Category: Misc

Friday roundup: Browns stadium gets airport okay, San Antonio mayor seeks cut of Spurs’ arena revenues

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: The Ohio Department of Transportation changed course yesterday and granted a building permit to the Cleveland Browns‘ proposed stadium in Brook Park, one month after declaring it would not do so because the stadium would “impact the airspace of the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.” What changed? An outside consultant hired by the department reported that “the proposed stadium would have no adverse effect on the safety and efficient use of the aeronautical environment,” so ODOT gave the go-ahead.

This leaves the Browns stadium facing only two lawsuits over whether the team’s move from Cleveland to Brook Park violates the state’s Modell Law (the state attorney general says nuh-uh), plus additional suits over whether it’s illegal for the state to use unclaimed property to fund the deal and whether negotiating a move violated the team’s lease, plus $600 million in proposed city and county spending that hasn’t yet been finalized. Details!

In other news this week:

  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says she thinks if the city is putting up money for a new Spurs arena, taxpayers should get a cut of naming rights, concessions, and parking revenues as well. Which, sure, it worked for the Minneapolis Metrodome, so well that the public ended up recouping its entire $68 million contruction cost over time. Admittedly, the Twins and Vikings hated this deal so much that they immediately started lobbying for new stadiums where they would keep all the revenues and eventually got them, but it’s nice to see some elected officials learn the lesson that so many sports team owners live by: You can’t get if you don’t ask.
  • USL Championship expansion team Buffalo Pro Soccer is still looking for a place to build a stadium so it can actually become an expansion team. “I think we could make the decision today if we chose to,” said team president Peter Marlette, “but we want to make sure we’re getting everything right and that we are considering every possible factor and whatever site we end up going with.” The team owners have said the stadium will be privately funded, but we’ve heard that before in other cities, let’s see how things look after any hidden costs like land subsidies or tax breaks are accounted for.
  • The libertarian Mackinac Center for Public Policy is suing to repeal Michigan state funding for stadiums for the minor-league Lansing Lugnuts and the Utica Unicorns, Eastside Diamond Hoppers, Westside Woolly Mammoths, Birmingham Bloomfield Beavers of the United Shore Professional Baseball League (which all share a stadium in Utica), on the grounds that “private or local” projects require a two-thirds vote of the state legislature, and these only got a simple majority. State court of claims judge Brock Swartzle said he’ll make a ruling on an injunction by the end of the year.
  • The Philadelphia Phillies want hotel tax money from Pinellas County to upgrade their spring training facility in Clearwater, more specifics to come when they’re good and ready.
  • The Athletics‘ stay in Sacramento may not be drawing many fans, but it’s apparently drawing enough to cut into attendance at Sacramento River Cats minor-league games, especially now that resale prices on A’s tickets are cheaper in many cases than River Cats prices.
  • Sports economists Dennis Coates (who organizes the annual sports economics conference in Baltimore County) and Brad Humphreys have had a research award named in their honor, here’s a nice article about them and it, see how many of the economists in the photo at top you can identify!
  • Columbus Fury pro volleyball team seeks $1 million in cash from the city of Columbus and Franklin County to keep playing in town next season, now I have officially seen everything.
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DC passes final $6.6B Commanders stadium subsidy, there is much media rejoicing

access_time personNeil deMause

The Washington, D.C. city council cast its second and final vote yesterday on the Commanders stadium deal that will involve a record-shattering $6.6 billion (or more) in public subsidies, and as expected passed it again, this time by an 11-2 margin instead of last month’s 9-3. Let’s see how our news media, which are not at all influenced by their corporate leadership or by other political pressures, described the decision:

  • Washington Post: “Transformative $3.7 billion Commanders stadium deal passes D.C. Council”
  • USA Today: “The stadium is set to open in 2030, just in time to host big events like the 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup and potentially the Super Bowl.”
  • WTOP: “The Washington Commanders are coming home.”

Not everyone was just feeling the excitement, admittedly: WUSA9 reported that the vote was “met with celebration by fans and concern by some neighbors in the surrounding community,” noting that local residents had asked for accommodations like guarantees of affordable housing, public transit, and preservation of green space. But proposed amendments on those and other matters — including the team having to repay the city if it failed to fully develop the stadium property as promised — were rejected after Commanders president Mark Clouse sent a letter to the council expressing his “deep concern” that any changes would make the project “unworkable and impractical,” at which point a councilmember who had vowed to vote no if the changes weren’t approved flipped his vote to yes anyway.

There was also some more critical coverage, including Greater Greater Washington‘s “Wednesday’s Council vote gets us a lousy RFK stadium deal,” which noted that D.C.’s CFO had declared the $6.6 billion in tax and land breaks to be “not financially necessary for the Team.” But that’s going to land far fewer eyeballs than Jeff Bezos’s WaPo calling the deal “transformative” — a word lifted from Commanders owner Josh Harris’s statement on the vote and not even dignified with quote marks in the paper’s headline (notably, it doesn’t appear in the accompanying article), something that could certainly never have been influenced by the fact that Bezos and Harris share both a socioeconomic status and a pal in the White House.

Very little of the news coverage bothered to describe the last-minute amendments (though almost all detailed Harris’s objection to them), and even less went into any detail about the $6.6 billion in stadium and garage construction payments, property tax breaks, and 26 years of free rent on 24 acres of prime city-owned property, all without even going through the motions of seeking competitive bids for the former RFK Stadium site. It all made for a shameful day for the media — okay, an even more shameful day — and prompted sports economist J.C. Bradbury to repost the Journalist’s Resource’s four tips for covering sports stadium deals, which include basic stuff like “interrogate economic impact statements or fiscal estimates from franchise owners” and “Understand how states and localities finance stadium construction.” Or, you know, you can just reprint team owner claims about all the Super Bowls this will bring. Journalists, think carefully: One may risk pissing off your publisher, while the other will get you done by lunchtime. It’s a knotty ethical conundrum!

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One person’s red tape is another’s oversight: a Denver Broncos stadium story

access_time personNeil deMause

The Denver Post ran a big Sunday explainer yesterday on what Broncos management still needs to do to get a stadium deal done: negotiate a community benefits agreement, get the land rezoned, seek tax breaks, clean up contaminated soil. None of it is super-interesting unless you’re fascinated by environmental report minutiae (“Groundwater contaminants included additional total petroleum hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds, lead, cadmium and polychlorinated biphenyls”), but I want to zero in on the nut graf, which comes just two sentences in:

There will be community negotiations. There will be an environmental cleanup. There will be planning and design. And there will be a whole lot of bureaucracy.

“Bureaucracy” is an interesting word. It was coined in the 18th century by French economist Vincent de Gournay as “bureaucratie,” a portmanteau word combining French and Greek terms to mean literally “government by desk.” De Gournay created the term to describe the system of professional managers installed by King Louis XIV to oversee his sprawling empire, which the economist saw as tyrannical and overbearing. (De Gournay’s main objection was that government regulations served to hamstring businesses — a position he promulgated, ironically enough, as an appointed member of the French bureaucracy.)

From the start, then, “bureaucracy” was an epithet: It’s what you call the rules when you don’t like them. When you do like them, they get different names: “oversight,” “regulation,” “management.” It’s a political term, in other words, which isn’t to say it shouldn’t be used — it describes a very real and exasperating phenomenon, as anyone who’s tried to file an insurance claim can testify — but rather that it’s important to pay careful attention to how and when it’s deployed.

In the Post’s case, by describing the stadium as facing bureaucratic “hurdles,” the story is framed as a collision between a promised future good — “a state-of-the-art stadium as well as housing and an entertainment district that would draw events and people year-round” — and the sadly necessary steps needed to get the sausages made. It’s not a bad article: It provides a useful reference for anyone who wants a laundry list of items that the Broncos need to check off their list before breaking ground on (and potentially collecting tax money for) a new stadium development. (It’s certainly preferable to the Post’s editorial last week that argued for the stadium project as “an announcement that all of Colorado can celebrate” after only talking to three people: the Broncos CEO and the Denver mayor and Colorado governor who are pushing for the deal.) But it also establishes the public image of the essential conflict here as between well-meaning sports developers and desk-bound paper pushers, as if Broncos owners Greg and Carrie Penner are just another couple of regular Joes struggling to renew their driver’s licenses.

We see this kind of framing all over these days, of course, most notably with assaults on government “inefficiency” that turn out to involve stopping research on cancer treatment. While keeping bureaucrats from bogging everything down in red tape is a noble goal, sometimes paper pushers are the best defense against letting people pursue really bad ideas, too, so it’s important to cast them as slightly more nuanced than mere obstacles to progress.

What should be the real takeaway here: The Penners are trying to build a big, complicated project that will require all kinds of environmental remediation and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars worth of discounted land and tax breaks. And at this point, the only thing that can stand in their way is a whole bunch of spiritual descendants of Louis XIV’s desk-sitters. It’s not an optimal situation, for sure, but then, you know what Churchill never said about democracy.

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Friday roundup: Browns airport standoff continues, Spurs threaten voters with mascot appearance

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the news, a quick note for any site supporters who are still waiting on swag: I haven’t forgotten you, I just have to restock on mailers and stamps, which I have penciled in for tomorrow morning. Thanks for your patience, and I assure you that your fridge magnets will still be timeless when they do arrive. (Because nothing ever changes in the world of stadium schemes, ha ha ha! Ha! Ha.)

But first, here’s the week’s remaining sports subsidy news to entertain and/or depress you:

  • The Ohio Department of Transportation has extended indefinitely its September 1 deadline for the Cleveland Browns owners to appeal their verdict that a new Brook Park stadium can’t be allowed as currently designed because it would infringe on airspace for a neighboring airport. Cleveland airport director Bryant Francis isn’t backing down on his insistence that the current design is a no-go, however, saying, “The FAA confirmed that the proposed height would intrude into protected airspace surfaces by 58 feet,” while adding, “We remain open to collaborating with all parties to find solutions that allow for growth while protecting the airport and the region it serves.” This is hardly the biggest problem with the Browns stadium project — that might just have to do with the at least $600 million in public money it would get from state checks that people haven’t cashed — but in America sometimes bad ideas get rejected because they’re bad, and sometimes they get snail dartered into submission.
  • The Browns’ proposed move is also now facing a second lawsuit charging that it would violate the Modell Law, with the law’s author, former mayor and state senator Dennis Kucinich, adding on to the lawsuit previously filed by the city. It’s actually the third lawsuit over the law, since the Browns owners are also suing the city to block the enforcement of the law, plus the state legislature moved to retroactively make the law not apply to in-state moves back in June, this is going to send a whole bunch of lawyers’ kids through college.
  • The San Antonio Spurs owners are holding a rally tomorrow in support of their campaign to be gifted around $750 million in city and county money for a new arena, and the key guest will be their mascot, who I’m just assuming will threaten to come to your house if you don’t vote for the subsidy.
  • Louisiana is planning to spend $7 million to bring a LIV golf event to New Orleans next summer. To put New Orleans on the tourist map. After spending tax money this year on a U.S. Bowling Congress Tournament, an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, the 2026 Southeastern Conference Gymnastics Championship, and the U.S. Gymnastics National Championships. “In a just world, politicians would have to come up with some reality-based justification for their desire to blow public money on what are effectively sports-adjacent parties,” notes Pat Garofalo in Boondoggle, almost wistfully.
  • The Athletics have submitted a development agreement for their under-construction (?) Las Vegas stadium while securing a permit to pour $87 million worth of concrete to support the lower seating bowl, tipping Schroedinger’s armadillo about 3% more into the “mostly not dead” category.
  • The Baltimore Ravens‘ $489 million stadium renovation, mostly funded by the first of a potentially bottomless pool of state tax money, is providing the team owners with more than a dozen event spaces that they can rent out for business meetings and the like. Will taxpayers get a cut of these new windfall profits, given that they’re paying for the bulk of the cost of building the event spaces? You must be new around here, kid, I’ve got some bad news about this timeline…
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Explaining the explainer on the San Antonio Spurs arena funding plan

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s fair to say that media coverage so far of San Antonio Spurs owner Peter Holt’s plans for a new arena district paid for partly by taxpayer money hasn’t been very good: The San Antonio Express-News has advocated against letting the public vote on how public money will be used, while News4SanAntonio had a reporter point to a chart showing how tax money would be used on the project and say “this doesn’t come from your tax money.” Meanwhile, local news outlets keep beating the drum to threaten that the Spurs could move without a new arena, even while acknowledging that Holt doesn’t have any great options to move to.

Against that backdrop, it’s nice to see a local news outlet, the nonprofit San Antonio Report, attempting an analysis of how the money would work for the Spurs deal. How’d they do? Let’s take a look:

Soon voters will be asked to weigh in on a portion of the NBA arena’s public funding, $311 million in county venue tax dollars, on the Nov. 4 ballot.

Another $489 million is expected to come from the city, which says it can spend the money without a public vote. And the remaining $500 million-plus would be paid for by the Spurs’ ownership.

That’s basically right, though it’s worth noting that the $311 million in county tax money would arrive over three decades, so it would only cover about half that in up-front arena expenses. Present value matters!

Unlike the city, which is using tax reinvestments, Bexar County’s taxing entities will enjoy the growth in taxable value from both the East Side developments and the new downtown sports and entertainment district — money that’s needed for a budget that relies heavily on new growth.

This is a mouthful, and it’s mostly wrong or at best misleading. So let’s unpack it bit by bit:

One part of those city “tax reinvestments” would actually come from a Project Finance Zone, a Texas-specific subsidy where state sales taxes are in and around a redevelopment area are siphoned off to help pay for the development itself. Since this is money that would otherwise go to the state treasury, one could see it as free money for the city — though, obviously, San Antonio residents are also Texas residents, so draining the state budget to help pay for a new Spurs arena isn’t exactly a free lunch.

Another part is from a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, which is just a TIF, redirecting any increase in city property taxes in the redeveloped area back to the developer. And as the Report reports, that’s not free money either: “New housing and development within the zone requires city resources, like police and fire, but the growth in property tax revenue is being directed toward special projects within the zone, instead of boosting the general fund for the entire city.” Translation: The new Project Marvel development that would include an arena would come with lots of new city costs, but the taxes that would normally pay for those added costs will instead go back to Holt to pay for building the arena.

The county money, meanwhile, would come from an existing car rental tax and an increase in hotel taxes, neither of which have much to do with a new arena — it’s unlikely Spurs fans will rent more hotel rooms or cars just because they’ve bought tickets to a sparklier home court — but which are revenue streams the county has available and if you squint they kind of have to do with “tourism,” so they’re getting thrown into the pot. Or will assuming that Bexar County voters approve them on election day in November, which no one appears to have done any polling on of late, but earlier this year support was deemed “tepid.”

And on top of all this, there’s the possibility of a city “infrastructure bond” — to be voted on separately, likely next spring — to provide $220-250 million toward new bridges and highway ramps to support the arena project. (The Report’s explainer doesn’t explain where the money to pay off the bonds would come from.)

So that’s more than $750 million worth of tax money going to the Spurs owner, in exchange for getting a big new downtown development and relief from any fears that Holt will move the team to Greensboro. Is that, like, a good deal? A bad deal? Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?

Here’s the entire cast of characters quoted by the paper in its attempts to explain the situation:

  • Rena Oden, an “activist with the COPS/Metro group that opposes the program”
  • Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, who wants to “do everything I can to keep the Spurs in town”
  • Pro-arena councilmember Marina Alderete Gavito
  • Houston Chronicle business columnist Chris Tomlinson, who is concerned the promised increased tax revenues may never arrive
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, who wants an independent analysis of the project
  • City of San Antonio Chief Financial Officer Ben Gorzell, who says the arena plan is “predicated on not using existing city resources or funds”
  • John W. Diamond, a tax and finance expert at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, who fails to really explain the infrastructure bond beyond calling it “the whole process on steroids”
  • Councilmember Teri Castillo, who doesn’t want to see money diverted from the city’s general fund

That certainly checks all the boxes of citing both proponents and critics, though it’s worth noting that most of the quotes are recycled from past public statements, so the Report’s reporters didn’t spend much time picking up the phone for this one. And they absolutely didn’t call any of the people who would be the most useful: sports economists or local budget analysts who could discuss what return on investment, if any, San Antonio and Bexar County can expect to get from $750 million in Spurs arena subsidies. Bothsidesing may make your news outlet look “neutral,” but what readers need going into public ballots is information on what exactly they’ll be voting on and how it will affect what government money they’ll have available. Without that, it’s all too easy to see this as a simple referendum on whether the Spurs leave town — which it very much isn’t, but if Holt gets to play it that way without ever having to threaten to leave, it’ll be a win-win for the Caterpillar dealership magnate.

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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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Dumb reasons to build a stadium with public money just got even dumber

access_time personNeil deMause

Way back in the early days of this site, I used to do an annual “dumbest reasons of the year for building a stadium,” which I eventually stopped doing because they were all just variations on the same theme: the team will move without one, it will bring economic riches to your city, etc. But I may have to revive the tradition for 2025 if things keep going like they are this week, because hoo baby.

First up, we have this from Sports Illustrated, or at least from “Tennessee Titans on SI,” the rebranded FanNation network of blogs that aren’t really SI articles but look like them if you aren’t paying close attention:

The Tennessee Titans are opening a new and improved Nissan Stadium opening in 2027, which will feature a retractable roof.

The new stadium will help the city of Nashville’s chances at hosting a Super Bowl in the near future. … [Titans president and CEO Burke] Nihill believes hosting a Super Bowl will elevate the Titans as a franchise.

“Why not us? In terms of taking a place on the Mount Rushmore of NFL franchises and cities? I mean, you think about what our current reality has been up until now, which is an aging building built pretty basically, surrounded by parking lots, to that future where I think a lot of the energy of our city, especially for locals, will be right out our front door, and we’ll have a lot of ability to play into that,” Nihill said via Freeze.

“If the football team is sustainably great, which I believe it will be, and we do all of these things right? We’re a completely different organization than we are today.”

Like, what even? Yes, new stadiums get Super Bowls, sometimes, at least once before going back to the back of the line. The usual argument for wanting a Super Bowl is that it is a huge boon to the local economy, which is very much is not, but at least we’re used to hearing that.

But the idea that “taking a place on the Mount Rushmore of NFL franchises” — which would be a pretty damn big Mount Rushmore, with 17 cities on it — would make the Titans “a completely different organization” … that’s breaking new ground in stupid. The Nihill quote turns out to be from a longer interview by A to Z Sports, a company whose founding mission was essentially “talk radio, but made entirely of internet, that should go well,” and the Titans CEO wasn’t even talking about Super Bowls so much as how “we’re going to activate that thing like crazy with movie nights in the park and yoga and farmers markets and little concerts” — but honestly the word salad is so intense that I can see where the On SI writer could have gotten lost, though he might have wondered at what kind of sense it was supposed to make. (Ha ha, no, that’s not what he’s paid to do, if he’s paid at all.

Moving on to San Antonio, where the Express-News has been beating the drum for Spurs owner Peter Holt’s Project Marvel development project for a while now, and today the paper’s editorial board takes on the question of whether city residents should get to vote on spending $489 million in tax money on the arena project, and comes to a novel conclusion:

This would be a city election, likely in May 2026, on dedicating $489 million toward the $1.3 billion project.

It would follow a November election in which Bexar County voters will decide whether to increase the county’s hotel occupancy tax and maintain its car rental tax to dedicate $311 million toward the arena, which is proposed to be built on site of the Institute of Texan Cultures at Hemisfair.

To be clear, the city’s contribution is contingent on this vote. If voters reject the county funds, they are rejecting the entire project, city funds included. For this reason, we don’t see a need for a second vote on the same issue.

It’s far cleaner to simply have a vote and let the chips fall where they may. Let the voters decide and then let the world spin.

First off: No, the “entire project” doesn’t die if the $311 million in county funds (really more like $150 million in present value) is rejected; Holt could still take his $489 million in city funds and try to supplement it with some other funding source. But more to the point: Express-News editorial board, you do know that Bexar County (2.2 million people) and San Antonio (1.5 million people) are two distinct places, right? So just because voters in the county but outside the city vote for (or against) using county money on the arena project doesn’t mean that voters in the city will do the same with city money — it’s why they have separate elections for county and city positions, and don’t just let the county judge appoint the San Antonio mayor on the grounds that that’s “far cleaner.”

In both of these cases, the arguments being made are less reasons than pretexts — the Titans CEO wants a stadium so he can make more money on it, not to be on some “Mount Rushmore” of Super Bowl hosts, and the Express-News wants no arena vote because it really wants an arena for some damn reason, and waiting till next May and then letting voters have their say would be subjecting the Spurs owner’s desires to the whims of democracy, and we can’t have that. And hey look, there’s a headline in the San Antonio Business Journal about how San Antonio needs to build an arena for the Spurs because the Seattle Supersonics moved to Oklahoma City, though it’s paywalled and not available on either Wayback or archive.ph, so I can’t determine what exactly its case is. It’s going to be a competitive race this year for Dumbest Reason to Build a Stadium, so get your dumb reasons in now!

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Friday roundup: San Antonio okays $489m arena subsidy to prove “love” for Spurs, plus: invasion of the soccer zombies

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: As expected, the San Antonio city council voted yesterday to move ahead with plans to give $489 million in tax revenues to Spurs owner Peter Holt to use toward a new arena. The actual council action was two votes: One to reject Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’s proposal to pause arena talks until an independent economic review could be conducted, and one to allow the city manager to “complete negotiations and execute a nonbinding Term Sheet,” notwithstanding that a term sheet already exists — it’s unclear what the city manager is authorized to negotiate going forward from here, not to mention exactly what the council has actually committed itself to given that the term sheet is nonbinding. Councilmember Edward Mungia said that “we still have the ability to get out of this deal at any point before other project deals are signed,” but didn’t specify if the council would have to vote to withdraw from the deal or still needs to vote on a binding agreement or what.

Jones, who votes as a member of the city council because San Antonio has that kind of city government, voted against the arena subsidy, as did councilmembers Teri Castillo, Ric Galvan, and Leo Castillo-Anguiano. Mungia and the “more business-friendly” councilmembers, as the San Antonio Report put it, voted in favor: Sukh Kaur, Marc Whyte, Marina Aldrete Gavito, Misty Spears, Ivalis Meza Gonzalez, and Phyllis Viagran. As Viagran explained her vote: “You either trust this team … or you don’t. I’ve heard so many people say, ‘We all love the Spurs.’ … But do you really?”

There’s still some possibility of an independent economic analysis down the road, or more hearings to see if public support for the project is still as “tepid” as it was earlier this year. (Jones is also pushing for a public referendum on the city’s spending next spring, but we’ve seen how her proposals go over with the business-friendly councilmembers.) And, of course, Bexar County voters can still throw a wrench into things in November if they vote down the ballot measure that would give Holt around $150 million worth of county tax money on top of the city funds. Regardless, in the first round of the Project Marvel arena battle, the San Antonio council has spoken, and its verdict is “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like half a billion dollars in public money so you can boost your sports team’s profits.”

Who else is loving who this week and how? Never thought you’d ask:

  • Like everyone else, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around MLB’s new set of TV deals that are supposed to be finalized soon, with Apple out and Peacock in and ESPN in on some things but out on others. As far as what it will mean for teams’ media revenues — and, by association, how footloose teams can be about moving into smaller media markets to seek more lucrative stadium deals — it sounds like teams’ cuts of media revenue won’t change much, it’ll just be that ESPN will increasingly be the ones selling the right to watch games, and they’ll be making you pay for an ESPN subscription on top of an MLB.tv subscription to do it. Only 17 years until the last World Series, get your baseball-watching in now!
  • Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula bought his $100 million superyacht in 2021, the year before he got $1 billion in state and county tax money for a new stadium, but people aren’t any less unamused at the juxtaposition. One wonders if this might even have become an issue in New York state legislative hearings on the stadium subsidy, if there had been any.
  • Manchester United seeking public money for their planned stadium project isn’t new news, but it did just get the attention of the Guardian, which called the team’s plan to seek hundreds of millions of pounds to clear land for the stadium a “sinister US tactic.” Which is fitting, given that Man U is owned by sinister Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners the Glazer family, though maybe not for much longer.
  • What would happen if a minor pro sports team — say, the Pittsburgh Riverhounds of the USL Championship — wanted to issue renderings of their proposed stadium expansion (to be “paid for with public and private funding, although details have not been provided“) but couldn’t afford the Pro version of Microsoft Stadium Wizard? We have the answer, and it is a hellscape of identical featureless soccer zombies, please enjoy your nightmares:
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Friday roundup: Reading the fine print on stadium and arena deals is a lost art

access_time personNeil deMause

A note to all of you Field of Schemes supporters who signed up to receive the daily posts in email — I’ve been made aware of a glitch that may have been keeping some new members from getting the emails. This should now be fixed, but if you think you should be receiving emails but still aren’t, please contact me; if you think you shouldn’t be receiving emails but are, then really contact me. (And if you’re not receiving emails because you haven’t become a monthly patron but would like to, just sign up!)

And with that business out of the way, let’s move on to the real excitement: the week’s leftover stadium and arena news!

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Bears exec to Illinois: Give us tax breaks for Arlington Heights stadium, or else (feigns coughing fit)

access_time personNeil deMause

The owners of the Chicago Bears are looking for help from the Illinois legislature for their proposed new stadium in Arlington Heights, and here’s how the Associated Press describes it:

The Bears have the plans drawn up for the indoor stadium but need a mega bill to pass in Springfield in October to supply momentum for the construction.

“The biggest item that remains, that has remained, is the fact that this mega project build that was on the docket in the spring but was not put forth for a vote, but it is very, very important that it passes,” [Bears president Kevin] Warren said. “Because without that legislation, we are not able to proceed forward.”

Momentum! Can you be a little more specific about what that means, AP?

The bill the Bears want to see passed would freeze property taxes for large-scale construction projects like the stadium.

Getting warmer, but that still doesn’t quite describe what the bill would do, which is to rule that construction projects that meet “certain investment and job creation specifications” would eligible for both a freeze on their property tax assessments and abatements of property taxes, subject to the determination of the state Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. As we covered here in May, this “would function exactly the same as a TIF that kicked back future tax increases to the team” — no one has yet done the calculations for what this would be worth to the Bears owners, but on a proposed $2.7 billion development, suffice to say that it could be a lot.

Whether Warren’s demands will get any more traction in Springfield than it did last session is unclear from the AP article, which only interviewed two sources, Warren and team owner George McCaskey. Warren did turn up the heat slightly on Friday, warning that Arlington Heights is “the only location in Cook County that will allow us to build a stadium — the new Chicago Bears stadium — with a fixed roof,” without which … okay, he left that to the imagination, he knows how this game is played. Warren also added that the Bears owners are “not trying to avoid paying taxes,” which is even more left to the imagination how that works for a bill that would only do one thing, and that’s to lower the team’s taxes. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not the best idea to write articles about a new development project that only quote the guy seeking tax breaks for it? Something to consider trying, anyway!

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Field of Schemes