Kansas City Current – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Oakland Coliseum redevelopment moves ahead (maybe), DeSantis writes $8m taxpayer check to Inter Miami stadium

August 9, 2024 Neil deMause

In case you’re wondering why sports team owners keep on releasing incredibly amateurish vaportecture stadium renderings that are just going to subject them to ridicule, check out these headlines from just the last two days: “Browns players share thoughts on Brook Park stadium renderings,” “Cleveland Browns stadium saga: Fans react to renderings of Brook Park proposal,” “Cavaliers Star Donovan Mitchell Chimes In On Browns New Stadium Proposal.” Pretty pictures, or even doofy-looking ones, are red meat to click-starved news outlets, and so long as they keep getting coverage that is more “ooh, shiny” than “who’s going to pay for this exactly?” the CAD mills are going to be kept busy.

And speaking of busy, let’s see what else happened this week:

Oakland A’s owner John Fisher has agreed to sell his half of the Oakland Coliseum property to developers African American Sports & Entertainment Group for $125 million, which is $20 million more than the city of Oakland got for its half. Now AASEG will convert it into a “$5 billion megaproject that could include a new convention center, restaurant, hotel, youth amphitheater and restaurants,” and maybe a soccer stadium — or could, you know, not, depending on how the economic winds blow. That the group’s private equity partner says the money will come from “investors” isn’t exactly reassuring, but at least a Coliseum development might pencil out as a better investment than the plan that Fisher is trying to sell.
One thing to breathe easy about with Inter Miami‘s much-delayed new stadium is that at least it’s not getting any public money, and … wait, why is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holding a giant $8 million check made out to the stadium? He can just do that? (Answer: Yes, it’s from an infrastructure slush fund he controls.) Technically the money is going toward traffic improvements around the stadium, but still, handing over $8 million to support a stadium that’s going to happen whether or not you spend the taxpayer dollars on it and then declaring “we just don’t believe that we give money to build sports stadiums” is a nice trick if you can pull it off.
And speaking of privately funded soccer stadiums getting public funding, how about Kansas City spending upwards of $30 million in cash and tax breaks for a parking garage for the KC Current‘s newly opened stadium? The deal isn’t final yet, so no publicity photos of oversized checks for now.
Signal Cleveland speculates that the proposed $2.4 billion Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park could use tax increment financing to cover some of its bills, with the $740,000 a year in property taxes the site currently generates continuing to go to local schools while anything above that number would be kicked back to help pay for the stadium. Except if you believe transit blogger and Browns dome enthusiast Ken Prendergast, the newly developed land would “generate millions more in property taxes or payments in lieu of taxes for Brook Park schools than it does now,” and both things can’t be right. We’ll just have to wait and see what’s actually in the financial plan, which the Browns owners seem perfectly content not to reveal anytime soon, not when they can get Donovan Mitchell making headlines by tweeting that a new stadium is “gonna be fire.”
The new Worcester Red Sox stadium has “put the Canal District’s emergence on overdrive,” according to a Boston Globe article citing … some bars that opened nearby? Not mentioned: What the numbers show about the city’s bang for its 150 million bucks, despite there being local economists who could have easily told the Globe the answer.
In Anaheim, meanwhile, the presence of the Los Angeles Angels has spawned a group of about 40 hot dog vendors who’ve set up outside the stadium, and Angels execs hate it because that’s money that’s not going into team pockets — no, of course not, they’re just concerned about someone “getting severely sick or even dying due to food poisoning,” because we know how devoted the Angels organization is to ensuring people get quality food.
Thomas Tresser, not the DC Comics villain but the author of a book on the successful campaign to defeat Chicago’s Olympic bid, has launched a petition to demand that the city of Chicago not provide any public money or land for sports stadiums, feel free to sign if you’re the petition-signing type.

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Friday roundup: Mets casino gets bill, Angels deal lurches from grave, news outlets everywhere need editing help, stat

March 24, 2023 Neil deMause

Thanks to everyone for helping us make it through another week! (I’m assuming here that it’s you readers who someone make time progress; I don’t actually know that much about science.)

Here’s what’s been happening that we haven’t talked about yet:

A New York state assemblymember has introduced a bill to allow New York Mets owner Steve Cohen to build a casino in his stadium’s parking lot, which requires demapping it as parkland since that’s how it’s currently zoned. The THE CITY article reports that “the city would have to find at least 20 acres of replacement parkland or significantly improve other existing greenspace — paid for by the private developer”; but the actual bill says the city has to spend “an amount equal to or greater than the fair market value of the parklands being discontinued,” and it just needs to include 20 acres of “open space” on the current parking lots (possibly on the casino roof), to be paid for by Sir Not-Specified-in-This-Legislation. Local residents are excited, but probably not in the way Cohen was hoping!
Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno is set to meet with new Anaheim mayor Ashleigh Aitken, presumably to reopen talks about giving him development rights to the city-owned parking lots around his stadium. Maybe this time he’ll be willing to pay the full $500 million value of the property, instead of the $150 million the old mayor agreed to before being forced out of office by a scandal alleging he approved the Angels deal in exchange for campaign contributions? One can hope, or at least pretend to!
Regina, Saskatchewan, may not be able to pick a tourism slogan that doesn’t sound wrong, but they have committed to building $490 million worth of new projects, including a new arena to host its junior hockey league team, the Regina Pats. Though not committed to paying for them, as “council is not making a commitment to spend all the money on all the projects,” said a council official. If anyone has $490 million sitting around, please contact Barry Lacey, executive director of financial strategy and sustainability, at this phone number.
The Denver Broncos have done one of those push polls for season ticketholders to ask them which cool new things they want as part of their cool new stadium that would cost a rumored $2 billion. What’s more important, a roof or lots of restaurant chains? Would you prefer sports gambling or axe throwing? “There is something about a survey that makes the possibility of a Broncos’ new stadium a little more real,” says KUSA-TV, which is exactly the point of such a survey, but you can’t really expect a TV station to notice and remark on that when they can’t even copyedit headlines that read “Survey strikes cord to how Broncos new ownership wants fans’ input.”
It’s rare that economist J.C. Bradbury gets upstaged in terms of quotes about why public funding of stadiums is a bad deal, but it’s hard to beat a Cleveland city councilmember who is quoted as saying about a new Browns stadium, “I’ve heard all the lines of (crap) about how we’re going to turn this around and turn that around. We’re going to benefit all these minority jobs and dah-dah-dah-dah. What a crock of (bleep).”
Isn’t that rather a lot of drinks that the couple in the left corner of this Kansas City Current stadium bar rendering are drinking? It seems like rather a lot to me, though maybe they started off by ordering a pitcher of lemon water and two soup bowls to drink it out of, then decided to switch to (squints) orange juice?
The amazing thing about Buffalo-area middle schoolers designing a new Bills stadium in Minecraft shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has seen middle schoolers with Minecraft, it’s that their design looks less ridiculous than the official one.

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There’s a moon in the K.C. Current stadium sky (it’s not called the Moon)

December 14, 2022December 14, 2022 Neil deMause

New renderings are out for the new stadium for the Kansas City Current, the city’s NWSL franchise, which claims to be “the first stadium in the world built solely for a professional women’s soccer team.” What do we got?

Sure, that’s normal enough, if a little hard to see why it would cost $117 million. (Most of this is being paid for by the team; the owners asked for $6 million in tax breaks in May to help cover cost overruns, but ifd that’s been approved, it’s escaped media mention.) Are there any other views?

Now that’s more like it! Not only can we see additional seating that wasn’t visible in the first image, this one is a smorgasbord of bizarro details:

Let’s start with the game action, where the team in white (presumably the Current, though their main kit is currently red) has sent the entire team up to within 20 yards of goal, not bothering to leave even a single defender back to help the keeper defend against a counterattack. This could be a desperation move to score a goal in the closing minutes, but more likely is because, as a closer look shows, they appear to be playing at an 11-to-8 player advantage, after the opposing team had three players sent off.
What could have caused the red team to accumulate all those red cards? Perhaps they were objecting to the home team setting off fireworks in the middle of a match, which does seem a little unfair.
While we’re looking in the sky, what’s that odd crescent in the top right corner? It could be the moon, but I dunno, it looks awfully big to be the moon, unless this is depicting a photo taken with a zoom lens, which it can’t be given the rest of the perspective. Maybe it’s the Death Star? Using the Death Star to gain home field advantage would definitely seem like a violation of the Laws of the Game, so I can see now why the opposing team’s players got themselves ejected.
Whatever that is, it seems to be backlit by the sun in a way that can’t quite happen in normal geometry, though given the stadium’s location, the sun appears to be setting in the north, so maybe everyone in this image has bigger things to worry about than being vaporized just so Grand Moff Tarkin can show off his new toy.

That was pretty good, even better than the last batch of weird renderings the team issued. The stadium is set to open in 2024, so be prepared for the Earth to be thrown off its axis sometime next year.

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Friday roundup: This post is all about the Bears (or the bears), even the parts with no bears

October 7, 2022 Neil deMause

What did we learn this week, class? We learned that bears are good for SEO, that elected officials can vote down democracy, and that rich people like public subsidies because it’s where the money is. In another sense, of course, no one has learned anything, which is why we are still here, 24 years into this website, still with the bullet points of outrage to mark the end of the week, every week, never ending or changing, oh now I see why you perk up when there are bears:

The Buffalo Bills and Erie County missed their September 1 deadline for finalizing a stadium agreement, and may miss their October 15 deadline, but what are deadlines among friends? “If we get it done before October 15, great,” said Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz. “If we get it done in the last few hours like Kaleida did, great. If it takes a few extra days, great.” The bit about New York taxpayers spending $1 billion while the Bills owners contribute negative $90 million has been set in stone for a while, so really it’s over but the shouting over a community benefits agreement, out of sight of the public, lord knows, you don’t want those people and their ideas getting in the room when the grownups are talking.
The city of Oakland and the A’s owners missed their October 1 deadline for finalizing a stadium agreement, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal thinks that “could be good news for Southern Nevada” in the sense that maybe the Oakland deal will fall apart and the team will move to Las Vegas and Southern Nevada will have to spend a billion dollars instead of Oakland. Silly Review-Journal, allow me to introduce you to the sage Mark Poloncarz, and also the 184th rule of acquisition.
When will Seattle get a new NBA team? asks the Los Angeles Times. (scroll scroll scroll) Okay, no actual answer in the article, but Macklemore is getting impatient, that’s sort of like a deadline, no?
A Baptist pastor who supports a development group led by former Sacramento mayor, former NBA star, and sexual harassment charge magnet Kevin Johnson that wants to redevelop the site of the Tampa Bay Rays‘ Tropicana Field is opposed to the Rays getting to redevelop the stadium site, because then KJ wouldn’t get to do it. Really, that’s the whole article, must not be anything else newsworthy going on in Florida’s Gulf Coast.
The Columbus Crew owners only pay $10 a month in rent on their new stadium, but they still managed to be late with the check.
It’s not super-interesting news that the owners of the Kansas City Current NWSL team broke ground on their $110 million stadium (which was supposed to be publicly funded but the owners decided to ask for $6 million in tax credits once they realized it would cost $110 million) this week, but any article about a ceremonial groundbreaking that manages to begin “Just over 200 hundred years after French fur traders landed here via the Missouri River and settled in rough cabins along its banks” deserves a Pulitzer for Chutzpah.
Finally, some actual news that we don’t hear every week: A Georgia judge has blocked a deal for $700 million in property tax kickbacks for a construction project, on the grounds that the people seeking the money didn’t actually show how it would help the local economy or create jobs or any of the other reasons why they said they should get $700 million. True, it was an electric car plant and not a sports facility, and also the only reason the judge was able to weigh in at all was some convoluted financing scheme that she needed to sign off on, but now the would-be subsidy recipients will have to settle for the $500 million in other tax subsidies that they’re already getting. I swear this started out being good news, sorry for the late plot twist, but I don’t write these storylines, I just report them.

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Friday roundup: Tempe opens arena talks with Coyotes, soccer teams everywhere want taxpayers to cover their cost overruns

June 3, 2022June 3, 2022 Neil deMause

Last of the semi-abbreviated news roundups! Things return to normal next week.

The Tempe city council voted 5-2 last night to approve opening talks with Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo for a new arena and development project, which would cost $1.7 billion and have at least $200 million and maybe significantly more covered by tax kickbacks and other public costs. This all happened last night at a time when I couldn’t watch, but here’s GO PHNX’s primer on what the meeting was set to be about, and here’s a set of computer-rendered flybys with enough lens flare to make even J.J. Abrams blush, hopefully that’ll hold you little bastards until more information is available.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has vetoed a bill to give $35 million to Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg for a new spring training facility in Pasco County because of that time the team’s Twitter account said that gun violence was bad. It’s hard to tell if this was grandstanding a la that time Donald Trump called for eliminating NFL teams’ tax-exempt bond status as punishment for allowing players to take a knee during the national anthem then quietly put the tax break back in his tax bill, or if it’s just that DeSantis likes vetoing things, but either way Pasco County still intends to try to go ahead with the deal without state money.
The owners of the Kansas City Current women’s soccer team, who promised to build a new stadium with their own money but now are asking for $6 million in state tax credits because their construction costs went up, as one does, tried to provide a bit of a carrot by dropping some new renderings of the proposed stadium that include fans walking to the game in daylight while cars on a nearby road zoom past under dark of night. Or maybe this isn’t a carrot, but rather a threat to blot out the sun if they don’t get their way? More news as events warrant.
Asking for more public money for stadiums when costs rise is apparently going around: The developers of a Pawtucket soccer stadium want a whopping $30 million in added tax kickbacks to cover their increased costs following “inflation and supply chain nightmares.”
The Nashville Scene has a long overview piece on the Tennessee Titans‘ stadium demands that makes an excellent point: Since a large chunk of construction costs would be paid off by kicked-back sales taxes from currently undeveloped land around the stadium site, this would create “time-sensitive pressure to quickly develop the East Bank into a stadium district that can generate enough sales tax to back $1 billion in debt.” And that in turn would create pressure for Nashville to sink even more public money into incentivizing (such a nicer word than “bribing”) developers into building up the area; Mayor John Cooper already has $1 billion in infrastructure upgrades planned for the site, and this could easily create a subsidy feedback loop that would drive taxpayer costs still higher.
Having the Colorado Avalanche in the Stanley Cup playoffs has been a big boon to sports bars in Denver, says the owner of one sports bar in Denver, while having the Edmonton Oilers in the Stanley Cup playoffs has been hit-or-miss for sports bars in Edmonton, say the owners of sports bars in Edmonton. Nobody seems to have asked anyone else in either city how their business has been what with everyone busy watching hockey, but surely responsible journalists will soon remedy that by — okay, I can’t even pretend sarcastically anymore, this is what you’re going to get from sports reporters now and forever, folks, just get used to it.
All the candidates for Illinois governor say they oppose using state money to help the Chicago Bears move from Chicago to Arlington Heights, but then nobody has actually asked for state money, so there’s no political cost to saying this, and anyway it’s easy enough to switch gears once you’re governor, so this probably doesn’t mean much.

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Saturday roundup: Moreno demands Angels land sale approval now now now, and other bribery news

May 21, 2022 Neil deMause

Told ya! And now an abbreviated (though extended by one day) look at the week’s other news:

Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno has responded to a judge granting a 60-day stay to his discounted purchase of stadium land thanks to the deal being caught up in a corruption and bribery scandal involving the city being run by an unelected cabal by decreeing that the city must approve the sale by June 14, or else … well, Moreno, or really Moreno’s lawyer, didn’t specify what would happen if the deal is delayed beyond that date, but you don’t want to find out what it’ll be, you hear? The Los Angeles Times speculates that the Anaheim city council could move forward with the sale despite the stay on its agreement with the state over selling the land without meeting state affordable housing laws, which would almost certainly lead the state to sue, which isn’t going to get the sale resolved by June 14, but maybe Moreno wants that for some reason? Anyway, here, thanks to reader Moose, are some photos of Mayor Harry Sidhu throwing Easter eggs from the private helicopter he’s accused of illegally registering in Arizona to save money, I know that’s what you really want.
Speaking of bribery scandals, the Cleveland city council is considering a resolution to demand that the electric utility FirstEnergy have its name removed from the Browns stadium after it was accused of bribing a state official. Browns officials replied that FirstEnergy is “committed to upholding a culture of integrity and accountability” going forward and also the council resolution is non-binding, which is another way of saying “Sorry, we own the naming rights to this publicly owned and paid-for stadium because that’s just how these things are done, we get to decide whose name goes on it, what part of that didn’t you understand?”
Tennessee Titans CEO Burke Nihill says it would cost $1.8 billion to renovate the team’s current stadium because it’s in such “disrepair,” citing … well, he didn’t actually cite any study or report or anything, but just trust him, okay? Better to just build a new stadium that would cost — oh, look, Nihill says the price tag is now $2.2 billion, while the team’s share remains at $700 million, meaning the city and state would have to come up with $1.5 billion? That totally makes sense, after all, the old place is 23 years old, it’s pretty much a given that all buildings that old get torn down, right, isn’t that just how engineering works?
And speaking of inflation, the Kansas City Current women’s soccer team’s stadium price tag has gone up from $70 million to $117 million, and the team’s owners are asking state taxpayers to cover $6 million of it through tax breaks. Councilmember Eric Bunch says this is fine because it would be “using state tax dollars indirectly to support a project that’s going to benefit Kansas Citians,” which seems to be a novel use of “indirectly” and also “benefit,” though I guess the team owners are technically Kansas Citians in addition to being hedge fund goons, so it would benefit two Kansas Citians, anyway.
And speaking of stadiums having the shelf life of mayflies, Palm Beach County is spending $111 million to renovate the spring training home of the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals; Cards VP Mike Whittle, asked if the 25-year-old Jupiter stadium’s facilities are outdated, replied, “They are. They are,” which should be good enough for you.
And speaking of naming rights (which we were doing a few bullet points ago, do try to keep up), the Chicago Fire owners are in hot water for allegedly trying to sell the naming rights to the Soldier Field field when they don’t actually own them, which should make for a fun lawsuit.
A Kentucky sports business professor says if the Cincinnati Bengals keep winning, they’ll be able to demand more publicly funded stadium upgrades, which doesn’t really make more sense, but maybe he really means “if the Bengals start losing again, no one will write their elected representatives to demand that the team owners be offered whatever they want in order to keep the team in town, which does check out.
Some guy wants to build a USL soccer stadium in downtown Milwaukee, which would cost an unknown amount of money and require an unknown amount of public subsidies. But look, here’s a rendering of it! True, there are no fireworks or people pointing at the sky, but you can imagine those things, no?
This is already more bullet points than I meant to write, let me leave you with pictures of the possum that has made its home in the Oakland Coliseum press box. Honestly, given what the A’s owners left of a team for local sportswriters to watch on the field this year with their player fire sale, this maybe should be considered a feature and not a bug.

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