Early voting has started in the San Antonio Spurs arena public funding ballot measure, and the local news media is on the job warning that the team could move so that its owners don’t have to. Today’s report from KSAT-TV report asks the question up front — “If the team doesn’t get the downtown arena it wants, could it leave San Antonio entirely?” — and then proceeds to answer it via an odd sequence of interview subjects:
- A guy on his way to vote, who said he would “probably” vote for the Spurs funding, because “if they lose the Spurs, they’re going to lose a lot.”
- The owner of a construction firm, interviewed at the Spurs’ practice facility, who said, “Say my valuation of my business is $1 billion, and I can move and double that valuation in a day … Be careful what you wish for, San Antonio.”
- Spurs lawyer Bobby Perez, who refused to answer questions about whether the team would try to move if the ballot measures were rejected.
- Finally, sports economist Geoffrey Propheter, who noted that “There has been no threat, direct or indirect, from the Holts, at least publicly, that says they are going to move,” and that lots of other teams, such as the San Francisco Giants, have had referendums shot down, multiple times even, and not moved.
It’s all factual enough reporting, and certainly readers are going to want to know if a move could be in the offing if voters turn down the $311 million over 30 years (about $150 million in present value) that Spurs owner Peter Holt is asking for. But it’s hard to miss that the framing ends up supporting owner Peter Holt’s attempts to make this into a vote on whether to keep the Spurs — notably reaching out to Austin’s mayor in recent weeks — while downplaying the public cost (which would likely total $750 million or more) or the fact that San Antonio just built the Spurs a new arena 23 years ago amid promises by Holt’s dad of neighborhood redevelopment that never came.
All this is very much part of what we dubbed the “non-threat threat,” where a team owner denies intending to move a team, but hints that you don’t want to push him and find out, and then leaves it to elected officials and the media to sound the alarm. (It is related to, though not exactly the same as, Jerry Reinsdorf’s edict that “a savvy negotiator creates leverage,” even if it’s leverage you have no intention of using.) If the KSAT story is any indication, Holt Jr.’s attempts at framing the story this way are having an impact; though if this set of person-on-the-street interviews is representative, most people are still weighing whether the promise of exciting new stuff is enough to outweigh giving money to “megamillionaires” instead of fixing “all of the stuff that needs to be fixed, that’s not fixed,” with no one mentioning the threat of losing the team at all.
The vote is likely going to be close, and as Propheter points out, almost exactly equal numbers of these referendums succeed or fail. The more interesting part may end up being what Holt’s Plan B is if he loses: As we’ve seen both in the early days of the public stadium boom and again more recently, megamillionaires tend not to take direct democracy lying down when there’s a group of legislators they can go to for a second opinion.
…plus lots of discussion from Tigers announcers George Kell and Al Kaline about what a shame it would be if the White Sox moved to St. Petersburg, Florida.