out to A’s officials to ask how much if any of this represented what a Vegas A’s stadium might actually look like as opposed to just AI hallucinations, but “an A’s spokesperson initially asked for a deadline extension to respond and then later came back and declined to comment,” LOLAthletics.
  • In less encouraging modern journalism news, WKYC reports “Cavaliers‘ impending playoff run already boosting business for downtown Cleveland bars,” citing precisely one owner of a bar a block from the arena who is “expecting steady traffic throughout the day,” which isn’t the same thing as “already boosting” at all. Bar owners more than one block from the arena were presumably unavailable for comment on whether they anticipated empty barstools while everyone was off watching the Cavs.
  • Friends don’t let friends who are concerned about being constantly surveilled and possibly targeted for being associated with people on New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan’s enemies list go to Madison Square Garden.
Share this post:

Liveblogging that giant Crain’s Chicago prize-bait package on public stadium funding

access_time personNeil deMause

Crain’s Chicago Business dropped a giant package on publicly funded sports stadium projects this morning, replete with Snow Fall-style animations because that’s what wins awards even if it makes articles largely unreadable, and I only got as far as it asking the question “Is publicly financing stadiums and arenas good for a city?” and then answering itself “It depends” before I wanted to give up and go back to bed. But I feel an obligation to Read This Crap So You Don’t Have To, so let’s do a quick annotated spin throught the highlights, at least:

Teams asking for public funds often argue that building a stadium will lead to greater economic growth for the community, but is that the case? Good data is hard to come by and recent history suggests that sometimes it does spur growth, but other times it does not. Let’s look at two examples.

This is followed by a graphic comparing the Atlanta Braves‘ Truist Park to the Golden State Warriors‘ Chase Center, the latter of which didn’t actually use any public funds. And no information at all is provided for either example on whether it has “spurred growth,” so we’re off to a great start here.

Because stadium-building booms happen about every 25-30 years, it stands to reason that those with terms of more than two decades will still have debt on the books when they start to strategize for the next upgrade.

Uhhh, no, it’s not that stadium-building booms happen about every 25-30 years because of sunspot cycles or something, it’s that team owners typically only sign 30-year leases, so they start strategizing for new or renovated venues once they figure they have leverage to do so. (And quite often well before that.) Not that it really matters whether there’s debt remaining on old buildings when new ones start getting planned, because that’s just bookkeeping, but at least get your facts right.

The overwhelming majority of the 36 stadiums that have been built or had major renovations since 2003 with price tags of more than $575 million (the original budgeted cost of the 2003 Soldier Field renovation) have done so with at least some public funding, based on Crain’s research.

The slideshow of the 36 stadiums shows that the ten listed as “team did not use public funds” include the Dallas Cowboys and Atlanta Falcons stadiums, which used $350 million and $700 million in public funds respectively, so I have some questions about that Crain’s research (which doesn’t provide its sources).

The structure of stadium deals varies so significantly that experts say it’s impossible to categorically state whether public funding is “good” or “bad.”

Really? You just cited J.C. Bradbury, who is one of several sports economists whose Twitter feeds are just endless streams of saying that evidence is overwhelming that public funding for stadium deals is unrelentingly bad — what “experts” disagree?

[Chicago Alderman Scott] Waguespack believes there are possible deals that could be beneficial for taxpayers, with such infrastructure as train stations, sidewalks and green spaces for public use in The 78, or bridges and sidewalks on the lakefront near the Museum Campus.

Waguespack 1) is not a stadium expert and 2) actually opposes Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s White Sox stadium subsidy plan, citing Field of Schemes’ description of the proposal as “crazytown.”

There’s more, but I just can’t today, sorry — suffice to say you’re not missing much. There are also some accompanying articles that are more worth reading, including an essay by University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson that resurfaces his quip that “There are only two things you never want to put on valuable property: a cemetery or a football field. Everything else is negotiable,” and a story on fresh poll numbers that show that 72% of Chicagoans want the Bears owners to pay for most or all of any new stadium. There’s still occasional good journalism out there in the world, but friends shouldn’t let friends read those giant stadium think pieces, life is way too short.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: OKC mayor wants new Thunder arena because 22-year-old one is “getting older,” and other things to sigh deeply over

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we even get to the bullet points, we need to start with this: Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt announced yesterday in his State of the City speech that he wants to build a new arena for the Thunder to replace their current one, which just turned 22 years old and is receiving a $100 million upgrade begun in 2011. The present building is “simply not what it used to be,” according to Holt, and  “will keep getting older,” which, yep, that’s how time works. “Seats get old, scoreboards get old, elevators break,” said Holt. Everything breaks, dunnit?

To help pay for a new arena, Holt wants to extend the 1% sales tax surcharge that paid for the old one and which is currently set to expire in 2028. Holt described this as “no tax increase will be necessary,” which is true if you mean that Oklahoma City residents won’t have to pay any more in taxes than they do now, but not true if you mean whether they’d have to pay more than they would if the Thunder were forced to continue to play in their aging more-than-two-decade-old arena instead of an aging new one.

The tax extension would at least require a public vote, as the original one did. Still, J.C. Bradbury has a point:

Nothing wrong with getting a new arena every year, so long as you’re not the one paying for it. And now, on to the week in bullet points:

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Jays plan $¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in SkyDome renovations, figure it out yourself, journalism can’t help you

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! I don’t know about you, but for me this was a great week: I got a new coffee mug, and also it’s now almost over! The week, I mean, not the mug. You’re smart, you probably figured that out already.

And now, how’s about some news:

  • The Toronto Blue Jays owners are planning $230 million in renovations to the stadium formerly known as SkyDome but now named for the team’s corporate owners, or maybe it’s $300 million in renovations, what is money, anyway, especially Canadian money? The CBC’s report says that the redo will include saying “goodbye to the nosebleeds,” as the top 500 level deck will be “completely removed and replaced with non-ticketed spaces,” and oh, here’s a rendering with the 500 level still very much visible, hmm. The stadium is owned by the Jays after Ontario built it and took a huge bath on it, so presumably the renovations will be funded by the team, though Jays president Mark Shapiro called this just a “medium-term solution,” so there’ll still be plenty of time to demand a new stadium later, don’t worry.
  • WPRI in Providence breaks down why Pawtucket’s new USL soccer stadium will cost taxpayers $60 milllion and not $45.5 million like its developers claim, which is helpful and all, except when you add up all the numbers it actually looks more like $80 million? ($46.2 million in state tax breaks, $10 million from the city, plus $27 million in additional money redirected from state infrastructure spending — yup, that’d be more than $80 million.) The fog of stadium wars is soupy indeed.
  • If the Philadelphia 76ers owners succeed in building their own Center City arena and no longer renting from the Flyers, “The companies that would benefit are Live Nation and AEG, because they would have two buildings in Philly to play off each other, so the rent expense would go down,” former Spectrum manager Ed Rubinstein tells Venues Now. “That’s the reason why we never wanted another arena built.” This would be the Sixers owners’ problem, on the one hand, but also Philly taxpayers’ problem if the idea of giving the Sixers arena a giant tax break would be to help the local economy when it would only end up shuffling concert spending around from one part of town to another.
  • There are new Tennessee Smokies stadium renderings, and — oh, come on, you’re not even trying! I get that the plans need to be downscaled some because the stadium is over budget, but at least you can afford some clip art fireworks or people playing random sports. Show some self-respect.
  • Somebody dug up this consulting report that everyone’s favorite economist-for-team-hire Andy Zimbalist did on mixed martial arts — okay, sure — and I must report that previous reporting that Zimbalist earns $225 an hour for his services is out of date: His “customary rate,” he wrote in the 2017 document, is actually $850 an hour. And that’s before any surcharges Zimbalist now imposes for supply-chain issues. Please draw your own conclusions as to whether that rate could be an incentive to report the findings that your client is hoping for, or at least look really hard for them.
  • Your occasional reminder that sports team owners don’t have a monopoly on getting billions of dollars in public money for no damn reason: Here’s a report on Kansas giving Panasonic $800 million in subsidies for a battery factory in exchange for a commitment of zero new jobs, and here’s Bernie Sanders talking about how a new bipartisan bill to compete with China on electronics somehow involves giving $76 billion to microchip companies. The New York Times called the latter “a remarkable and rare consensus in a polarized Congress,” which is both true and all too telling about what our elected representatives (and major newspapers) can agree on.
  • “It’s morally corrupt that new arenas for professional teams worth billions of dollars are majorly publicly funded — especially when the tax dollars could be going to other areas in the city in actual need of the money,” writes Norman Transcript sports reporter intern Clemente Almanza of devoting public dollars to a new Oklahoma City Thunder arena like the team’s owners want, “but” — you knew there was a “but” coming — “that comes with the territory of having a franchise. 18 of the 29 NBA arenas are owned by a government multiplicity” — he’s an intern, he can’t be expected to own a dictionary — and “losing the Thunder would cause catastrophic levels of damage that the state would never recover.” Um, you don’t want to recover the damage … hey, Norman Transcript, don’t you have any copy editors? No? I guess “let the intern sit down and keyboard out a column on why a new arena is necessary” is just how journalism goes these days — that coffee mug gets righter and righter every day.
Share this post:

Poll of Americans on reopening stadiums shows why not to reopen stadiums based on polls

access_time personNeil deMause

There is a very dumb journalistic tradition that will not die of “Let’s poll people about what they believe about purely factual things.” So you take a question that should be answered with reporting — say, whether climate change is an imminent crisis, or whether Saddam Hussein really had weapons of mass destruction — and then parse the responses as if they mean anything more than just a reification of the ideas that the media itself has been telling people. It is truly very, very dumb.

Today is Major League Baseball opening day, and so the question the Washington Post chose to ask random Americans is whether they would feel comfortable attending a live sporting event. The answer is a resounding “it depends”:

About two-thirds say they would feel comfortable attending an outdoor event such as baseball (66 percent), but fewer than half as many (32 percent) feel comfortable attending an indoor event such as basketball. Nearly 2 in 3 people (64 percent) say they would feel comfortable if all attendees were required to wear masks, compared with 22 percent who would feel comfortable if there was no mask requirement…

More say they would be comfortable attending a stadium limited to 20 percent capacity (69 percent “comfortable”) than 50 percent capacity (50 percent).

That is simultaneously unsurprising — being outdoors, masked, and distanced makes people feel safer — and utterly meaningless, for a couple of reasons. First off, the questions were all asked separately, so it was either “Do you feel safe at an outdoor event?” or “Do you feel safe if people are wearing masks?” or “Do you feel safe if you’ve been vaccinated?”, with no way to respond “Only if these other conditions are met as well.” If a Washington Post pollster had been unlucky enough to get me on the phone, for example, I would have said, “I feel pretty safe at outdoor, masked, and distanced events right now, and once I’m fully vaccinated would consider indoor events, but not if people are unmasked, unless maybe the case rate is really low by then because so many other people are vaccinated — are you getting all this? Should I talk more slowly? Are you crying?” (This answer would be very hard to fit into a “data visualization,” as fancy journalism types these days call bar charts.)

The poll results are also meaningless, though, because the most reasonable answer would be “You’re the ones with the resources of a giant journalistic enterprise here, you tell me whether I should feel safe.” Doing that would require asking people who actually know things — fancy journalism types call these “experts” — what is and isn’t safe, and then reporting their answers. For example, here’s Anthony Fauci telling the New York Times for its baseball opening day story what he expects to transpire over the coming weeks:

“I would expect that as we get through the summer — late spring, early summer — there’s going to be a relaxation where you’re going to have more and more people allowed into baseball parks, very likely separated with seating, very likely continue to wear masks,” he said.

That’s not very useful either, since Fauci doesn’t answer more fine-grained questions like “Is it safe to go to indoor events once you’re vaccinated?” or, better still, “Could we start having full-capacity ballgames sooner if we weren’t wasting our bullets on reopening indoor dining?” He probably would have answered those questions, too, but the Times needed the rest of its column inches to list every MLB team’s reopening policies, even though those will almost certainly be changing as soon as next month, depending on whether case rates plummet in coming weeks thanks to increased vaccinations or soar thanks to elected officials encouraging people to act like the pandemic is already over. And we just don’t know which of those two things will happen yet — hey, I know, let’s ask someone about it? No, not someone who can make an educated guess, that’d be too elitist; let’s do a poll! Hello, sir or madam, I’m calling from the Washington Post, and I have a few questions for you about the future…
Share this post:

Very bad article predicts where Sixers arena will go without discussing who would pay for it, this is just how journalism works now

access_time personNeil deMause

Want to read a really bad article about Philadelphia 76ers owner Josh Harris’s quest for a new arena? Sure, who wouldn’t! But, you may be asking yourself, how do I know that I am identifying every possible bit of badness, for maximum schadenfreude action? Fret no longer, for here is a step-by-step guide:

  • Start by looking at the URL to see if it’s from a legitimate news source, or whatever passes for one these days. “Play Pennsylvania” appears to be a site about gambling in Pennsylvania, but all of its domain registration contacts are in Malta. This, it turns out, is because it’s owned by a Maltese lead generation company, “lead generation” being corporate jargon for “getting people interested in things.” The author of the article is at least an award-winning freelance journalist and former standup comic, but we’re not off to a great start.
  • On to the article itself: “The Sixers have made it clear they do not intend to rent the Wells Fargo Center (owned by Comcast Spectacor) beyond the expiration of their lease in 2031.” Sure, and I don’t intend to still be driving a 2013 car in 2031, but you know what? Unless I find one that saves me so much on operating costs that it’s a better deal, or someone buys me one, I probably will be.
  • “When you own a venue, you own the development rights and collect rent from every concert promoter, trade show and college team to whom you lease the space.” You also own the debt from building the place, and the additional revenues from renting it out are seldom enough to pay that off, especially in a city that would then have two similar-sized arena competing for concerts and trade shows. (Remember concerts and trade shows? Those were good times.)
  • “They have options. Of course, matters like ‘who pays for it/tax incentives’ and infrastructure will ultimately drive the decision.” Yes, matters like that! Now let’s never speak of who’ll pay for it again, because this is not that kind of article!
  • “Building another arena next to the existing one doesn’t make economic sense. … A new arena will need to be somewhat removed geographically from the existing Sports Complex and have the opportunity to develop other uses with it.” This is a worthwhile nod to the above point about arena glut, but also completely misses the point about how arenas compete: Being across town from another arena isn’t sufficient to avoid conflicts. That’s why New Jersey’s Izod Center shut down in 2015 after competition from Newark’s Prudential Center ten miles away (and also Brooklyn’s Barclays Center across two rivers) when it was paid to shut down by, hey look, it’s Josh Harris!
  • “Here are three locations the Sixers should consider for their new home.” This is the real point of the article, and look, I get it, the Sixers are in the news, and you write for a somewhat sports-adjacent sort-of publication, and “Where else could the Sixers go?” is the kind of thing that might get you a few clicks, and you’re probably being paid based on your traffic numbers. But “Where will the local team owner build his inevitable arena?” is a tired bad-journalism cliche at this point, especially if you’re not looking at how it would be paid for or if he would even want one if somebody else weren’t helping to foot the bill. Especially if you’re just speculating wildly without any apparent sources for where Harris might actually be looking. (Top three wild speculations, if you’re wondering: Camden, on the Schuylkill River near 30th Street Station, and “I dunno, maybe the suburbs somewhere?”)

To be fair, this post actually isn’t much worse than the kind of thing one frequently reads in the actual daily news media — but that’s more an indictment of the actual news media than an endorsement of this. Coverage of sports stadium demands has been pretty bad for decades, and now that reporting is being left to overworked, underpaid writers working for shadowy offshore gambling-promotion companies, it’s only going in the wrong direction. Media literacy is the only real solution at this point, so as long as there’s still money for quality schooling instead of it being siphoned off to pay for private development projects … oh. I see what you’re doing, sports barons — well played!

Share this post:

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.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: I, for one, support our new dancing robot overlords

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, everybody! Let’s see what’s going on:

While I’m sorely tempted to stop right there, we do have some other news this week to cover, so let’s continue:

  • Oak View Group, the operator of the New York Islanders‘ new Belmont Park arena currently under construction for a planned opening next year, is reportedly interested in taking over operations of the Nassau Coliseum as well, according to Newsday “sources.” I mean, so would I if the price were right, and given that current operator Mikhail Prokhorov is $2 million behind in rent and threatened with eviction, OVG probably thinks it can get a good deal here, but still it’s hard to see this as anything other than throwing a few pennies at shutting down a rival so as not to risk any competitors making a go of it.
  • Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury has looked at the impact of the new Atlanta Braves stadium that “was intended to serve as an anchor for further economic development in the suburban business district of Cumberland that would ripple throughout the county,” and found that local commercial property values actually went down relative to similar properties elsewhere in the Atlanta metro area. Bradbury theorizes that businesses may not want to locate near all the traffic congestion of a sports stadium, or be scared off by the tax surcharges put in place to help fund the $300 million public cost. “This finding is consistent with the vast literature on the economic impact of sports venues and events,” concludes Bradbury, which is economistese for “We told you so, over and over and over again, but you wouldn’t listen.”
  • Restaurant owners in Edmonton are so desperate for business that one declared himself “super-excited” at the prospect that visiting NHL teams might place some takeout orders, and the Edmonton Journal sports section is so desperate for hockey news that it ran a whole article about it. Wait, that was in the business section? These are not glorious times for journalism.
  • The National Women’s Soccer League used a forgivable loan from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program to help pay players when its season shut down, which sounds like (and is) a subsidy but is also exactly how the PPP is supposed to work: covering salaries to keep people from being laid off during a pandemic, thus keeping the economy from collapsing even more than it is otherwise. Sure, it would have been nice if the program hadn’t run out of money before most businesses could access it, but given that the maximum player salary in the NWSL is $50,000 a year, it’s hard to complain too much about them being less deserving than anyone else.
  • The way the PPP was not supposed to work was for companies to hold onto employees and then lay them off as soon as they’d certified for the forgivable loans, but that’s what New Era did in Buffalo, and now Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz is so mad that he’s refusing to call the Buffalo Bills stadium by its New Era-branded name, which will totally show them.
  • Lots of NFL teams are planning for reduced capacities at games this fall, while the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is preparing for his players to “all get sick, that’s for sure.” And that’s the state of the NFL in a nutshell right now.
  • Hawaii can’t spend $350 million on replacing Aloha Stadium with a new stadium and redeveloping the area around it because somebody made a typo in the legislation and wrote 99-year leases instead of 65-year leases, everybody laugh and point!
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Ohio could cut stadium funds, A’s could delay stadium plans, sports could return, world could end, anything’s possible

access_time personNeil deMause

A little distracted this morning with a new work project and the usual pandemic stuff and the not-so-usual riots on TV, but there’s a passel of stadium and arena news I didn’t get to, so let’s get to ’em:

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Sacramento faces cuts to pay arena debt, Henderson approves arena debt, music festival to be held in phantom Yankee Stadium parking lot

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry, getting a late start today, let’s get straight to the news without delay:

Share this post: