Category: the sports-media complex

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

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Friday roundup: Spurs, Bengals owners to seek even more public money, Olympics could cost LA $1.5B for security

access_time personNeil deMause

Congratulations, we once again made it to the end of another programming week, as well as the end (presumably) of the “Will Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris get to pocket billions of dollars of cash and tax and land subsidies?” saga. (Answer: He sure will.) Which cities’ sports funding debates could be the next to absorb the eyes of a nation, or at least the eyes on this website? Let’s run down some contenders from this week:

  • We’ve already covered the ongoing San Antonio Spurs arena debates here this week, but that earlier report on the city council’s Wednesday hearing missed the tidbit that right now the plan is for San Antonio to provide $500 million, Bexar County to provide $311 million (really only enough to pay for about half that in up-front costs, since the money would arrive over 30 years), and team owner Peter Holt to provide $500 million, which is less than the potential $1.5 billion arena cost. Spurs chief legal counsel Bobby Perez said (in the San Antonio Report’s paraphrasing) that’s “something the Spurs would have to figure out,” but that the team would pay for any overruns above the final public price tag, whatever it ends up being, which is maybe not as reassuring as he meant it to be. Perez also said that the team would not consider sharing any arena revenue to help pay the public’s share of costs because Holt will be using it to pay off his own share of costs, the public will just have to make it up in volume or something.
  • The Cincinnati Bengals owners finally signed their new lease with Hamilton County that will include at least $700 million in public subsidies, everybody relax. Though the Bengals and the county said they’re still planning on asking for even more money from the state, exact dollar figure TBD, so maybe don’t relax just yet.
  • Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski wrote that if Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeff Lurie wants a new stadium, he should pay for it himself, and got a flood of agreement back from readers, including that it’s a bad time to ask for public money “with hospitals closing, SEPTA broke, and schools struggling” and that “many people think that Camden Yards created the Inner Harbor, but the Inner Harbor was booming long before the Orioles left Memorial Stadium. And now the Inner Harbor has collapsed.” Good thing for Lurie that it’s almost certain none of these people will get to vote on any stadium plan, because that’s not how cities east of the Mississippi roll.
  • The owners of Boston Legacy F.C. (née BOS Nation F.C.) faced an August 1 deadline to figure out how they will pay for their share of stadium costs on top of the city’s $100-millionish, but they blew that deadline so now they get a new one of September 15. Meanwhile, mayoral candidate Josh Kraft is accusing Boston Mayor Michelle Wu of not being transparent about the total cost of the women’s soccer project, at the same time as Josh’s dad Robert is fighting with Wu about his plan to build a new men’s soccer stadium for his New England Revolution in neighboring Everett, which Wu has warned could subject Boston to increased traffic, this is the most convoluted HBO Max series plotline ever.
  • When the Los Angeles Olympic host committee promised that the 2028 Games would come at “zero cost” to the city, apparently it didn’t include security costs, which could amount to maybe $1.5 billion. There’s now growing talk of getting L.A. to pull out of the 2028 games altogether, especially now that Donald Trump has threatened to send in the military during the event; that doesn’t sound very likely, but the Unite Here hotel workers’ union has proposed a ballot measure that would require many Olympic venues to get voter approval to be used for the Games, which looks to be mostly a tactic to head off attempts to overturn the $30/hour “Olympic wage” passed by the city council in May — I take it back, maybe this is the most convoluted HBO Max plotline ever.
  • ESPN is about to own part of the NFL’s media package and the NFL is about to own part of ESPN, don’t see any potential problems there. I do greatly look forward to every football highlight on SportsCenter being accompanied by a disclaimer that “the National Football League is a part owner of ESPN,” surely a company with such a great ethical record as ESPN wouldn’t skip over that.
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Friday roundup: The world is increasingly an ocean of stadium disinformation slop, and sea levels are rising

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another exhausting news week, so if you need a pick-me-up, please enjoy some videos of how I spent last weekend. Sometimes we all need a musical reminder to hang on to your humanity.

Once you’re sufficiently fortified, here’s what else happened this week in the world of sports stadium and arena shakedowns:

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Day 3: D.C. held hostage by a thing Donald Trump probably already forgets he said

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the great things about being an elected official, and more specifically about being president of the United States, and still more specifically about being Donald Trump, is that you can influence news reporting just by blurting out any half-formed thoughts that cross your mind, then watching as reporters reprint them and then ask other elected officials — and sometimes even regular people — to respond to them. It really is a superpower, and it’s one that’s entirely bestowed upon them by stenography journalism, maybe somebody ought to look into fixing that.

Anyway, it’s now Day 3 of “Trump Wants the Old Washington NFL Team Name Back,” and the media frenzy isn’t letting up:

The most likely scenario for the Commanders remains that both Bowser and the D.C. council ignore the president, who either forgets about the entire thing or maybe just orders Google to label the team “Washington Redskins” and declares victory. Meanwhile, the D.C. council is preparing for next week’s hearings, including public testimony, on the actual nuts and bolts of Bowser’s proposal — we’ll see if the public’s opinions will carry any more weight than Stephen A. Smith’s, but one can always hope.

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Friday roundup: If not for John Fisher schadenfreude, we wouldn’t have any freude at all

access_time personNeil deMause

Hello, Canadians, and Americans who couldn’t find a way to get out of town for the holiday weekend! This Friday roundup is handcrafted especially for you!

I wish the news were better, but we have to go with what we’ve got:

  • The latest bad news from Sacramento: So few people want to go to A’s games that tickets are selling for a fraction of what they were at the start of the season, leaving season ticket holders with a massive case of buyers’ remorse: “It is really rough,” one told SF Gate. “I’ve given away a bunch of them. I’ve given them to friends. The other day, I set a record: I sold $90 seats for 12 bucks. So, it’s kind of pretty bad.” At least worries that season ticket holders will miss out on playoff games if they’re not playing in Sacramento are probably moot: The A’s can’t see a playoff spot with a telescope right now, and that’s even before they trade their best pitcher because he keeps complaining about how much their stadium sucks.
  • Speaking of the A’s, I got quoted a lot in this Guardian article on their LOLgroundbreaking in Las Vegas, check it out if you enjoy John Fisher schadenfreude. Economist J.C. Bradbury is also cited as speculating that the A’s could end up in Salt Lake City or elsewhere next season, which he rushed to clarify doesn’t mean he thinks SLC is a long-term solution either (“too small,” yup, checks out).
  • Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie needs to make a decision on whether to build a new stadium to replace their 22-year-old one, says CBS Sports, because “the clock is ticking due to the lease expiring in seven years” and no no no no that is not how leases work, you can renew them, I just can’t even. Lurie hasn’t actually said anything about wanting a new stadium beyond being asked if he’d like a roof on one and saying he’s “torn,” but rest assured that the sports media is going to keep up the pressure for one regardless.
  • The Niagara Reporter took a look at Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino’s plans to build a $200 million hockey arena and determined that to meet its revenue projections it would have to attract a junior league hockey team (as yet uncertain), host 60 concerts a year (typical similarly sized venues average 12 to 20), and host 60 youth tournaments a year, which the Reporter deems “impossible” — and even then still would fall short of meeting the city’s $13 million a year in debt service.
  • “Pioneer League’s Northern Colorado Owlz fold after playing start of season in Colorado Springs following being evicted from their Windsor stadium for ‘health and safety’ reasons and are replaced by new Colorado Springs team with all of the same Owlz players and staff” is quite the story, if only for all the interesting questions it raises about when a sports franchise is no longer the same sports franchise. Also Colorado Springs already had a Pioneer League team, and they’re called the Rocky Mountain Vibes? So very many questions.
  • In case you needed more reason to block the Daily Mail from your news feeds after it was banned as a source by Wikipedia for being unreliable, this article (Wayback link, they don’t deserve the traffic) headlined “NFL team finally given green light to build new $600 million stadium” when it’s a $2.4 billion stadium and the Cleveland Browns owners still want another $600 million to go with the $600 million in state money they just got should be the icing on the cake.
  • How are subsidies going in the non-sports world, you ask? Well, California just raised its tax credit for film and TV production from $330 million a year to $750 million, meaning 35% of all filming costs in the state will now be covered by taxpayers. This has worked out extraordinarily poorly for states in the past, and stories of wasteful tax expenditures continue to pile up, but elected officials keep on insisting it’s necessary to keep economic activity from leaving the state, sound familiar?
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Friday roundup: Arizona senate votes to give $500m to D-backs owner for stadium upgrades

access_time personNeil deMause

At 10 pm last night, the Arizona state senate voted 19-11 to approve spending $500 million in state money on stadium upgrades for the Arizona Diamondbacks. The bill had been passed by the state house in February but had stalled in the senate as Gov. Katie Hobbs and other bill proponents tried to round up enough votes for passage.

What did Hobbs agree to change in order to win over reluctant senators? Not a whole hell of a lot, at first reading:

  • The city of Phoenix’s contribution will be capped at $3.5 million a year in sales tax money, a little over half what Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego had estimated her city would be on the hook for under the original bill.
  • An increase in Maricopa County contributions to match the city’s cost.
  • No use of state income taxes from team employees, as was proposed in the original bill.
  • A provision by which if the Diamondbacks owners don’t spend $250 million of their own money on renovations, the state legislature can repeal the stadium subsidy and leave the team responsible for paying the full debt.
  • Probably other stuff, I’m still reading the bill.

It’s a weird laundry list, especially all the rejiggering of which level of government will contribute what — Gallego apparently demanded a city cost cap before she would sign off on the bill and thus flip some Democratic senate votes to yes, but the contribution amounts needed to still be tied to sales tax receipts to maintain the Casino Night Fallacy, so instead we get this odd mishmash of set dollar figures and dedicated tax revenues.

In any event, the overall thrust of the legislation is the same: A half-billion dollars will be pulled from city, county, and state sales tax revenues that would otherwise go to the general fund, and will now instead be siphoned off and sent back to D-backs owner Ken Kendrick to use for renovations to Chase Field. In exchange, Kendrick will agree to a new lease to keep the team in Phoenix through … oh, sorry, that hasn’t been determined yet, he insisted on the state approving public funding first before agreeing to what he would provide in return, because that’s totally how reasonable negotiations work.

The bill still needs to go back to the state house for a re-vote on its amended form, and then on to Hobbs for her signature, but those look like mere formalities at this point. Add Ken Kendrick to the list of billionaires who got commitments for several-hundred-million-dollar taxpayer checks this year because local officials were either too afraid of the possibility the team would move, too besotted with the alleged economic benefits of a team, or too beholden to lobbyists and campaign contributors to say no. Representative democracy: It’s not going great!

Lots of other stuff happened this week before last night’s vote in Arizona, let’s get to that:

  • Oklahoma City Thunder owner Clay Bennett has finally agreed to lease provisions in exchange for the $850 million in arena money he got from the city a year and a half ago, and they’re pretty skimpy: The team will pay about $2.4 million a year in rent, rising with inflation, and agree to a $1 ticket surcharge to go toward a capital improvement fund; anything above that for maintenance and operations will be on the city to provide. Also, Bennett will keep all the proceeds from sale of the new arena’s naming rights, plus will get exclusive rights to buy and develop the arena site, with the sale price going back to him to pay for his arena. “Worst arena deal in history” is a high bar to clear, but Oklahoma City seems determined to be in the running for it.
  • The mayors of both St. Petersburg and Tampa say they’re happy the Tampa Bay Rays are up for sale, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor calling it “a very positive step” and saying her city’s “bid is dusted off and we’ve sharpened our pencils,” while St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch said he’s “excited about the possibility of new ownership” and focused on ” the fulfillment of the economic promises made to the historic Gas Plant District community.” The preferred Tampa site is also being targeted by the owner of the Tampa Bay Sun women’s USL team for a possible soccer stadium, but as nobody has the slightest idea how any of this would be paid for, it’s a little early to start worrying about competing stadium requests.
  • Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne and some county councilmembers are shouting at each other about whether a Brook Park Cleveland Browns stadium would be an affront to Cleveland or a windfall that’s too good for the county to pass up. Not that Cuyahoga County’s position matters all that much, but with the Ohio state legislature still in its staredown, somebody’s gotta provide the juicy quotes that drive the click machine.
  • The New York Times’ Athletic sports site is excited that sports stadium subsidies are now also for the ladies, if you needed any more reasons to stop reading the Times. (They offer games-only subscriptions, you don’t have to give up Spelling Bee!) The Kansas City Star editorial board, meanwhile, is worried that Missouri’s recently proferred (but not yet accepted) stadium subsidies for the Chiefs and Royals has too many unknowns and that spending public dollars on sports teams is “deeply regrettable” if also “sadly, the world in which we live,” if any of that makes you more interested in reading the Kansas City Star.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred will be at the Athletics‘ stadium site groundbreaking in Las Vegas on Monday, this is gonna be the best Potemkin village ever!
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Here is your “questions the DC media should be asking about the Commanders deal” bingo card

access_time personNeil deMause

I hinted at it on Tuesday, and now it’s a reality. Behold, your unanswered Washington Commanders stadium questions bingo card!

(Thanks to Ed Lazere, director of legislative advocacy for the United Planning Organization and founding director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, for help coming up with the entries.)

How to play: Watch the news coverage of the proposed Washington Commanders stadium deal, and check off a box every time you see reporters asking either elected officials or Commanders owner Josh Harris one of these questions. (You get to check it off whether or not the question is answered — we don’t want to make this too impossible.) Once you’ve scored five in a row, announce somewhere — in comments on this item, on social media, in a press conference on the U.S. Capitol steps — that you’re a winner, and you’ll be a winner!

And in case you’re wondering: Yes, journalists themselves are eligible, so if you’re a D.C.-area reporter who wants to ask these questions yourself and claim the prize, be my guest! What exactly you’ll win has yet to be determined, but it will at least include living in a country where journalism is still alive, and who can put a price on that?

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Friday roundup: DC hires same clown consultants for Commanders deal who screwed up DC United math

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the weekly news roundup, a commenter asked me a question yesterday — I mean, I think they may actually have been trying to troll me, but it was in the form of a question — about how it could be better for Missouri to risk the Kansas City Chiefs moving to Kansas and losing all the tax revenue that comes with games. After initially going the “because economists say so” route, I tried to write up an actual detailed answer, and I want to include it here, because I, at least, found it instructive to see how quickly these kind of “sports stadium pay for themselves through economic activity” arguments fall apart once you subject them to actual math:

I found where your numbers are from, and they’re not from any economic impact study by the sports authority or an independent auditor or anyone else. They’re from a consultant hired by the Chiefs, who declared that the team and the stadium “generate $28.8 million in direct, indirect and induced tax revenue for the State of Missouri annually.” (The supposed $572 million is just “economic activity,” and the $28.8 million is the presumed taxes on that; if you include both, you’re double-counting.)

So, we already have Missouri spending $500 million in order to save $28.8 million a year, which would be a negative return on investment right there. But where does that $28.8 million figure come from? The Chiefs consultants, Econsult Solutions, only released a one-pager with no footnotes or other methodology, so we have no idea.

Most importantly, we have no idea if Econsult included money that would otherwise be spent elsewhere in Missouri if the Chiefs left. Is that all of it? No, of course not. Is it enough that it would reduce the $28.8 million a year in new taxes to a level where Missouri would be better off if the Chiefs left? Given that Missouri would be better off even if the real number were $28.8 million a year, yeah, that’s a near certainty.

But there’s an easier way to figure this out than guesstimating where people would be spending their money in some hypothetical situation: Look at cities that have gained or lost teams, and see what happens to local tax revenues. Innumerable economists have now done this, and found that the resulting losses are somewhere between 1) nothing and 2) next to nothing. (It’s actually worse than that: Some cities brought in *more* tax revenue without a team.) And that’s cities — the numbers are going to look even worse for states, since you can’t even make it up by stealing tax revenues from the suburbs.

No matter how you slice it, the numbers show that at the price points we’re talking about, $500 million and up, there is no way on earth for local governments to do better with the teams than without. You can wish it were otherwise — and team owners will certainly hire people to claim that it’s so — but good luck finding any data to support your case.

And now, on to the news:

  • Speaking of economic impact reports, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser just released one for her proposed Commanders stadium that would cost the city upwards of $7 billion, and you’ll never guess who wrote it: That’s right, Convention, Sports & Leisure, everyone’s favorite Dallas Cowboys–and–New York Yankees–owned clown consultants! I have no plans to go over it in detail (though the page with the large heading spelled “MULTPLIERS” does stand out), but I am obligated to point out that the last time D.C. hired CSL to do a stadium study, it was immediately revealed that about two-thirds of the projected city benefits weren’t benefits at all, forcing the consultants to put out a letter “clarifying” that its 400-page report didn’t actually say what it said it said. That CSL they got hired again by D.C. to do their next big stadium study is either a sign that Bowser wasn’t paying attention in 2014 (when she was a city council member) or that stadium consultants aren’t getting hired for the quality of their work, but rather for how reliably they report what team owners and elected officials want to hear, yeah, that’s undoubtedly the one.
  • Sports economist Geoffrey Propheter read far enough into the CSL report to find this knee-slapper: “Suppose I attend a conference in Denver, get a hotel room, and eat a Subway. According to CSL, the Subway gets to count my conference fees, room fees/taxes as economic impact. And so can the conference and the hotel. So now all my spending gets counted x3. Please stop being terrible at thinking.”
  • The Chiefs and Royals owners may now have blank checks from the state for up to 50% of their stadium costs (or will once the Missouri state house passes the bill and Gov. Mike Kehoe signs it, which should happen soon), but they still want even more city and county money to pay for their stadium dreams, and that could require more public referendums. The Kansas City Star reports that the two teams are likely looking at separate ballot measures after a combined one failed spectacularly last April; no word yet on when these would happen, but the teams are clearly going to have to ask the state of Kansas to renew its offer of state money for stadium there beyond its June 30 expiration date, or else “We must outbid the evil barbarians from beyond the western realm!” is going to have somewhat less impact on election day.
  • The plan by Ohio state senators who accepted tons of campaign donations from Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam to raid the state’s unclaimed funds account to borrow money for a Browns stadium may be stoking outrage from residents about what one called “legal theft,” but it’s doing wonders for publicizing the existence of the unclaimed funds and getting Ohioans to start claiming them.
  • Also, the Browns’ stadium hasn’t even been approved yet, and it’s already racking up cost overruns: The city of Brook Park just asked for $71 million in state road improvements for the planned stadium site, on top of the $1.2 billion in public money that’s already been proposed.
  • Want to read an article about how a min0r-league baseball stadium has “revived a struggling downtown” in a South Carolina city, while quoting only the mayor, the team owner, and the stadium developer? Sorry, I’m going to link to it anyway.
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Friday roundup: How real is the threat of a Royals or Chiefs move to Kansas, and other pressing questions

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy zeroth anniversary of that time we decided to all die of bird flu! It’s a fitting way to go out, honestly.

While we’re still here, though, there’s plenty of other stuff to keep getting wrong in the meantime:

  • A company affiliated with the Kansas City Royals has bought the mortgage to a potential stadium site in Kansas’s Johnson County, and … guys, you know that buying the mortgage isn’t anything like buying the land, it just means the property owner makes their payments to you instead of to the original mortgage issuer, right? Sure, if the property owner defaults, you get the land, but that’s a slim thread on which to hang a potential stadium plan — unless of course you’re just looking for easy ways to get “Royals” and “Kansas” into a headline to throw a scare into Missouri, in which case, nice outside-the-box thinking there.
  • Speaking of moving to Kansas, two economists have looked at that state’s STAR tax diversion deal and determined that there’s no way the state can build even one stadium, let alone two, without cannibalizing existing revenue. “A majority of Kansas lawmakers disagree,” reports the Kansas City Beacon, meaning “whether STAR bonds can support one or two teams depends on who you ask” — if you ask people who know what they’re talking about, you get one answer, if you ask people just grandstanding on behalf of the edifice complex you get another, whoda thunk it!
  • Over in Missouri, meanwhile, a group of Republican senators are refusing to consider Chiefs and Royals stadium funding unless the state approves new tax cuts, while Democrats are objecting to spending billions on stadiums when the state is only providing $25 million to tornado relief. “It’s not coming together just swimmingly as of right now,” summed up state Sen. Lincoln Hough.
  • At least one Missouri legislator is still on board: Republican Sen. Mike Cierpiot said spending on stadiums is worth it because “we’re not giving this money to billionaires. We’re giving it to the stadiums, which is owned by the county.” That’s not how stadium ownership works, unfortunately — owning stadiums just costs you property taxes, what’s important is to own the revenue streams from them, and here those would be controlled by the team owners — and isn’t how number agreement works either, this really isn’t going swimmingly.
  • Over on the other side of Missouri, meanwhile, a state audit has found that the Dome at America’s Center — that’s the former home of the St. Louis Rams, not a missile shield program — needs $155 million in maintenance over the next decade, and while that’s not all that much all things considered, the dome is losing money just hosting St. Louis Battlehawks UFL games and the occasional concert, so, you guessed it, the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority is considering asking for state money. If they can find a way to increase that maintenance price to $500 million, they could qualify for funding under Gov. Mike Kehoe’s everybody-gets-a-stadium plan, I bet diamond-encrusted cupholders would go a long way toward meeting that requirement.
  • And to answer your question, yes, there was some news this week that was not in Missouri or Kansas! Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed not to provide any state money for a Tampa Bay Rays stadium — except for “roads and exits,” of course, gotta have roads and exits. And stairs and ramps are really exits of a kind, right? Not that any local governments are really proposing a new stadium for the Rays at this time, so DeSantis is unlikely to get called on his promise, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens if he’s in office long enough that he does.
  • This New York Times op-ed is getting a lot of likes for its headline (“Sports Stadiums Are Monuments to the Poverty of Our Ambitions”), but fewer seem to be reading down to the part that argues that “cities build stadiums in part because it’s so hard to build almost anything else,” which is presented without evidence and isn’t really historically true, but it’s of the moment because something something Ezra Klein.
  • Does everyone who plays at the don’t-call-us-Sacramento Athletics‘ ad hoc stadium still hate it? You betcha! Sports Illustrated speculates that John Fisher could consider relocating the team again, perhaps to Salt Lake City, but notes that then he wouldn’t be able to get sweet Northern California TV money, and … remind me what size TV market his intended destination of Las Vegas is again? Hmm.
  • And finally, this week in one-sentence media criticism:

Why investigate the public financing of a billion-dollar stadium when you can post pictures of Trisha and Garth with hardhats and shovels?

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.bsky.social) 2025-05-30T12:31:50.461Z

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Rays execs again blame city and county for stadium delays, while further delaying stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Tampa Bay Rays co-presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman waded back into the stadium wars late last week, and the Tampa Bay Times scrambled all its reportorial jets to cover it. For those who haven’t been following, the Times has three writers who’ve been working on the Rays’ stadium story: baseball beat reporter Marc Topkin, who is historically a mouthpiece for Rays leadership; sports columnist John Romano, who is more a “can’t we just find a solution here” guy; and St. Petersburg reporter Colleen Wright, who actually reports the news. All three were on display over the weekend, and they did a classic job of describing the elephant:

  • Wright kicked things off on Friday by reporting on how Auld and Silverman went on a team-sponsored radio show Thursday night and again blamed St. Petersburg and Pinellas County officials for delaying their stadium financing votes from October to December following Hurricane Milton, which they said “effectively broke the deal.” City and county officials, in turn, were “expressing growing impatience” with Rays execs, wrote Wright, with County Commission chair Brian Scott, a strong supporter of the stadium deal, saying,  “If you can’t make a deal work with $600 million in public funding [Ed. Note: more like $1 billion actually], then you’ve got a business model that’s not sustainable. That’s not something that public dollars are going to fix.”
  • Romano followed up Saturday evening with a column on how “Mayor Ken Welch and a handful of city council folk were just about the last allies the Rays had in the universe and now they’ve managed to tick them off, too.” And while “to a degree” the Rays ownership’s anger was justified, he wrote, because the county commission did delay their vote until new members came on board, those new members “realized their error” and decided they didn’t want to be blamed for “the bungling of a $6.5 billion redevelopment deal” and approved the funding anyway. This is Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s last chance to get a stadium in the Tampa Bay area, Romano argued, and if that doesn’t happen, either 1) Sternberg will move the team, 2) Sternberg will sell the team to someone who moves it, or 3) Sternberg will sell the team to someone who gets a new stadium built locally. (The idea that maybe the Rays don’t actually need a new stadium, or at least a new stadium that costs $1.3 billion plus whatever the Trump steel tariff surcharge will be, seems not to have crossed Romano’s mind, despite his writing that it’s likely “the team will not see huge profits upon the opening of a new stadium” because nobody really wants to go see Rays games.)
  • A few hours later, Topkin chimed in by turning over all his column inches to Silverman, who said “we have four years to figure this out” and “we’ve always wanted to be here” and “we’re going to try to figure it out,” but that Rays execs are still deciding whether to go ahead with the new stadium deal by March 31, after which it turns into a pumpkin and everyone goes back to square one.

It was all really quite the case study in the breadth of U.S. newspaper coverage, running the gamut from straight-up team boosterism to even-handed reporting. And even more than that, it’s a reminder of how daily news outlets seldom convey a perspective that isn’t held by someone in a position of power: We have Topkin telling us how Rays execs see the stadium fiasco, columnist Romano expressing how Mayor Welch and other pro-stadium councilmembers see it, and Wright reporting on the perspective of city and county officials as a whole. The idea of consulting economists or budget experts, or just regular local residents who still haven’t been asked what they think of the deal, is crazy talk — who even are those guys?

Meanwhile, none of this gets us any closer to understand whether Sternberg and Friends are truly set to walk away from a $1 billion check because they just realized stadiums are expensive or Florida gets hit by hurricanes or something, or if they’re waiting to see if St. Pete officials will sweeten the deal if they hold out until March 31. That sure doesn’t sound likely given the latest statements by local elected officials — don’t forget, even Welch indicated two weeks ago that he’s ready to walk away from the stadium deal if Sternberg doesn’t live up to his end of things — but we’ll see. The power of “let’s just get things done” is powerful, especially when it’s posed as the sensible middle.

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