Category: the sports-media complex

Roof firm expressed willingness to attempt “monumental task” of repairing Rays stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Finally some actual news about the Tampa Bay Rays stadium roof situation, courtesy of the St. Pete Catalyst, one of those nonprofit news sites springing up that could no doubt use your subscription money if you have some burning a hole in your pocket for other reasons. The Catalyst got hold of emails (it didn’t say, whether via a public records request or leaks) revealing that city building officials met with representatives of roof construction firm Dunn Lightweight the day after Hurricane Milton tore the roof off of Tropicana Field, and that company was at least initially ready to take a shot at having the roof replaced by Opening Day 2025:

In a Friday, Oct. 11 email sent after visiting the site, Javier Rattia, partner director for Dunn Lightweight, noted that his firm was under a “very tight schedule” to dismantle and replace Tropicana Field’s roof in time for the 2025 season.

“We will airfreight some of the materials and use most of our stock to achieve this monumental task,” Rattia wrote.

The next day, Dunn signed an agreement with the city to just dismantle and remove the existing roof, at a cost not to exceed $548,534. Nine days later, however, the city hired Global Rope Access to provide seven “rope technicians” to remove the roof at a cost of $416,353. (The Catalyst didn’t attempt to explain the discrepancy; I’ve reached out to Dunn and GRA to try to clarify.)

All this could either mean 1) St. Pete is giving up on trying to replace the roof, despite Dunn’s willingness to give it a go, 2) St. Pete is just working on cleaning up the debris for now while it evaluates the possibility of repair, or 3) something else, probably, this is one of the hazards of writing articles based entirely on email records. But it definitely tracks with the idea that nobody has yet figured out if the stadium roof is reparable, what it would cost, or how long it would take, though presumably Rays and city officials are working on that.

Speaking of which, somebody asked MLB commissioner Rob Manfred during World Series batting practice what he thought the timeline was, and he came up with a date:

“I think by Christmas they gotta have a pretty good plan in place, and there’s a lot to that.”…

“They’re still in the damage assessment mode,” Manfred said. “That needs to get done and obviously, it’s not just the roof, there was damage internally as well. Won’t know exactly what’s going to happen until they complete that process. … It’s just a guess as to how long it’s going to be.”

That’s hardly definitive, even before Manfred got to “just a guess”: What does that even mean to “have a pretty good plan in place”? Do Rays execs have to know for sure where they’ll be playing at the start of 2025, or just have various contingencies in place? When to MLB’s schedule makers need to know, so they can adjust game and travel times if necessary? Quick, somebody ask Manfred some followups — nope, he’s already on to the next thing:

“We can make it work in a minor-league park,” Manfred said. “I think there’s probably some flexibility in terms of what we do with the big-league schedule.”

Probably! This is not really helpful at all, even if it did get the Athletic some quotes to justify an article to lure you behind the New York Times’ paywall. Somebody get the St. Pete Catalyst (or Hell Gate, they’re in town already) a World Series press pass already so we can get some actual damn answers.

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NYCFC releases more pretend stadium images, pretend public cost numbers

access_time personNeil deMause

New York City F.C. officials held a press event last week to promote their new stadium set to open in 2027, let’s see how that went:

Okay, yes, that’s a new rendering. (Or a “model” as the New York Daily News caption puts it.) It’s not exactly an improvement on the last round of vaportecture, given that the entire surrounding neighborhood (plus the Mets‘ stadium across the street) appears to have been demolished and replaced by a gray void featuring only some kind of elevated highway called the “Queens,” but maybe they just wanted people to stop clowning on it as “Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium.” (Team officials said they hope to have a naming rights deal in place by the end of the year, at which point people can clown on it for that name.)

And what about details regarding the possibly $700 million in tax kickbacks and infrastructure spending this all will cost New York City taxpayers?

“When [Mayor Eric Adams] got into office, that’s when the project really started getting some legs, because we were able to present what we really believe is a transformative project for Queens,” [NYCFC CEO Brad] Sims said.

“He was able to say, ‘100% privately financed [stadium]. The city’s in a housing crisis right now. [This is the] biggest affordable housing project that the city’s seen in four decades.’”

I mean, he was able to say “100% privately financed.” He wasn’t able to actually mean it, but he was able to say it. Somebody else — say, a sports economist, the city Independent Budget Office, me — could have told the Daily News otherwise, but as the Daily News didn’t speak to anyone not employed by the team, its readers will never know.

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Friday roundup: Sacramento celebrates A’s move with new golf simulators, KC residents say cap public stadium funds at one-third

access_time personNeil deMause

Sports economist Victor Matheson and I were both on a radio show this week to discuss the Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium situations — you can listen to it here, but first check out the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, it’ll be quick, I promise:

  • There’s a “major economic boost” coming to Sacramento now that the Oakland A’s are relocating there temporarily, reports KCRA-TV: A new brunch-and-golf-simulators venue is opening across the street! (It was going to open there anyway, but now that the A’s are coming, the owner is trying to open it earlier.) Also, the mayor is “in discussions” with three new restaurants! Feel the excitement!
  • There is no excitement in St. Louis, where the Cardinals are still technically in the playoff hunt, but fans in the best baseball city in the world don’t want to watch .500 baseball, it turns out, or even buy hot dogs. “I love being the hot dog lady,” says hot dog lady Karen Boschert. “I’ve cut my staff down. My prices are reasonable. You can take my food into the stadium.” Maybe she could pivot her sales pitch to point out that you can buy her food and not bring it into the stadium? Just an idea.
  • Pollsters in Missouri decided to ask an unusual question of local voters: not whether taxpayers should pay toward new stadiums for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, but how much. The average was two-thirds team, one-sixth state, one-sixth city and county, which is kind of arbitrary and doesn’t account for whether the public would get back any share of revenues or community benefits or anything, but sure it sounds fair. Ish. Time will tell if the team owners come back with “zero-thirds team, poke in the eye with a sharp stick public.”
  • Most of the San Antonio residents who testified at a Wednesday hearing on a $160 million Missions minor-league baseball stadium “voiced concerns and skepticism,” according to Fox San Antonio. For actual quotes we have to turn to KSAT, which notes that a local arts and social justice activist said, “This project is all about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” while a resident of a housing complex that would be demolished to make way for the stadium said, “I would not be able to get somewhere else, and I would end up in the street yet again.”
  • Chicago’s city budget is facing a $982.4 million shortfall, and Mayor Brandon Johnson says, “There are sacrifices that will be made,” but not new Bears and White Sox stadiums, those are important even if they would cost the city upwards of $1.2 billion and $2 billion respectively, sacrifices are for little people.
  • Team-funded studies of a Philadelphia 76ers arena say it would be great, other studies show it would be a disaster; the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board says it’s up to the mayor and city council to figure out where the truth lies in the middle!
  • Another group of developers unrelated to either the Royals or the city has come up with renderings for a new downtown baseball stadium, and guys, you should at least look up how many players are on the field for a baseball game.
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That big Economist article got more wrong than right about sports subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

I almost wrote something earlier this week about this Economist article on the flood of new stadium subsidy demands, but decided it wasn’t worth my time or yours since it doesn’t really report any new news. But then all youse all kept emailing me about it so fine: We’re going to go over it, and do so in excruciating detail, because oh, are its details ever excruciating:

On a summer evening in Kansas City, Kauffman Stadium is a fine place to be. … But amid the bonhomie is an undercurrent of worry. In April nearly 60% of local residents rejected a sales tax that would have helped pay for a new ballpark. Now there is a chance that the Royals might pick up their bats and go elsewhere. “If it stopped them from leaving, I’d take the tax,” says Daniel Capp, a lifelong fan.

That’s all technically true as far as it goes, but “a chance that the Royals might pick up their bats and go elsewhere” is a gross exaggeration: All signs are that team owner John Sherman will either try again in Kansas City, Missouri, try next door in North Kansas City, or try the other next door across the Kansas border — and attempts at that last one are so far going nowhere fast. So the odds on lifelong fans no longer being able to watch the Royals are pretty long.

Whether the Royals end up staying in Missouri or moving, one outcome seems all but assured: taxpayers somewhere will end up footing much of the bill for their new stadium.

Assuming the Royals get a new stadium, and don’t just stay put at their current one, which continues to be ranked as one of the best in baseball.

Virtually every new professional-sports venue in America is built with public funds. And the subsidies are only growing, even as evidence piles up that they are almost always lousy investments.

True!

Stadium construction tends to come in waves. Most venues are used for about 30 years before their owners look for new digs.

Not true! Nowadays plenty of team owners start looking for new digs well before the 30-year mark, with the Atlanta Braves and Texas Rangers owners famously getting fresh stadiums approved just 26 and 22 years, respectively, after their previous ones opened. And that’s only because it’s harder to demand a new stadium before your lease is running out at the old one, or at least when the optics would look too bad — as sports economist Rodney Fort memorably said, “I don’t see anything wrong, from an owner’s perspective, with the idea of a new stadium every year.”

In baseball, Tampa Bay is building a new stadium, Cleveland is undertaking renovations and Oakland is hoping to move to Las Vegas.

Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg is currently waiting to see if St. Petersburg will approve public money for a new stadium. The Guardians renovations are already underway. Oakland is not moving anywhere (except maybe slowly southward relative to San Francisco), but A’s owner John Fisher is hoping to move his team to Vegas.

In basketball, Los Angeles is building a glitzy new arena, and Philadelphia and Oklahoma City hope to follow.

The Los Angeles Clippers‘ new arena is in Inglewood, not Los Angeles, and Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is footing the bill, though Inglewood did use its powers of eminent domain to obtain land for him. The Philadelphia 76ers arena plans are still very much up in the air, while the Oklahoma City Thunder had their arena approved by voters last December.

In the 1960s and 1970s cities regularly stumped up 100% of the money for new stadiums.

Yes, but they were also routinely repaid much of that money in rent payments and revenue sharing. That all came to a screeching halt in the late 1980s, as team owners began demanding that the public cover most or all of the costs while getting little to nothing in return.

As it became clear that über-rich owners captured many of the profits from the sports played there, officials started to demand that they should pay for more of the building.

[citation badly needed]

Public funding now covers about 40% of costs.

According to J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad Humphreys’ big study in 2023, yes, for the first years of the 2020s, though that’s skewed somewhat by the new Los Angeles Rams and Golden State Warriors venues, both of which opened during that time and were entirely privately funded.

The economic case for stadiums rests on three pillars: they create thousands of jobs; they unleash a steady stream of consumption; and they serve as anchors for thriving neighbourhoods. But a half-century of evidence suggests that the three pillars are actually rather wobbly.

True! Though limiting the discussion of this to just two paragraphs seems like pretty short shrift.

[Some Kansas City voters] were upset that, along with a new home for the Royals, the money would have gone to renovations of the stadium used by the Chiefs, the city’s football team, including sprucing up VIP suites.

If anything, the Chiefs renovations were likely more popular than the new Royals stadium, both because they wouldn’t have required tearing down a neighborhood and because the Chiefs are more popular than the Royals.

In Chicago a proposed lakefront stadium for the city’s football team has run into political hurdles, but the project may well go ahead on a different site.

The “political hurdles” are at the state level, so the Bears owners are unlikely to get around them by moving to a different site unless they come up with a ton of money out of their own pockets, which doesn’t seem to be what they’re interested in.

The root of the problem is fandom itself. Local politicians craving re-election do not want to be known for presiding over the exodus of their city’s beloved team.

Don’t make me come in there with the fact that only one city in history (Seattle) has voted a local politician out of office by fans angry at a team leaving, while several cities have voted out elected officials for approving stadium subsidies!

Love of sports, like many passions, is not reducible to rational calculations.

Really, that’s your kicker? Those Americans sure do love their sportsball, enough to give billions of dollars in tax money to it. Perhaps you might want to explain, then, Economist, why your native England has a little bit of a rabid sports fandom thing going on, yet massive stadium subsidies there are rare?

Overall: A C-minus, maybe? It gets right that sports stadium subsidies are common in the U.S., but gets wrong the reasons why, which way things are trending, and the details of a lot of specific sports subsidy demand campaigns. I would expect this from an American news outlet that assigned this to an intern along with 10 other articles that day, but not so much from a 181-year-old British magazine that says right there in its name that it has expertise in economics. I guess love of a cheap clickbait narrative, like many passions, is not reducible to rational calculations.

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How many words can you throw at a stadium news story and still not learn anything? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

Ugggggh, do I really gotta write about this San Francisco Chronicle article asking “financial experts” whether Oakland A’s owner John Fisher will be able to raise another billion dollars or so to pay for a new stadium in Las Vegas? Nobody really has any new insights, and we just talked last week about how nobody without access to the insides of Fisher’s stock portfolio and Fisher’s brain can really guess what he’s willing or able to do, can’t we talk about something else? Look, how about this Governing column making the remarkable claim that even though stadiums don’t produce any economic impact, they do have “tangible” benefits:

Yet there’s a flip side to the stadium argument that is rarely considered. There’s a real case that stadium and sports team subsidies actually have a positive return on investment when viewed as marketing expenses…

One of the best ways to think about stadium subsidies is as an implicit naming rights deal. What the city is really paying for is the right to have the team be named after itself.

There’s a novel concept: Maybe stadium spending is worth it because it gets your city more attention, drawing more tourists and business and stuff! If that’s true, it should be easy enough to see it in, say, per-capita income going up as a result of a team moving to a city, or down as a result of one moving out, and in fact that’s been studied and … oh. Well, then. That wasn’t much of a discussion, it turns out.

Fine, let’s talk about the Chronicle piece. Your dramatis personae:

  • Andy Zimbalist, sports economist for hire: “I think it’s tough. If I had to make a prediction, Las Vegas isn’t going to happen.”
  • David Carter, sports marketing professor: “His bankers are well respected and deeply connected, so a deal is certainly attainable.”
  • Former A’s owner Lew Wolff: “I have been involved with John and his family for decades and never encountered any endeavor that they undertook where they were not committed and capable of implementing.”

Gotta say, this really reads like Chronicle columnist John Shea called up a few random people in his address book until he got enough quotes for a piece “balanced” by differing opinions. Are any of these opinions right? Who can say! That would require some sort of research about the actual finances of Fisher’s Vegas plan and whether he can make enough money from it to pay off its costs — or more specifically, as discussed here last week, about whether he can find either bankers or investors who he can convince that it’ll pay off. Even Fisher doesn’t know that yet, and we know he doesn’t know, because if he had firm commitments he would have announced them by now instead of hiring consultants to look for those bankers and investors.

(Or, to be fair, it’s possible he has bankers and investors but they’re driving too hard a bargain, so he hired the consultants to find him more options. But we can’t know that either.)

Conclusion: Fisher still needs over $1 billion to pay for the rest of his stadium plans, and still has three choices — borrow $1 billion and pay it back once revenues start pouring in from some theoretical revenue fountain; sell $1 billion worth of stuff, or at least what he can convince someone is worth $1 billion worth of stuff; or get his mother or one of his brothers to sell $1 billion worth of their stuff. You can express skepticism about this, or optimism about it, but “people differ on how rose-colored their glasses are” is not really an excuse for a news article, no matter how much I sympathize with having a deadline staring you in the face and not enough material to really justify a story. In fact, I feel kind of ashamed for even spending this much time on it myself, stop reading this now, please, get out and enjoy the spring weather or something, when there’s any real news, I promise to tell you.

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Friday roundup: Rays promise “intimate” stadium with ginormous upper deck, Cleveland running out of tax money to pay for Cavs and Guardians upgrades

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy end of the week! Surely some other news of note happened in recent days, but you chose to come to this website, so you’re looking for different news, maybe some bleak Utah minor-league baseball renderings? And that is but the beginning of the smorgasbord of stadium and arena items on tap! (Yes, you can have a smorgasbord on tap, I’m a professional wordsmith, you’ll just have to trust me on this one.)

  • Reporting live from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s colon, the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin has a love letter to the Rays’ new stadium design, gushing about how much more “intimate” it will be thanks to only having 30,000 seats and “70% of the seats in the lower two of three seating levels.” Getting rid of the worst seats doesn’t actually make the view from the remaining seats any better — getting rid of intervening luxury seating might accomplish that, but there’s no indication Sternberg plans to do that — and having 30% of the seats in a third deck actually sounds like a lot for a 30,000-seat stadium (the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ stadium holds 38,000 and doesn’t have a third deck at all), but team officials blurted all this stuff out and Topkin wrote it down and printed it verbatim, that’s the job of a journalist, right? (UPDATE: FoS reader Andrew Ross points out that the Times actually squeezed this story onto its front page alongside the other notable news of the day.)
  • Cleveland’s stadium agency is on the hook for nearly all upkeep of the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and the alcohol and cigarette taxes that are supposed to pay for them are running dry, so someone is going to need to find more money to spend on the teams. (Right now Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is fronting his team’s arena costs, and the city and county will have to pay him back.) Some of the work includes upgraded elevators and escalators for the Cavs, kitchen equipment upgrades and new in-stadium TV screens for the Guardians, and a special film on the new glass wall at the Cavs arena to keep birds from flying into it which will have to be replaced every five years, not all of which really seem like “capital repairs” to me, but from the sound of things whoever negotiated these leases on behalf of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County did an absolutely horrible job that is allowing the team owners to bill the public for any and all upgrades, can lawyers be found guilty of malpractice? Make a note to check into that.
  • Speaking of malpractice, the Baltimore Banner managed to write about the Ravens‘ new stadium upgrades with only the briefest of mentions that state taxpayers are picking up the entire $430 million tab, and not mentioning at all that Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti can avail himself of another $170 million or much more after that. The headline the Banner chose to roll with: “M&T Bank Stadium’s premium areas will soon reach new level of luxury.” Turns out corporate-run nonprofit journalism isn’t necessarily any better than corporate-run for-profit journalism, maybe we need a better model?
  • I’ve been sadly neglecting the throwdown in Indianapolis between Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir, who was planning to build a new stadium for his USL-but-wants-to-be-MLS team with $112 million in state money, and Mayor Joe Hogsett, who now wants to use the money for a different soccer stadium on a different site for a different wannabe MLS ownership group. The City-County Council is set to vote on authorizing legislation for a new “professional sports development area” (read: super-TIF district) on June 3; if it’s approved, it would then go to the state legislature for a final vote.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plan to build a casino in his stadium parking lot, despite it being public parkland, is likely dead after state senator Jessica Ramos said she won’t support any casino project in her district when 75% of residents say they don’t want one. The state legislature could still pass casino authorizing legislation over the local representative’s objections, but that rarely happens, and anyway the state casino location board is unlikely to hand out a casino license to a project on such shaky ground, so probably New Yorkers will get to gamble somewhere other than the Mets parking lots, which Cohen is vowing will remain parking lots until the sun burns out, because it’s the prerogative of a sports team owner to throw a hissy fit.
  • A stairway flooded during heavy rains at the St. Louis Cardinals stadium, time to build them a new one, that’s how it works, I don’t make the rules!
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How not to do news coverage of a new Commanders stadium at the RFK site

access_time personNeil deMause

Look, I get it. It’s tough enough to report on often-convoluted stadium deal finances when the details are known; when it’s a proposal still in the works, like Washington, D.C.’s long-discussed plan to build a new Commanders stadium on the former RFK Stadium site, it’s like trying to nail mud to the wall. Any news coverage is going to require a lot of digging into what internal conversations local elected officials are having and what other cities are doing, plus a healthy dollop of speculation. It takes time and effort and is likely to obsolete as soon as more specifics are released.

Or, you can just do like WUSA did, and just go with one number that is irrefutable, whether or not it’s relevant:

According to data obtained from DC’s chief financial officer, by 2030 the District is predicted to be more than $1.7 billion in debt, including the $520 million the city just shelled out for renovations at Capitol One, as part of a deal to keep the Wizards and Capitals from leaving D.C. That puts the District smack up against the city’s limit on debt based on D.C. law. Essentially, the D.C. government is out of borrowing power.

“Out of borrowing power” sounds pretty definitive, but the WUSA segment then undercuts its own conclusion by noting that some types of bonds — including those based on tax increment financing, where future property tax payments are kicked back to pay for stadium construction — are exempt from the bond cap. And the guy who they choose to explain this, remarkably, is former district councilmember Jack Evans, who spearheaded almost every D.C. stadium subsidy plan until being forced to resign after taking money from companies who would benefit from legislation he was pushing.

What makes WTOP consider Evans an expert in this case rather than an unindicted co-conspirator is presumably that he, equally remarkably, was hired by the district to conduct a study of how to fund an NFL stadium. And Evans has much to say about that, it turns out:

Evans said the study, which focused on successful stadium funding models locally and nationally, was completed in mid March. But months later, the DC government still hasn’t released the results.

“I would say the overall conclusion is that sports stadiums actually produce enormous revenue for the cities,” Evans said. “You’ll have economists say it never does anything, and in some cities it doesn’t.”

But Evans says D.C. is different. Nationals Park, which revitalized Navy Yard, is paying off its debt far faster than planned.

Okay, so: The results of Evans’ study aren’t available, and Evans isn’t going to make them available. But WUSA is going to let Evans characterize the conclusion as that “sports stadiums actually produce enormous revenue for the cities,” without either asking Evans to show his work or checking in with actual economists to see if D.C. really can be different. Or even whether the Nationals stadium paying off its debt faster than planned is really a good thing. (Spoiler: It’s not really, since it just means that the various tax revenues that are funding it are coming in faster than expected — and being kicked back to the team owners faster, but it’s still the same total outlay by taxpayers.)

Evans specifically recommends a TIF to raise money for a Commanders stadium, which is kind of hilarious if you remember that Evans was last seen writing an op-ed about how a Virginia arena for the Capitals and Wizards was a terrible idea because it relied on TIFs. Though not nearly as hilarious as where WUSA chose to stage its interview with Evans, which was apparently in the room where he keeps his personal vibrating football stadium:

Truly, how could anyone who has one of these be anything but unbiased about NFL stadium funding? Cut, no need for more interviews, everybody knock off for the day.

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Are the Chiefs moving to San Antonio? A mini-investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

Could the Kansas City Chiefs move to (rolls random city generator) San Antonio if they don’t get a new stadium in the Kansas City area? Here’s what we know so far:

  • “There’s murmurings about it, but the fact that there’s even murmurings means that something’s going on.” —Jackson County Legislator Manny Abarca, who is trying to get support for a possibly illegal vote on a sales tax hike to fund a new Chiefs stadium.
  • “I think Kansas City ought to do what it can to save the Chiefs. And the Chiefs ought to remember the great success that they’ve had with Kansas City and how loyal those fans have been. That should be a marriage that lasts in perpetuity.” —Former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros, who said he hasn’t heard of any talks about the Chiefs moving to San Antonio.

And that’s all the research anyone needs, as this should be plenty for news articles from now until the end of time to say the clock is ticking to keep the Chiefs in town, as news articles do. There are lots of interesting questions to ask about this Chiefs-to-San Antonio rumor, like “Is the recently renovated Alamodome really preferable to the recently renovated Arrowhead Stadium?” and “Would San Antonio put public money into more upgrades?” and “Would Chiefs owner Clark Hunt even want to move the team?” and “Is Abarca just pulling this rumor out of his ass?” Anyone interested, news outlets of America?

Shocking City Rumored as Possible Chiefs Relocation Site

Would Cowboys’ Jerry Jones Allow Chiefs’ Move to San Antonio?

Twitter weighs in on report of potential Chiefs move to San Antonio

Yeah, figured. Sports team owners have never needed legitimate move threats so much as move threats that will get printed and reprinted in the news media — and unfortunately, the bar for that is somewhere around “Someone said they heard a guy say something once.”

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Friday roundup: KC pol seeks to revive sales tax hike for Chiefs only, A’s stadium plans still extremely ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

access_time personNeil deMause

This has been a week, for a lot of reasons as well as my trip yesterday to an unseasonably hot Philadelphia to talk with city council staff and community members about the 76ers‘ much-unloved arena plans, so I’m declaring editorial privilege to go straight to an abbreviated news roundup:

That’s all I have in me today — if I missed anything, feel free to bring it up in comments. Have a good weekend, and try to stay cool!

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Was defeat of Royals/Chiefs stadium tax hike Frank White’s fault, or to Frank White’s credit?

access_time personNeil deMause

While we await Chicago Bears stadium plan details, let’s kill some time reading Monday’s Kansas City Star article on “what went wrong in Jackson County” that led to the overwhelming April 2 vote against a 0.375% sales-tax hike to funnel money to Royals and Chiefs stadium projects.

(And yes, “what went wrong” is very much a leading framing, since it implies that Jackson County residents expressing their opinion that they didn’t want to kick back $500 million in sales taxes en route to well over a billion dollars in public stadium is a bad outcome. But let’s not hold the article responsible for the headline’s crimes, and just see where it goes.)

Kansas City Manager Brian Platt offered reassurance last week as the teams consider next steps. The city will take a lead role from here on in trying to keep the teams happy, by learning from others’ mistakes…

“We were largely on the sidelines, on the city side, for a lot of this,” Platt said. “And we are going to take a much more active and proactive role in making sure that whatever comes next, we are a big part of it. And that we’re listening to all the voices that need to be heard.”

Not a great start: “Reassurance” implies that KC residents want a different jurisdiction to take over that isn’t as skeptical of the teams’ demands, which doesn’t appear to be what the voting results show at all.

Emails obtained by the Star between the county and the team reveal what was said behind the scenes, and ultimately how the talks broke down.

Internal emails! Now we’re talking.

Let’s see, blah blah, Platt “re-enforced the narrative” that Jackson County executive and former Royals second baseman Frank White “bargained in bad faith” — no, that’s you re-enforcing the narrative, and also it’s actually “reinforcing” — and “the teams cast White as a villain.” Where are these emails already? “The blame game will go on.” This article sure does!

Okay, now we’re talking:

The Star has obtained correspondence between the Royals and White’s administration that shows the arc of the negotiations…

[In May 2023,] two Clay County commissioners and the mayor of North Kansas City posted an open letter on X, formerly Twitter, saying that not only were they willing to make an offer for the team, but that the Royals were interested.

White saw that as an insult to Jackson County taxpayers and fired off a letter to Sherman that day. … “Given today’s unfortunate developments, I urge the Royals to publicly reaffirm their commitment to Jackson County until at least 2031 and voice their intention to continue calling Jackson County home for decades beyond.”

Ignoring White’s ultimatum, the Royals issued a public statement saying that the team had not yet decided where it was headed but “continue(d) to be actively engaged” in talks with Jackson County, as well as others.

Not really news that this is how it went down, but it’s at least new documents. Tell us more!

Brooks Sherman, the [Royals] president of business operations, said the team envisioned that the cost of building a new ballpark would be shared by county taxpayers, the team, Kansas City and the state of Missouri, but left out a crucial detail. What it didn’t say was exactly how much the $1 billion-plus ballpark was expected to cost, or how much each party would be expected to contribute to the project.

Again, this isn’t news, as it had been clear for months before that that Royals owner John Sherman didn’t want to specify how his stadium was going to be paid for, except that the first $250 million or so would come from the sales tax hike. But sure, here’s an email showing that team execs were saying the same thing privately as publicly.

[Jackson County counselor Bryan] Covinsky said the county needed more information before face-to-face talks began, such as how much money the team expected to receive from the city and state, as well as any tax incentives the Royals might pursue on the commercial ballpark village development the team proposed building around a new ballpark.

Okay, let’s skip ahead: Is there anything in these emails that we didn’t already know from public statements? And what does it all have to do with the role of Frank White, as promised by the lede? We have White requesting only a 20-year sales tax hike instead of 40 years, which we also knew already, and Royals execs saying nope nope, and more talks, and Sherman agreeing to at least cover property and casualty insurance on their new stadium, and finally both teams saying they’re going ahead with the April 2 vote regardless of what White wanted. And then got their heads handed to them at the ballot box.

The only thing new here, then, is the framing: Both White and the team owners are presented as having screwed up by failing to get a deal agreed on before sending it to a public vote, which then led to referendum being defeated.

But there is another way of looking at this, which is that White stood his ground in refusing to give in to the teams’ demands (though he did offer up as much as $300 million in public money for each stadium, and didn’t rule out city and state money being used as well so long as it wasn’t coming out of his jurisdiction’s pocket), and the teams tried to get what they wanted by going around him directly to county voters, who likewise told them to kick rocks. That’s not a failure so much as tough negotiating — and if the teams now come back with reduced subsidy demands, it’s a success.

Of course, stories like this one in the Star that cast responsible governance as “getting things done” when the things are making it a spending priority to meet the wish lists of local sports billionaires only make it harder to negotiate toughly, since it throws shade on elected officials who do so. The Star has generally done pretty good reporting on the whole Kansas City stadium saga so far; if Platt is indeed taking the lead in talks, let’s see how the newspaper portrays his role, and if they chide him if he gives in too far to the owners, or only if he doesn’t give in enough.

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