Regina arena – Field of Schemes

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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Friday roundup: Rays revive Ybor City plan from dead, A’s set $1B price tag on Vegas stadium, and other self-serving rumors

May 28, 2021 Neil deMause

The news has been coming hot and heavy this week, especially if you count self-generated rumors by the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays management teams to be “news.” Let’s make an attempt at corralling all of it, shall we?

After St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman declared that he wouldn’t engage in stadium talks with Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg while he’s being sued by his minority owners, Rays president Brian Auld met with selected Hillsborough County commissioners this week to discuss the possibility of reviving the idea for a stadium in the Ybor City area of Tampa that died in 2018 because nobody wanted to pay for it. There’s no sign that that funding situation has changed, but since it appears Auld made sure to meet with commissioners who he could trust to go straight to the media to say the parts he wanted (Ybor City is alive!) and not the parts he didn’t (anybody got $900 million to spare?), this qualifies as leverage, I guess. Kriseman is out of office next January, anyway, so maybe it’ll work on his successor.
Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is reportedly seeking a $1 billion stadium in order to move to Las Vegas, according to an unnamed Las Vegas Review-Journal source. Also that “the A’s are interested in pursuing a public-private partnership, similar to what the Raiders received when they relocated to Las Vegas from Oakland,” which ended up with Clark County on the hook for $750 million; and that “there is little desire from the county to offer much, if any, public funding to build a possible MLB stadium.” Of course, if Fisher is mostly using Vegas as a stalking horse to shake loose more stadium money from Oakland, it doesn’t matter much how much money he can or can’t get in Nevada, but expect to see lots more talk about this ghost stadium in the near future, eventually undoubtedly including renderings, because just showing pictures of other cities’ stadiums really doesn’t cut it.
Speaking of that Las Vegas Raiders $2 billion stadium with the $750 million in public subsidies, Clark County is pulling $11.7 million from a reserve fund to make its next debt payment on the building, after dipping into the fund for a similar amount last November, to cover for hotel taxes, which were anticipated as the funding source, falling short thanks to the pandemic. Boondoggle’s Pat Garofalo calls this a sign that “long arrangements between a particular business and the government are always going to be risky for taxpayers,” which I’m not quite so sure — this was just hotel tax money that Clark County otherwise could have used to spend on other things, so really there are two separate questions here: 1) Is the pandemic crushing tourism revenues in the nation’s tourist capital? and 2) did Clark County blow $750 million on a stadium for the Raiders that it will never see again? It’s hotel taxes that are risky, in other words; stadium spending, unless it can somehow generate three-quarter-billion dollars in new hotel tax receipts just from eight NFL games a year, is a sure terrible bet.
The USL’s chief operating officer and real estate officer Justin Papadakis — yes, a soccer league has a “real estate officer” — was asked by Forbes how his league has been able to put together so many stadium deals during the pandemic, and answered, um, something about millennials and multi-use facilities, that oughta hold the little bastards. Papadakis also said that the league is currently exploring 35 different expansion targets, so maybe its secret is more about offering a team to every podunk town in the country if they build a stadium and seeing who bites?
The Washington Spirit NWSL team moved its home opener to Houston after complaining that its home stadium in Virginia “is not compliant with NWSL stadium requirements.” My first thought here was, whoa, women’s soccer is getting into the “we need upgraded facilities or else we’ll take our team elsewhere” game, but then I noticed that 1) Segra Field, home to the USL’s Loudoun United F.C., was only opened in 2019, and 2) the “upgraded facilities” the Spirit are seeking mostly come down to having showers in the locker rooms, so clearly this is something different. (Also, the USL lets its teams play in stadiums with no running water? I guess that’s one way to get to 35 expansion teams!)
“The White Sox took an area named for a beloved stadium worker and renamed it for Tony La Russa” is really pretty much all you need to know about this story, but Defector includes the tidbit that the Chicago White Sox also threw out the old sign honoring Loretta Micele rather than giving it to her family, plus offers another recent article on what a horrible person and baseball manager Tony La Russa is, so see those for further context.
F.C. Cincinnati using its new stadium as a giant ad board for Old Spice? F.C. Cincinnati using its new stadium as a giant ad board for Old Spice.
Saskatoon’s mayor says he doesn’t want to “lose the race to Regina” to be the first to build a new arena. That’s it, that’s a perfect sentence about the state of politics in North America in 2021, have a good long (in the U.S., not Canada) weekend everybody!

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Regina elects mayor who wants to build new hockey arena while cutting taxes on developers

November 11, 2020 Neil deMause

Monday was election day in Saskatchewan, which meant all eyes (well, my eyes) were on the results of the all-important mayoral elections in Saskatoon and Regina, two cities that are considering whether to devote public money to building sports arenas. And the verdict in Saskatoon is: It snowed. A lot. So the election is put off until Friday.

Fortunately, conditions apparently weren’t as bad a couple of hours south in Regina, and the results there are in:

MAYORAL ELECTION

Incumbent: Michael Fougere: 14,023 votes, 34 per cent

Sandra Masters: 18,177 votes, 46 per cent – Elected

Jerry Flegel: 3,130 votes, eight per cent

Tony Fiacco: 1,455 votes, three per cent

Jim Elliott: 1066 votes, two per cent

Darren Bradley: 488 votes

Mitchell Howse: 478 votes

George Wooldridge: 281 votes

Bob Pearce: 121 votes

Mayor-elect Sandra Masters, according to her campaign page, is a credit manager for mega-agribusiness Richardson Pioneer and a former vice-president of Hockey Regina, the local youth hockey organization. According to her interview last week with the Regina Leader-Post, this is her vision for the city:

Masters: As a city we need to lead growth, rather than penalizing renewal with a burdensome improvement tax. As mayor, I will work to eliminate the 29 per cent intensification levy. We also need to rejuvenate our downtown by attracting investment into our downtown core and support initiatives that will enhance and fill the more than 1,800 residential spaces currently available. We need to create a plan for a new downtown library and multi-use cultural facility to replace the current facility within 10 years. This will enhance quality of life, community identity and pride by supporting arts, culture and four-season sport and recreation activities for all our citizens, fostering community vibrancy and cohesiveness.

To translate: The “intensification levy” is the same as the “improvement tax,” and is a tax surcharge (not actually 29%, but subject to a complex formula) that is designed to offset the city’s costs of building infrastructure (roads, schools, that stuff) to support new development by charging developers a fee. A “multi-use cultural facility” means a hockey arena, preferably one with lasers and fireworks shooting out of the top of it. “Community vibrancy” means absolutely nothing at all.

How Masters plans to pay for a new arena, especially while cutting taxes, is completely unknown, but she did leave herself an awful lot of wiggle room with that “within 10 years” qualifier. Though she might face pressure to act more quickly if Saskatoon elects a pro-arena-funding mayor on Friday; she wouldn’t want Regina to fall behind in the race to host (squints at Canadian concert ticket sales rankings), uh, Queen and Backstreet Boys.

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This election holds future of the world (or at least Saskatchewan) in the balance

November 3, 2020November 5, 2020 Neil deMause

This November, voters face a stark choice that will determine the entire direction of their future lives. And it could be a long wait for results, as election officials go through the long process of counting this year’s many mail-in ballots.

I’m speaking, of course, about the mayoral election in Regina, where eight challengers are facing off against incumbent Michael Fougere in the race for City Hall. And one of the issues at stake is whether to build a new arena for the junior-hockey Regina Pats, at an unknown public cost. The idea was first floated by mayoral candidate and current city councillor Jerry Flegel about a month ago, and now many of the candidates have been chiming in:

Former amateur hockey and fastener-supply salesperson Darren Bradley: “I threw [out] the idea of a new arena the first day it was mentioned to me, on my Facebook page, on Sept. 23, that will occupy some empty space. That’s one idea that will rejuvenate the core and help the businesses around there and throughout the city, long term.”
Flegel: “I am proposing the development of a new entertainment and sports facility in the core of the downtown area. The facility will draw entertainment, concerts, and sporting events year round to the City of Regina, which will grow the city’s economy substantially.”
Guy with an adorable handmade sign George Wooldridge: “I am also shocked that fellow mayoral candidates want to build another sports facility when we haven’t paid for the existing one. We must look at all options to ensure the stadium does not become an ongoing fiscal burden.”

Okay, okay, so that’s not the only election going on. There’s also a momentous decision being faced by voters across the border — the border between Regina and its Saskatchewan neighbor Saskatoon, which is facing its own decision on whether to build a new arena for the Blades (junior hockey), Rush (lacrosse), and Rattlers (minor-league basketball), also at uncertain public cost. While the current city government has been in favor of the plan, Saskatoon’s six mayoral candidates are split, with their positions roughly being: we should have built a combined arena and library; nobody can get to a downtown arena with our lousy transit; a new arena will only siphon off business from existing locations, so let’s build it in a different part of the city maybe?; downtown growth is good; Saskatoon needs “an arena, convention centre or whatever” to bring people downtown; and need new arena soon!!!

I’m sure you’ll be watching as the returns roll in from Saskatchewan, plus any other electoral races that might be of mild concern. Vote early and vote often, and hope you’ve stocked up on your election supplies!

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Friday roundup: Jaguars’ billionaire owner wants $232m in tax money, plus guess-the-Angels-rationalization contest!

October 9, 2020 Neil deMause

We made it another week further into the future! Sure, it’s a future that looks too much like the recent past — bad pandemic planning and stadium deals with increasingly more well-disguised subsidies — and we’re all still here discussing the same scams that I really thought were going to be a momentary fad 25 years ago. But the zombie apocalypse hasn’t arrived yet, so that’s something! Also the Star Trek: Lower Decks season finale was really excellent. Gotta stop and smell the flowers before refocusing on the underlying horror of society!

And with that, back to laughing to keep from crying:

Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan has put a price tag on the development subsidies he’s asking for on building a bunch of buildings in his stadium’s parking lot: $167.8 million in construction costs, infrastructure, and tax breaks on a hotel, plus a $65 million loan that will be paid back at ?? time and at ??? interest. Or, as the Florida Times-Union helpfully headlines it, “$152 million in incentives.” The Times-Union also reports that “the city would own the entertainment district, which would keep the property off the city’s tax rolls” and that Khan’s “estimated $7.8 billion net worth earned him the 66th spot on Forbes’ list of richest Americans”; it doesn’t say when the city council is expected to vote on this plan, or whether there will be public hearings or just lots of private discussions, as councils like to do these days whenever possible.
Some development is finally being built around the Hartford Yard Goats stadium, only several years later than it was promised, but mostly this article is entertaining for the bit where the developer thinks that people will be relocating out of New York and Boston because of the pandemic but also relocating to Hartford because the pandemic will be over soon.
F.C. Barcelona‘s vice-president claims that the club’s $957 million stadium renovation project will more than pay for itself, by adding 6,000 seats and 70 corporate boxes and enabling the sale of $50 million a year (!) in naming rights, totaling $150 million a year in new revenue against only $50 million a year in debt payments. This seems dubious to me, even if there wasn’t reason to think pretty much everything coming out of the current team management is pretty dubious; but Goldman Sachs, which is lending the money for the project, seems sold, so if Barça really has figured out how to make a billion dollars in stadium costs pencil out, that would be big news. Any Barcelona fan-owners reading this who can share details from the team’s prospectus or whatever they’re sending out?
The Los Angeles Times’ Bill Shaikin wrote a whole article called “Did Anaheim get a fair price for the Angel Stadium property?” that relies on a single source to answer the question, and that source is former Oakland A’s owner Lew Wolff, who has been acting as a consultant to Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno on this deal. Don’t bother reading it, as you can almost certainly guess what he says — in fact, let’s see who in the comments can come closest to guessing Wolff’s exact words without reading them! Winner gets the people’s ovation and fame forever, and maybe an extra magnet.
Virginia is approving multiple sports betting permits, maybe with an eye to helping lure the Washington Football Team to the state; meanwhile, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said yesterday, “We don’t want to lose the team out of the state and we’re going to fight hard to make sure that we keep them here.” It really is so much easier to get a good bidding war going when you have multiple jurisdictions in your metro area; James Madison really should have thought of that before pursuing that whole “not in any state” thing.
The Phoenix Suns‘ $168 million in publicly funded arena renovations won’t just include new furniture and a big-ass kitchen, but also 15,000 new seats, each with their own cupholders, because if there’s one thing Americans want from their tax dollars, it’s cupholders.
Three of six mayoral candidates in Saskatoon say their city needs a new arena, and one mayoral candidate in Regina says his city needs a new arena, because blah blah economic impact something something.
Sure, I savaged the NFL’s coronavirus response this week, but it’s worth noting that European soccer is doing a pretty lousy job lately as well.
A guy with a podcast claims that “a source” told him that the city of Tampa will soon announce “a massive state of the art stadium that will have a retractable roof” for the Tampa Bay Rays and the New York Yankees‘ spring training, and wants you to tune in to his podcast for details. You should neither do that nor even click the above links, needless to say, but if there’s anything to this rumor once his podcast drops, I promise you’ll be the first to know.

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