spheres – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Oakland sends MLB owners gift boxes, personalized baseball cards to forestall A’s Vegas move

November 10, 2023November 10, 2023 Neil deMause

As we come to the end of another programming week, let’s pause briefly to wish a happy 25th birthday to Good Jobs First, the corporate subsidy watch group that Greg LeRoy founded the same year Field of Schemes launched. Neither this site nor our book would exist without LeRoy, whose 1994 report “No More Candy Store” was a constant reference as we got up to speed on the then-new phenomenon of companies, whether sports teams or auto plants or computer chip factories, demanding giant piles of public cash in exchange for relocating to or remaining in a city. Happy birthday, GJF, and I hope neither of us still needs to be doing this another 25 years from now.

And now, the news:

With MLB owners preparing to vote on whether to approve the Oakland A’s relocation to Las Vegas, opponents are turning up the pressure to try to get eight owners out of 30 to vote “no.” Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao sent a letter to 15 potentially swayable owners on Wednesday, pointing out that her city is offering more than $900 million in infrastructure money for a stadium project at Howard Terminal and pointing out that owners would be giving up a potential $2 billion expansion fee in Vegas if they let John Fisher move the A’s there for free. Also included were “Stay in Oakland” gift boxes provided by a local ~~bar~~ apparel company named for the Oakland Coliseum’s nickname of the Last Dive Bar, which include an A’s cap, a “Summer of Sell” DVD, a “Keep the Athletics in Oakland” postcard, and a personalized baseball card for each of the 15 owners. Meanwhile, the A’s released new renderings of their planned Vegas stadium, but apparently released them only to MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle, who described them on an investor call as “spectacular” and left it at that. Fisher’s agreement with Tropicana Las Vegas to buy their site for his stadium is only good if MLB votes for the relocation by the end of the month, so expect a lot of dueling fruit baskets when owners meet next week.
Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, who holds sway over spending decisions in San Antonio because San Antonio is weird, says he’s open to the idea of the Spurs moving to a new downtown arena so long as team owners do something to boost job development in the East Side location of its old arena. “We will bring exciting new projects in this area and incentivize business developments to harness the potential that exists,” said Sakai, which is awfully handwavy, so we’ll just have to wait to see if he has anything in particular in mind or this will just end up with the Spurs buying local schools some new basketball nets.
Here’s a report by Kansas City’s NPR station claiming that it would cost as much to repair the Royals‘ Kauffman Stadium as to built a new one, based entirely on a 2022 report by Populous, the company that is hoping to design and build the new one, nope, no conflict of interest there.
The Las Vegas Sphere concert arena lost almost $100 million in its first three months, LOLDolan.
Would it be cheaper for Baltimore to condemn and buy the Orioles rather than give them possibly $1 billion to sign a new lease? Sure, say local activists Andy Ellis and — hey, it’s Bill Marker, he was another early interview for our book, hi, Bill! Anyway, even they say the condemnation route is a longshot, but it’s still worth noting that the city has other potential responses available to O’s owner John Angelos than “Sure, how much should we make the check out for?
And speaking of Baltimore, here’s me being interviewed by Nestor Aparicio yesterday about the whole Orioles (and Ravens) mess, and how they’re just following the playbook that other team owners have laid out, though given that John Angelos’s dad Peter helped get the ball rolling on stadium subsidies back in the late ’80s, they can probably lay a claim to intellectual property rights.

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Friday roundup: Sixers tell Chinatown community it’s wrong about community benefits, plus even more reasons to clown on James Dolan!

March 17, 2023March 17, 2023 Neil deMause

Happy Friday! Unless you’re a New York Mets fan or a Puerto Rico fan, that is, or a fan of not destroying the climate more than we already have, or of knowing how words in Spanish are pronounced, in which case sorry, hope next week will go better! (SPOILER: It won’t. Maybe for you, but not for someone, possibly everyone. I mean, have you been paying attention at all to [waves hands at generally everything]?)

We got news! Or at least news-adjacent:

Pretty much everyone in Philadelphia’s Chinatown hates the idea of having a 76ers arena built on their doorstep, in part for fears it would help jumpstart gentrification. (Generally not, but also maybe yes in this case.) A 76ers development spokesperson replied that it was “disappointing” to see such local opposition when the team is proposing “one of the largest community benefits agreements in the history of our city and country,” which, yup, that’s totally how community benefits agreements are supposed to work, with the developer disparaging community members if they don’t want to accept your first proposal. Or how it too often ends up working, anyway.
It has nothing to do with stadium and arena funding per se, but the cold war between Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan and the state of New York over Dolan using facial recognition tech to ban lawyers working for firms suing him from attending events and then the state moving to revoke MSG’s liquor license got even more entertaining with the news that Dolan hired a private eye to tail a Liquor Authority investigator. If this spills over into the state legislature actually moving to pull MSG’s tax exemption after 41 years, that would be more important/hilarious, but Gov. Kathy Hochul doesn’t want to do it because, she says, she knows “how important the Garden is,” so that’s probably not happening, at least not until Dolan hires someone to stake out Hochul’s house.
And in other MSG news, while I really really hate reporting on news that sources to the New York Post, since it’s not really a legitimate news source, this story about the soon-to-open $2.2 billion MSG Sphere in Las Vegas being an inevitable money-loser because it massively overestimated both how much it can rake in from concerts and how much it can get in naming-rights fees is too deliciously schadenfreude-y not to at least take a peek at. (And could be true! The Post isn’t always wrong, just usually.)
The Chicago Bears may soon get public funding for a new stadium while Chicago taxpayers are still paying off the old one. This isn’t technically bad, for reasons we’ve covered here before, but it’s also not great. Anyway, you can mostly skim through that article, as the best part comes at the very end, when Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury delivers the kicker: “Expecting a stadium to generate a revenue windfall for the community is like expecting Charlie Brown to kick the football. It’s not going to happen.”
“Has the NHL had it with the Coyotes?” asks (checks exactly what hockey fan site this is) HockeyFeed. As evidence that the league’s backing for the team and its perpetual efforts to either gain a new arena in Arizona or sell any tickets is — avert your eyes, spelling fans — “starting to waiver,” the site cites an “NHL insider” (read: Canadian sportswriter) as saying on a podcast that “I’ve had a couple of GMs who tell me their owners are not happy about it.” Good enough for Betteridge work!
I sincerely doubt that West Virginia University economist Brad Humphreys actually phrased his public testimony about a potential new Cleveland Browns stadium as “If it is a dome stadium, it will be over a billion dollars,” but in an article that also writes “Humphreys is West Virginia University professor and renowned stadium finance expert,” attention to details like whether it’s “dome stadium” or “domed stadium” is probably too much to ask for.
Did the Veterans Stadium turf kill Tug McGraw? We’ll probably never know, but you might want to keep your kids off artificial turf fields — or away from other things like, you know, water — just in case.
Were you hoping to go into the weekend with a handy list of European soccer stadiums that could be underwater thanks to sea level rise by 2050? Got you covered.

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Friday roundup: Miami Heat park 26 years overdue, Virginia Commanders stadium plan rises slightly from dead

December 23, 2022 Neil deMause

Sorry to keep you waiting this morning — let’s just blame “the holidays” and leave it at that. Getting straight to the news:

The Miami Herald editorial board would like to remind everyone that Miami Heat owner Micky Arison promised to build a waterfront park as part of his arena deal with the city … in 1996. “But there was a loophole,” notes the Herald. “The ballot language didn’t actually specify that the park would be built.” Whoops! Too bad there aren’t such things as legal proofreaders to check over ballot language to be sure that it does what it says it does! Or, you know, newspapers like the Herald to check that people are voting on what team owners have promised they are.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has proposed spending $500,000 for a study of how to lure the Washington Commanders to his state with a new stadium, which is a drop in the bucket in stadium spending terms, but as the first sign of life since the Virginia legislature killed a Commanders stadium bill in June, it’s worth watching.
Here’s a long article by CNBC about how “since 2000, public funds diverted to helping build professional sports stadiums and arenas have cost taxpayers $4.3 billion” (no source provided, but that is almost certainly a massive undercount) that says “the reason cities end up paying for stadiums begins with the issuance of tax-exempt bonds from state and local governments that the federal government has signed off on for decades,” which isn’t really true at all, so I’d probably recommend not reading it unless you want to risk being confused by spaghetti logic. (There’s also a video piece that I haven’t watched, please report back in comments if it’s any better.)
The MSG Sphere in Las Vegas, which is technically not an arena since it will only host concerts and such and not sports, has now reached $2.17 billion in estimated cost, which is mind-boggling. MSG is set to pay the entire cost, at least, but I can’t help but wonder if this had any impact on MSG owner James Dolan’s announced plan to spin off the Sphere and his regional sports networks into a new company — not that I’m saying cable channels have as dubious a future business plan as a $2 billion concert theater, but I’m not not saying it, either.
New York Mets owner Steve Cohen wants to seek a state license to build a casino … somewhere. In his parking lot? Across the street next to the proposed new NYC F.C. stadium? Either of those places are owned by the city, and the former is technically parkland so this could get interesting.

Okay, I have lots to do and so do you, only two shopping days before Christmas/the last day of Hanukkah/the first day of Kwanzaa! Happy holidays if you observe any, and see you on Tuesday.

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Friday roundup: Rays stalling on St. Pete stadium talks, Marlins tear out seats to please millennials, Raiders stadium maybe delayed or maybe not

March 29, 2019 Neil deMause

Happy baseball season! Or not-so-happy baseball season, as Deadspin reminded us in two excellent articles this week, one on all the ways from bag-check fees to card-only transactions that teams are using to separate fans from even more of their money, the other on how fans were stuck on endless lines to get into stadium on opening day because of things like paperless ticketing apps that kept crashing. And on those cheery notes, the rest of the rest of the week’s news:

St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman says he still hasn’t heard from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg about whether he wants to try to build a new stadium in St. Pete, and he’s getting impatient: “The [Pinellas] County Commission oversees those TDC [Tourist Development Council] dollars and they’ve indicated they would keep that money in a lock box, but it’s not going to sit there forever.” That’s a new tactic — we have tax money for you, but you have to act now — and it’s not really clear what Sternberg is waiting on, unless he’s still hemming and hawing about whether the reason nobody goes to Rays games is the St. Peterburg location or the Florida location or the fact he’s a lousy owner. Regardless, the Rays will still be in St. Pete through 2026, and after that it’s anyone’s guess, as the Tampa Bay Times concluded in the world’s most boring roundtable.
The Miami Marlins debuted some changes to their much-reviled stadium this week, including a standing-room-only section in right field that team owner Derek Jeter says is designed to appeal to young people: “A lot of times fans come to games and they don’t necessarily want to sit in their seats. They want to be able to move around, especially the millennial — the younger generation.” Uh, Jeets, there may be other reasons than millennial ADHD that Marlins fans don’t want to sit and watch the game.
The Milwaukee Bucks‘ new arena that opened last fall has already needed $3 million in upgrades, including bigger cup holders in the lower-level seats because the old ones “can barely hold a cup of coffee.” All together now: Just tear the place down and build a new one.
Here is a trash article in Bloomberg in which Golden State Warriors team president Rick Welts asserts that the team has already made $2 billion from its new $1.3 billion San Francisco arena “in the form of tickets, suites and sponsorships” before the doors have already opened. Is that for its first year, or does it include multi-year commitments? And how does it compare to what the Warriors would have brought in from those revenue streams in their old Oakland arena? Despite the article taking two people to write, neither of them seem to have bothered to ask those questions, because writing down what important people say and leaving it at that is what journalism is all about, right?
The projected completion date of the Las Vegas Raiders stadium has been pushed back from July 31, 2020 to August 4, 2020, but also not really pushed back, and besides no one knows when the first Raiders home exhibition game will be in 2020, so get off their backs, okay? Given that this is what the site looks like right now, I’d take the over on any completion date projections — if nothing else, it’s clear why owner Mark Davis included an option for 2020 in his new lease with Oakland.
Nonvoting D.C. delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton has introduced a bill to sell the RFK Stadium site to the city of Washington, which would allow it to be used for a Washington NFL team stadium or maybe something else. Figuring out how much D.C. should pay for the site, though, could be tricky, because it currently isn’t zoned for any particular type of development.
The local resident group Elmont Against The Megamall has proposed using the land the New York Islanders owners want for a new hockey arena for public sports fields instead. That is probably not happening, even if the state isn’t getting much money for its land either way; though another group of local elected officials, this time from Nassau County, expressed qualms about the project’s impact this month, so momentum certainly doesn’t seem to be going the Isles owners’ way.
The Madison Square Garden Company wants to build a giant sphere-shaped arena in London, and … wait, haven’t we heard this somewhere before?
The Olympic-quality BMX track that Tulsa is building with public money will now cost $22.8 million instead of $15 million. This is not a sentence I expected to be writing in 2019, but I probably should have.

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