Category: Saskatoon arena

Friday roundup: A’s charging $200 each for Sacramento tickets, DC hires NFL-linked firm to study building NFL stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

How much additional stadium news was there this week? So much so that I skipped posting anything yesterday, just so I could start on the bullet points for this roundup. That’s just how much I care about you, the readers of this site. (Also I couldn’t bear to write entire posts for any of these, they were all either too silly or too depressing or both.)

On with the news:

  • There were rumors that Oakland A’s management was going to force fans to also buy Sacramento River Cats season tickets if they wanted A’s season tickets in Sacramento next year, but it turns out that’s not true. What is true: A’s fans wanting season tickets will have to commit to buying them for the “duration” of the team’s stay in Sacramento, and tickets will run between $185 and $250 per seat per game. (UPDATE: The Sacramento Bee reports that that’s only for “premium” season tickets; it’s unclear if there will be non-premium season plans, or if so what they will cost.) At least A’s players won’t have to suddenly acclimate themselves to playing in front of crowds bigger than the intimate affairs they’ve grown used to since owner John Fisher alienated all his fans in the Bay Area.
  • Washington, D.C. is exploring building a new Commanders stadium by agreed to pay $565,000 for a feasibility study to ASM Global, which Fox5DC describes as “a company with extensive experience managing NFL stadiums,” but which is more accurately described as a subsidiary of Legends Entertainment, which is co-owned by the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys. Surely they will deliver an unbiased and comprehensively researched cost-benefit analysis of building an NFL stadium in D.C., why would you ever think otherwise?
  • Not only is the city of St. Petersburg forcing its top employees to pay back $250,000 in bonus checks it sent out for overtime work on the new Tampa Bay Rays stadium project, now city administrator Rob Gerdes has suspended city HR director Christopher Guella for a week as punishment, despite Mayor Ken Welch having defended the bonuses as “within budget and my administrative authority.” Gerdes says this is because the bonuses actually turned out to be illegal; Welch insists it’s just because he wanted to avoid a bad look, though if so he really should have checked first with Barbra Streisand about how well that works.
  • Illinois labor leaders are pushing for the state to fund sports stadiums for the Chicago Bears and White Sox and Red Stars, because “unions want to build,” according to AFL-CIO president Tim Drea. And they don’t like building the things that won’t get built if the state saves a few billion dollars by not building stadiums? Somebody get them on the phone with the Nevada teachers union, they have a lot to talk about.
  • Two Cleveland city councilmembers walked around the Browns stadium during an exhibition game and asked more than 3,000 fans if they’d rather the team stay at the lakefront or move to Brook Park, and most said they prefer the lakefront. Of course, since these were people at a game at the lakefront, you’d expect them to skew more toward wanting to see games there, since people who skip going to games because they’re at the lakefront wouldn’t be at a game at the lakefront. Anyway, what did the fans say about how much they want the city government to spend on a new or renovated Browns stadium? Oh, they didn’t ask about that? Opening day is two weeks from Sunday, plenty of time for the councilmembers to plan a new round of canvassing.
  • The Dome at America’s Center, former home of the St. Louis Rams, needs $150 million in upgrades, according to the stadium authority that runs it and surely would never lie about something just to get a nicer space to rent out at public expense. The dome is currently rented out for “assemblies for large conventions, Metallica and Beyoncé concerts, and even some lower-level professional football games,” which surely will make it easy to earn back $150 million, so long as Metallica never stops touring.
  • Saskatoon needs to come up with $400 million in public money toward a $1.22 billion development to include a new arena for the Saskatoon Blades, and it plans on raising the money via a long list of uhhhh, we’ll get back to you: maybe hotel taxes, maybe TIF property tax kickbacks, maybe money from the province, who knows? “What would the city look like without SaskTel Center or without TCU Place?” asked Saskatoon director of technical services Dan Willems. “Would we be able to attract newcomers and help major employers attract talent to our city without these types of amenities?” Shh, don’t tell him.
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Friday roundup: O’s lease, Brewers doubletalk, A’s lawsuit, Bears gibberish

access_time personNeil deMause

Today’s Friday where you are, right? I’ve completely lost track, honestly. Some things happened this week, or maybe last week, but they definitely happened, let’s talk about them:

  • The Baltimore Orioles owners announced a 30-year lease extension on Camden Yards last night by putting it up on the scoreboard between innings, that’s totally normal, yup. Actual details like what if anything the team got on top of the $600 million in state money approved last year will have to await a Friday news conference.
  • Wisconsin state representative Rob Brooks, who co-authored the bill to give Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio even more money than he asked for, now says that he doesn’t want the city of Milwaukee to give Attanasio $7.5 million a year, but just $5 million a year. “If they come up with the things they’ve counted they can do and we think we can do, I do think it will be around $5 million,” said Brooks, which, sorry, what? You really gotta show us some actual legislative language, man, this trying to describe things using your words thing just isn’t going well at all.
  • “Representatives with ties to the A’s” have sued the teachers’ union–backed group Schools Over Stadiums over their proposed Las Vegas A’s stadium referendum “not fully describing the petition’s ‘substantive impacts’ on the project,” according to SOS. Who? What impacts? “This is a developing story. Check back for updates.” Pro journalism tip, Las Vegas Review-Journal: Try to answer at least some of the five W’s before hitting publish. (The Las Vegas Sun has a bit more info, adding that the suit is from registed lobbyists Danny Thompson and Thomas Morley and is objecting to the referendum petition trying to overturn just the funding part of the stadium bill and being “argumentative,” but doesn’t explain why either of those things would disqualify it from the ballot.)
  • Arlington Heights is still talking to Chicago Bears execs about a new stadium, and so is the mayor of Chicago, and that could mean that they’re about to approve a ton of subsidies or agree to a deal that doesn’t require a ton of subsidies or not agree to anything, really. “It’s what the people of Chicago elected me to do is to bring people together,” said Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. “Being collaborative, compassionate and competent, those are the hallmarks of my administration. It’s what I expect, quite frankly, all leaders to possess.” Is there some sort of brain worm they inject mayors with at their inaugurations that make them talk like this?
  • Michael Baumann of FanGraphs writes that the Tampa Bay Rays and Kansas City Royals owners are both trying to get new stadiums by claiming it would let them start spending money with the big boys, but “we all know this is bunk.” He also complains that new baseball stadiums are too disconnected from their neighborhoods and too tall and too generic (all true), and then headlines the whole thing “The Jewel Box Under End-Stage Capitalism,” to which I can only say promises, promises.
  • The Chicago Tribune is worried that if the Bears don’t win games, no one will want to give them stadium money, and WCPO is worried that if the Cincinnati Bengals don’t win games, no one will want to give them stadium money, and both are probably right, but is that really the part to be worried about?
  • Sports management professor Mark Rosentraub still thinks Saskatoon needs a new arena, this time to remain “competitive” for concerts, LOLRosentraub.
  • Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke may pull his stadium from consideration for hosting 2026 World Cup games because FIFA won’t let him have enough of a cut of the vig. Sometimes when elephants fight, we can just get an entertaining elephant fight, maybe?
  • The Athletic noticed that A’s owner John Fisher, during his recent interview with ESPN, said (in ESPN’s words) that his San Jose Earthquakes‘ stadium “is already outdated compared to newer MLS stadiums” and “lacks the capacity and premium seating that drives the kind of revenue needed to compete for championships.” The stadium is eight years old.
  • “I don’t really like owning teams,” New York Knicks and Rangers LOLowner James Dolan told The New York Times, adding, “Being a professional sports owner in New York, you’re not beloved until you’re dead.” This may be overly optimistic, but sure, he’s welcome to try.
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Friday roundup: Bills owners get their $1B in public stadium cash, triggering other NFL owners’ salivary glands

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the news roundup, the big story today: The New York state legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul came to a “conceptual agreement” on a state budget last night, and it will include $1 billion in state and county money for a new Buffalo Bills stadium.

There aren’t a whole lot of details yet on whether anything was tweaked from Hochul’s original proposal, who was involved in hashing out the agreement, or who will or won’t vote for it. The New York Times — which somehow managed to describe the Bills stadium as one of the budget items with “populist overtones,” despite it providing a record subsidy to billionaires for a project that state residents overwhelmingly oppose — printed state Sen. Julia Salazar’s tweet calling the budget “unacceptable”; Bloomberg News reported that senate finance committee chair Liz Krueger called the Bills money the latest example of “New York state using its economic development money very badly.” Now that leadership has okayed it, though, it presumably doesn’t matter much how anyone in particular actually votes: They can either vote for the overall budget while grousing about some of the items in it, or cast protest votes that they know won’t affect the budget’s passage, but as the deal was struck by the traditional “three men in a room,” there won’t be any messy debating or having to take positions or any of the other things that normally go along with democracy or accountability.

This is very good news for Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula, obviously, who just scored a brand-new stadium at virtually no cost to themselves (their share should be mostly covered by NFL grants, naming-rights fees, and seat license sales) by doing little more than mumbling vaguely about how they might move the team somewhere and then waiting for the governor to show up with a $1 billion check. It’s arguably good news for Hochul, too, assuming she doesn’t face voter backlash in this June’s primary for giving away public cash to wealthy NFL owners; and also arguably good news for Bills fans afraid the team would leave otherwise, though less good news if they’re Bills fans who are also New York state and Erie County taxpayers. And it’s very bad news for residents of NFL cities nationwide, as the bar has now been raised for expectations of what states will do to keep their football team owners happy, something that the owners of the Tennessee Titans and Washington Commanders and Chicago Bears and Baltimore Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars and eventually every other team in the league will no doubt be pressing in their own state legislatures in months and years to come.

More on this Monday, no doubt, once the final details of the budget vote become clear. Meanwhile, there’s other news that’s been piling up amid all this Bills stuff, so let’s get to it:

  • Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman, asked about prospects for a new stadium in downtown Kansas City, said it “would really round out our central business district” and cited as an example the Atlanta Braves‘ new stadium, which is nowhere near Atlanta’s central business district and has been shown to be a massive money-loser for the county that paid for it. Remember, kids: It’s not important to make sense when you’re a sports team owner or other major public figure, as the media will just print whatever you say regardless! Grow up to use your family’s wealth to found a fossil-fuels company and get rich off it, it’s great!
  • Would-be Nashville MLB team owner John Loar says he’s still looking at building a stadium there — not next door to the Titans’ stadium anymore, that didn’t work out, but somewhere else — by creating “a sports and entertainment district” with “a ballpark that would be limited or would require no public financing,” which sure sounds like he’s talking tax increment financing or some other kind of tax kickback scheme, but no time for questions about that, just make a “Loar is confident Nashville will hit a home run” play on words and end the article already.
  • The Tempe city council held a closed-doors session yesterday on the Arizona Coyotes owners’ plans for a new arena aided by $200 million in city infrastructure spending plus possibly additional land and tax breaks, and don’t expect there to be any word of how it went, what don’t you understand about “closed-doors session”?
  • Despite not landing an MLS expansion franchise, the owners of the USL’s Sacramento Republic FC are still moving ahead with plans for a $100-150 million stadium on the city’s downtown railyards. The team owners already got a pile of city money approved for the stadium (reported as $27 million at the time, $33 million now), so may as well use it so as not to lose it.
  • Business promotion leaders in Saskatoon say that Saskatoon needs a new arena to be “competitive in the Canadian landscape”; no more details on how much a new Blades junior-hockey venue would cost or how it would be paid for, but there’s a three-minute video that includes a chartered professional accountant saying there’s “lots of creative ways” that an arena could be financed, including “sales ticket surcharges, bonds, government grants, even rental-car sales taxes” — okay, “bonds” isn’t actually a way of paying for something, just a way of borrowing money to be paid back later, just what are they teaching at Canadian CPA schools these days?
  • Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk’s dream of a new arena is “very much alive,” according to SportsNet, despite Melnyk being very much not alive. That’s because “Melnyk’s death last week only enhances the probability of a new arena downtown because of the new range of possibilities regarding ownership and future business partnerships.” No, no explanation of what that means, but SportsNet also cites Ottawa Citizen columnist Kelly Egan as saying it’s appropriate that a new Ottawa arena is being discussed just before Easter, “when thoughts turn to resurrecting the dead,” so uh, guys, I think the NHL may be dabbling in the dark arts, or at least some really suspect theology.
  • Tampa Bay Rays president Brian Auld says the team is no longer considering building a stadium on waterfront sites that will soon be underwater thanks to sea-level rise. Noted.
  • Oh, right, I promised in my post about the new Cab-Hailing Purse Woman art prints available to FoS subscribers (click here to get dibs on yours!) that I would report back on lawsuits against the Oakland A’s stadium environmental impact report: There are, uh, a bunch of lawsuits against the Oakland A’s stadium environmental impact report, read about one of them here, but seriously there are always EIR lawsuits in California and they almost never go anywhere, can this post be over already? I think it should be, have a good weekend of coming to terms with living in a world where a billion dollars in public spending on a private sports stadium can be approved in ten days with no public debate, and see you back here on Monday.
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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

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

access_time personNeil 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: World still on fire, let’s remember 1989 when the greatest sports horror imaginable was Alan Thicke in a tuxedo

access_time personNeil deMause

Very busy week here at FoS HQ, so let’s dispense with any introductory chitchat and get right to the news we didn’t already get to this week:

That’s all for now, see you all Monday!

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

access_time personNeil 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:

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Friday roundup: Panthers owner donated to Charlotte officials during stadium lobbying, St. Louis MLS didn’t need $30m in state money after all, and what time the Super Bowl economic impact rationalizations start

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, and try not to think about how much you’re contributing to climate change by reading this on whatever electronic device you’re using. Though at least reading this in text doesn’t require a giant server farm like watching a video about stadiums would — “Streaming one hour of Netflix a week requires more electricity, annually, than the yearly output of two new refrigerators” is one of the more alarming sentences I’ve read ever — so maybe it counts as harm reduction? I almost linked to an amusing video clip to deliver my punchline, wouldn’t that have been ironic!

And now, the news:

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Saskatoon to maybe build $175m arena to save local businesses “millions,” this is surely great fiscal management

access_time personNeil deMause

Saskatoon city officials have been talking about building a new downtown arena for years now, and for years now I’ve been relegating it to the small bullet points in Friday roundups, because it’s such an amorphous plan (the dollar figures have wavered between $175 million and $375 million) and because Saskatoon’s arena doesn’t even have a major pro sports team playing there, just the Blades (junior hockey) and Rush (lacrosse) and Rattlers (minor-league basketball). But that all ends today, and not just because Global News chose the report on this with the irresistible headline “Saskatoon city councillors want fewer homicides, new arena in 2020.”

No, the real kicker is this:

[Saskatoon councillor Randy] Donauer compared the SaskTel Centre to a used car, saying a responsible steward needs to plan for its replacement. He also said that concert promoters had told council that the SaskTel Centre is missing amenities which would keep attracting A-list talent to the city.

He said local businesses would lose out on “millions” of dollars if entertainers went to another venue in another city.

First off: Used cars have lots of moving parts that tend to break, while stadiums are mostly steel that can last effectively forever if protected from corrosion, so this is a terrible, terrible analogy. But more importantly, here we have an elected official saying, presumably with a straight face (Global News didn’t include video of Donauer’s comments), that his city needs to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new arena because otherwise local businesses would lose millions of dollars if Paul McCartney and Barbra Streisand kept on skipping stopping in Saskatoon.

I am not an expert on Canadian finance, but I’m pretty sure hundreds of millions of Canadian dollars are still hundreds of times more than millions of Canadian dollars, so, you know, even if you see the main job of city governments is to prop up local businesses’ profits, maybe there would be cheaper ways to help Saskatoon businesses than building a whole new arena? Maybe?

Right now it looks like the Saskatoon council is only going to work on identifying a site for an arena in 2020, with any actual money to be allocated down the road, possibly because the city is already almost at its debt limit. So there’s still a long ways to go before anything gets decided, which will hopefully give Donauer a bit more time to learn about how money works.

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Friday roundup: Developers pay locals $25 each to hold pro-arena signs, a smoking and farting winged horse team logo, and do you even need a third thing after those two?

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another week of pretty bad news, topped off by a private equity firm somehow buying the entirety of .org domains, meaning every nonprofit website will now have to be licensed from an entity whose sole mission is to squeeze as much money from them as possible. The stadium and arena news, by contrast, isn’t all terrible, so maybe it qualifies as cheery? You be the judge:

  • The Richmond city council voted Tuesday to put off a decision on a $1.5 billion downtown development that would include a new arena (public cost: $350 million), after a contentious hearing where both supporters and opponents held signs espousing their opinions. Or espousing somebody’s opinions, anyway: Some locals holding “yes” signs later reported that the project’s developers paid them $25 a pop to do so. City council president Michelle Mosby replied that if anything people were just reimbursed gas money, which 1) only makes sense if everyone there drove their own car and had to travel like 250 miles round trip to get to the hearing and 2) isn’t really any less corrosive of democracy anyway.
  • If you’ve been wondering how Inter Miami plans to build a temporary 18,000-seat stadium in Fort Lauderdale (later to be turned into a practice field) between now and March and figured it would have to involve throwing up a bunch of cheap metal bleachers, now there’s video of construction workers doing exactly that. Also laying down the sod for the field, which I thought usually takes place after the stadium is more or less built, but I guess if they can build the stadium without treading on the field, no harm in doing so now. This all raises questions of whether the stadium will feel excessively crappy, and if not why more soccer teams can’t just build cheap quickie stadiums like this without the need for public money; I guess we’ll know the answer by springtime one way or another.
  • When the state of Minnesota agreed to pay for the Vikings‘ new stadium with cigarette revenue after electronic pulltab gambling money didn’t come in as expected, it still kept collecting the gambling cash; and now that e-pulltabs (which are just lottery tickets, only on a tablet) have taken off, there’s debate over what to do with the cash that the state is collecting, about $5 million this year but projected to rise to $51 million by 2023. The Vikings owners want the money used to pay off their stadium debt early, while some lawmakers would like to use the revenue to fund other projects or reduce taxes on charitable gambling institutions now that it’s no longer needed — all are valid options, but it’s important to remember that the state already paid for most of the stadium, this is just arguing over what to do with the zombie tax that was left over after the financing plan was changed. (It would also be nice to know if e-pulltab gambling has cannibalized revenues from other gambling options, thus making this less of a windfall, but modern journalists have no time for such trivialities.)
  • The city of Wichita is spending $77 million (plus free land) on a Triple-A baseball stadium to steal the Baby Cakes from New Orleans, and have been rewarded with the Wichita Wind Surge, a name that’s supposed to reference the city’s aviation history or something but actually means “storm surge,” which isn’t a thing that they have in landlocked Kansas? It also features a logo that looks like a horse and a fly got caught in a transporter accident, which the team’s designer explained with “The nice thing about Pegasus, however, to me, was the fact that it’s got a horse in there.” A local designer responded with a sketch of a winged horse smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, and farting, which by all accounts is much more popular with Wichitans. (The sketch is, I mean, though I’d love to see a poll asking Wichitans, “Which do you prefer, the name Wichita Wind Surge or farting?”)
  • San Diego State University’s plan to buy the city’s old football stadium and its surrounding land for $87.7 million has hit some “speed bumps,” namely that city economists have determined that the price could be below the land’s market value and $10 million of the sale price would have to be set aside for infrastructure improvements for the university’s development. “There’s also the matter of the $1-per-month lease that, as proposed, may not adequately protect the city from expenses or legal risk,” notes the San Diego Union-Tribune. Given all these uncertainties, the city’s independent budget analyst called SDSU’s proposed March 27 deadline “very challenging,” not that that’s stopped city councils before.
  • Saskatoon has enough room under its debt limit to finance either a new central library or a new sports arena, and regardless of what you think of how badly Saskatooners need a new library, it’s still a pretty strong example of how opportunity costs work.
  • The Phoenix Suns‘ new practice facility being built with the help of public money will include a golf simulator for players, because of course it will.
  • Speaking of Phoenix, the Arizona Republic has revealed what the Diamondbacks owners want in a new stadium; the original article is paywalled, but for once Ballpark Digest‘s propensity for just straight-up paraphrasing other sites’ reporting comes in handy, revealing that team owners want a 36,000-  to 42,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof and surrounded by a 45- to 70-acre mixed-use development and a 5,000-seat concert venue and good public transit and full control of naming-rights revenue and public cost-sharing on ballpark repairs. And a pony.
  • “Will Raiders football hike your home value?” asks the Nevada Current, apparently because “Is the moon made of green cheese?” had already been taken.
  • And last but certainly not least, your weekly vaportecture roundup: The New Orleans Saints‘ $450 million renovation of the Superdome (two-thirds paid for by taxpayers) will include field-level open-air end zone spaces where fans have ample room enjoy rendered people’s propensity for flinging their arms in the air! The new Halifax Schooners stadium designs lack the woman hailing a cab and players playing two different sports at once from previous renderings, but do seem to still allow fans to just wander onto the field if they want! It should come as no surprise to anyone that even Chuck D can do a better job of drawing than this.
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