Category: media appearances

Friday roundup: Browns owners sue to block Modell Law, still no Vegas stadium finance plan from Fisher

access_time personNeil deMause

We have a lot to cover today, but first I would like to encourage you to donate to Matthew Sweet’s GoFundMe for stroke recovery if you’re a fan of his music and haven’t yet — he sounds like he’s in a bad way, he couldn’t afford health insurance on a musician’s income (especially being off the road for much of the last four years thanks to the pandemic), and needing to have health insurance is still a thing in the U.S. for some reason. Here’s hoping that the money raised will help allow him to make a significant recovery, and that someday even people without hit songs will be able to afford medical care and the Pentagon will need to hold a bake sale.

But enough about the unfairness of the modern American economic system, on to … well, you know:

  • With the city of Cleveland considering whether to file suit under the Art Modell Law to force Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam to offer the team for sale to local buyers before decamping to suburban Brook Park, the Haslams have taken the preemptive step of suing to block the Modell law on the grounds it violates the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause and is too vague and probably a bunch of other things, the typography on the PDF is really hard to read. “Today’s action for declaratory judgment was filed to take this matter out of the political domain and ensure we can move this transformative project forward to make a new domed Huntington Bank Field in Brook Park a reality,” said Browns COO Dave Jenkins, which is a nice way of saying, “These damn ‘laws’ and ‘democratic procedures’ were getting in the way of our stadium plans, that could not be allowed.”
  • Speaking of things getting in the way of the Browns’ Brook Park dome plans, Cuyahoga County executive Chris Ronayne has reiterated that he doesn’t want Ohio taxpayers footing $1.2 billion of the stadium bill, saying, “We have looked at the facts, and the facts are that, and I said it before, that the Brook Park play just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work from a financial standpoint, and it’s frankly very detrimental to our future.” Added Cleveland city law director Mark Griffin: “I want to say this to our state legislature … and to this court system: If you make moves to try to gut this city of one of our key corporate partners and money maker, all of us will remember. You will be up for reelection. You would have to deal with the city of Cleveland in some way, shape, form, or fashion, and none of us will ever forget it.”
  • John Fisher will not be presenting any financial details of his Las Vegas Athletics stadium plan at the Las Vegas Stadium Authority’s October 31 meeting, I’m sure you’re all shocked to hear. The authority will discuss his proposed lease agreement for the stadium, but the actual language doesn’t appear to have been posted yet on the authority’s website, guess it’ll be a surprise! Marc Normandin has more on the Vegas clown show at Baseball Prospectus.
  • The Green Bay Packers have agreed to future rent increases at Lambeau Field after previously demanding a rent freeze so it could instead put the rent savings into paying for stadium upgrades. The Green Bay council unanimously rejected that proposal, and Packers execs agreed to annual 2.75% rent increases worth about $30 million in total present value — turns out sometimes pro sports franchise owners do take “no” for an answer, though obviously the Packers are a bit of a special case in terms of franchise ownership.
  • WTOP-TV quotes University of Maryland business professor Michael Faulkender as saying a renovated Washington Capitals and Wizards arena could benefit the surrounding Chinatown because “Generally when people come down for an event, they’re not just going to go straight to the event. They’re also going to, perhaps, come in early, go to restaurants, maybe stay afterward, go to bars,” which 1) they really don’t that much, 2) those that do are already there, since the arena is already in place. Faulkender added, “It may, on the margin, attract people to live closer to it, if they’re regular fans of one of those teams,” and attracting new residents to displace existing ones is exactly why people say the arena has been bad for D.C.’s Chinatown, Faulkender can just stop now, I think.
  • If you were wondering what former Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo was up to and had your money on asking for tax kickbacks for a proposed $1 billion minor-league and college hockey arena in Reno, Nevada, you’re a winner!
  • New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says her $1 billion Buffalo Bills stadium subsidy was necessary because five other cities were trying to steal the Bills otherwise. She didn’t name any of the cities, of course, but we know what one of them must have been.
  • I wrote a long explainer for Defector this week on where the proposed Philadelphia 76ers arena deal falls on the bad-to-awful spectrum, if you’ve been wanting a long explainer on that. And I did an interview with ABC Tampa about where the Tampa Bay Rays might play next year with their stadium roof in tatters, if you want to hear me expound on that, or just missed seeing what I have on my living room walls.
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Friday roundup: Kansas-Missouri stadium border war gets hot, yet another non-economist cited as economics expert

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy heat dome Friday! Hope those of you in the parts of the U.S. that are broiling are staying inside watching soccer tournaments and cranking the air-conditioning and … okay, maybe that isn’t the best plan. We’ll try to come up with a better one before the Paris Olympics, which will once again provide athletes from around the world with the opportunity to compete for medals and maybe die of heatstroke. (Or mutant sharks. But more likely heatstroke.)

Where was I? Oh, right, stadium and arena scams, plenty of those to go around while we wait for the world to boil:

  • Missouri elected officials are up in arms over Kansas elected officials’ passage of legislation to allow selling billions of dollars of tax-funded bonds to lure the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals across state lines, and are also prepared to work on their own stadium subsidy legislation in response. “Today’s vote regrettably restarts the Missouri-Kansas incentive border war, ” said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, adding, “We remain in the first quarter of the Kansas City stadium discussion.” Missouri House Majority Leader Jonathan Patterson, calling the Kansas stadium bond legislation “a wakeup call to Missouri,” said he expects his state to put together its own legislation later this year. It’s all going according to plan!
  • Meanwhile, some developer dude took it upon himself to hire an architecture firm to design a rendering of a Royals stadium on the Kansas-Missouri border, with most of the stadium in Kansas but the right field wall in Missouri, that wouldn’t cause any problems figuring out which state would collect sales taxes to then kick back to team owner John Sherman. Lots of nice fireworks and people flinging their hands in the air, though.
  • WTOP reported Wednesday: “The projected benefits of a new Washington Commanders stadium being built in D.C., which were detailed in a report the city released last week, are largely honest and reasonable, according to a University of Maryland economist who reviewed it.” Unfortunately, three sentences later the radio news station revealed that Michael Faulkender is actually a finance professor, not economics, which is not the same thing at all. The University of Maryland does have an economist who’s an expert in stadium deals, but WTOP didn’t ask him for his opinion, they must have wandered into the wrong classroom building, that probably happens a lot.
  • Facing a vote on whether or not to commit to spending $775 million in public money on upgrades to Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s stadium, the Jacksonville city council yesterday pushed back — on spending $94 million on affordable housing and homelessness prevention as part of an accompanying “community benefits” package. The council says it’ll still come up with the money after taking “some time this summer to work on this,” and it doesn’t affect the $150 million from Khan for community benefits (over 30 years, so really only worth about half that amount), so nothing to worry about, elected officials never go back on their promises!
  • Charlotte was apparently “working on [a Carolina Panthers stadium] deal for a year and a half” before letting the public in on the details, yeah, that might be a story.
  • I personally prefer not to get my news in video form, as you’ve no doubt noticed from the endless scroll of plain text that is this website, but if you do, this report from More Perfect Union on “How Sports Team Owners Scam Communities Out of Billions”  is worth checking out: It has me in it, and also an A’s fan organizer saying “we’re all about kicking John Fisher in the nuts,” what’s not to like?
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Friday roundup: St. Pete council says loud parts quiet on Rays stadium, A’s Vegas plans get even murkier

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week has run its course, but before we get to the remaining news tidbits, we have one new news item to attend to:

The St. Petersburg city council took up its discussion of a Tampa Bay Rays stadium project yesterday, and team execs led by releasing a pile of new renderings, no doubt figuring correctly that even if they don’t show much more than the old renderings — we still don’t see the inside of the stadium, for one thing — they’d still dominate the news coverage. Rays execs still had to answer questions at the council “workshop,” though, and questions there sure were, including about guarantees that affordable housing will be built, why the city should be on the hook for $142 million in infrastructure costs, whether the community benefits agreement could provide more community benefits, and whether the projected tax revenues to pay for the whole mess depend on monkeys flying out of J.C. Bradbury’s butt.

Nobody on the council appears to have asked the “$1.5 billion in public subsidies, really?” question, though. Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano, who’s staked out a position as a critical-but-not-too-critical advocate for the deal, called this “refreshing” because “no one attacked it as a nonsensical corporate giveaway.” (Karla Correa of the St. Pete Tenant Union did say “We desperately need public housing, we don’t need more of these public, private partnerships” and “we should not be giving away upwards of a billion dollars of our taxpayer’s dollars,” but she said it at a protest outside the council hearing, so she doesn’t count, I guess.) One of the more critical councilmembers, Richie Floyd, when asked if there were enough votes on the council to kill the deal, said “no,” so it sounds like the council debate will mostly be nibbling around the edges; there’ll be another workshop session next month, which may shed more light on the likely endgame.

Okay, now the news tidbits:

  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher may have selected the site of the old Tropicana hotel for a new Las Vegas stadium, but it turns out he and landowner Bally’s still don’t know which part of the site the stadium would go on, and NBC Sports has the explanation: “because the project’s master plan has yet to be completed.” That’s, uh, not actually an explanation, it’s just saying the same thing a different way? Anyway, add “Where exactly will it go?” to “How will it fit?” and “Who will pay for it?” and “Will the public money approved so far get overturned by referendum or lawsuit?” on the list of unanswered questions about the soon-to-be officially cityless Athletics franchise’s future stadium plans.
  • Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens says he’s against giving $600 million in state money toward $1.2 billion in public funding for a $2.4 billion Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, because “we don’t have $600 million to give” and “it’s really easy to not support it when you don’t have it.” Then Stephens said he would prefer to raise the money by selling bonds, which suggests he either isn’t really against it or doesn’t understand that bonds have to be repaid somehow — apply Hanlon’s Razor as you see fit.
  • DaRon McGee, the Jackson County legislator who introduced the sales tax hike plan to funnel $500 million or so to the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs for stadium projects before it was trounced in a public vote, turns out to have asked the Royals’ stadium front man and team owner John Sherman’s personal assistant for box seats to a game in the run-up to negotiations. McGee says it’s all cool, he paid for the tickets now that somebody noticed, get off his case, okay?
  • The Richmond city council voted to issue $170 million in bonds to build a new stadium for the Double-A Flying Squirrels, to be repaid by hotel and restaurant tax surcharges in the stadium district. The plan was immediately met by a lawsuit from local attorney Paul Goldman saying the bonds should have gone to a voter referendum; Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney dismissed Goldman as a “gadfly,” which is at least better than the time Goldman successfully sued to block a casino project and got called “a white Jew with a background of Judas,” so, progress?
  • Albany and New York state officials are talking about building a $75 million minor-league soccer stadium as part of a $300 million downtown redevelopment, to be paid for by “still unknown.” Gov. Kathy Hochul is involved in the talks, though, so we can probably guess what direction this is headed.
  • The Atlantic ran an overview this week of the state of stadium subsidies, and while I could nitpick a couple of things — crediting Camden Yards for the new-stadium boom leaves out the earlier formative effects of Toronto’s Skydome and Chicago’s New Comiskey Park, and shutting off the supply of federally tax-exempt bonds wouldn’t really be the most effective way to eliminate the problem — but I get quoted saying, “Teams need a place to play, and if local governments told them to pay a fair rent or go pound sand, owners would have little choice but to go along,” so I wholeheartedly endorse it.
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Rays TIF subsidy assumes stadium site will grow 7% a year in value, would cost taxpayers $1.5B either way

access_time personNeil deMause

As the St. Petersburg city council prepares to launch public hearings tomorrow on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium that could cost taxpayers $1.5 billion in cash, tax breaks, and discounted land, the Tampa Bay Times headline department asks the burning question:

St. Petersburg is counting on 7% growth to fund Rays project. Is that risky?

Short answer: Duh. Slightly longer answer: Duh, but not necessarily much more risky than if it were projecting less growth in downtown tax revenue.

Even more slightly longer answer: Mayor Ken Welch’s Rays stadium package would include $417.5 million in tax increment financing, kicking back all new property taxes from the stadium site to pay off construction bonds and infrastructure costs. Part of that calculation is an assumption that the property will grow in value by 7% a year through 2042, spinning off tons of new property taxes to kick back to the stadium project (attendant vaportecture hellscape pictured here).

University of Tampa accounting professor Kimball Adams tells the Times that this is overly optimistic, under the accounting principle of shit happens: “I guarantee you, nobody in 2019 predicted a pandemic in 2020. You can’t project worst-case scenarios, that 1-in-100-year event. Are we going to get a Cat 5 hurricane in the next 40 years? I don’t know. You can’t project that. But the further you go out, the less confidence you should have.”

That is extremely true, and should be a concern in terms of whether the TIF district will actually be able to cover that $417.5 million in costs or whether St. Petersburg may have to dip into its general fund. (It will already have to do so starting in 2042, when Welch’s plan has it scheduled to spend $220 million in general fund dollars on the Rays stadium.)

But to see the bigger problem here, instead of looking at what happens if the TIF money falls short, let’s look at what if it doesn’t. The TIF district, a large swath of land known as the Intown Redevelopment Area, has historically grown in value at a rate of 8.25% a year, something city officials used as an argument that 7% growth is a conservative project. But if downtown St. Pete land is growing in value at 8.25% a year, then future growth of 7% a year wouldn’t really all be new money attributable to the stadium. Rather, much of it would be money that St. Pete would normally get to keep, but now would instead be handing back to Rays owner Stuart Sternberg, on the grounds that his new stadium caused a leap in tax revenues that had been going on all along.

(Just after posting, I amended the above to say “much of this” money, because some of it would be increased property tax kickbacks from the stadium itself, which wouldn’t exist without this project. Though something else certainly could get built there in the absence of a stadium, so it could easily end up being all money the city would get anyway.)

Or if you want a shorter answer again, economist J.C. Bradbury has done so with his trademark 280-characters-or-less skills:

Bradbury also points out that the media seems to have forgotten that the Tampontreal Ex-Rays plan has been dead for two years, which is very good for any plans Sternberg and Welch might have to press the council for approval of the stadium subsidy on the grounds that the team might leave without it:

If you want more tagteaming by me and J.C., you can find it on the latest episode of Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley’s Effectively Wild podcast that was recorded yesterday and dropped last night. Plus MLB’s “latest pants-related wardrobe malfunction,” I gotta check out that part myself.

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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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Friday roundup: Bears set arbitrary stadium deadline, A’s now have three different sets of stadium renderings they won’t show you

access_time personNeil deMause

A reporter asked me this week if I thought there was one particular thing driving the current wave of stadium and arena demands, and I said not really, though there are a few factors influencing it — lots of ’90s stadiums hitting the end of 30-year leases, local governments feeling a little more flush thanks to federal infrastructure and COVID relief money, baseball teams rushing to get deals in place before expansion takes move threat targets out of play. But at the same time, man is the sports subsidy news ever a firehose right now: This site is seeing multiple posts a day right now, and still I feel like I’m leaving more news than ever for the Friday roundups.

Which is all fine and good and I’m happy to do it, it can just be a little exhausting to write. If it’s not too exhausting to read as well, and you want to throw some additional coins in the tip jar to help me shoulder this increased workload, that’s always appreciated. I’m sure things will die down some once we get to the end of various legislative sessions in the spring and early summer, but right now we should all be taking our vitamins to keep our stamina up.

And speaking of the firehose, let’s turn it on and get blasted:

  • Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren says as far as a new stadium goes, “the timeline has to be in 2024,” adding, “Time is money. It takes probably three years once you put a shovel in the ground. ’24 should be the focal point.” Oh hey, it’s our old friend the Two-Minute Warning from the standard stadium playbook! As is de rigueur, Warren did not indicate what would happen if his team didn’t get a new stadium approved in 2024, but given that right now he doesn’t have a lot of viable alternatives, I’d wager that holding his breath until he turns blue is not off the table.
  • And speaking of arbitrary deadlines, St. Petersburg is pushing back a council vote on Tampa Bay Rays stadium funding until May, so there’s enough time for committee meetings first. Rays president Brian Auld warned back in October that “any delay is going to fundamentally alter the entire agreement”; nothing yet from Auld on whether he has a problem with this delay now, but given that it looks like relatively smooth sailing right now for Rays owner Stuart Sternberg to get a potential $1.5 billion in public cash, I’m expecting he won’t complain too much about waiting a few extra weeks for the check to arrive.
  • MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle, who previously said he had seen the mythical Oakland A’s Las Vegas stadium renderings and that they were “spectacular,” now says he’s seen three different versions of where the stadium would go on the current Tropicana resort site, and it’s holding up his plans to renovate his resort across the street until he sees the final design. “I have to believe, in the next 30 to 60 days, we should find out more,” Hornbuckle said; maybe he has to believe it in order to sleep at night, but with the stadium renderings now overdue by two and a half months and counting, we are under no such obligation.
  • The meeting between A’s execs and Oakland officials about a potential short-term lease extension at the Coliseum were “really positive” according to an unnamed team official and “very open and frank” according to Alameda County supervisor David Haubert, who added, “No food fights.” I read somewhere that I can’t find now that the whole thing only lasted about 30 minutes; more meetings are expected, at which there should be plenty of time for food fights.
  • For the many of you expecting Joe Lacob to ride to the rescue and buy the A’s from Fisher and keep them in Oakland, Lacob has an update of sorts: “I’ve not checked in recently. It’s his team. If he decides he wants to sell, he knows who to call, that’s all I’ll say. We might be interested, obviously. We’ve said we were interested in the past. But I don’t think he’s doing that. I think he’s very committed to continue to own the franchise. Looks like he’s committed to Las Vegas. We’re always there. But I’m not calling anybody, it’s his team. I want to stay out of the way. We’ll cross that bridge if it or another team comes available.” Read those tea leaves as you prefer.
  • Jacksonville mayor’s office lead negotiator Mike Weinstein says Mayor Donna Deegan is considering paying the public’s share of $2 billion in Jaguars stadium upgrades by using money in the city’s pension funds, which would be repaid by (scroll, scroll) nope, he didn’t say how, so this is very much the equivalent of explaining how you’ll afford a new purchase to your spouse with “I’ll put it on our credit card.” Note to First Coast News headline writers: This is not what “paying for” means.
  • Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas says her finance and appropriations committee will “absolutely” strip funding for the proposed Alexandria arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals from a 2024 budget bill: “I’m not changing my mind.” We certainly seem headed for a scenario where the state house approves an arena bill while the state senate does not, though there’s still lots of speculation that Senate Democrats are just haggling over their price, possibly for cannabis legalization, an increased minimum wage, more affordable housing, or possibly a pony.
  • An analysis of the Virginia arena deal by the D.C. city council, which obviously isn’t impartial, estimates that it would actually cost taxpayers more than $5 billion counting maintenance and debt service. That’s not entirely fair since a bunch of that money would be paid out in the far future — it’s the old fallacy of calculating how much your house costs by adding up all your mortgage payments over 30 years — but the report does note that the arena plan includes a publicly covered $12 million a year repairs slush fund that would grow at 2% a year, so that’s maybe another $250 million in cost that hasn’t been accounted for by the first $1 billion or so in public money, add it to the list.
  • Another stadium playbook standard is the Home Field Disadvantage, claiming that the old place is just too decrepit ever to stack up with modern buildings, and the Kansas City Royals deployed that one this week, having Populous stadium designer Earl Santee say it’s “just not feasible” and “not realistic” to renovate the team’s current stadium, on account of it having what’s called “concrete cancer.” Oh, really, Earl? This didn’t come up when the Royals stadium was just renovated last decade? Do you have an engineering report to show us, or a price tag on what it would cost to subject Kauffman Stadium to concrete chemotherapy? Hello, Earl, we have followup questions! Earl!
  • Buffalo Bills execs say that their new stadium will have a steeper upper deck that will allow it to bring fans closer to the field, so that, in WGRZ-TV’s words, “fans who sit in the last row of the general concourse will be 54 feet closer to the field than they are at the current stadium.” Yes, that’s how geometry works, and yay for them for applying it — except that the old stadium holds 71,608 fans and the new one will hold only 62,000, so really a lot of the improvement is just from lopping off the farthest 10,000 seats, so not so yay after all.
  • The city of Pawtucket sold $54 million worth of bonds last week to fund a new Rhode Island F.C. stadium, and while that’s a lot for a minor-league soccer stadium and double what taxpayers were supposed to be on the hook for less than a year ago, perhaps most alarming is the news that the bonds were sold at “a yield of 8.24%, equivalent to almost 14% on taxable securities.” Nothing tops off massive public cost overruns like the worst interest rate imaginable, that’s what I always say!
  • I was on the radio in Chicago this week to talk about the new White Sox and Bears stadium proposals, and props to WBBM’s Rick Gregg for leading with my juiciest quote: “I think we went in fairly skeptical, and we came out of our research horrified.” Click the link above to give it a listen, and have a good long weekend for those who celebrate!
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Friday roundup: Sports subsidy protests in Virginia and KC, plus 2023’s biggest non-sports subsidies went to an industry that may surprise you (this is how clickbait headlines work now, right?)

access_time personNeil deMause

No news worth reporting yesterday, but I instead spent my morning recording this interview about the Oakland A’s potential move to Las Vegas, which covered a lot of ground in just half an hour. Tune in to hear what Brodie Brazil and I discussed, or just to see what’s on my living room wall behind the other end of the sofa from where I usually sit for Zoom interviews!

And a few other things of note happened this week, let’s get to them:

  • The newly formed Coalition to Stop the Arena at Potomac Yard rallied yesterday at the site of the proposed $2 billion Washington Capitals and Wizards arena, with former Alexandria vice-mayor Andrew Macdonald saying, “We don’t need an arena to thrive,” and local resident Shannon Curtis saying the project would “create a traffic boondoggle.” In related news, apparently the Potomac Yard Metro station was set for possible closure until this project was proposed because nobody was using it, but now, as discussed before, it would need expansion to handle arena-sized crowds. Hmm, maybe that should be included in the already-$1.5 billion public price tag? Just a crazy notion.
  • People in Southeast D.C., which is home to the new arena where the Washington Mystics play but which may lose the team to the current Capitals and Wizards arena if those teams relocate from D.C. to Virginia, are equally steamed about the whole thing. “I can’t stress enough that we’re not leaving; there’s still a commitment to the neighborhood,” promised Caps/Wizards senior VP John Thompson III, saying the team owners would work with the city to “bring other events” to the neighborhood “to help fill the void” — which sure sounds like leaving, though I guess keeping the arena open and every once in a while holding a concert there or something is technically just “moving out and promising to visit.”
  • As if Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman didn’t have enough prospective stadium sites to play off against each other, now the owners of the old Kansas City Star printing plant site want back in the game. (No details on who would pay for a stadium at that location.) Meanwhile, residents packed the first public meeting by Jackson County yesterday on the Royals’ plans, with KMBC reporting that “many voiced their concern about continuing a tax when they didn’t know where the stadium would be or any specifics about how it would benefit low-wage earners.” The local food and retail workers union also demanded that the project include a community benefits agreement to require that stadium jobs be union, which is already part of the tax extension proposal, and anyway CBAs often don’t work out that well for many reasons. But sure, better-paying jobs are better than worse-paying jobs, can’t get if you don’t ask.
  • The owners of the new Oakland Ballers minor-league baseball team say they signed a deal to rent out the Oakland Coliseum to host one game this summer, but A’s execs blocked them by enforcing their exclusive right to play baseball at the stadium. (Yes, the stadium that A’s owner John Fisher is trying to get out of as fast as possible. Irony is not his strong suit.) A fan group spokesperson said he figures it’s because Fisher was in “a position of embarrassment” because “I think we would have outdrawn them,” which is maybe wishful thinking but also maybe not.
  • Wondering how the biggest sports subsidy deals compare to the biggest non-sports subsidy deals? Check out good Jobs First’s list of the top megadeals of 2023, headed by Ford getting $1.7 billion from Michigan for an electric car battery plant and Volkswagen getting $1.3 billion from South Carolina for its own EV battery plant. Nothing against electric car batteries any more than against sports, but at 6,500 jobs combined, that’s nearly half a million dollars per job, which is a sports-level awful ratio — good job, car companies, even if not good jobs!
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Friday roundup: John Fisher Oakland conspiracython, plus OKC Thunder arena logic gets even weirder

access_time personNeil deMause

Okay, so this first one needs more than a bullet point: Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle ran a long article this week on the possibility of Oakland getting an expansion team if the A’s leave, and how A’s owner John Fisher could salt the earth in his old city while moving to a new one. Ostler’s scenario: Fisher uses his option to buy the 50% of the Oakland Coliseum site currently owned by Alameda County to block a new team in Oakland from building there. Per Ostler, all Fisher needs to do to cement his purchase is to pay the remaining $45 million of the original $85 million purchase price, something that’s due within 180 days of the A’s “announcement of their relocation,” whatever that means.

Or! Given that Fisher needs a place for the A’s to play while waiting for his $1.5 billion Vegas dream house is ready, he could demand a sweetheart lease in exchange for not consummating the purchase, suggests Ostler, under threat of blocking development of the Coliseum site altogether.

And while we’re conspiracy-theorizing, “It’s possible that MLB leaked that Oakland expansion-team teaser in order to pressure Nashville politicians into offering more taxpayer assistance for a new ballpark in that city.” Sure, anything is possible!

“If this all seems convoluted and nutso, that’s because it is,” writes Ostler, and that, at least, is undeniably true. Spending $85 million to buy a piece of land you don’t want and can’t do anything with without partnering with the city you’re in the middle of abandoning seems like an idiotic move, but Fisher could certainly do it either 1) as a game of chicken with the city of Oakland to get what he wants, or 2) because he’s an idiot.

Ostler also notes that as of Tuesday, neither Fisher nor MLB has reached out to Oakland to discuss a lease extension beyond next year, and again, it’s hard to tell if this is them being crazy like a fox or just crazy. From the start nothing about this A’s Vegas move has made sense — well, other than Fisher extracting $600 million in tax money from the state of Nevada, that’s right out of the standard sports team owner playbook — and the endgame, if that’s what this is, only appears to be getting nuttier.

And with that, on to the shorter news items, if only marginally less nutty:

  • If anybody has a study claiming to show that the Oklahoma City Thunder create $600 million of economic impact, the people trying to factcheck Mayor David Holt’s public statements on Twitter would like to see it. Also, Holt’s own administration said in 2018 that the Thunder’s economic impact was only 10% of that, so WTH, David Holt?
  • Holt has also clarified that the 1% sales tax surcharge he wants to impose to provide $780 million toward a new Thunder arena, which he says wouldn’t increase taxes because it will just replace a similar tax surcharge used to pay for the MAPS project that funded the old arena, isn’t an old tax either because it’s not an “extension” of the expiring tax: “It’s the penny currently being utilized by the MAPS initiative. But some people will always call it MAPS because they call everything MAPS. It’s just not.” So it’s a new tax that doesn’t increase taxes because it replaces a different old tax that otherwise would have expired, but that’s not a tax increase because the new tax steps in as soon as the old one leaves — looks like somebody’s been studying their Felix Unger logic.
  • Pinellas County officials say they’re looking at providing $300 million in hotel-tax money toward a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium in St. Petersburg, with county administrator Barry Burton saying, “To be able to create the model, we had to put in something. That’s a reasonable number for plug number. Whether it’s up or down, it’s good for assumptions.” If that sounds like rather than determining what was reasonable in terms of either what the county can afford or how much a stadium would be worth to it, county commissioners picked the $300 million number because it’s half of the $600 million total public cost Rays owner Stu Sternberg wants, which is in turn half of the $1.2 billion stadium he says he wants, and “half” is about the roundest number available, you are very cynical and also probably right.
  • MLB owners are reportedly set to vote on approving the A’s move to Vegas in November, though it remains an open question what approval will mean if Fisher still doesn’t have a stadium plan finalized by then.
  • Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Jeff Gammage’s last article on the Philadelphia 76ers‘ arena plans may have gotten disappeared, but he’s still out there following the story, including reporting that the team is backing off from its end-of-2023 deadline for approval, as well as that this abomination has been driving around Philadelphia City Hall, presumably with an implied threat of “Approve our 76ers arena or else you have to hear this for the rest of your lives.”
  • Also backing off on deadlines: The owners of the Chicago Bears, who have said they won’t pursue state legislation granting them a property tax break on a new stadium site during this year’s legislative session. Oh, you guys, with the deciding what kind of stadium you want to build where before asking for money for it, John Fisher has a lot to teach you.
  • USA Today and The Tennessean are advertising for a Taylor Swift reporter and a Beyoncé reporter, and J.C. Bradbury has a theory.
  • I went on Battleground Wisconsin yesterday to talk about how Wisconsin officials are scrambling all over each other to offer money to Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio for stadium upgrades, and how it fits into the overall trends in baseball stadium skulduggery. You can listen to it here.
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Friday roundup: Philly paper mysteriously pulls article about 76ers arena being called human-rights violation

access_time personNeil deMause

So this was originally going to be a minor bullet point in the Friday roundup: An international human rights organization called The Shift had declared the Philadelphia 76ers‘ arena plans to be “inconsistent with international human rights law” and called on team owner Josh Harris to work with Chinatown residents to “help realize, rather than interfere with, that community’s human rights.” Okay, sure, international human rights law is a bit of an odd legal footing to appeal to, but if anybody’s authorized to do so it’s an international human rights organization, so that’s worth a small note.

Until this happened:

That’s right: Click on the original link on the Inquirer site and it 404s, though the article still shows up in the Inquirer’s own search results. (I had previously saved the article to Instapaper, and you can find a PDF of that here.) Debbie Wei of Asian Americans United, one of the Philadelphia groups strongly opposed to the arena, says she believes the article was taken down at the request of “the billionaires,” but I haven’t been able to get any more details yet from her.

It’s extraordinarily unusual for a news outlet to outright pull a story without even an editorial note stating why it was removed. It actually goes against most journalism ethics policies, which is that stories should be corrected, but not outright deleted. (The Inquirer does have a committee to de-index older stories that may be unintentionally harmful, but even then the stories remain searchable on the Inquirer site, just not on search engines like Google.)

The whole thing is, frankly, bizarre, doubly so since the original article was fairly tame, with the statements from The Shift countered by statements from team spokesperson Nicole Gainor that The Shift’s letter “isn’t based on a clear understanding of how we are thoughtfully approaching this project.” I’ve reached out to the Inquirer for comment, but haven’t heard back yet; if I get any more information today, I’ll post an update here.

UPDATE: Just got this emailed statement from Gabriel Escobar, Inquirer editor and senior vice president: “The article that briefly appeared Thursday on Inquirer.com, in hindsight, required more context and more reporting. For those reasons, we decided to take it down while continuing to pursue the story.”

Meanwhile, on with the rest of the news:

  • The new Forbes NFL team value estimates came out this week, and there have been lots of headlines about how the Tennessee Titans‘ value jumped 26% after getting their new $1.2 billion stadium subsidy. Which, yes, it’s an indication of how stadiums let the rich get richer on the public dime, but some grains of salt do apply: The Forbes team value estimates are very handwavy and much less reliable than their team revenue estimates (which generally check out), and the average NFL team rose an estimated 14% in value next year, so it’s tough to say exactly how much more the Titans are worth now. If anything, it’s notable that even according to Forbes, the Titans only appreciated in value by $420 million more than they would have without the $1.2 billion handout, which implies that Nashville and team owner Amy Adams Strunk both would have been better off if the city had, say, written a half-billion-dollar check to Strunk and let them keep playing in their old stadium.
  • Add the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality to the list of Bronx groups who really hate Mayor Eric Adams’ idea to build a temporary cricket stadium atop public cricket fields in a public park to host the T20 Cricket World Cup: In a Bronx Times op-ed, the BCEQ wrote that it could take two years for the parkland to be fully restored, and “You can add the NYC/ICC proposal to the growing number of ‘mega-events’ that, according to sports economists, drive wedges between localities and global brand-building strategies and fail to deliver promised economic benefits.” At press time, the Bronx Times had not pulled the op-ed.
  • Just when you thought illegal helicopter registration was going to be the weirdest thing about the now-defunct Los Angeles Angels stadium land sale fiasco, now comes the news that the city of Anaheim can’t find the email where an Angels consultant laid out how Mayor Harry Sidhu and city council members were expected to rubber-stamp the deal, even though the FBI already has a copy. Please consider kicking the nonprofit Voice of OC some cash for keeping on top of these things, if only for the LOLAngels value.
  • The insane Jackie Robinson (not that one) Las Vegas arena for no tenant at all is maybe finally dead, after it blew past a county deadline on Wednesday. That only took, let’s see, ten years? Andy Warhol said you get 15 minutes, man, and you already played seven years in the NBA, quit hogging all the attention already.
  • The Las Vegas Raiders stadium has a leak in its roof, time to build a new one.
  • I forgot to link to the KSHB-TV story last week that interviewed me about the Kansas City Royals stadium situation (sample sound bite: “For this to create the kind of new spending that the Royals are claiming, it would be the first time in sports history that occurred”), but you can still check it out here, along with my living room wall art. (Diego Rivera and Jon Langford, if anyone’s curious.)
  • Finally, thanks to everyone who signed up as a Field of Schemes subscriber to get the brand new set of 25th anniversary fridge magnets! (Or, you know, to support the work this site has been doing for 25 damn years now. But I know it’s mostly the magnets.) If you want to get in on the swag, or just encourage me to spend more time on this apparently never-ending mission, sign up now!
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Friday roundup: Commanders buyers’ $500m tax writeoff, SF soccer stadium surprise, commissioners gonna commissioner

access_time personNeil deMause

Can you believe we got through almost an entire week without talking about the Oakland A’s and their planned Las Vegas stadium and its path through the Nevada legislature? I already miss that crazy cast of characters: For-the-Record Jeremy Aguero, the relentless tweeters of the Nevada Independent, the blue recess screen. Yes, they botched the ending, but we’ll always have the memories.

And we’ll always have the future, where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives. Which will be the next stadium drama to become a breakout hit? You make the call:

  • Josh Harris and his friends will get a potential half-billion-dollar tax writeoff for their $6 billion purchase of the Washington Commanders, and while I don’t totally understand Mike Ozanian’s explanation of how it will work — something about amortizing part of the purchase price as being for “intangible assets” — I hope it has something to do with the Bill Veeck depreciation dodge, because that’s a great story worth revisiting.
  • San Francisco Mayor London Breed, in the middle of answering a question of whether her city is in the midst of an urban “doom loop” (spoiler: it’s not) by saying, “we could even tear down the whole [Westfield Mall] and build a whole new soccer stadium,” which is an interesting idea not least because San Francisco doesn’t have a soccer team in need of a stadium (it has the lower-division San Francisco F.C., but its owners haven’t been pushing for a new home), while nearby San Jose already does. Mayor Breed, I have some followup questions, oh crap, she’s gone already.
  • NHL commissioner Gary Bettman “provided an update” on the Arizona Coyotes’ arena situation yesterday, and it is: “They’re in the process of exploring the alternatives that they have in the Greater Phoenix Area.” Does it actually count as an update when you’re just saying the same thing everyone already knew? Discuss.
  • Time magazine asked MLB commissioner Rob Manfred about why a Las Vegas A’s stadium should get public financing, and the faux-pas-missioner replied, “I have read obviously peoples’ arguments about public financing. There’s an equal number of scholars on the opposite side of that issue,” which, I’m sorry, what? Is this one of those dark matter things, where there are thousands of economists who think that public stadium funding is a good idea, they’re just invisible? Mr. Manfred, I have some followup — oh crap.
  • Nashville journalist Justin Hayes unearthed some emails between the Nashville mayor’s office and the Tennessean over the paper’s coverage of the Titans stadium deal, and they’re a gold mine of showing how the media sausages are made: My favorite bit is where the mayor’s communications chief asks for “two half sentences” to be inserted into an article to counter “the vocal echo-chamber of folks who are reflexively negative,” which it’s fair to say he eventually got and then some.
  • Construction has stopped on Pawtucket’s half-finished Rhode Island F.C. soccer stadium after developers ran out of money, and one can only hope that the city will be left with a ruin half as impressive as Valencia’s.
  • More on U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee’s proposed Moneyball Act, which would apparently require any baseball team that moves more than 25 miles to pay its former host city and state “not less than the State, local and or Tribal tax revenue levied in the ten years prior to the date of relocation,” or else baseball would lose its antitrust exemption. That’s a kind of arbitrary and vaguely defined price to hold over MLB’s head, but arbitrary and vaguely defined is probably good enough for government work that is never, ever going to pass anyway.
  • If you’re really jonesing to hear me go on and on about the A’s again, check out my appearance yesterday on KPFA, which should ease your withdrawal symptoms. I did not provide any updates, but we did cover a lot of ground, including the enduring question of what John Fisher is thinking spending $1 billion to move his team to what would be MLB’s smallest stadium in its smallest TV market.
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