Category: NWSL

Friday roundup: Can the Home Team Act save your home team, and other pressing questions

access_time personNeil deMause

Let’s get this out of the way, since it’s blowing up on the socials: Yes, Sen. Bernie Sanders and another less famous guy (Rep. Greg Casar, a second-term representative from Austin and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus) yesterday introduced a “Home Team Act” that would require sports team owners to give one year of notice before moving or terminating a team — and also give local buyers the right to purchase the team “at a fair and reasonable price” first, with the price determined by a team of appraisers appointed by the Treasury Department. According to the bill, either private buyers or local governments themselves would be eligible to purchase the team, and any owners who jumped the gun would be subject to a $30,000-a-day penalty.

Removing team owners’ ability to threaten to yank a city’s team away if they aren’t bestowed with public subsidies would indeed be a huge step toward ending stadium shakedowns. And it’s justifiable on a couple of grounds: Not only do teams owe their livelihood to the local fan base, but leagues also routinely use their monopoly power to deny teams to cities if they, say, have one in the next state over, or just out of spite.

At the same time, though, there are plenty of questions about this bill. First off, this is Congress we’re talking about, which has not exactly shown the backbone to stand up to the sports industry — even Sanders and Casar, notes the Chicago Tribune, “acknowledge the legislation won’t get passed quickly, if at all.” The bit about governments being allowed to purchase teams could be dicey, given that leagues currently have the power to reject public ownership, or, for that matter, even private buyers they don’t like. And in terms of enforcement, a $30,000-a-day penalty only amounts to $11 million over an entire year, and no sports team owner is going to let a crappy $11 million stand in the way of moving wherever they damn well please, or at least threatening to in order to extract money from the public treasury. (Local governments could also seek “injunctive and monetary relief,” so presumably judges would have the power to impose harsher penalties, if they saw fit.)

Basically, once this has more than two co-sponsors, then we can start taking it more seriously. Until then, it goes next to David Minge’s Distorting Subsidies Limitation Act as proof of concept that our elected representatives could be doing more to stop the flow of tax dollars to extortionate billionaires, they just don’t want to.

Other pressing questions from the week that just was:

  • Could there be some speed bumps for the Tampa Bay Rays stadium plan and its $2.25 billion in public cash, land, and tax breaks after all? Hillsborough County Commissioner Josh Wostal is demanding that the county and the Tampa Sports Authority release “all draft documents and personal notes” about the deal before a hearing is held next Wednesday — and further says if no public hearings are held before a scheduled April 15 vote, he’ll move to postpone it. “People at a minimum deserve transparency,” said Wostal. “And we are playing hide the ball?“ No word yet on whether others on the commission will support such a wild-eyed radical position as wanting to talk about what’s being voted on before a vote, but people are arguing on the internet about the Rays deal, and in particular its potential use of infrastructure money that elected officials previously pledged wouldn’t go to stadiums, so that’s a start, perhaps.
  • Will the Ohio state legislature add $45 million in road and transit upgrades around the Cleveland Browns‘ new stadium to the $600 million in state money they’ve already promised owner Jimmy Haslam for construction costs? We won’t know until they revote on April 23 following a public comment period, but given the committee that can authorize such spending unanimously passed it the first time: probably.
  • What about Haslam’s demand for $50 million in city and county money for a stadium for a Columbus women’s soccer team, will he get that too? Five out of nine city councilmembers say they’re opposed, the other four say they need more information, more lobbying is clearly needed.
  • Will the new Oklahoma City Thunder arena end up costing taxpayers there more than the $850 million they approved back in 2023? Possibly, says assistant city manager Brent Bryant, who explained that given “economic uncertainty,” the city will “add a factor to that on top of the anticipated cost, to try to plan for that.” What does that mean? Sorry, only one question per bullet point!
  • Is prospective new Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon “a go-getter” with “enormous passion and spirit,” like NBA commissioner Adam Silver said he was on Wednesday, or a predatory lender who got rich by letting people take out high-interest car loans that they would inevitably default on, like Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica reported earlier that morning? Nothing saying it can’t be both!
  • As Anaheim officials push for the Los Angeles Angels to restore “Anaheim” to the team name, could team owner Arte Moreno or the 80-year-old’s eventual successors move the team to Los Angeles County? The L.A. Times’ Bill Shaikin writes that “the logical landing spot would be Inglewood,” only to have Inglewood Mayor James Butts tell him, “We’re maxed out when it comes to sports. We are not going to reduce the housing stock and move residents out to have a baseball team.” Welp, that’s unfortunate, but the column’s already written, too late to go back and choose a new topic!
  • Does the city of L.A. know what year the 2028 Olympics will be held? Possibly not!
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Friday roundup: Pittsburgh cancels in-person school while hosting NFL Draft, this is just a thing that happens now?

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been quite a week: In case you missed it, I spent much of it keeping up with the comment storm after this Q&A about a paper on housing policy published on Monday. (Turns out people have very many feels about housing policy.) Add in a busy week of stadium news, and I should probably take the day off from typing to avoid a repetitive stress injury — but not before taking a run through the week’s additional stadium and arena news, that’s more important than my wrist tendons.

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Tampa and Boston both learn the hard way that stadium costs only go up

access_time personNeil deMause

What do you get when you spend $2.3 billion on a baseball stadium? Not a top-of-the-line roof, apparently: An architectural report for the Tampa Bay Rays has found that the curved “grid shell roof” the team has requested would add about $300 million to the stadium’s cost. A fabric polymer roof was suggested by the Rays’ construction contractors, but architects warned that that material “can lead to rapid depressurization” and instead suggested a “trussed arched roof,” which is what the Dallas Cowboys stadium uses, among others.

The good news for Florida residents is that the Rays owner Patrick Zalupski would be on the hook for whatever the roof ends up costing, since he’s agreed to pay cost overruns. (Though since he’s set to get $2.25 billion worth of subsidies from the city, county, and state, Zalupski can afford a schmancy roof if that’s what his heart desires.) It’s a cautionary tale for other cities that it’s important to cap public costs, though — see, for example, Boston, where the renovation of city-owned White Stadium for Boston Legacy FC is continuing to go not well at all:

Opposition to the city’s now $325 million public-private plan to rebuild White Stadium for a pro soccer team has intensified following the latest taxpayer cost update, and exposed the mayor’s fractured relationship with the Black community.

Residents and city councilors who oppose the project, which now has taxpayers coughing up $135 million to cover the city’s costs, forcefully pushed back on Wu administration officials’ insistence that new costs announced last month are final and that the city had no other choice but to pursue a public-private stadium rehab.

We already found out last month that the public cost was up to $135 million, but if residents and city councilors are now wondering if it could go even higher, who can blame them? Stadium proponents have absolutely no reason not to lowball projected costs in order to get public officials on the hook, figuring if the real numbers eventually come in higher, it’ll be too late to back out — it’s the same gambit New York City power broker Robert Moses used to use to get the government to fund projects he knew they would back at the price of, by spending all his money building, say, half a bridge and then daring officials to leave it unfinished. This makes it absolutely vital for cities to ensure that team owners cover all cost overruns, and no cheating by working in “maintenance funds” that let them fob off costs onto future public subsidies, either.

At a Boston city council hearing yesterday, Reggie Stewart, a member of the local District 7 advisory council, warned Mayor Michelle Wu and city councilors that they’ll have to face the wrath of voters for squandering their money on a pro soccer stadium instead of using it to improve their neighborhoods. We’ll see — voters are notoriously fickle about penalizing elected officials over single issues, when they even have a viable alternative in the first place — but if it did happen, they wouldn’t be the first politicians voted out of office because they handed the keys to the store to the local sports owner.

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Boston women’s soccer stadium to cost taxpayers 2.5 times as much as value of team

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a few months since we’ve checked in on Boston’s plan to spend $100 million to rebuild White Stadium for NWSL club Boston Legacy F.C., how’s that going?

The city of Boston’s project to overhaul Franklin Park’s White Stadium will cost taxpayers $135 million, up from a previous $90 million estimate — an increase Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has attributed to inflation and the rising costs of materials and labor….

She also said that Boston Legacy FC, the new professional women’s soccer team that is partnering with the city to pay for the project and will share the space with student athletes, will put in more than $190 million for its portion of the redevelopment.

That puts the total cost of the project at more than $325 million — an eye-popping increase from the $200 million total the project was thought to cost last year.

Awesome. Wu’s criticism of New England Patriots heir Josh Kraft, who back when he was running for mayor last year claimed the stadium would end up costing the city $170 million, as not “grounded in reality” does not look so great about now — politicians of the world, you should have learned always to take the over on stadium cost predictions.

Wu didn’t only blame inflation for the rising price tag: She also said the “primary driver” was “we heard from community members that there were all of these dreams and hopes and goals and we decided to make the project better, and therefore more expensive, in response to that.” You little people with your big dreams for things like public water fountains, we did this for you! For you, I say!

Spending $135 million in public money toward a $325 million stadium could be worse — it could be $325 million toward a $325 million stadium — but it’s still pretty bad: The expansion fee for the women’s soccer team was only $53 million, meaning the city is now spending 155% more on a stadium than the franchise itself is worth. Boston will also get a snazzier place for high school soccer teams to play, sure, but the city could have skipped such Legacy-demanded expenses as a beer garden and just rehabbed the stadium for school sports for an estimated $20 million, so, yeah, not great. There’s still a lawsuit ongoing against the project, but given that vertical construction of the stadium structure is set to start next month, it’s going to take a ruling really soon to keep taxpayers from being on the hook for the full cost, whether that’s $135 million or wherever the bouncing price tag eventually lands.

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Friday roundup: Chiefs stadium deal still not finalized, Royals even less so

access_time personNeil deMause

Pressed for time here on a bunch of projects (I’ll be able to reveal more about one next Thursday or Friday), so let’s take a brief spin through the rest of this week’s news:

  • Wyandotte County will hold a public hearing sometime in the next three weeks to help decide whether to put some amount of city and county sales taxes into a Kansas City Chiefs stadium that would be built somewhere in the county. Meanwhile. legislators from both parties are criticizing the deal as “tax giveaways for billionaires.” The Chiefs deal isn’t falling apart or anything, but it does still have a lot of t’s to cross and i’s to dot before Clark Hunt can cash his $4 billion check.
  • Clay County officials said three weeks ago that they were no longer talking with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman about building him a new stadium, and now the county commission has announced that the deadline has passed for putting a stadium measure on the April ballot. Royals stadium sites are truly falling like dominoes (I don’t think that’s actually how that metaphor works, but sure, close enough).
  • It’s been almost four years since the Los Angeles Angels‘ sweetheart stadium land deal was torpedoed by an FBI fraud and bribery investigation into then-Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu, which means it’s about time for city officials to start bringing up the prospect of a new stadium land deal. Councilmember Natalie Meeks, who proposed the agenda item, seems open to ideas — selling the parking lots around the stadium for quick cash, leasing it out for development for slow cash, turning it into open space — and any proposal will also have to deal with the state’s Surplus Land Act, which requires that any sale of public land prioritize affordable housing. City officials say they haven’t talked with Angels owner Arte Moreno about any of this, which will probably be necessary, only hopefully this time with fewer federal investigations.
  • ICE is going to be present at the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, and Batman will not stand for it.
  • The owner of a dead mall in Phoenix wants to get one of those “theme park districts” to divert tax money to a new domed women’s soccer stadium. Tasmania says hold my beer.

 

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Denver council puts off soccer stadium vote till next Monday amid public funding questions

access_time personNeil deMause

The Denver city council met last night to cast a vote on moving forward with what could be $175 million in cash and tax breaks for a stadium for the Denver Summit NWSL team … and instead punted:

The council delayed voting on rezoning the Santa Fe Yards property near Interstate 25 and Broadway, but still held a public hearing. Council is now scheduled to vote next Monday on both the rezoning and whether to allocate $50 million in city funds set aside to purchase land for the project.

Councilmembers had previously said they wouldn’t move forward without a community benefits agreement with the local neighborhood, but that was resolved yesterday when the team owners agreed to chip in $300,000 a year toward things like scholarships and equipment donations. Rather, the vote was delayed “at the request of the city’s ‘executive branch’ to allow for the vote on the soccer stadium rezoning to coincide with the remaining pieces of legislation covering public funding and other steps necessary to keep the stadium in Denver,” reports the Denver Gazette — which suggests that the mayor’s office may be trying to get all its ducks in a row before holding a vote of a council that has raised questions about what exactly the city would be spending money on and why.

Stadiums built specifically for women’s pro teams are still rare, which has given rise to proponents saying that using public money on an NWSL stadium would only be fair. Team president Jen Millet insisted: “When you’re a tenant in a stadium, it’s not your true hub. Women deserve that. Just like men.” Meanwhile, the alt-weekly Denver Westword even ran an op-ed last week by a local middle schooler (with “more than ten years” of soccer experience? she must’ve started young) saying, “By debating whether or not to invest city funding to support building infrastructure around the new stadium – a discussion that rarely (if ever) happens with stadiums for men’s sports [ed. note: Ahem] – Denver City Council is sending a message to girls that we don’t matter as much as the boys.”

Public comment at last night’s council hearing was split, as it always is. This is presumably going to come down to haggling with individual councilmembers, which could go any direction — we’ll all regroup next Monday to see how things went, and whether the team owners can rely on appeals to gender equity, or if they’ll need to again threaten to move to the suburbs or somewhere, just see if they won’t.

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Friday roundup: Denver mayor says he’ll fight to the death to give George Lucas’s wife $170m for a soccer stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

I had a birthday this week, and nothing says “Yes, you’ve been writing this blog since you were 32 years old and you’re apparently going to have to keep at it well into old age, you got a problem with that?” than becoming a Field of Schemes supporter! There are both one-time and recurring payment options, many of which give you the chance to get one of just ten remaining copies of this Vaportecture art print before they’re gone forever, so act now!

Or just keep on reading and commenting, honestly, that at least makes me feel like this entire project has been worth something, even if the central problem it has detailed shows no sign of slowing down. I remain inspired by the Straight Dope‘s tagline “Fighting Ignorance Since 1973 (It’s Taking Longer Than We Thought),” though the fact that the Straight Dope stopped publishing in 2018 without declaring victory over ignorance is sobering, admittedly.

Anyway, onward!

  • Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has heard the NWSL expansion Denver Summit owners’ threat to pursue a “parallel path” in unspecified neighboring cities at the same time as trying to win over a city council not crazy about handing them maybe $170 million in cash and tax breaks, and he knows just how to respond: by offering to do whatever it takes to get Summit co-owner (and Broncos co-owner, and wife of billionaire George Lucas) Mellody Hobson to build in his city. “Over my dead body will I let the Broncos stadium leave Denver,” said Johnston on Wednesday. “Over my dead body am I going to let the Summit stadium leave Denver. We want that site to be here.” Noooooo, that’s not at all how you haggle, you’re doing it all wrong! It remains to be seen whether the Denver city council will take up Johnston on his “dead body” offer.
  • Residents of Kansas’s Johnson County are “seething” over the possibility of the Kansas City Royals building a stadium there, according to the Kansas City Star, though the Star also reports that a poll found 53% of residents support the idea and 40% oppose it. But also 40% of respondents said the Royals should stay put at Kauffman Stadium vs. 26% who wanted them to move to Kansas, a good seethe is so hard to find these days.
  • How did New York Mets owner Steve Cohen take his plans to build a casino next to his stadium from distant longshot to likely winner? One part, two local anti-casino activists write in the New York Daily News, involved hiring two community board members (one now the councilmember-elect for the district) as consultants, while also holding fundraisers for the local state assemblymember. The main reason for Cohen’s success may still be that the state senator who was his main opponent also turned out to be the most disliked person in Albany, but throwing money around to local officials couldn’t have hurt, either.
  • Buffalo Bills fans appear to have given up and bought the hated personal seat licenses required to get tickets at the new publicly funded stadium scheduled to open next year, with nearly 90% of the PSLs reportedly having sold. All of the $250 million in proceeds so far will go toward paying Bills owner and superyacht captain Terry Pegula’s $1 billion in stadium expenses, none of it toward paying New York state and Erie County taxpayers’ $1 billion in stadium expenses, because standard business practice something something.
  • It’s still not clear where Athletics owner John Fisher will find the $1.4 billion he needs to build an entire ballpark in Las Vegas, but he’s certainly building something: Construction crews started pouring concrete for the lower deck this week. There’s been no word when he’ll hit the $100 million spending mark that will allow him to access $380 million in public money, let alone what he’ll do once that money runs out as well, but if nothing else Fisher is committing to the bit.
  • The owners of Sacramento Republic F.C. have only just started building their new soccer stadium, and they’re already seeking permission to expand it from 12,000 to 20,000 seats, just in case they ever want to.
  • Asked how new Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski is doing at coming up with plans for a new stadium, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred somehow managed to say, “With respect to the go-forward issue, Patrick and his group are hard at work getting the lay of the land in the Tampa Bay region to find out what their options are.” Language is always evolving, and Manfred is truly an inspiration in breaking new ground about where it will go in the future, or as he would say, the go-forward time.
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Denver NWSL owners threaten to move expansion team before it’s even started play after council delays stadium approval

access_time personNeil deMause

Back in May, the Denver city council voted 11-1 to approve spending $70 million for land and infrastructure for a new stadium for a new NWSL team — at the time unnamed, since dubbed the Denver Summit — with one catch: The council would need to re-vote on it in the fall. “It’s a dicey time,” said councilmember Paul Kashmann. “We may find things ease up over the next six months, or it may be doom and gloom — and we will have to make some very dire decisions.”

Six months later, Denver’s budget is fairly doomy and gloomy, and that was enough to cause the council last week to put off votes on four of the five stadium measures it’s considering. Council president Amanda Sandoval specifically pointed to such items as a possible pedestrian bridge to the stadium — sports team owners sure do love asking for pedestrian bridges — that currently has no set price tag, and is to be paid for by maybe asking the state for money or using local property tax funds or something, we’ll get back to you on that:

“How does that work if we don’t have the funding right now? Like, when does that come into play?” Council president [Amanda] Sandoval asked regarding the potential pedestrian bridge. “I’m just concerned that, like, we’re taking the cart before the horse.”

There was also this exchange between Sandoval and the team’s lawyer:

“The core agreement was in all of the documents that were sent to all council members last week,” said Andrea Austin of Greenberg Traurig, outside counsel for the group working on the development of the Summit’s stadium.

“Yeah, and parts of them are blank,” said Sandoval.

“Parts of the exhibit. The agreement itself is not blank,” Austin said.

“No, I want to see the funding, like the money is not here,” Sandoval said.

“The money is all in the funding agreement. What is not there are the specific allocations of how that is spent,” Austin said.

In fact, the proposed stadium project could be significantly worse for Denver than $70 million plus ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ for a pedestrian bridge. As covered here back in May, the council is also considering exempting the stadium land from property taxes, plus kicking back property taxes on the stadium itself and other nearby development — a subsidy that University of Colorado Denver sports economist Geoffrey Propheter at the time estimated would cost the public “definitely less than $300 million but definitely more than $175 million.” The Denver Urban Renewal Authority has since projected the TIF cost as $158 million through 2042, which would be more like $100 million in present value — even if that lower estimate is correct, city cash and tax breaks would end up covering the bulk of the team owners’ proposed $200 million stadium cost.

The team’s owners, who include Mellody Hobson, wife of billionaire filmmaker George Lucas, have naturally enough responded that if they have to go through a whole legislative process before cashing $170 million or more in taxpayer checks, maybe they’ll just take their soccer balls and go, you know, somewhere:

“Denver Summit FC ownership is committed to fulfilling our obligations to the league, our fans, our athletes and the community. That means we need to deliver a purpose-built stadium for women’s professional soccer – on time, ready for play in March of 2028. We have been planning for a permanent stadium at Santa Fe Yards in Denver’s urban core. Given the challenges we have faced in the Denver City Council process, we are currently pursuing a parallel path regarding the stadium site and engaging with other jurisdictions outside Denver. We will continue to engage in an open and honest dialogue with the Mayor, City Council and Community in Denver.”

The Summit are currently scheduled to start play in 2026 at the Broncos‘ stadium, so “need to deliver a purpose-built stadium” refers only to the team owners’ promise to the league that they’d get their own 14,500-seat stadium eventually. This seems like it shouldn’t really be Denver’s problem — “We should not be rushing a spending decision of this level because of agreements between private parties,” remarked councilmember Sarah Parady — but arbitrary deadlines and unspecified move threats are part of the standard stadium playbook, you just have to expect them and move on. The council has meetings all this week; it’ll be interesting to see if and how Sandoval and other members respond.

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Friday roundup: Royals “poll” fans on why they need a new stadium, plus still more soccer teams, so many soccer teams

access_time personNeil deMause

I’m posting this week’s roundup from the road, so apologies if any news slipped through the cracks, and I’ll try to catch up with it next week. But at least I’m not shutting down my site to take a full-time editing job: While I’m very happy for Tom Scocca’s bank balance and health coverage, he’s one of the best writers and most astute political analysts in an increasingly threadbare media landscape, and his writing at Indignity and elsewhere will be sorely missed.

In happier news … hahaha, what am I saying, most of this news is dismal as always. But anyway in LOLdemocracy news:

  • Kansas City Royals officials are surveying selected fans about their thoughts on three potential stadium locations — Downtown/Near Downtown, Clay County/North Kansas City and Johnson County/Overland Park — some of which surely is meant to serve as a push poll, given that it only includes one positive option about the team’s current home (“Kauffman Stadium is still a great place to watch a game; There is no reason for the Royals to leave”) and two negative ones (“Kauffman Stadium is past its prime and needs to be replaced by a modern ballpark that is surrounded by an entertainment district with shops, restaurants and bars” and “I love the ‘K’, but it lacks the amenities of modern ballparks and our region would be better served with a brand-new ballpark in a different part of town”). And while surely team owner John Sherman will use the actual responses in some way, you know that his main concern is who he can extricate the most public money from — and by naming three potential locations, he also creates leverage to get the most public money from whichever site he or fans might prefer otherwise, so really win-win-win for him!
  • Raleigh may be asked to build a new stadium for the NC Courage and North Carolina F.C. (currently about to go on hiatus before jumping to the USL’s new top tier intended to compete with MLS) soccer teams, and Green Bay may build a stadium for new minor-league soccer teams, and Rancho Cordova may get tax incentives to help build a $175 million arena for an indoor soccer team, hands up everyone who knows where Rancho Cordova is or that the U.S. has an indoor soccer league! In any event, everybody still gets a soccer team, cities really don’t have to rush to pay for stadiums to get one, you have to beat them away with sticks at this point.
  • Tampa Bay Business and Wealth (?) headline: “The data is in: Mixed-use stadiums win big for cities and fans.” Actual report (?) by consultants JLL (“We believe in the power of real estate to shape a better world”) linked to in the article: “Attendance trends from the 2025 MLB regular season show that stadiums in Lifestyle Market ecosystems drive elevated attendance, even when team performance is poor” (mostly based on the success of the Atlanta Braves, who drew well in 2025 despite sucking largely because people still  bought tickets thinking the entire starting rotation wasn’t going to get injured) and “By 2040, we predict that at least half of MLB organizations will announce plans to develop a new stadium or perform a major redevelopment of their existing venue” this seems to be more winning big for team owners than for fans or cities, you know?
  • MLS commissioner Don Garber is headed to Vancouver to complain that the Whitecaps don’t get first dibs on dates for playoff games and have to share food and beverage revenue with their government landlords, can you imagine the nerve of those Canadians?
  • On Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb’s proposal for a sales tax surcharge district to fund Guardians and Cavaliers upgrades, Cleveland.com reports that “on Reddit, users on r/cleveland and r/cavs were largely united around the same message: billionaire team owners should pay for their own stadiums. They rejected the idea that beers or hotdogs should cost more,” while “on Facebook, the reaction was more skeptical — and often sarcastic.”
  • We already knew that the Baltimore Ravens were working on a nearly-half-billion-dollar renovation funded mostly by tax dollars, but “The Ravens are investing an additional $55 million for the improvements, with the stadium authority set to reimburse the team up to $35 million of that amount” is a new twist, not to mention a new definition of “investing.”
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Friday roundup: Browns still haggling over stadium permit, Fire stadium could include TIF-funded parking garage

access_time personNeil deMause

We’ve somehow ended up again at the last Friday in August, and if history is any guide, none of you are actually reading this, as you’re all headed out of town for the long weekend (as am I). So I could write about anything, really — maybe, okay, that’s too depressing. No, not that, either. How about we stay away from the current U.S. administration and … eeeagh! Fine, sports stadium news it is!

  • Cleveland Browns officials and representatives of the Ohio Department of Transportation are “in discussions” on the height of the Browns’ proposed stadium that ODOT ruled could interfere with flights into nearby Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, but “it remains unclear whether those talks could lead to a compromise,” reports Cleveland.com. The only wiggle room appears to be either digging the stadium lower into the ground (unlikely, since it’s already set to be 80 feet below ground level) or move it farther from the airport (maybe, though if you go too far you run into I-71). If they can’t negotiate an accommodation by Tuesday, the team’s owners can still file an appeal of ODOT’s ruling in state court.
  • Chicago Fire owner Joe Mansueto quietly removed a bunch of plans for a new park and transit and bike path improvements to accompany his proposed new soccer stadium, and advocates for parks, transit, and bike paths are steamed! The new plan also includes a parking garage that could potentially be funded by property taxes from the site (i.e., a TIF), which one steamed Chicagoan told Streetsblog Chicago may not be “even permissible under existing regulations.” Expect lots of shouting at the next Zoom meeting on the project’s transit plan, scheduled for September 9.
  • Wannabe Orlando MLB expansion team owner Jim Schnorf says he’s “confident we will be awarded a Major League franchise in the next decade,” citing the fact that Orlando is bigger than other prospective expansion markets (true) and that it has made more progress on stadium funding (not really so much true). Orlando is also very close to Tampa Bay, which already has the Rays (for now, at least), and MLB expansion looks to be on hold for now while the Rays and Athletics stadium situations get resolved so those team owners have lots of cities available to use as move threats, but “confidence” is nice!
  • Boston city councilor Julia Mejia and the Boston NAACP have proposed a scaled-back rebuild of White Stadium just for school sports that would cut the city’s costs to an estimated $64.6 million from the $100 million-$172 million it would cost for the city’s share of a stadium for the NWSL’s Boston Legacy F.C. That would leave Legacy without a stadium, which was originally the whole point of this exercise, but would also create possibly $100 million in savings that Mejia and the NAACP say should be put toward “unmet student needs” in public schools. Mejia tried to introduce this as a bill on Wednesday but the council ruled it out of order since it already voted for the NWSL stadium version; Mejia says she’ll find other ways to raise it.
  • Houston Astros owner Jim Crane is suing Harris County to keep being allowed to not pay property tax even though Harris County officials say they have no intention of trying to charge the Astros property tax. So long as nobody who owns a sports team has to pay property tax, that’s the important thing, no matter what those crazy judges in New Jersey think.
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